Musicoin Project (http://musicoin.org )

June 28, 2017

The Musicoin project was launched on the 11th of February 2017 when the first block of MUSIC was mined. The MUSIC blockchain is a fork of the Ethereum blockchain and was launched without an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) or pre-mine or pre-allocation of funds. Without an initial pool of fund to draw from, Musicoin was and continues to be a ‘labour of love’ of Musicoin developers and community.

We have come a long way in this short span of four months. Along the way, we’ve received plenty of helpful feedback and suggestions from our diverse but united community of miners, musicians, listeners and music enthusiasts.

We carefully listened and considered everyone’s thoughts on how to make Musicoin better for everyone involved. After a lot of careful deliberation, we are excited to unveil a grand vision for this project that we hope will make creating and enjoying MUSIC a joyous and rewarding experience for everyone.

We present to you here an overarching roadmap of our vision for Musicoin. Specifically, we will clearly define the objectives of future versions of the MUSIC blockchain. Our ultimate goal is to make the MUSIC blockchain more Stable, Sustainable, Secure and Scalable (4S). This roadmap will help guide us to achieve these goals.

Going forward, we will design, implement and deploy network-wide algorithms that are going to bring tremendous utility and value to this blockchain. Each of these 4S goals strives to establish Musicoin as a viable and attractive alternative to the current ineffective models of content creation and distribution in the music industry.

Without further ado, we present to you Musicoin Roadmap. We hope you will share this exciting adventure with us.

Figure 1. Musicoin Blockchain Roadmap In a Picture

Musicoin Version 1.0 (‘Hello’) — Feb. 2017

The current version of the MUSIC blockchain ‘Hello’ is geared towards solving the fundamental problem of unfair compensation of musicians by the streaming music industry. ‘Hello’ was created as a fork of Ethereum and so is empowered by smart contract functionality. In the current version of the blockchain, the smart contract capability of ‘Hello’ is used as a Pay Per Play (PPP) revenue stream for musicians on the Musicoin network.

The ‘Hello’ blockchain, powered by smart-contract functionality, automatically distributes 100% of the revenue to musicians on the Musicoin platform every time a listener presses play. As it stands today, Musicoin v1.0, ‘Hello’ is a fully functional blockchain solution that is powering the rapidly expanding network of Musicoin artists and listeners.

By bringing the power of automation and decentralization through blockchain technology, the Musicoin project has removed all intermediaries between the only two parties absolutely required for a music economy to thrive; the artist and the listener. And by distributing an unprecedented 100% of the revenue to musicians, the Musicoin project has created a tremendous economic incentive for musicians to participate in the platform. It is also the only cryptocurrency project with a currency that provides a tangible utility for the consumer.

Our commitment to the welfare of musicians was a resounding success based on technical, social and economical metrics. In the end, thousands of contributions are made and enjoyed everyday by our community of musicians and listeners.

Musicoin Version 2.0 (‘Heal the world’) — Q3 2017

The success of ‘Hello’ allows us to continue to move forward on our path; and with each passing day, brings us a step closer to Musicoin’s full potential. Because of our impressive early success, we now have the freedom to think outside the box in search of ideas that can revolutionize the music industry. If ‘Hello’ was a proof of concept, our next version, ‘Heal the world’ is much closer to our vision of the future. So far, we have validated our concept and witnessed growing adoption of the Musicoin platform while providing limited initial subsidy (sign-up bonus) to listeners to encourage and spread adoption.

However to radically increase the adoption of our platform by listeners (end-users) and thereby broaden Musicoin’s adoption and acceptance by the broader music community, we are introducing a groundbreaking new concept in cryptoeconomics, ‘Universal Basic Income’(UBI) for musicians. Once UBI is implemented, listeners will not have to pay for streaming music on the Musicoin platform. Instead, it will be completely free for listeners to stream content on the Musicoin network. The payment to artists for streaming content on the platform will come from a pool of funds reserved for this specific purpose. That pool will be funded by reserving a percentage of every block mined on the MUSIC blockchain.

Universal Basic Income as revenue for streaming content on the platform will guarantee a fair and steady source of revenue for musicians and make streaming content on the platform free for listeners. At the same time, it will separate creating and enjoying music on the platform from the market price of $MUSIC.

The goal of UBI is to boost consumption with system-wide subsidy for listeners thus stimulating the whole economy. Because end users don’t pay for playback, they can simply relax and enjoy the content on the platform. A portion of coin issued on the blockchain will be automatically reserved for future music consumption. Each stream of music (PPP) will still generate revenue for the artist (PPP) but this payment will be covered by miners instead of listeners.

Figure 2. UBI Will Drastically Boost Up Musicoin Ecosystem

Listeners who stream content for free on the platform will be able to use their $MUSIC to tip their favorite artists. This will provide a strong economic incentive to the artists to continue to generate high quality content and cultivate a loyal fan-base. The amount of $MUSIC spent on tipping will be entirely up to the end users.

To summarize, Every time an end user listens to a song, the system automatically pays the musician a predetermined amount of PPP, with funds reserved for UBI, without any cost to or intervention from the listener. Moreover, if the listener likes the content, and decides to tip the musician, they can do so with however many $MUSIC coins they want.

The implementation of UBI and a set of APIs will present a vast opportunity to developers to build value-added services on top of the MUSIC blockchain and increase its utility and value. It will make it free for every listener to enjoy music on every app and service that will be built on top of the MUSIC blockchain. This concept has never been attempted in thr traditional music industry, and we hope it will revolutionize the existing paradigms of content creation and distribution in the music industry.

Musicoin version 3.0 (‘Walking on the Moon’) — Q3 2018

From this version onwards, we will introduce our Proof-of-Sharing algorithm to the network. To clarify, Proof-of-Sharing is not Proof-of-Stake. Instead, it is a new way to deliver $MUSIC content across the network while serving user demand. During this time, we will prepare to make the shift away from Proof-of-Work. It is important to make sure each part of the network is ready, as the sharing of content will be a key factor in mining a block. The algorithm will evaluate the probability of hit rate matching to a specific file hash from sporadic resources. For the Musicoin network, this is a key component towards becoming a decentralized content delivery network.

Musicoin version 4.0 (‘Life on Mars?’) — Q3 2019

Musicoin originally inherited the concept of the “difficulty bomb” deadline from the Ethereum blockchain. The goal of this “bomb” was to assure miners and traders that the money supply will slow significantly within 2 years since it will be harder and harder to mine a block when this difficulty bomb drops.

In version 4, the difficulty bomb will be removed once we have implemented and demonstrated that the Proof-of-Sharing model works. During this time we will adjust money supply based on trials and feedback from the Musicoin community. Once the network has spread widely and evenly, we will begin to adjust and finalize the algorithm. Our ultimate goal is to make sure the blockchain is scalable and can power a healthy distribution for decades to come.

Further Discussions, Development and Deployment

To be able to deliver on the long term vision of Musicoin, collective opinions from all community members are very important. We are building concrete methodologies that will allow us to implement the vision laid out in this roadmap in the real world, but we can not do it without your help. That is why we have open-sourced all development processes on our Github, under the repository “MCIPs”(Musicoin Improvement Proposals). Here the community can propose detailed solutions, design necessary algorithms and signal the Musicoin network to deploy them. For deployment to the entire blockchain, we will have special MCIP(s) to oversee these proposals and safely upgrade from one version to the next.

The advantages of universal basic income for music creators in version 2.0 are obvious, but implementation will require consensus from community members. Only when we stand together can the Musicoin community realize its noble ambition of creating a future where creating music is as rewarding as listening to it.

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