COMPROMISING COMPETITION

Who are Bismuth’s competitors & why is Bismuth superior/different to it’s competitors?

I’d personally say that Ethereum is Bismuth’s primary competitor.

Ethereum has established itself as the de-facto dApp platform, and it offers development in Solidity- a custom, brand new language just for the Ethereum protocol.

This can act as a barrier of entry to plenty of potential developers. It is far more convenient to employ a programming language that one already knows- and so Bismuth fully enables that w/ Python.

Another notable trait of Ethereum is its method of executing dApp code. Once a user “uploads” their dApp to the network, all nodes across the network are forced to execute its code. This degree of coercion is completely unnecessary and a waste of computing resources.

Bismuth offers something completely different: execution of code becomes completely voluntary, and nodes can choose whichever plugins they wish to support across the network.

For example, if a private business entity chose to build a dApp on top of Bismuth, they could also supply dedicated network nodes that exclusively supported their dApp plugin. Interested users and clients could also choose to support the plugin on their nodes, if the plugin was publicly available.

All above are extracts from the Bismuth Whitepaper

TOKENOMICS

Can you give a quick rundown of important tokenomics?

A development fund does exist for the Bismuth Foundation despite there being no crowdfunding or ICO. This fund is completely denominated in BIS, and increments slowly as 10% of current PoW emission is directed towards the fund address to help support development.

Bismuth has multiple components to its inflation schedule.

The first part is the PoW reward, which decrements slowly block by block in a relatively linear fashion. It reaches zero reward when the total PoW emission reaches 51,370,000 BIS.

The second part of the emission schedule is the Hypernode rewards. This used to be a static 0.8 BIS per block, but recently got increased to 2.4 BIS per block. The HN rewards do not decrement and remain static, and continues as a form of tail emission even when the PoW emission reaches zero.

As of this interview, the current circulating supply is 15,284,918 BIS, with a maximum PoW-issued supply of 51,370,000 BIS, with an additional 1–2%/annum tail emission from Hypernodes.