Who is Fermat?
We are a group of hardworking people driven by our vision and collaborating to change the path to another future. We are pioneers, developers, inventors and dreamers, discovering new paths, trying to change the world.
We are neither a corporation or company, nor driven by any third party economical interests. We don’t believe in concentration of power because we think that in the wrong hands it could lead humanity to a catastrophic failure. We believe in freedom and the power of technology. We believe in people. We are happy to use our skills to recreate over the internet the same level of private person-to-person interactions that we have to protect outside the internet.
Fermat’s Vision
We have been living inside an ongoing trend towards centralization of power and control. In present time a handful of entities (giant companies or conglomerates including some states) dictate with the control over politicians and military what a huge percentage of the world population can or cannot do. In this current scenario it is not difficult to predict that fights between such interest groups are likely to happen and someday in the future some entity may try to control it all (in a devastating big fail).
Anticipating that future, we envision a world where people can freely interact electronically without unnecessary third party interferences. Both for social and commercial interactions. No spying, no censorship, no taking a cut on private transactions between individuals, no mining of self-defined private information, no unnecessary middlemen. A world where people are more important than entities like companies and states, a world where people have the choices and the means to interact directly between each other. This is the Fermat project vision and to reach this goal we first have to build the Internet of People.
What is the Internet of People?
What we need to enable now is direct device to device communication, with data being stored at end user devices and apps built to interact with each other directly over the Internet but without going through the web or requiring any service from any company or institution. We need P2P Apps that can run independent of any entity.The Internet of People is a set of P2P networks, designed to enable direct device to device P2P communication using P2P apps. The main purpose of the network is to allow my device to connect directly to your device without using any service of any company in the process of establishing the connection or during the interaction.
One of this P2P Networks is a blockchain that runs the token system needed to incentivize operators to run all the components of other P2P networks that form the Internet of People.
We call our token the IoP and its existence is what we are announcing here today.
IoP Token Fact Sheet
- Name: IoP [Internet of People App Token]
- Official Ticker: IoP
- Blockchain Type: Fork of bitcoin 0.13.x
- Max Supply: 21 M
- Pre-Mining: 10%
- Pre-Mining Beneficiaries: Angel Investors (2 rounds over 2 years, 650K USD total invested). Founders, early contributors received pre-mined tokens as bounties for their contributions.
- Project Running Time: 27 Months. (Started Aug 2014).
- Available Supply: 2,109,000 approx. minus 525,000 time locked at the blockchain level. Time locked tokens redeemable in 1, 2, 3 and 4 years counting from Oct 2016.
- Target Block Reward: 1 token for miners / minters every 2 minutes. Zero to 1 token for Approved Contribution Contracts every 2 minutes (voted by token holder via the blockchain. Think DASH)
- Current Block Reward: 1 token for miners every 10 minutes. There is a schedule to get to the Target Block Reward after hitting several software development milestones. You can find this schedule here under the title “Token Issuing”.
- Target Consensus Mechanism: Randomized PoS / PoW hybrid. We expect to implement our own ideas on a PoS / PoW hybrid model. You can find more details here under the title “IoP Token System” .
- Current Consensus Mechanism: Pre-Authorized PoW. Until we develop our own consensus mechanism we are running a regular PoW with participation in the mining restricted to developers and community local chapters. Once our consensus model is in place, permissionless mining will start.
- Halving Rules: The same as bitcoin, every 4 years.
Token holders will be able to:
- Propose projects to be funded by the blockchain after being approved by token holders.
- Vote for projects to be funded by the blockchain.
- Run IoP nodes and participate in the mining reward proving their stake on IoPs.
Tokens in small quantities (micropayments) are also needed for:
- End Users need them to pay Profile Servers to host their profile at the IoP Network.
- End Users need them to pay for other IoP Network services like Proximity and Reputation.
- Funding their online identities.
- Connecting to other people.
ICO, Crowdfunding Market Value and Exchange
We are not planning an ICO. We have no plans of a crowdfunding campaign either. The project is not holding tokens. We are and want to stay independent. Our development funds were secured by our early token sales to angel investors of pre-mined tokens.
We are, however, planning to take the IoP token to the market soon – after this announcement. We expect a market value of $12 per token since that was the last price contributors received during this early days of the project.
Project Status
The project is 27 months old. The first year a handful of people joined forces to forge the vision and design the system architecture. The second year more than a hundred people collaborated to prove the concept was viable. We are now at the beginning of the third year, already producing production quality code. Over the course of the next 12 months we expect to release all the Internet of People components (there are many, and it is a technically challenging project). From there we will move on to bootstrapping the P2P economy, creating tools and client-side infrastructure to easily develop device to device P2P Apps.
Funding
We are currently funded by early token buyers (angel investors). During the next 12 months we transition to a DASH-like Contribution-Voting-System paid by the blockchain with the issuing of new tokens (issuing go to miners and a significant part goes to contributors approved by token holders voting over the blockchain). We enter the market with our App Token in Nov 2016.
Resources
On our website you will find the following resources:
- Article that will explain you the Internet of People in the context of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
- Links to all available IoP wallets.
- Links to important documents like:
- Internet of People whitepaper.
- Software Requirements Specifications document.
- Fermat long term vision whitepaper.
- Internet of People presentation document.
- IoP Token Explorer can be found here.
Internet of People’s vision presentation.
Github Repos:
Call to Action
We recommend you reading the following documents in this order, to have a better understanding of what we are doing:
- The home page of our website. Our current featured article will give you the needed context of the project. Also you will find there links to the press coverage that can tell you how journalists interpreted our work.
- The script of our presentation. This will show you step by step in plain english what we are building and why.
- Internet of People’s vision presentation. This will give you an idea on what a world with the IoP will look like.
- The Internet of People whitepaper. It will give you more technical details. Expect a technical overview of the project.
- The Software Requirements Specifications document will get to the technical details needed to actually implement the code of each component. Also will give you some sense on where we are now and the current problems being discussed.
- The Fermat long term vision whitepaper will give you an idea of what is beyond the Internet of People.
Unless we are heavily spammed, we will keep the door open for you to comment on any of the Google docs.
We encourage you to ask questions here in this thread regarding anything you read about Fermat.
If you like our project and want to support our vision, you can either join or build a Fermat Local Chapter (with possibilities to mine if you wish) or buy IoP Tokens once they reach the market (soon).
