Day 3 update: We're up to 584 Genesis claims, so the total supply stands at 584,000,584 tokens. See all the latest Pocket stuff here. If you want to see a sampling of transactions, check 
Hive account@pocket-a's comment section. Among all the many messages of "Success! You claimed..." you'll start to see quite a few "Successful Send of..." indicating that people are sending Pocket tokens around. Very fun!
Million Dollar Question: Is Pocket decentralized and trustless?
I had someone ask me this yesterday, and it's an important enough question that I wanted to write a whole blog post about it. If Pocket isn't those two things, then it's just a bot that's being run by some schmuck who goes by 
Hive account@biophil, and you should all run for the hills - what's to prevent me from taking away your tokens? On the other hand, if Pocket is decentralized and trustless, you can be much happier and feel more secure, because, and this is the crucial point, it's not about me. I'll take them one at a time.
Decentralization
A lot of people have argued at great length about the specifics of what exactly constitutes decentralization, how it's different from "distributedness," what its value is, what its costs are - etc. For my purposes, I'll take a simplified binary view, and I'll tell you what decentralized is not:
A system is not decentralized if it contains a single point of failure.
So it might be helpful to think about the differences between Pocket and a centralized tipping service like 
Hive account@tipu. Hive account@tipu, I'm not trying to disparage you; it just happens that you're an excellent example of what Pocket isn't.
Hive account@tipu works like this: Hive account@tipu is a bot. You send them SBD ("deposit"), then reply to a post with the word "tip!", and Hive account@tipu will send a small tip to the author of the post you replied to. All of the SBD deposits are stored in the Hive account@tipu account, controlled by Hive account@tipu's single active key (whose public key is STM6pdex2VkcBhNFPwkw6vFeDrV7hhRy7XiY6eKFgmZ14pENeqVCo). The software that operates the Hive account@tipu bot is probably running on only a single server somewhere, and Hive account@tipu is controlled by a single entity. I don't actually know if that entity is a single person or multiple people working together, but in any case, it's an organized group.
So what happens if:
- Hive account@tipu's active key is lost?
- The server/computer that is running the bot software crashes?
(there's an obvious 3rd involving theft that I'll get to in the "trustless" section)
The answers are simple:
- All of the depositors are SOL, because the several thousand dollars that are held in Hive account@tipu's wallet are lost forever.
- This is less catastrophic, but it means that the Hive account@tipu service will be completely shut down until the software can be relaunched on another machine or the server can be repaired.
How is Pocket different?
Anyone who's used Pocket so far has seen a confirmation message from the Hive account@pocket-a account. Hive account@pocket-a is a bot, so on the surface it might look like Pocket is exactly the same as Hive account@tipu - a bot service being run on a machine by a human entity. Actually, Pocket is completely different.
You see, there is absolutely nothing special about Hive account@pocket-a. That's just the account I created to be the first Pocket confirmer. But if someone else creates a 
Hive account@pocket-b account and has that account post confirmations before Hive account@pocket-a can get to it, then as long as the confirmations are formatted correctly, Hive account@pocket-b will earn the fees! Now, so far, Hive account@pocket-a is the only confirmer account that I know of. So right now, Pocket isn't quite as decentralized as I'd like. But it's still less centralized than Hive account@tipu! Here's how. I'll answer those same questions from above for Pocket as currently operating with only Hive account@pocket-a:
- If Hive account@pocket-a's private key is lost, it won't be able to post confirmation messages any more. I'll lose access to its 400-odd POCKET tokens. However, I'll just go create a new account (probably call it Hive account@pocket-b, let's be honest) and have it start posting confirmation messages. Everybody's funds are safe.
- If the machine running Hive account@pocket-a crashes, it will cause a lapse in confirmations until I can get it going again. This one looks the same as Hive account@tipu.
Now, in both of those cases, all Pocket users experience a lapse in confirmations, but nobody loses their tokens! So that's a good place to be. Can it get better than that?
Yes, and it should get better than that. What we need is for more people to start running confirmation bots! Those people will be rewarded with fees for every Pocket transaction they confirm, and they'll add robustness to the system! So now let's look forward to the day (hopefully soon) when there are 2 confirmation bots running, call them Hive account@pocket-a and Hive account@pocket-b, and let's answer the two questions again.
- If Hive account@pocket-a's private key is lost, Hive account@pocket-b will take up all the slack. The owner of Hive account@pocket-a will lose access to its Pocket tokens, but essentially nobody will notice that it is gone.
- If the machine running Hive account@pocket-a crashes, users of Pocket will NOT experience a lapse in confirmations because Hive account@pocket-b will confirm all transactions.
So you see, we need to have someone start running another confirmer bot! Contact me if you'd like to; I can give you tips on how to se it up. It's extremely easy to do if you happen to be running a Steem witness node, but that's not actually completely necessary.
What about trust?
"Trustless" means, essentially, that you control your funds and that you don't have to trust someone else to take care of them. This, in my opinion, is the absolute most important difference between something like Hive account@tipu and Pocket.
With Hive account@tipu, you have to trust the human entity that owns Hive account@tipu not to run away with your money. They're sitting on thousands of dollars of SBD; they could steal that and you would have no control over it. Please understand that I'm not suggesting they will - I suspect they're good people and wouldn't do such a thing. But the fact remains that if you deposit your money with them, you trust them not to steal it.
With Pocket, nobody can steal your tokens unless you give them Posting access to your account! Your tokens are tied to your Steem account by the rules of the Pocket Protocol. Now, this gets a little slippery with only one confirmer bot running. I could program Hive account@pocket-a to tell you you don't have tokens when you actually do; how would you know? Again, this is a reason we need more people running confirmer bots. The more bots we have, the more people we have to call BS when a confirmer bot tries to go rogue.
Conclusion
The main point of all this is that Pocket is designed to be decentralized and trustless, but it can't really be unless people start running their own confirmer bots like Hive account@pocket-a. Contact me if you want information about how to do this!
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