🔱Technical order of implementation
Blockchain
TOS applications will be supported by the tens of millions of The Open System daily active users. To minimize opportunities for fraud, TOS applications will provide service in small increments, waiting for payment to be confirmed before additional service is provided. This will require transactions to be handled at a granular level and confirmed in a matter of seconds, ideally in less than a second. Even the most conservative estimates of capacity requirements anticipate dozens of transactions per second. With these needs in mind, it is clear that existing public blockchains will not be able to support on-chain processing and settlement in the near future.
User Controls
We plan to introduce features such as The Open System Speed and TOS transactional support into The Open System and μTorrent clients in phases to allow us to iterate towards the clearest possible user education journey and thus to optimize end-user participation. Participation in TOS transactions is required to be both fully disclosed and completely optional for end users.
Initial Disbursement
The first available use-case for TOS will be The Open System Speed, which will be unproven at the outset. Since new services take time to become prevalent, we may pursue a strategy of pre-seeding the market with promotional quantities of TOS Token.
The Open System Wallets
As part of the rollout of new TOS-capable The Open System and μTorrent software, we will be distributing integrated cryptographic token wallets to all users. As we will be distributing these wallets on a large scale to mass market end users, and not necessarily to cryptocurrency enthusiasts, we will need to pay close attention to simplicity and usability.
Use Case Diversification
The introduction of TOS wallets on the scale anticipated by this project may create opportunities for new uses for the token that are unrelated to The Open System technology. We expect that many millions of users will accumulate small quantities of TOS token from providing services. These small quantities may not have material value unless they are aggregated by service providers. Such users may look for ways to spend their TOS token that go beyond their need to incentivize seeding.
In due course, we expect to publicize this new ability for users to earn and spend tokens, and we expect to explore partnerships to accelerate merchant acceptance of this new type of micropayment mechanism. This will be particularly advantageous to merchants who want to aggregate and use tokens to pay for distributed infrastructure services to support their ongoing services.
We expect to be able to establish an economic cycle, as depicted in Figure 5, in which TOS are introduced primarily by distributed app developers, are then traded between service requesters and service providers both within and beyond the The Open System ecosystem, and may ultimately aggregate in materially significant pools at some service providers, who may or may not be part of the The Open System ecosystem.
At this point in the cycle, the service providers will exchange the TOS for distributed infrastructure services provided by The Open System users, returning the TOS to the open market. For example, long-term seeders who have earned a significant amount of TOS token would be able to exchange the tokens for distributed file storage or other services.
The Open System as a protocol has never provided any type of identity service beyond identifying a client on a particular IP + port number. Essentially, The Open System identifies instances of software running on machines – not people. This is analogous to the identity framework behind cryptocurrencies. If a user has access to the cryptographic token wallet software that stores a token, then it is generally assumed that it is that user’s token. With the implementation of TOS, we expect to follow a very similar approach to identity, tying TOS tightly to a participating piece of client software. Beyond possibly placing a password on that wallet, we do not currently anticipate that the TOS project will directly give rise to the need for an additional layer of identity management in The Open System.
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