The Pi Network cryptocurrency program, started by a team from Stanford University, is currently a little project with big dreams.  Right now it's mostly an application for mobile devices that acts as a faucet - show up once a day, tap the button, watch an ad sometimes, and you'll "mine" the Pi Crypto for the next 24 hours.  There's no battery drain, no slowdown in processing, and really no drawbacks for this program right now, except for maybe taking up 2 minutes of your time every day.  It's an easy, non-obnoxious mobile faucet that gives away their proprietary cryptocurrency.

But WHY?

There are many, many projects out there.  Why should you spend your time on this one?  Below are the reasons that I find the Pi project interesting.

• Social Aspect
• Mobile-first development
• Fixed supply tied to total user base

Social Crypto

The whitepaper has a plan for a "scarce social media channel" (I'll refer to it from now on as the "Pi SSCM") which sounds like an advertiser's dream. 

You can think of the scarce social media channel as Instagram with one global post at a time. Pioneers can wager Pi to engage the attention of other members of the network, by sharing content (e.g., text, images, videos) or asking questions that seek to tap into the collective wisdom of the community.

The Pi SSCM would be a part of the Pi mobile app, so each day as users open the app to restart the faucet they would see whatever content is there.  Right now it has videos that the Pi team wants to spread, like announcements, governance videos, and their "Pi COiNVENTION".  You don't need to watch that content to collect Pi, but the screen has been designed in such a way that it's always obvious that the content is there.

Contributor Role

The other social aspect of Pi that I find interesting is the Contributor role.

Contributor. A user of the Pi mobile app who is contributing by providing a list of pioneers he or she knows and trusts. In aggregate, Pi contributors will build a global trust graph.

I haven't heard of this "security circle" thing before, but it's an interesting concept that could be expanded into many different areas.  I've often had a thought about democratic voting using blockchain and something similar to this as an anonymous proof-of-vote system (that's a topic that will be a different post, though, and will be more along the lines of SkinnerCrypto's "Intentional Community Of The Future" posts.)

The whitepaper doesn't specify a function that this global trust graph will serve, though.  When discussing the differences between the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) and the Pi Network, the whitepaper mentions that the Contributors and the trust-graph system are an addition they've added onto the SCP.  I would guess that the verified members in the Contributor system are going to be given an increased level of trust; not enough to cause problems, but enough to allow the team to simplify things running through that system.  I'm no expert, though.

Mobile-First Development

As someone who has been making websites for a few years now, responsive web design is a concept that's nearly as dear to my heart as open-source.  With an ever-growing group of internet users that are only connecting using mobile devices (though I haven't seen numbers for this that take into account the work-at-home trend caused by the Covid-19 pandemic), prioritizing the smartphone users is simply a prudent business/design decision.  Many cryptocurrencies began as resource-heavy, and therefore PC- and server-only, projects that have had secondary development done to allow access to mobile users.  Pi prioritizes mobile at a foundational level, which is something that allows a larger group of global users to access it.  It doesn't require a large financial investment to get into it either, all you need is an android phone capable of running a simple application.

Fixed Supply Tied To Total User Base

In their whitepaper, the creators of Pi point out a flaw in the Bitcoin system: Whales that got in early have an incentive to hodl, while the vast majority of miners/users who got in late are fighting over the scraps now available.  Unfortunately, for a cryptocurrency to get off the ground it needs people to be willing to take the risk of investing - in this case investing their time and a bit of storage space on their phones, not vast amounts of money.

While Pi seeks to avoid extreme concentrations of wealth, the network also seeks to reward earlier members and their contributions with a relatively larger share of Pi. When networks such as Pi are in their early days, they tend to provide a lower utility to participants. For example, imagine having the very first telephone in the world. It would be a great technological innovation but not extremely useful. However, as more people acquire telephones, each telephone holder gets more utility out of the network. In order to reward people that come to the network early, Pi’s individual mining reward and referral rewards decrease as a function of the number of people in the network. In other words, there is a certain amount of Pi that is reserved for each “slot” in the Pi Network.

 

Cons

Right now there are a few problems with Pi.

• The whitepaper specifies that nodes will run yet-to-be-released PC-based software, and that software will be open source based on the Stellar Consensus Protocol.  The current Android application, though, is not open source.
• ThePi cryptocurrency is not listed on any exchanges, and hold no real-world value.

Both of these problems are, hopefully, temporary.  As time goes on, the project gains some traction, and more development is done these are problems that will have solutions.

There is one more benefit to this project: the cost of joining is low.  It's just an android application, and it doesn't require a stupid amount of privacy violations.  In fact, it didn't ask me for ANY permissions: not contact list, storage, camera, nothing at all.  It requires either your phone number - to send you an SMS security code - or for you to log in to Facebook.  I haven't done the Facebook route (because that's just... dirty...) so I don't know what all it needs from that to verify your personhood.

Get into it yourself by going to https://minepi.com/tankdigital and use the invitation code tankdigital to activate the app.  You have to have an invitation code to get in right now, so this is my gift to you I guess.

Thanks for reading!