Welcome to the fourth session of the Pi Convention. This is a Pi Panel session where the Pi Core Team will introduce the questions in discussion and representative Pioneers will present their views on these questions. The Panel discussion is about the future of Pi mobile mining
The original design of Pi’s economic model and its mining mechanism is to strike a balance between access and scarcity. While setting out to be the most inclusive and widespread digital currency in the world, Pi tries to achieve a level of scarcity through a mining mechanism where the base mining rate halves when the network size increases by 10X. This mechanism also provides a meritocratic reward system to members based on their contributions to Pi. Even though in our White Paper, we specified the network size to be at least 100 Million people, the Core Team had left the decision open, as to whether we will continue or stop mobile mining at the mark of 10M network size, because back then we were uncertain about at least the following three aspects to make a well-informed decision: 1) first, how fast the network grows, for example, how fast we achieve all the previous halving milestones; 2) second the progress of ecosystem building including utilities and applications of Pi at the time of 10M, 3) third, the progress of the mainnet at the time of the 10M. Also, at this network size, the Core Team would want to take input from its members about this question, in order for us to make the final decision that is best for the whole network.
We predicted that the community opinions will be split based on at least simple rational motivations derived from when the Pioneer joined and started mining, i.e. how much Pi the Pioneer has mined. However, more importantly we value voices that support their opinions and sentiment with reasonings and considerations of the overall goals of Pi, the health of the ecosystem, and the interest of the whole community. For this purpose, we went through a sophisticated process to solicit and collect such input from our community, including applications to speakers, moderators recommendations, video surveys to collect video responses, and spend tremendous time watching and processing such submissions.
We’re currently having over 9 Million engaged Pioneers, approaching the 10 Million mark. We’d like to pose this question at this convention in the format of a Panel, where, for some vocal Pioneers who applied to speak and submitted their video responses, we selected well thought-out, articulated, clear and representative videos to be featured as part of the Panel discussion right after this current Core Team video. Even though we only selected a limited number of video responses here, the Core Team watched all the submissions. For the larger number of Pioneers who did not apply to express their thoughts through video format, you can participate in the Panel through the forum in the Topic on the homescreen.
We’re well aware that in some regions, there have been activities campaigning for a certain type of view on this question and some campaigns even use economic incentives to manipulate the popular views. We hope Pioneers can form their individual thoughts independently without any misinformation and disinformation, with the overall benefits of the whole network in mind.
After the Pi Convention, the Core Team will review the written responses in the Topic, in addition to the video responses, and will provide an analysis incorporating these community views, experts’ views and the Core Team’s own views to make the final decision about whether to continue or stop mobile mining when our network size hits the 10 Million mark. We all hope Pi will succeed, and the Core Team is trying to find and evaluate the best option for this decision in a systematic and scientific way.