Here Bryce Weiner responds to a recent article explaining why the music industry can’t be put on a blockchain, addressing several fallacies within said article and providing further research on the topic in question.
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Guest post by Bryce Weiner on Medium
I was having a lovely Sunday evening when one of my business partners linked me a story from Hypebot mentioning my project, the Tao Blockchain (symbol: XTO).
The story was entitled “Why You Can’t Put The Music Industry On A Blockchain” which was about the only thing accurate in the article. I will let other projects defend themselves, however I’d like to address the absolute fallacies which the author suggests as truth. Apparently this guy wrote a book that people buy, so this is a worthy effort to show how off-base his commentary truly is. This is a prime example of blockchain “fake news” created from poorly researched material.
Disclaimer: the author made no effort to contact me to ask any questions about the project prior to publication. I am returning the favor.
Just… wow. First of all, tokens are not “shares.” Tao is a “naked” blockchain: it is not a token running on another network, it is an actual self-sufficient public blockchain. It has nodes and exchanges and third parties. The network operates via Proof of Stake, which requires pre-existing distribution. The Tao Network Proof of Stake has an automatic 4% annual return on the amount held in the wallet for a specific period of time. There is no additional effort required to receive the 4% other than possession of the token. Even to make the suggestion that what was sold was “shares” or “unregistered securities” borders on libel as it illustrates a complete lack of understanding of securities regulations as well as the specifics of blockchain consensus.
Tao is the only project mentioned to have it’s own self-sufficient blockchain specifically designed for rights management applications in the music industry. Every other project relies on technology from a third party over which they have no control.
Second, Tao is operated as a distributed autonomous organization or DAO. “The DAO” was a smart contract based wealth re-distribution scheme that was designed to launder money. Bitcoin is a DAO, in the manner of Tao. Neither are anything like “The DAO” in form or function.
What the Tao Project has released so far is a prototype version of our Infiniti Protocol, which allows what is known as “Object Relational Mapping” or “ORM” between blockchains. This means if you put your rights or data on one blockchain, another blockchain or non-blockchain platform can easily consume the data.
We are also one of the few projects with actual rights data in a blockchain that may be independently verified. We have a patent pending on the process.
We are blockchain experts. We have surrounded ourself with music industry experts, not all of which agree. What we ended up with is a solution for the solutions that create more problems than they solve, which is the point that the author missed entirely.