By a unanimous vote of the Moderators last night the Minnow Support Project has approved the following white paper to be published to the Steem Blockchain describing PALcoin, which is a Steem-Engine token to be powered by scotbot and seen in a Nitrous instance through https://www.palnet.io as well as a ScotBB instance through https://palnet.tokenbb.io.

Steem is a blockchain. On that blockchain lives an app called steemit.com, which is a blogging platform, and the most widely used social media application in all of crypto. It attracted artists, devs, musicians, bloggers, business leaders, photographers, and people of all walks of life because what you produce on the platform can earn crypto.

Earning crypto and getting started was hard so a group of people got together and formed a Discord group called the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network to help new users (often called minnows) get a strong start on the platform. Within that group a team of leaders emerged who called themselves the Minnow Support Project (MSP) and helped the Discord group grow to 20,000 users and helped the Steem ecosystem grow to over 1M accounts.

The next step for the Minnow Support Project is to launch a community token. This is in line with the mission to spread the values of Peace, Abundance, and Liberty, grow the Steem ecosystem, and train and retain new members on ths platform. Specifically, launching a token will enable users to promote their content through posting on palnet.io, earn/spend palcoin through post promotion or to gain Discord customizations within the largest Steem community, and ultimately help people stay engaged on the Steem platform.

Executive Summary

MSP is launching a token called PALcoin. It's a token launched on the Steem-Engine.com smart contract platform. It is a consumable in app token designed to integrate into daily use within the palnet.io and palnet.tokenbb.io websites. It's powered by Nitrous and ScottBB and distributed by Scotbot (services offered by steem-engine.com). These websites serve as a way to promote digitally authored content.

This token offering features:

a claimdrop,
Token sales on steem-engine.com
ongoing distribution to active participants in the PALnet Discord,
ongoing proof-of-brain distribution powered by Scotbot (a python based voting bot that distributes rewards based on PALcoin stake)
ongoing distribution through delegated proof of stake mining
https://www.palnet.io, a custom website similar to steemit.com where post rewards are displayed in palcoin as opposed to steem
https://palnet.tokenbb.io, a custom website hosted by buildteam which displays token rewards for posting on a forum
palcoin is redeemable for upvotes from @minnowsupport
Steem delegators to @minnowsupport receive PALcoin through paid post promotion
PALcoin is redeemable for customizations and advertising in the PALnet Discord

Initial Distribution of PALcoin
There will be 21M tokens initially minted and launched
10% @ Minnowsupport
10% existing moderators/team members
Up to 20% will go out in an claimdrop to a white list of 16000 people
the remaining 60% will be sold on the market for Steem and used to powerup the @minnowsupport account and pay for expenses

Token Launch Pricing

After consulting with legal we're revising our token lauch price:

12.6M PALcoin are available for sale in a large sell wall at 1 steem/PALcoin on Steem-Engine.com.

Team Rewards

There are 2.1M Palcoin that will go to moderators.

@victoriabsb
@swelker101
@r0nd0n
@juliakponsford
@ma1neevent
@kubbyelizabeth
@isaria
@followbtcnews
@discordiant
@crimsonclad
@clayboyn
@aggroed
@ausbitbank
@danielsaori
@drakos

Primary Account

2.1M PALCoin will go to the Minnow Support Project. These tokens will be staked on a Minnow Support account that isn't @minnowsupport.

Claimdrop

The Minnow Support Project will provide a claimdrop up to 16,000 accounts. We worked from a list of under 50,000 accounts that have been active in the last two months. We applied blacklists from trusted sources. We manually removed known multi accounts and previous bans from PALnet discord. We removed users with 10 SP or less. We then took the square root of SP, capped that value at 250, and multipled by 10. The potential value is right around 4.2M PALcoin.

Users will have 1 month to claim the token. There will be an icon seen through Steem-engine.com.

On Going Distribution

Faucets

All financial systems relying on currency requires faucets for the currency as well as sinks. A faucet is how the currency enters the system. A sink is how it is removed from the system. PALcoin will have 3 primary faucets that stem from token inflation: Proof of Brain and Proof of Interaction.

Overall Inflation PALcoin will have an initial target inflation of 10% and decline every year by 1% until it reaches 4% and it will stay at 4% inflation.

Overview:
Initial PALcoin 21M
Initial annual inflation 2.1M
Distribution:
PoI: 10%
PoMining: 10%
PoMod: 5%
PoB: 75%

Proof of Interaction 10% of the inflation will go to msp-active and awarded to community members who partake in discussions in discord (https://minnowpond.org).

Proof of Brain The remaining inflation will occur through Proof of Brain and rewards voting (author and curator rewards) on chain.

Proof of Moderation Similar to how the Steem blockchain provides 10% of the inflation to witnesses; 5% of annual inflation goes to @msp-finance for administrative tasks and management and to cover network expenses.

Proof of Mining 10% of the inflation can be mined. To mine the token purchase and stake PAL Miners (PALM) and PAL MEGA MINERS (PALMM). PALM mines at a rate of 1X, and PALMM mines at a rate of 4X. PALM miners are available in a nearly infinite supply at a cost of 33 steem/miner. PALMM are limited to 10,000 miners and are priced at 100 Steem.

Token Redemption (sinks)

Tokens can initially be redeemed for 1 of three things: upvotes, advertisement, and customizations.

Upvotes - The main account, @minnowsupport, currently allows anyone in the Discord community to use a command $upvote, and receive a low percentage vote on a post. After a year of trying to manage this we're still concerned that it leads to low quality posting. We'd like to continue to encourage posting, but we're attempting through this process to increase the quality.

Going forward users can exchange palcoin they receive for upvotes from @minnowsupport. The ability to store and use PALcoin later decreases the need to burn votes on a timer, which puts pressure to put out content on a schedule rather than when quality content is written. The goal remains the same of getting new users and active discord community members to post, but this approach we think will incentivize higher quality content.

A portion of the tokens received by the voting bot will be used to offset new inflation. A portion of the tokens will be distributed to delegators. To clarify, any SP owned by minnowsupport is stored to be issued as inflation instead of issuing new tokens. Any SP delegated to the bot will receive a portion of the daily PALcoin earnings relative to the percent on the bot.

Ex. Minnowsupport has 100,000 SP on it. 10,000 is organic to the account and 90,000 is from delegation. When PALcoin is sent to the account 10% of what's collected will be used to offset inflation instead of new issuance, and 90% will be returned to delegators to the @minnowsupport account.

Ads Banner advertisement opportunies will exist on the platform.

Post Promotion Users can promote posts on the site using PALcoin.

Discord Customizations A large part of the Steem experience is interacting with a social group. There are a variety of Discord roles that are available for fine tuning your social experience. After the initial token offering, we'll organize a variety of roles to be applied onto users depending on the amount of PALcoin they have staked, steem they have delegated, interaction they've gained, and other ways as makes sense.

Palcoin Settings

7 day payout windows
unstaking occurs in 28 days in 4 installments

Scotbot Settings

Here's the list of initial settings.
"author_curve_exponent":1.05,
"author_reward_percentage":50.0,
"cashout_window_days":7.0,
"curation_curve_exponent":0.5,
"downvote_power_consumption":20,
"downvote_regeneration_seconds":432000,
"issue_token":true,
"json_metadata_key":"tags",
"json_metadata_value":"minnowsupport",
"reduction_every_n_block":10512000,
"reduction_percentage":1,
"rewards_token":15.5,
"rewards_token_every_n_block":100,
"token":"PALcoin",
"token_account":"minnowsupport",
"vote_power_consumption":2,
"vote_regeneration_seconds":432000

Reward curve is just slightly superlinerar to encourage keepign PalPower on one account rather than spread out.
Author reward is 50:50.
Cashout window is a 7 day payout like steemit.com.
Curation is like steemit.com.
There is a downvote pool. Here you get 1 free downvotes a day.
Downvoting power goes from 0-100 in 5 days like upvote power refills on Steemit.com.
To get a vote which receives PALcoin the post has to include palnet as a tag
The inflation rewards shrink every year by 1% (faster than steemit, but will change to 0% shrinking by the time it hits 4% annual inflation ie inflation won't go smaller than 4%).
Voting calculation works like steemit.com.
You get 10 votes a day similiar to steemit.com.
Your voting power recharges completely from zero over 5 days (20% per day).

Mining Rewards

10% of inflation are available from mining.
Mining rewards are once an hour. 10 separate distributions are made every hour to accounts that have staked PALM and/or PALMM.

This is an experiment we think is worthy to take on. We look forward to constructive commentary. All of this is launching as described above today. Minor blips are expected as we roll it all out. Please be patient if any part of this experiences a delay.

Disclaimers

The PALcoin token provides no income or profit sharing from any account that the Minnow Support Project manages.

The Minnow Support Project is offering the token on an "as is" basis and provides no guarantee that additional work or effort will be made other than supporting the existing community with the existing tools.

While it is possible, especially while testing the accurate price of the PALcoin token that prices may fluctuate in the market the Minnow Support Project makes no claim that the token prices will rise in the future beyond the initial lauch (or the initial discounts) listed above.

This token offering has been communicated to the existing members of the PALnet Discord and on the @minnowsupport website. We have no plans to inform people of the token to an audience beyond our Steem Presence.

We are not a business nor intend to be one.

The Minnow Support Project will put the raised Steem into Steem Power. The primary use of the Steem power is to ensure the long term existence of the network and pay server costs and administrative costs. PALcoin on @minnowsupport will not be used to pay for development of the network.

The Minnow Support Project warns that there is long term inflation of the asset built into the design of the asset.

PAL images