Nothing but walls of text here but it's worth the read especially if you have never heard about things like Ethereum, Blockchain, Dapps or are wondering what decentralization even means. Oh and just in case I have gotten something completely wrong here please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section below and correct me.
Wait... this is actually a thing?
Yes! BrofistCoin (PEW) is actually a thing. It's a real and fully functional cryptocurrency that you can send to other people and
theoretically you can even buy stuff with it if you find someone willing to accept it in exchange for their stuff. This is of course
(at the moment) highly unlikely.
But if you think about it, cash (as in paper bills and metal coins) is conceptually the same thing. It would be completely useless
without a community that agrees upon its value.
People as a community have all agreed that cash holds a certain value and that it can be used to buy stuff. All in all they are
still pieces of paper and scrap metal, but since our government has enabled us to trade it for goods and services we use it without
even thinking about it.
If an alien visited our planet they would most likely not care about our piles of cash. It would be completely irrelevant to them
because they have different standards for declaring what is valuable and what isn't. What I'm trying to say here is that the value of
BrofistCoin is entirely dependent on whether or not the community as a whole decides to assign it a certain value.
Real world applications for BrofistCoin
Thousands of people all around the world are spending their free time creating new and funny memes for PewDiePie so he can
review those memes on his channel and earn revenue off the work of others. And while getting upvotes from the community and praise
from the meme lord PewDiePie may seem like a decent reward in itself, wouldn't it be nice to actually receive something tangible for
your efforts? A meme coin in a literal sense is perfect for this!
Since BrofistCoin is a meme coin built by fans of PewDiePie for fans of PewDiePie it makes sense to use it to reward creators
who submit the best content in the PewDiePieSubmissions subreddit.
Whenever PewDiePie rates a meme in one of his LWIAY or Meme Review episodes I will try to personally get in touch with the original
author of the meme and reward them with some BrofistCoin. At the moment I'm going about this solo but I hope that PewDiePie will
eventually notice what we're trying to do here and will support it.
I have also made a public request on Reddit to have BrofistCoin approved for the Reddit Tip Jar Bot. It enables Reddit users to send
tips to other Reddit users using a simple !tip command. And since BrofistCoin is an ERC-20 standard token (the one that Reddit Tip Bot
likes) I don't see no reason why it shouldn't be approved. If you wish to help you can simply go here and upvote the request.
So how do I get some PEW coins?
I'm glad you asked. Since BrofistCoin is built on top of the Ethereum blockchain you will need an Ethereum wallet to store your
PEW coins. It is strongly recommended to get your Ethereum wallet by installing a browser plugin called MetaMask. You can Google it
yourself or you can simply go here to get it.
Unfortunately you cannot claim any free PEW coins because the airdrop event is over. Since we have distributed all of the 50 million PEW coins to
the public, your only other options are to either win a LWIAY episode or buy them directly off an exchange such as
ForkDelta.
Once you have some PEW coins you can send them to other people using our new Transfer
feature or if you prefer you can use MyEtherWallet as well. Both methods require you to be logged in to your MetaMask account.
What's Ethereum?
Ethereum is a decentralized platform (not a cryptocurrency) that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference. It requires Gas (aka. Ether (ETH), the cryptocurrency) in order to operate.
What's a smart contract?
The concept of smart contracts was first proposed back in 1994 by a computer scientist Nick Szabo. Generally speaking a smart contract
is a computer protocol that enables credible and transparent transactions without third parties. It's worth noting that Bitcoin was the
first to support basic smart contracts in a way that it enables peer-to-peer transfer of value in the form of a cryptocurrency. The coin
gets transfered directly from one person to another without going through a third party like PayPal or a bank. It's the equivalent of digital
cash. However Bitcoin's functionality is very limited when compared to Ethereum.
An Ethereum smart contract is written in a fairly new programming language called Solidity and it enables developers to
create and run fully functional and complex programs called dapps (decentralized apps) inside the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Perhaps
you've heard about Crypto Kitties? It's a pretty cool example of what I'm talking about.
Almost any web service that can be found on the
"regular" internet can theoretically be built as a decentralized app. Imagine a social network without evil Mark Zuckerberg snooping around
your private data. Or a decentralized voting platform so we can finally be sure that our votes actually count and the results aren't being
tampered with. The possibilities are endless and we are only just beginning to realize how the Blockchain technology will help reshape our
future.
I will definitely write more on this topic soon but let's get back to the smart contracts for now.
Our contract address is 0xa701122c1b67220a8B6883D03C8Ad67896B12466 and if you are
interested you can read its source code here.
If you look at the source code you'll realize that it's a program that declares a PEW token with certain variables. It then sends out the PEW
token to addresses who send it some (or none) Ether. It then blacklists the address so it cannot claim PEW again (let's give everyone a fair chance,
eh?) Additionally there are a few functions that allow the contract creator to do things like transfer ownership to someone else or query the
balances of token holders etc.
I guess I should come out and say that I copied the code from another token (uetoken.com) because I wanted to
launch this quickly after PewDiePie announced it. Almost all Ethereum based tokens use a very similar approach in their smart contracts so in the
end it doesn't matter that I didn't write the code myself, right? The overall functionality is exactly the same as 99% of other tokens. And it is
so for a good reason: by having one specific token standard (ERC-20) with a common set of functions and rules we can create Dapps that can easily
interact with all other tokens without having to go through hoops and complicated workarounds.
Once a Smart Contract is deployed it can no longer be modified. Which is also good because this way we don't need to rely on the word of the
contract's creator for trust. The contract simply cannot do what it was not programmed to do initially. Nobody can tamper with it in the future.
This will force developers to write good code and to think hard beforehand what they want their smart contract to do in the future. Ironically there is
a certain flaw in our own token contract that will result in transactions being slightly more expensive once we launch the PewDiePie's Collectibles
mini-game. Thankfully it's nothing significant. If you're interested then it basically requires 2 transactions for any collectible to be bought using
PEW coin instead of just one. You, the user, will still make only one transaction but the contract will make an additional transaction and will therefore
ask you to send a slightly higher miner's fee.
What's a miner's fee?
To understand why you need to pay a miner's fee (also known as Gas) for every transaction you will first need to understand how the
Ethereum network works.
The Ethereum network consists of thousands of powerful computers all around the world. All of those computers are "mining" Ethereum
which basically means that they are confirming transactions that take place on the Ethereum blockchain. You can think of the blockchain
as a decentralized (no single entity controls it) public ledger that has a record for every transaction that has taken place, ever.
So for example if I were to send you Ether or any other token that resides on the Ethereum blockchain (PEW for example), the transaction would first
need to be confirmed by the miners and if everything checks out the transaction will succeed and is then added permanently to the public
ledger.
Unfortunately the miners are not altruistic meaning that they don't just keep their machines running 24/7 without getting anything in
return. On top of that the process of mining uses up quite a significant amount of electricity which of course costs money. For example my
personal Ethereum mining rig which consists of 6 graphic cards consumes the equivalent of about €50 EUR per month in electricity. This is where
the miner's fee (Gas) comes in. By mining (confirming transactions) the miners are rewarded Ether which will easily cover their
electricity bill and then some.
Useful links:
How Ethereum mining works
What is a Blockchain?
What are Gas Limit and GWEI?
The total cost of a transaction is Gas Limit (Gas) multiplied by Gas Price (GWEI). The Gas Limit is called a "limit" because it is a maximum amount of units of gas you are willing to spend on a transaction. The price you pay for each unit increases or decreases how quickly your transaction will be mined. A more thorough explanation can be found here.
How much PEW will I get if I win a LWIAY episode?
We will allocate a total of 100 BrofistCoin for every LWIAY episode. This amount will be divided by the top 3 performers.
First and foremost we will look at PewDiePie's reaction and whether or not he clearly points out your meme by saying something like "well done" etc.
We will then check how many upvotes the community has given to your meme. Once we have those numbers we will generate a pie chart to better visualize
the finalists. Finally the top 3 are rewarded BrofistCoin based on the percentage of their total upvotes.
You should really check out this Medium article where we explain all of this in more detail.
What happened to the mineable coin (BFC)?
When BrofistCoin first launched we were invited to join a group of developers who started working on a mineable coin. However after a month of trying the developers still had no luck in compiling the code forked off CryptoNote and since many of them didn't have enough free time to spend on the project the development of a mineable coin was officially stopped on the 26th of March, 2018.
Does this mean that the project is dead?
Far from it! After the developers announced that they were no longer working on the mineable coin it made sense to crown the promotional
PEW token as the official BrofistCoin by default. With over 22 million PEW distributed at the time of writing coupled with the fact that
PEW coin is already trading on ForkDelta at around $0,000017 per coin it's safe to say the community has already chosen PEW to be the official
BrofistCoin.
And when you consider the real world application we have envisioned for BrofistCoin since the beginning (a means to reward meme creators on PewDiePieSubmissions
subreddit) you will understand that a mineable coin simply wouldn't have made sense in the first place. BrofistCoin should be earned by creating
new and original content not by mining it on your computer without any contribution to the community whatsoever.
That, and the Reddit TipJar system only supports Ethereum based ERC-20 tokens and no other type of cryptocurrency.
If you're interested you can read our
Medium article
that explains, in more detail, why a mineable coin would have made no sense to begin with.
What is the ERC721 standard?
For those of you not familiar with Ethereum, the term ERC721 is used for a type of token standard
where each token is unique and identifiable by their ID (a Non Fungible Token).
Unlike the ERC20 standard (a Fungible Token) that our BrofistCoin is based upon, with ERC721 no single token is like the other.
In other words, with BrofistCoin you can give any random coin to me and if I give you back any other random coin,
the value exchanged is exactly the same. However with ERC721 tokens, because they are all unique, if I give you a random token
and you give me a random token, their values are not the same so they are Non Fungible.
The owner of every token is publicly
viewable and nobody can counterfeit these tokens which makes ERC721 ideal to represent virtual assets.
In our case these assets are Meme Trading Cards, but the standard can really be used for anything from
birth certificates to plots of land in the real world. In a way you can compare ERC20 to US Dollars and ERC721 to Pokemon Cards!
What do you have planned for the future?
Smart Contracts, which are the true power of Ethereum, have opened the door for us to create many amazing new things. At the moment we are
slowly but surely working on a prototype model of what you could call "PewDiePie's collectibles". It will be essentially a lot like CryptoKitties
but with PewDiePie related memes. For example the first collectible will most likely be the infamous chair that Pewds is selling for just $399.
The way it would work is that anyone who pays 399 BrofistCoin could claim ownership of a virtual version of his chair. It wouldn't be good for anything
other than showing off, but it's still a pretty decent step forward for our project and for the community as a whole.
That said we are currently looking for volunteers who can help us move forward faster and more effectively. If you happen to know anyone who knows
a thing or two about Solidity and Smart Contracts feel free to send us a message on our official email address: [email protected]. Additionally we
are also looking for people with experience in marketing and social media.
Leave your thoughts below