Recapitulation of Orchid AMA event held at AMA LOVERS CLUB

Venue: https://t.me/amaloversclub
Date: Monday, 23rd November, 2020
Time: 15:00 UTC

The Orchid team was represented by @dereksilva. He judiciously shared with us detailed knowledge and information about the project.

1st Segment: INTRODUCTION

Q1 : Can you please introduce yourself and your background, also introduce the Team working on Orchid

Ans : Of course. I’ll try to keep each message to a few sentences so people can start reading. 🙂

I’m Derek Silva 👋 I live in Canada 🇨🇦. I was first introduced to Bitcoin back in 2015 or so. I found it interesting but couldn’t get my computer to mine it, so I set it aside. In 2017 I went to Fireside Conference and met some very smart people like Anthon DiIorio, founder of Decentral (Jaxx), and Ethan Buchmann, co-founder of Tendermint and Cosmos.

Learning about Ethereum that weekend, about the Byzantine general’s problem and how to solve it, about bypassing censorship and smart contracts, that was a major relevation for me. 🙂

I went home and dove into ICOs first learning about ETHLend (now Aave), Bloom Protocol, district0x, and others. A few months later I became the Head of Community Relations for Bloom, and have since moved on to focus my time on Orchid Protocol!

Orchid was founded by Gustav Simonsson, Jay “saurik” Freeman (original iPhone jailbreaker and founder of Cydia), Brian Fox (open source advocate and author of the Bash shell), and Dr. Steven Waterhouse (serial entpreneur). The development team is incredibly smart, and almost a year after the Android VPN client launched we’re really picking up steam. 😄

Q2 : Can you introduce the Orchid project, what critical problems does it solve that existing solutions are not solving and what’s the competitve advantage

Ans : Of course. At its core, the purpose of Orchid is to allow for anonymous payments for services at scale. As many of you know, Ethereum cannot handle a large number of transactions per second at this time. While Ethereum 2.0 should help solve that, Orchid’s founding team identified the opportunity to build a scalable solution sooner than that. The Nanopayment smart contract was born, and the first product deployed to show off its capabilities was the decentralized VPN marketplace. 🙂

The competitive advantages using Orchid provides include fully open source software (clients and server), no personal information collected or shared, no credit card or debit card data collected, no in-app analytics (that’s very rare!), and Orchid is collecting the best VPN providers all under one roof so that you don’t have to choose.

Once the server node and Curator documentation is available, eventually there could be thousands of individuals selling their excess bandwidth which means you’ll be able to select any number of nodes. Orchid also provides the ability to set up multi-hop circuits to guarantee the middle node can’t even see the source or destination.

Q3 : Can you briefly describe the Top milestones you have achieved and your target milestones with timelines, also share your roadmap

Ans : We would say that releasing Android, iOS and macOS apps within 7 months was a tall order, but they development team managed to do that. 🙂 This is also a fairly custom VPN protocol, it’s not simply a fork of another one, so a lot of work has gone into making it better and better over time. The first people to use it could only get 1-2 Mbps. Now it’s easy to get 30 Mbps, and sometimes even more. 🙂

For better or worse Orchid doesn’t publish a public roadmap. What I can say is that the major work going on right now is on the Windows client, and on more ways to reduce Gas fees so that it’s less expensive to use Orchid from beginning to end.

2nd Segment: TWITTER QUESTIONS

Q1 : Regarding $OXT, do I need a minimum amount to use Orchid services? Is it a negotiable / minable token?

Ans : Yes, you do need a minimum amount of OXT to create and fund an account. This number varies based on the price of OXT and Gas fees at the time. When you’re setting up your account, the account management dApp at https://account.orchid.com will show you recommended values. Right now 151 OXT is the recommended minimum, but you could start with less.

Q2 : Can anonymous transactions be performed on the Orchid Protocol network to hide transaction details to help protect the confidentiality of user information and tokens?

Ans : Yes! That’s the goal of the protocol. 😄 In brief:

1. You create Orchid account using an Ethereum wallet
2. You fund your account, those OXT go to the nanopayment contract
3. Most payments go from the nanopayment contract to the bandwidth providers directly
4. Every once in a while, a larger “lottery ticket” payment is issued from your wallet to continue securing Orchid via Ethereum; that’s why there’s a minimum amount of OXT needed

To maintain maximum privacy and anonymity, you would want to use a brand new Ethereum wallet that you’re not using for other transactions in order to create your Orchid account.

Q3 : Which countries can use Orchid’s VPN service and What about countries that prohibit the use of VPNs? Do I feel safe using Orchid?

Ans : The apps are not easily available in France or China right now, however anyone can use the service. There is an APK available directly from Orchid’s GitHub repository as well to help solve for that, and the team is working on getting the app into the French App Store and Play Store in the near future. There is some paperwork that needs to be filed in France because the app contains encryption.

Q4 : What are the securities that you provide for Orchid users? What are the privacy policies you have taken for Orchid users?

Ans : I provided some information on this earlier but I will reiterate the most important points:

1. Orchid does not collect personal information
2. Orchid’s server software does not collect traffic logs
3. Orchid’s mobile app does not collect traffic logs or in-app analytics
4. Orchid doesn’t know your name, email address, credit card information

And in anticipation of someone asking… that means if law enforcement comes knocking, Orchid has no data to provide them about you. We don’t know who you are, where you’re from, and what you’re using the service to do. 🙂

Q5 : Can you explain the meaning of this word "we can reclaim the internet together". What is the ability of Orchid Protocol to do this? Are you sure you will succeed?

Ans : Yes. There are a few parts to this:

1. Individuals and non-profit organizations should run the internet, not giant corporations; decentralizing the Orchid network will help make that happen
2. You should be able to browse the internet and information freely, without your government censoring information that they don’t like
3. Software should be open source whenever possible

3rd Segment: LIVE QUESTIONS

Q1 : - I'm new to this, do you have any tutorials showing how to set up an Orchid VPN account?

- How can I identify if my VPN is working properly and keeping your data private, any Tips?

Ans : 1. Yes we do! I made a new tutorial just last week that was uploaded to Orchid’s YouTube channel. You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pACL-N2Sf0

2. You can always check a site like speedcheck.org which will show you the IP address you’re connecting from, and you can run a speed test there as well. The IP address and provider should look different from what you’re used to from your internet service provider or wireless carrier.

Q2 : What strategy will you implement to bring non-crypto-natives into your ecosystem? How do you keep a balance between developing the technology and also improving the value of your token?

Ans : This is a good question and probably something that will evolve over time. The easiest thing we’ve done so far in the iOS and macOS apps, which will eventually come to the others, is adding in-app purchases. So a non-crypto-native doesn’t have to learn about wallets or dApps, they can use something they are familiar with to create an Orchid account instead.

The focus is always on developing the protocol and ecosystem. The price of OXT is entirely out of our hands and not something we focus on.

Q3 : Lot of projects have been hacked recently. Does your project have programs like hackaton and bug bounty?

Ans : If someone finds a vulnerability in the VPN client or node sofware, absolutely they will be rewarded for disclosing it to the team. 👍 So far, so good. 🙂

Q4 : So I need to pass KYC as an orchid user? What levels of KYC?

Are there fees involved for using Orchid network?

Ans : Nope! No KYC, no email address, nothing. 🙂 Download the app, follow the tutorial I posted earlier to make an account, and go.

Yes, OXT is paid to the bandwidth providers for selling bandwidth on the network. It’s not a free service, but it’s very affordable for people who need a VPN occasionally. There are no monthly subscriptions though, it’s a pay-as-you-go service. The partners in Orchid’s default Curator have set their prices between 3 cents and 8 cents per GB.

Q5 : As a community member and developer how can i contribute to your project 'ORCHID’? What benefits do you offer?

Ans : We are working on a few initiatives right now like an Ambassador Program and some clear guidelines for developers who want to contribute back. Please follow along and we will let the community at large know as soon as these initiatives are ready for your participation. 🙂 We would love to get your feedback on how we can make it easy for developers to help out as well so we can continue improving.

Q6 : How do you evaluate the support from the community? What difficulties do you have for marketing and mass adoption?

Ans : We use a variety of metrics like community growth, number of people actively participating, and sometimes we look for growth in specific areas of the world. We’re in the process of now of looking over the community strategy to make sure we’re addressing different types of people’s needs appropriately.

Q7 : What is the use of the $OXT token in the Orchid and VPN ecosystem? Does $OXT also have a staking feature?

Ans : I would refer you to https://orchid.com/how-it-works for the answers to these questions. In brief, service providers must stake OXT in order to participate in the network, and users must fund their accounts with OXT and stake a small amount to show they have enough OXT to pay for the service.

CONCLUSION

Can you share the link where can buy tokens and share the social media ..!

Ans : OXT can currently be purchased on Binance, Bitcoin.com, Kraken, CoinList, Gemini, Bittrex Global, OKEx, Coinbase, Coinbase Pro, Upbit, and CoinDCX, amongst other exchanges.

You can follow Orchid on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, or even Holdex. 🙂

Does OXT have airdrop?

Ans : Not quite, but there is a CoinMarketCap Earn campaign that just started. If you watch the videos and successfully complete the quiz, you can earn 20 OXT.

https://coinmarketcap.com/earn/project/orchid

Thank you everyone! I will get the reward over to Christiam and malachi shortly for distribution.

Follow Orchid on their platforms:
 ... Website: https://www.orchid.com/
 ... Telegram: https://www.t.me/OrchidOfficial
 ... Twitter: https://twitter.com/OrchidProtocol
 ... Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/orchid/
 ... Github: https://github.com/OrchidTechnologies

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