AMA with our CEO, Lawrence Samantha on Zcoin Telegram group

ZCoin recently hosted an AMA session with Honest Mining and our CEO, Lawrence Samantha on their Telegram on the 21th November 2019.

We had an awesome response from the AMA and there were many excellent questions. For those of you who missed it, we enclose the transcript. The text is unedited, just formatted for clarity and easy reading.

Highlights can be found below as transcribed by @Muggles Yap, ZCoin’s community managers:

@Muggles Yap | ZCoin CM

Hi everyone, welcome to the latest of our ZCoin AMA Session with Honest Mining. First of all, let me give you a short summary about today’s AMA. In this AMA Session, We’ll be able to ask Honest Mining detailed questions about their platform.

We also have a special rewards for one lucky winner with a total rewards of $100 worth of $NST! So prepare your best question as the winner will be given their share of $100 worth of $HNST.

Firstly, we want to start our AMA session with a project presentation by Lawrence Samantha. Now, I’d like to welcome Lawrence Samantha as the CEO of Honest Mining!

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

Hi Everyone! To put it simply, Honest Mining is a staking as a service provider. We want to lower the barrier of entry so everyone can stake. Traditionally, crypto staking is hard for non-technical people. For example, staking requires you to run a validator, that means as validator you need to run a Linux server. It is easy for some, but it can be a real challenge for most people.

Let alone, you also need to have a big amount of coins to stake. However, with Honest Mining, everyone are able to stake easily. You can access our platform on https://honestmining.com — it is live and everyone can use it. Registering is easy at Honest Mining, and you can stake multiple coins — including $XZC !

@Muggles Yap | ZCoin CM

Thank you, Lawrence! Can you also tell us a bit about what makes Honest Mining different?

Reuben Yap I Project Steward of ZCoin

Hi everyone, please also noted that this channel is muted for the moment and will be open later for questions.

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

Sure thing, We offer both staking pool & full node. For staking pool, you don’t have to have full amount of coins. Full disclaimer, it is centralized — just like most exchanges are now centralized now. But by using staking pool, we allow you who don’t have 1000 XZC to still be participating on a masternode.

Full node service is a trustless solution. We run the ZNode, and your XZC can stay in your Ledger / Trezor hardware wallet. You have to have exactly 1000 XZC & execute some steps to do this. At the moment, we are running 29 Znodes, and combined with other chains we have 100+ nodes online at any given time. So we definitely have the experience & required expertise to run such staking operation.

Our strength lies in our focus to customer happiness, though. We try to make staking experience as simple as possible. Our platform have gone through many design iterations & feature release to make your experience as simple as possible. We value feedback and always try our best to make sure our customers are satisfied.

@Muggles Yap | ZCoin CM

Well said, Lawrence. But can you tell more about the advantages of the Honest $HNST token?

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

Service Fee Discount. We are confident that we’re offering one of the most competitive staking fees on the market. And with $HNST, you will get a 40% discount on top of that! This makes it cheaper than even if you choose to run it by yourself.

@Muggles Yap | ZCoin CM

I see, Can you tell us more about the fees involved?

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

Well, to start with — there is no fee for joining / exiting a masternode. On the staking services, we have three kinds of offering:

You basically join, and wait until the pool is full. We charge 7.5% per staking reward. There is a contract to make sure that the pool stick together for a period of time (for Zcoin Shared Node, it is 2 reward distribution / approximately 35 days)

It is our most popular selection, but very limited seats. If you get a seat on it you’ll start earning immediately. We charge a 15% per staking reward. No contract, join & exit anytime you like.

It is a trustless solution. We run the ZNode, and your XZC can stay in your Ledger / Trezor hardware wallet. This is still in alpha mode, so we are not offering this to public yet, but if you’re interested — please message me.

Oh, and don’t forget the 40% discount using $HNST😄

@Muggles Yap | ZCoin CM

Thank you for the detailed explanation, Lawrence! One last question from me, Do you require any KYC? And if you do, then what sort of documentation do you require?

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

KYC if optional. Our daily withdrawal limit is 500,000 $HNST (around 675 $XZC). If you want higher limit, you need to do KYC using a biometric passport or national ID, and your best selfie picture.

@Muggles Yap | ZCoin CM

Thank you, Lawrence! Now it’s the time to let everyone else have a turn to ask their questions!

Reuben Yap I Project Steward of ZCoin

For your shared node, custody is an important bit as people are essentially trusting Honest Mining to keep their funds secure. Could you give us some details on how your custody is handled?

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

Great question! We do all the industry standard cold-hot wallet separation, we also use hardware wallet on a secured location. All of our internal data are encrypted, and we also have strict internal procedures to get our ISO 27001 next year.

Kiren Dude I Community Member

Recently Vitalik made a statement on MibleWimble technology of coins like Grin, Beam etc. , He also put the positive thoughts on coins like Zcoin, Monera etc. What are your view on this?

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

My view? Of course, ZCoin team is more mature & ahead of the competition

@Muggles Yap | ZCoin CM

Could you touch on the security side of Honest Mining platform? How secure is it? How do you act in a hacking situation? Does Honestmining has a User Protection Fund? And do you have a plan to reimburse your customers against any hacking issue?

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

I’ll explain more on the wallet infrastructure. Basically more than 95% of our assets are in the cold wallet. It is encrypted & we put it in a secure location. The hot wallet is obviously connected to the internet, but all the keys are also encrypted, with salt to the hash. And yes, in case an emergency arises, we have a fund (also in cold wallet) to recover.

@Muggles Yap | ZCoin CM

What is the real utility of HNST tokens? In real life, how can we use them? I understand and read a complete Honest Mining work process but can you explain me about ROI and the profit side? For different Master node it will be different but How Honest Mining ensure profit for each and every investor?

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

HNST token is a utility fee token to pay the service fee. Profit or ROI is in terms of the coins. So let’s say you stake 1000 XZC, at the current rate its generating 7.5 XZC every ~19 days, that’s roughly 14.5% annual ROI.

@Jandamanis I Community Member

Hi Lawrence, I am from Indonesia too, I want to ask what is your opinion on cryptocurency and will it push through as a creative economy? because the current government is aggressively advancing the creative economy. and how do you believe that this will be a creative economy in the future?

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

Hi @jandamanis, I believe that creative economy requires creative solutions. Cryptocurrency is the true global currency, if our government can be more open to that, and let crypto industry flourish- then we will have a chance to be a leading player on the global crypto economy.

@Jorwor I Community Member

How to be in Honest Squad? Is there any space left to join it? How honest I need to be to join Honest Squad?

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

There are some requirements, such as an eagerness to help & grow community. For more details, you can contact @HNSTadmin. There are only a few spaces left, I think.

@Gopabandhu I Community Member

As in ZCoin community member, I need to ask this question. How Honest Mining is seeing the performance of ZCoin? How much percentage staked in Honest Mining of ZCoin out of total staked in your platform?

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

29 out of 103 current nodes are XZC, so 28% — ZCoin is very popular indeed.

@Rishabh I Community Member

What is the plan of Honest Mining in next quarter? Also, what have you achieved in the last 3 quarters this year?

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

We publish monthly update highlights on our blog, so you can check that yourself on the blog. We also focus on adding support for more coins, especially dPoS coins.

Reuben Yap I Project Steward of ZCoin

Do Honest Mining supports only PoS consensus coins or other consensus coins or tokens too?

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

We will support good Proof of Stake based coins. This includes dPos.

@Stella I Community Member

I understand that Honest Mining is a new platform, with a vision already projected towards the future in the field of mining.

So, I would like to ask you, What is the possibility that this project will finance or include in its pattern new crypto coins for the mining process? Of course, it would be a matter of stable cryptocurrencies in the market.

And if so, would they maintain the same parameters to mine cryptocurrencies, or would they change?

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

“Mining” stable cryptocurrencies is not possible, but there are DeFi related projects out there that enable this. We are actively working on this. We focus on PoS because that’s what’s missing on the market.

Reuben Yap I Project Steward of ZCoin

Quick question, What is the reason and origin behind the name of “HONEST MINING”?

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

Easy, it’s because there are so many scams & lies on “crypto mining”. The concept behind mining & staking is wildly different for experts, but for many they are “similar”. We think staking is like “mining 2.0″

@Olexander I Community Member

No need for complicated sophisticated questions, simple question by me but one that a lot of us (potential users) would like to know:

Who are your recognised competitors and what are your winning differentials for spearheading adoption in staking and masternode participation?

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

All Nodes is obviously a good competitor in the space. Their bot is amazing, I think Zcoin is using it too on this group. Staked is another big player in the staking industry. As I said earlier, we’re focusing on ease of use so that even the no-coiners can understand & use.

Reuben Yap I Project Steward of ZCoin

How Honest Mining is changing the traditional mining and How is it better? And also, which is more profitable, Traditional Mining or HonestMining?

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

Traditional mining as in running the node yourself can be cheaper, but only if you know how to do everything yourself properly. Otherwise, it’s quite a hassle as running multiple nodes can be a full time profession.

@S.A.M. Crypto Trader I Community Member

What are the requirements of Honest Mining to join a MasterNode ?

Lawrence Samantha I CEO of Honest Mining

5 XZC per seat, minimum 1 seat.

@Muggles Yap | ZCoin CM

And that’s a wrap. Once again, We’d like to thank Lawrence Samantha for joining us for today’s session.

Reuben Yap I Project Steward of ZCoin

By the way, please also thank @Muggles Yap for getting up to host this AMA session. It’s 6 am for him in Johannesburg

@Muggles Yap | ZCoin CM

Thank you everyone and Huge thank you to Lawrence and the Honest Mining team!

Originally published at https://honestmining.com on November 21, 2019.