undo crew,

I wanted to let you all know that Blocktech is about to start the private
beta for a cryptocurrency 2.0 app, Alexandria - a distributed library for
sharing and preserving art, history and culture. You can think of it as
essentially youtube or soundcloud, but by making use of various P2P
networking technologies, the platform relies on no servers. Users can
self-publish anything they'd like (videos, songs, books, 3d printables,
recipes, etc) and they (and only they) have complete control of how their
works are published. By integrating bittorrent technology, certain media
types can be streamed in HD right in the browser, and because the service
has no server or bandwidth overhead, we don't need to make users watch ads.
And with a blockchain at its heart, a cryptocurrency payments layer is
built right in. So content creators will be able to monetize their work in
a variety of ways - from free access with optional tipping, to
microsubscription streaming to pay-per-play. Initially only tipping will be
available, but we are working with partners in the industry, including
Rivetz Technology, to start implementing optional purchase-to-download
mechanisms for our publishers.

For our blockchain, we're currently using a 1 year old fork of Litecoin
called Florincoin. The reason we chose it is because it is designed to
store information in addition to transaction records. Each transaction can
store 528bytes of extra data, which we've made use of as our permanent and
unalterable publishing database. It also has a 40 second target block time,
which makes our front end much more responsive in discovering new media
submissions. We are designing the platform to be as blockchain agnostic as
possible, so if sidechains turns out to be a good, workable idea, we can
make use of them, but for now Flo is serving our needs best.

We have a private beta list going, which we're going to start seeding to
shortly - in perhaps a week or so, after we finish integrating a few more
components into the client app. At the moment, users can run the app to
browse the library and stream content in-app. When we release the beta,
we'll have the wallet and torrent client fully integrated to make the
submission process simpler, but at the moment, doing so requires running
some terminal apps. If any of you would be interested in checking this out
before the beta starts, please let me know. Also, we have a Slack chat
going for some of our early users, so if anyone would be interested in
joining it to chat directly with the developers, just drop me a line.

Thanks so much,
Devon