Understanding Pi Network: The Rise and Controversies of Pi Token

hello everyone happy New Year and welcome to the first episode of 2023 in English so today we're going to be

talking about Pi Network or the pi token so um a lot of news have been circulating

about the pi token but three years ago uh in one of my videos about cryptocurrencies what is bitcoin I had

explained about the pi token in a Tamil video and it was in 2019 in December and that is basically the same network or

the same token that we're talking about now so why are we talking about Pi in the first place so uh pi as a token has

been there for three years and you know you can mine it on on of my mobile phone for free and all of this something that

I had explained three years back but recently there's been a lot of questions about the pi Network and about the pi

token because who will be as an exchange had listed it and the price had suddenly gone up to nearly 300 and everybody is

suddenly starting to talk about and there's a lot of confusion around Pi token in the pine Network work so we're

going to be trying to explain the basics of pi as well as all of the controversies surrounding the pi Network

in this video so first of all what is Pi Pi is a token or a network or a cryptocurrency that you can you can mine

on the phone rather it's actually not a cryptocurrency it is because it's not in it's not in a an open blockchain yet it

is right now in close proxy in fact three years back when it was launched it was not even on a blockchain it was just

a concept that was created at that point of time with the intention to go towards a blockchain with the intention to

launch a main net in the future which they have just done as an enclosed main net now the the how does a token get

popular how does a token become popular like mean coins for example when the popularity spreads that's when the price

increases when everybody starts buying it but initially when the tokens are launched they are either launched as a a

far price launch or through like an Ico initial coin launch they are launched as an Ico on an Ideal

sale where they are sold at a common price and it creates a bit of a marketing strategy it's basically to

try and say that there is a coin like this and to spread the awareness and spread the News That's How most coins

are launched like sheep and and Dodge and all those coins and there are some coins which are then mined through the

power of uh you know the the pow um where proof of work like Bitcoin for example which are then mined through the

uh the process of actually providing crypto support or the technical support the hardware support to the blockchain

itself but pi as a concept was a little bit different the aim was to distribute as much spy as to possible to ask many

people and then once a large number of people millions and millions of people had uh ownership of the pi tokens had a

share of the pi tokens then they were trying to create a value for the python then they were trying to create a value

basically first divide the tokens equally into a large community and once a large community has had a sufficient

number of pi tokens then launching the token would make sense because then everybody would then contribute to the

ecosystem and contribute to the value of the pi Toker it's more intended like a barter system to begin with but then

that's um what that's what the objective was that initially instead of launching a

blockchain instead of launching it at a at a value at a price it was launched at zero dollars it was 100 zero values

where people who had mobile phones can just click a button and you're basically acquiring these tokens over a large over

a period of time and for the last three years many people have been mining it on their mobile phone including me I've

been like I had explained in that video in 2019 you can basically just for free you can just click the button and you

can just accumulate by over a period of time slowly and you will also basically tell your friends and tell people that

you know and that's how the the thing spreads now there's a subtle difference between uh it's it's commonly called as

MLM or pyramid strength the only big difference is that in MLM other people are required to buy here everything is

free you're not forcing anyone to actually spend any money everything is completely free so like I had explained

in that video uh you can go to mindfy.com and you can download it and there is a white paper which talks about

the full details there is also a medium article that explains the tokenomics of Pi and you know Pi is actually a

blockchain that was built on the Stellar consensus protocol SCP which is what xlm Stellar lumens is also built on so it's

built on the Stella lumens protocol the consists protocol and there are a lot of good details on this medium article

which is published somewhere in I think March 2022. the main point is on December 2021 after about two years

without a blockchain without a main net Pi Network created the enclosed main the first enclosed maintenance so for over a

year ah roughly over a year Pi has had a main net a blockchain main net on the Stellar consensus protocol but it's an

enclosed mean meaning ah you cannot send the tokens outside of this network or you cannot send tokens into this network

you can only transact within this network which means that you cannot sell it in a centralized exchange for a price

or for a value or you cannot put a value you cannot even put a value on these Pi tokens another important factor in the

medium article is that the tokenomics number of tokens it limited the total Max Supply in the main net to 100

billion Pine and they also depicted how this hundred billion Pi is going to be broken down so

for example 80 billion Pi was going to come going to go to the community and 20 billion Pi was allocated to the core

piety so out of this 80 billion by 65 billion Pi was the mining Rewards or how whatever you are doing on the mobile

that is where the 65 billion Pi was being allocated to which is a huge amount that is being allocated to a free

mining process from a crypto token perspective no other crypto token has probably allocated this much percentage

of crypto tokens for a free mining process like not even spending your computing power for example so ah this

is probably the first attempt where ah this much of tokens were given away for free to a large community and then

creating a value for it now there is also a coin gecko article which talks about the pi Network and it gives you

all the details about how the algorithm works how the tokenomics works and you know it also talks about you know what

how initially it was perceived as a scam and how it is not a scam or how more and more uh people are starting to have

confidence over the pi Network as a in general basically so this is again a good article to read and it talks about

the kyc in in detail so like a centralized exchange on the pi Network you need to do uh do your customer kyc

the reason the rational that they have given is that because people can have multiple phones or multiple devices they

can create duplicate accounts fake accounts and they can mine in multiple devices one person can mine multiple

devices the objective is that only one person can have only one person should have only one account and so we should

not be rewarding all the fake outcomes so even if you had managed to mine in like five or ten phones for example you

can do kyc on only one phone and that limits the uh the fake accounts or that limits the duplicator constant this is

one of the main reasons why they've said that kyc is required and this makes sense because that what it would mean is

that out of the 65 billion probably only about 15 or 20 billion would actually go to as actual rewards to actual people

because there is an expectation that you know uh the the remaining uh would probably be fake accounts or would be

probably people having multiple accounts on multiple devices so the controversy started when huobi Global on December

29th they announced that they are listing Pi ah token Pi without ah you know any AdWords any announcement from

the pi Network team in in their official channels who will just announced that they are listing the pi tokens and Pi

token launched to almost like nearly uh 300 dollars to start with on the on the launch day and it went up at one point

to probably about 309 310 dollars and it has gradually come down from that point but it did huge volumes it did millions

and millions of dollars in volume and uh it was that is when it got the attention of the media and it got attention of the

social media a lot of people started talking about it now the reason this was controversial was because

the pi team or the pi Network team actually came out in a tweet saying that they have not authorized any exchanges

to list Pi token as such so they had warned in fact saying that you can suffer substantial losses by

participating in those unauthorized listings and even on their website they published a detailed article that it is

still in an enclosed maintenance stage which means that you cannot transfer Pi tokens to outside of the enclosed main

net and all of these exchanges are doing it without their authorization but in general what they had done what the

exchange had done is that they had listed an IOU token an IOU token again give you a link to what an IOU token is

but it's basically a representation of a token before the actual token gets issued you know you can basically give a

presentation of the token using a IOU token now this has been done many times before

especially in crypto the most famous example is when spark token a flower token uh in in 2020 when it was about

when it was about to be launched or when when they thought it was about to be launched a lot of exchanges listed the

flower token as an IOU token and flower Network actually came out with a tweet saying that you know they are aware that

many exchanges are listed the flower token as an IOU I had even tweeted saying that there is an IOU of flare and

not actually the flr token and the risk of trading an IOU token with zero idea of what the price would be at launch so

a lot of people had been trading uh flr token at that point of time without you realizing the fact that uh what was

being traded was actually an IOU token and uh even though uh on on the uh you know there was a clear indication from

Flair and there was a notification from the crypto action user it was IOU token if you go to a crypto pricing website it

did say flare IU you for example when the pricing was given sort of for right now even like you know next week has

been the actual fire token is going to launched even now the flare IUI token has been trading for nearly two years

for two years the IOU token has been trading but the difference here was that the Huawei did not mention anywhere that

was an IOU token they just said it was the actual Pi token that was being listed and that was being traded uh only

in one of their articles they mentioned that they are still uh closely following up with pi Network's update on the

upcoming main Network that's the only place where they had mentioned that it's not actually an actual mainnet token but

they said they were working with the pi Network PI right now like I said is about 86

dollars it has fallen down nearly one-fourth of the value in about three four days

um but that is where the the problem is the problem is because all of this original value this 300 value where did

it come from who did it go to what is the uh you know why is this big controversies because most of the

trading volume is with hobby so when Hobie launched it without actually having any sort of uh

collaboration or cooperation with the pi Network all of this was coming from Whoopi basically so Pi Quantum crypto

Quant actually published a detailed article on it and it's very interesting because who obeys proof of reserves was

was coming down and their their proof of resource values in Bitcoin and stablecoin was actually going down so

they needed something they needed a Cash Generator mechanism and they had used Pi Network which had about 30 million users

as one of the uh you know options to generate cash for them cells because just the trading volume alone was like

millions of dollars which should have generated a huge amount of fees trading fees for huobi when their other when the

trading volume was being dried up so um obviously they made a lot of money who have we made a lot of money by

listing pi.com or the pi Network tokens at a very high value and it's quite easy to set the initial price because once

you create some initial trades or that value the the market makers or the order book basically start showing you the

values are 300 or whatever and the subsequent buyers will then follow the same order book or full follow the same

liquidity and would start trading at that value so in a nutshell uh when will Pi Network be released what's going to

be the price so my expectation is that because 100 billion tokens it's like similar to xrp and it's probably going

to be around the price of what the xrp is right now you know it would probably be less than one dollars from a launch

perspective and also because a lot of people who've been mining for a few years they will want to have an exit

liquidity immediately on launch and there'll be probably a lot of sale that will happen immediately and you can

expect the price to drop initially and then to sustain after a while so I expect the price to be less than one

dollar so even the people who are buying in Hawaii right now at 80.85 the probably uh you know incurring a huge

Risk by buying it at a such an inflated value when will the mainnet launch again I have no idea like flr token for

example they've been launching the mainnet for nearly two and a half years so obviously it could take any number of

months for example for the main net to go as an open minded so this these are my expectations when these things happen

I will obviously make a video now for people who have never used Pi or who never mind buy and want to mine it or

people who have already been mining Pi but do not know what needs to be now now with the main net launch and all these

things I'll give you a brief demo of how to do it on your mobile and what to do if you've already been mining Pi Network

on your mobile I'll just give you like a brief demo of the application so if you've never registered for pi token or

mind Pi token so here's how you start so you can click on the link or you can directly go to mindpay.com

and you can basically download the mine app for either iPhone or for Android and you can register for the pi Network as a

new user so you can use your phone number of Facebook uh I use the phone number and here you will be asked for

the invitation code where you can type on and through which is my referral code you can also skip it and you can

directly do the registration without using a referral code as well so once you register will also guide you on

where to click it's basically where it's circled right now that's where you click for Mining and you have to do this every

24 hours every 24 hours you have to keep clicking it for you to get the mining rewards and it will also say that

whether you want to get notified for a reminder for the notification when you have to click it for the next day I have

enabled notifications on my phone as you can see at this point it's point zero two Pi per hour initially it used to be

one Pi per hour about three years back and it has slowly come down it's now point zero two Pi per hour and on the

left you can click uh for the menu where you can see the link to install the pi browser and you can also see the mainnet

link which shows you um the migration checklist so in the migration checklist you have like seven

options or seven steps seven or eight steps which you can go through one by one now even for the users who already

created a pi Network and been mining it for a few years but have not done the kyc so you can click there and click on

the sign in to Pi browser which will then open the link for downloading the pi browser Pi browser and another app

like Pi Network mining Pi browser is another app where you can actually have the links for kyc for wallet creation so

we will start with the kyc option so know your customer as I have already explained why we need to do kyc we need

to provide our details like a crypto exchange we need to provide our details and we need to provide our uh you know

identity card like our driver license or a passport and you have to go through the verification process the kyc

verification process similar to how you will do in a centralized exchange and once you have done this then again you

can go back to the the pi Network or the pi token you can look at the the migration checklist and in the migration

checklist you can then see that once this first download has been done that be marked as green now you can click on

the Second Step which is creating a pi wallet it will again open the pi browser so once you've done the pi browser it

will open it for all the actions and in the pi browser it will ask you to generate a wallet if you have not

created one when you generate a wallet it will give you a 24 word secret phrase which you can store safely like any D5

wallet here it will start with the test net where you will have like a hundred test net tokens and you can actually

send and receive tokens within the test net to the other Pi Network participants who are also on the test net and you can

click on the main net where you can see that you will currently have zero Pi because nothing has been migrated yet so

once you you come back to the checklist you will see that the generate wallet has now been confirmed and now you go on

to do the other steps the third step is to confirm wallet and now your Pi Network app and your Pi browser app are

connected and now the third step is done now you go to the fourth step wherein you will commit to lockup

configuration now this is an important point where you are basically locking up the tokens for a few months to increase

the reward rate of the reward percentage now I do not opt for 90 percent which was a starting scenario I opted for

fifty percent lockup and six months lockup but you can also do much lesser as well and I would probably suggest not

to do more a much longer duration as a personal research and then now that you've completed the the six steps

because we have already done the kyc and we go and do the acknowledgment in the acknowledgment they are giving you a

contract wherein the first class itself is saying that you know you are not expecting the tokens uh you're not

expecting profits from the token and all of this is basically just to cover themselves from a legal perspective from

a Securities and Exchange perspective so you can read through the whole thing it's actually quite useful to read

through the whole thing but um You probably don't have an option and finally I have done the sign

acknowledgment and the eighth step is now in progress which will take a few days for the main net tokens to be

migrated hopefully you found this useful until next time thank you bye