What I learned about PalNet during the Minnow Mayor Town Hall

So, it has been quite some time since I spent any quality time on the PAL Discord server, or on Discord at all. Life has been busy, and spending time in a chat window just wasn't essential to my day to day life. But last night @aggroed was going to be talking about the brand new PALNet, and I could watch game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals on mute, so I found myself back on the old Discord Server.

First impression was that this was not as well attended a show as I expected. In the old days, people were crawling out of the woodwork during a Minnow Mayor Town Hall. You could hardly keep up with the chat, and it was all Aggroed and his guests could do to keep up with a few of the questions being asked. That was not the case here, and I am not sure if that is a sign of the times, or if everyone was just busy on their Sunday evenings and didn't have time to come and listen. It is also entirely possible that people had been buzzing in @crimsonclad Steemwaves radio show on Saturday and they found out all they needed to know then. I'm not sure, I will say it was kind of nice to have fewer people spamming questions in chat, so there was more opportunity to have some questions answered.

So here's a few of the tidbits I found out.

The site is slow, but they are working on it
On of the questions that came up was about not seeing your vote impact the PAL payout. Currently, the Pal system is slower than Steem so votes are taking 15-90 seconds (I believe I recall that correctly) to register. So if you are hitting the upvote and moving along, you might not see what your vote does to the payout right away. Patience is a virtue with a new platform.

This is all run off of one node currently
Where do the speed issues come from? Whereas STEEM has 20 witnesses plus the backup witnesses, PAL is currently run off of one node. I didn't get a firm idea of if there will be more nodes coming, or if the intent is to keep it to one node but find ways to make that one node faster, but at this point one node is what we have.

2500 PalCoin Doesn't make you a whale
If you have followed the claimdrop you know that the amount of PALCoin you could claim was capped at 2500. This was to give everyone a fair shake at having influence on the system, so we don't get the collective power issues we currently see in STEEM. Your initial stake is based on your Steem Power, and they went through the math a little bit, but my eyes glazed over during that part. I will tell you, my 3300 Steem Power translated to 574 PAL, so do the math from that as you will.

So if the cap is 2500 PAL in the drop, then 2500 PalCoin staked makes you a whale right? Wrong. There was a "Mod-Drop" during testnet, and there are many of the MSP-PAL folks on the system with 30,000 PAL to their name. These folks are our current whales. In theory, they are going to be curating the PalNet looking for great content and distributing upvotes accordingly. I will say, if you have spent time in PAL, the people who have made it to MOD status do seem to have the community in mind, and I am much more willing to believe in their intent to spread the PAL than I have faith in any STEEM whale hitting posts with upvotes outside of their circle jerk group.

The 30,000 PAL Mod-Drop comes with some caveats. These PAL must remain staked for a year, and the MODs have also agreed not to Self-Vote during that one year period. Not sure if there is any prohibition against MODs voting for each other, but the no self-voting is something.

the PalNet reward split is 50/50
STEEM has talked about a curator bump with each hard fork conversation that has come up, reward distribution is one of the biggest sticking points on the platform. Palnet has gotten out in front of this by offering up a 50% Author / 50% Curator reward system. So you really are rewarded for going out and seeking good content to vote up.

You will be able to use PalCoin to promote your posts
This is not live yet on the mainnet, though they are using it on testnet with success. You will have the opportunity to use PALCoin to promote your post. The idea is that this will work better than the STEEM post promotion that is basically doing nothing at this time. Until we see it on the Main Net it will be tough to say how well this works. But it might be worth keeping some PAL unstaked, as I don't believe you will be able to burn Staked Coin to promote your post.

You can buy PalCoin on the Steem-Engine
At a current price of around $0.02 per PAL, if you believe in the system it might be a great time to buy in. You can even stake your PAL straight from Steem-Engine. This is kind of a bet on @aggroed and his team at this point, but after the success of SplinterLands and most everything else that has come out of this group, throwing a bet their way seems logical to me. I sent 100 STEEM over to the Steem-Engine and increased my stake to 2520 PAL. Not sure if that makes me a dolphin or just a higher level of minnow, or if those names will even apply on Palnet, but it's just a small bet that PAL will perform well against STEEM over time.

This is still a work in progress
There is a lot still to be worked out on this front end. There are questions still to be answered. One question that was talked about for a bit was if the unclaimed tokens from the claimdrop would be burned or used somewhere else. This is still to be decided. They are also working out the best way to enhance curation. One idea was to send the unclaimed tokens to @msp-curation to help boost the discovery of good content.

There are people working on this project full time. It is not a fork of STEEM, it is "in addition to" STEEM. Voting for content on one platform translates to a vote on the other platform as long as you have stake in both STEEM and PAL. There is work to be done on percentages, as you might want to give a 2% upvote on STEEMit, but 100% on PAL and you can't currently do that. So they are going to work on options for that. It seems no one wants two sliders for every vote they make, so other options need to be come up with.

Aggroed hinted at some upcoming partnerships to help with the onboarding process for new users. PalWorld (Steemworld site for PAL) is coming soon. Fractional PAL payout will be part of the next release. And much much more.

I'm sure I have missed a lot in this little recap, but hopefully this answers some questions. I haven't read the whitepaper for the project, and that would probably help, and just hanging around the MSP-Waves and listening is bound to be useful.

We'll see if users are prepared to embrace a new way of Steeming.

Thanks to @aggroed, @juliakponsford, and @r0nd0n for being on the air handling the questions and making us better informed than we were previously. I hope this write up is reasonably accurate and helpful to a few people to better understand what we are getting into here on Palnet.

If you haven't claimed your PALCoin, there is still time to do so. Get in, and get staked to start reaping benefits from PalNet.