Welcome to another episode of Satoshi Club AMA Series. Today we would like to tell you about the AMA session with our friends from Gotem. The AMA took place on September 7 and our guests were Tawei Chang and Karma GotEM.
The total reward pool was $800 and it
was splitted into three parts.
In this AMA Recap we will try to
summarize some of the most interesting points for you.
PART 1, INTRODUCTION AND COMMUNITY QUESTIONS
Serg | Satoshi Club: Hello dear community! Today our guests are
from @gtxgotem. @iambhutia and @ty8851,
welcome to Satoshi Club!
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: Hello! Welcome to Satoshi Club @iambhutia. Nice to meet you. 🙂
Karma GotEM: Thank you.
Tawei Chang: Hello all!
Serg | Satoshi Club: Hey guys 🙂 Please tell us a bit about
yourself. how did you get into crypto and how did you start Gotem.
Tawei Chang: Got into crypto very early, back in
August 2011. This was back then when you could only get BTC on MTgox.
Serg | Satoshi Club: So, you mined BTC with your laptop?
Tawei Chang: Not at all, just bought a handful
over mtgox, at that time btc was pretty worthless, even played on to poker
sites that used btc. Gotem started off as MeetMySpy.
Luis Merino |
Satoshi Club: Oh! That should be a great amount of money now.
Tawei Chang: Yes! I had gave away a great amount
of money! 😂
Serg | Satoshi Club: So, what is the story behind Gotem?
Tawei Chang: Basically due to several experiences,
including me getting scammed out of some btc, I realized it’s hard to track
people down and investigators are hard to hire. So created a marketplace called
meetmyspy back in 2015. loaded it up online and a year later revisited the
marketplace to find real detectives signing up and people posting cases for a
lot of random stuff. 2017 was actively running the platform. Realized there
were way too many issues within the investigations industry, I met karma in
2018 at startup thailand. He gave me the inspiration to make the platform
something bigger, like a holistic view and we pretty much rebranded and
reinvented the platform into gotEM.
Serg | Satoshi Club: Karma, would you like to make an introduction
before we get to the question part? questions from the community.
Karma GotEM: Well @ty8851 has covered the origin
story… I’m from India. Been an entrepreneur mostly, so this is my first foray
in the blockchain/crypto space with @ty8851, I’ve subscribed to the vision of
Gotem with @ty8851 and now am glad that there is a community that shares the
same vision….
Q1 from Bitcointalk user JonahAp
Does Gotem have partnership with the
Interpol and other international organizations involved in investigating and
handling international crimes? how does Gotem source for Investigators?
Tawei Chang: We do not plan to make any formal
partnerships with these sort of agencies at the moment because we feel this
would cause the platforms decentralized agenda to become corrupted. Our
rebranded platform Gotem has just wrapped up recently with a rough MVP and we
are on-boarding users currently.
I think that
as more adoption is gained and these global organizations actually see that
smart contracts and blockchain can solve many issues with transparency that I
believe it is a possibility they will either use the platform as a 3rd party
service or perhaps seek a partnership to utilize the platform through an API.
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: So you want to keep GotEM fully
decentralised, and it’s surrounding too. Blockchain is the future. Let’s see if
it gains more adoption soon.
Tawei Chang: Such a platform seems to not work
well as a fully decentralized platform. The reason for that being that there
are too many bad actors that would use investigations for evil rather than good.
The platform works partially decentralized. It could be the case that a few
years DAO voting would allow for such a platform to be fully decentralized
Karma GotEM: And to add to this the GotEM platform
is the place to source investigators and post investigation requirements as
well. In essence like a matchmaking marketplace.
Serg | Satoshi Club: I was scammed of 3 BTC last year. Am I able to
find where did they go through your platform? 😁 I am just
curious to see what channel did he use and maybe to block his accounts.
Tawei Chang: You can upload your case to the
platform and then discuss with investigators or techies that are able to trace
the transactions.
Serg | Satoshi Club: I’ll try that. 🙂
Tawei Chang: Yes, please do. But it depends what
information you have. If you have enough then something can be done.
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: That would be very useful. There are
plenty of scams daily, just hope GotEM gains users… It’s a great solution for
this problems.
Tawei Chang: Right so users. in 2017 I started
running google ads for investigations. and I set a budget of $150 a month and
we would average $100k in case value every month Right so users. in 2017 I
started running google ads for investigations. and I set a budget of $150 a
month and we would average $100k in case value every month. Right so users. in
2017 I started running google ads for investigations. and I set a budget of
$150 a month and we would average $100k in case value every month.
If it’s
something with skip tracking, locating someone, you need full name, DoB,
social, stuff like this. If it’s something with skip tracking, locating
someone, you need full name, DoB, social, stuff like this. So thats why
crowdsourcing works for cyber investigations.
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: What a pitty that some scammers know
really well how to save their public image.
Tawei Chang: A full name and DoB can get you
someones social in the US. Right, they can use proxies or VPS…
Q2 from Bitcointalk user gustafsson
We all have seen in the news the
possible poisoning of a Russian opposition leader with Novichiok. Since your
project is able to do better investigations, are you capable of finding if the
Russian government did or did not poison him?
Tawei Chang: We want to avoid investigating
anything political for now, the reason being is that we would wind up making
enemies with powerful people and karma and I would probably disappear!
Karma GotEM: Well there is a humanitarian aspect
to the platform as well. One of the things that that platform can help is in
the humanitarian needs area.
Tawei Chang: NGOs have a hard time raising funds
and sourcing man power. We hope our platform can address this by letting NGOs
use the platforms API to post their missions and to raise funds and source help.
Q3 from Telegram user @abedmahmud
You mention that there is difficult
to hire a detective nowadays because they are not trustworthy or because you
need to pay in advance without being sure of the results. I understand that.
But how are you solving this?
Tawei Chang: Another excellent question!!! Let me
answer in detail.
There ARE
trustworthy detectives but the large majority of them cannot be found because
google has dominated the advertising space. Many detectives simply do not know
how to market or advertise in order to get clients. Which is why meetmyspy was
gaining so much adoption. Not to say there werent scammers joining the site,
there were but there were excellent old school detectives that found our site
to be useful because we could advertise for them, load their creds up and make
it easy to communicate with their customers.
Our platform
does not allow more than 20% of a retainer and then can be voted on when you
participate in a crowdfund for an investigation. Smart contract technology can
allow funds to be held in a blockchain escrow and voting can determine if funds
are released for each milestone based on the total number of votes yes/no. Small
time investigators that still use yellowpages, whitepages would start getting
noticed over the platform over time as they taking on cases.
The issue
with investigations is everyone is going to google to search for someone, and
you’ll find scammers and corporations with large budgets to advertise their
services. You contact someone you find on the first page and they take up your
entire day doing intake and they dont discuss pricing till you are fully
dedicated and divulged so much information you are exhausted and dont have
energy to find someone else
Scammers are
going to avoid our platform like a plague because of the voting capabilities,
smart contract escrow, and ratings and reviews that are embedded permanently on
a public Blockchain, so naturally all the detectives and freelancers that are
legit will flock towards the platform to provide a real service
Serg | Satoshi Club: Thank you for this thorough
explanation.
Q4 from Telegram user @ion_cristescu
Why you’ve changed your name from
MeetMySpy to Gotem. Why you need blockchain technology to implement your
solutions?
Tawei Chang: We felt that a change from meetmyspy
into something that could be taken mainstream made more sense. A lot of people
would snicker or laugh when they heard meetmyspy. Spy has a sort of negative
connotation attached to it.
With
blockchain tech, it wasnt till end of 2017 that I realized how the Eth smart
contract and blockchain could change the investigations industry forever. After
operating the platform, I realized it was all an issue with trust.
Serg | Satoshi Club: GotEM is from got them?
Tawei Chang: Yes! Got’em. Like we got’em.
Smart
contracts and a DAO allows for voting which removes the need for a third party
disputes company and blockchain means transparency for where funds are held in
escrow, and with someones performance record embedded on the public BC it will
hold investigators accountable to their actions / results. This also eliminates
the ability to game the ratings which we see with google reviews and many other
sites
Our token is
basically used to execute a smart contract between users. Hence the utility
behind our token.
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: Blockchain connected with
investigation is great.
Tawei Chang: Interestingly we are thinking we can
have people stake their tokens in a fund which can later be used for a large
scale global investigation or humanitarian mission all over a DAO, this is like
a DeFi Investigations idea.
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: So you plan to include a staking
program for token holders.
Tawei Chang: Yes we had been planning for node
staking since 2019. That was to already be included, node staking. We need node
staking eventually to make gotem decentralized.
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: Do you have an approximate date for
its launch?
Tawei Chang: It would operate similar to tor. Platform
MVP beta is currently launched. platform.gotem.io
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: DeFi is destroying the market, so
it’s always a great idea.
Tawei Chang: For blockchain to be implemented, we
begin end of year and we would be able to have partitions of the platform decentralized.
DeFi can work if its meant for a greater cause. I believe a reserve fund which
can be voted for a usage by everyone can change the game. A reserve fund for
private security, or a global investigation.
We need help
from the crypto community. We need more funding to build more and faster. I had
raised privately and using my own personal funds to operate, we hope to expand
faster.
Q5 from Telegram User @Brainchest
Is Gotem a truly decentralized
platform or does it have control? For example, if I set a task to find African
rebels for a certain job in Moscow, will this task be removed from the
platform, or, according to all the rules of decentralization, no one can
specifically remove this job? Only after voting can you decide to delete any
work from the site.
Tawei Chang: Excellent, let me answer. We will
have filters for cases and anything related to stalking will be removed. We
require KYC for both the user and the detectives using this platform, we are
keeping the important stuff decentralized, such as your payments, your contract
(smart contract), your funds (in an escrow), your rating, all decentralized.
Yes, down
the road 3-5 years, there is a decentralized internet, and gotem has enough volunteers
hosting nodes, we could eventually let this platform off into the wild, but
this won’t happen at least for a minimum of 3 years.
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: Do you think it’s important for a
platform as yours?
Tawei Chang: Yes it is, without it we would be
breaking laws and we break laws out site gets shut down.
Serg | Satoshi Club: So, I can’t remain anonymous if I
search for an investigation?
Tawei Chang: A user can remain anonmyous publicly,
but as a company we have a responsibility to know who the user is. Why you ask?
Because there are people that open investigations to find people to murder,
kidnapp, harass. We had this happen several times in 2017, its unbelievable how
sick some people are, we had a guy get out of prison and hired a detective to
track down this stripper.
Serg | Satoshi Club: Because there are certain situations
when a user wants to remain anonymous while asking for the investigation, due
to the sensitive aspect of certain events.
Tawei Chang: He wanted to do something to her, the
detective actually had to warn her, the user will be required to submit KYC to
the platform because if something happens we need to have user info to provide
to LE.
We would not
disclose any client info, in fact KYC can be done by a third party company that
uses software to automate this.
… so we
could set these requirements for certain countries, and countries where there
are NO regulations, well yes we wouldn’t require the KYC, but UK, US, there are
strict laws and if you break them you can do jail time. Also hacking, any of
this stuff is this is recorded or if the government wants to “test”
us, and we don’t play by the book.
Q6 from Telegram User @yzmoney
How does your system protect the
privacy of the investigar and the client? how many mission do you expect the
system to handle monthly?
Tawei Chang: Our platform traffic is already
encrypted with https but we also would not be sharing or holding any of the
personal information belonging to the users or detectives as that would be
handled by a 3rd party kyc company. These companies are everywhere and there
are several just here locally. Previously with our $150 budget we were
averaging 4-12 cases per day.
Luis Merino | Satoshi Club: And how many detectives work with
your platform?
Tawei Chang: So my guess is there would be
hundreds and thousands of cases per month as adoption picks up. Why? Because
life is messy. Relations, partnerships, disagreements, these are all perpetual.
These are all related to investigations.
We have over
500+ detectives signup to meetmyspy, worldwide, over 60+ countries. Getting
detectives to sign up is easy. You scrap the web such as a directory for
investigators or like what we did was we used google maps.
Serg | Satoshi Club: And how exactly does it work? someone
posts a job and they get notified?
Tawei Chang: We scraped several countries from
google maps and used keyword investigator, made an excel, and then you do an
email campaign emailing all of them to sign up. Yes, that is how meetmyspy
worked.
If a case
was local to them or relevant they got an email to accept or deny the mission. 500
is quite small, that number can increase by a lot investigation is very
profitable they make really good money more than people realize a good detective
can easily make 10k a month a detective with a team can easily make 50k or more
per month and its for stupid stuff.
“Follow
my gf after work”, “see whats on my wifes smart phone”, “record
my boyfriend’s conversation at this restaurant”. we had a lot of stupid
investigations like this, half the time their partners were innocent! We had
seriours ones, missing people, suspected kidnapping, police brutality.
PART 2, TELEGRAM COMMUNITY LIVE
QUESTIONS
The
chat was open for 80 seconds; a lot of questions were posted by Satoshi Club
community. Our guests chose some of them.
Q1 from Telegram User @Dev30000
WHERE DO U SEE GOTEM IN NEXT 5-10
YEARS? IS IT GONNA HELP ALL THE PEOPLE FOR FREE?
Tawei Chang: Yes, that is the point. We allow
crowdfunding on Gotem so that your investigation will be sponsored by others
and free to you. This was the biggest problem we saw in the industry. People
have no funds for real cases. Crowdfunding your mission means people will pay
to help you have things investigated.
Q2 from Telegram User @cengizhantekin
Your system seems different than any
other existing projects. Do you have any competitors? If yes, what are the
competitive advantages or distinguishing features of your system? If no, is
this an advantage or disadvantage?
Tawei Chang: We are first to market, there is
nothing like this. Someone had copied me back in 2016, Trustify. Well, their
company no longer exists because danny boice embezzled all the investments her
received. That is how karma works!
Q3 from Telegram User @Nickkiii
How will you ensure trust is built on
Gotem, especially when I need to hire a private detective, why should I trust
the review of others, how can I be sure that it’s not a paid review just to
boost the ratings of the detective?
Tawei Chang: It would be impossible to pay someone
to review an investigation in this case because you would need to actively open
a REAL investigation and fund the case with real money to even be allowed to
provide a review.
Q4 from Telegram User @Ketz23
Can you share #GOTEM opinion on DeFi?
What steps are already being taken towards the future progress of #GOTEM?
Tawei Chang: DeFi is interesting in how things played
out because in 2018-2018 karma and I talked about staking. How can we make
staking relevant? So node staking was what we planned but now with all the
abuse of power and inequality we see staking means we can build reserve funds
that serve the people. A fund that is governed by everyone that contributes to
it. So imagine a privately police force funded by DeFi. Let your imagination go
wild with this.
Q5 from Telegram User @JoanaZ
Have you considered the developement
of Gotem Mobile Application?
Tawei Chang: Yes, we built out platform using PHP
and Laravel framework so that we can quickly convert to app version for IOS and
Android. We will have an app available by 2021 Q1.
Q6 from Telegram User @Bayezidhassan
Vast majority of Crypto projects are
built just for the sole purpose of amassing wealth for themselves. So, I want
to know the value you aim to add to crypto industry that will bring greater
abundance to the industry?
Tawei Chang: I left Digix team because their goal
was to “achieve mass wealth” Money is important but how much money is
too much? It’s how you spend your money to make the world better thats
important. I truly believe in the vision I had for meetmyspy, which is why I
spent my own personal funds to build, market and operate this platform. he
crypto space and it will and already has in some cases. Not just the crypto
space but for our entire world and the generations to follow.
Q7 from Telegram User @Alika061
Can you list 1 or 2 of the #GOTEM.IO
deadly features that make it stand out from its competitors? What competitive
advantage does your platform have that make you feel the most confident in
yourself?
Tawei Chang: DEADLY features of Gotem! Thats so cool.
Deadliest features is the ability to CROWDFUND your missions/investigations.
Second deadliest feature is that we allow voting for all people that fund
missions.
Serg | Satoshi Club: What was the biggest amount raised for a
mission? in the crowdfunding.
Tawei Chang: This hasnt be done yet because we
just built this for our Gotem Beta platform. These features were not available
on meetmyspy.
Q8 from Telegram User @Evaadam
Do you have any plans to attract
non-crypto investors to #your project Because it is the success of a project to
get more investors who are still not in the crypto world? What are the plans to
increase awareness around you in non-crypto space?
Tawei Chang: Yes! Our platform is meant for non-crypto
investors / community. Its meant for common people. Crypto investors are
important because they help us to reach our goals, we can’t do it alone and we can’t
count on traditional investors that are scared of change. We want to CHANGE
thing. Change the industry and traditional investors are opposed to changing
the system they survice off. The investigations industry is in such turmoil
that our platform can actually gain so much attention in such little time that
we would gain 5% marketshare within a year if marketed properly.
Q9 from Telegram User @Gejwany
You organized an AMA session very
rewarding and received a lot of questions related to utilities and technology,
future vision, …So now I want to ask what do you want to receive from the
community?
Tawei Chang: We need your support. We need your
help. We cannot do this alone. Buy our token, spread the word, follow us on
social media. Go to the platform and create an account. Follow our progress and
post missions and bring people to the platform that need things investigated.
Q10 from Telegram User @Evaadam
It’s quite unfortunate that many
projects have infiltrated the market with just white papers without having any
genuine use cases. What are the main utilities of your coin?
Tawei Chang: In order to actually open a smart
contract between your detective, it needs to be done through our native token.
The native token enables the smart contract, the funds in escrow, and the
rating. Why not ETH? Because we would need to purchase eth and use it to open a
smart contract, it doesn’t make economic sense.
PART 3, QUIZ AND INFO
As usual, for the third part, Satoshi
Club Team asked the chat 4 questions about Gotem. A link to a Quiz form were
sent into the chat. Participants had 10 minutes to answer. 500$ were distributed
among winners.
For more information and future AMAs, join our
Social Media channels:
English
Telegram group: https://t.me/Satoshi_club
Russian
Telegram group: https://t.me/satoshi_club_ru
Spanish
Telegram group: https://t.me/satoshi_club_spanish
Telegram
Channel: https://t.me/satoshi_club_channel
Website: https://esatoshi.club/
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/esatoshiclub
Our Partners:
gotEM.io
[GTX]: https://t.me/gtxgotem
