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Here is a draft of my version of Free TON Whitepaper. It is a draft so the work is still on going but I feel it is good time to involve the community in the discussion of this vision. You are welcome to comment in this thread. Abstract Bitcoin has eliminated trust when conducting peer-to-peer financial transactions by inventing the economic incentives and technology to run a decentralized computer network. Ethereum has invented Turing complete-programming for it, which helped to create more complicated financial instruments, such as tokenized assets, collateralized loans, liquidity pools, synthetic assets. In this paper we describe the architecture, components, governance mechanism and financial model of Free TON — a trustless worldwide operating system. The Operating System of Freedom. Chapter One Free TON We, the un­der­signed Free TON Community, Validators and Developers, hereby an­nounce the launch of Free TON Blockchain upon the prin­ci­ples and terms stated in this Declaration of De­cen­tral­iza­tion. — The Declaration of Decentralization Decentralization Free TON is a decentralized global blockchain network launched on top of TON OS on May 7, 2020. It's important to note that cryptocurrency provides economic incentives to the decentralized computer we call a blockchain and is inseparable from the technology that blockchain is empowered with. Everyone who says otherwise is just protecting outdated values for their own benefit. The reason for this inseparability is the “decentralization” property of the system. The whole raison d'être of a distributed computer technology is its ability to be run by parties which do not need to trust each other. Please note that the emphasis is not on “do not trust” but on “do not need to.” This is a very important and powerful concept. We already have technology which can run distributed systems. These systems can scale, they have sharding, consensus, advanced databases, programming languages, they are proven by many years in production to deliver robust performance. There is just one little thing, one detail, one tiny principle you need to obey in order to use them: you must trust someone who runs them. That little trust assumption is how we, as a human race, almost surrendered our freedom to a few tech corporations and a handful of government organisations around the world. This trust assumption is almost unilaterally accepted by people as something mandatory to protect them, to provide security guarantees, economy of scale, easy to use interfaces, usability, utility and so on. Let’s call them the conveniences of surrender. The evil gifts. The inability as a group to protect ourselves which leads to a delegation of powers is a compromise we make with our liberal values. As human beings and as a matter of historic law, any time and every time we have a technical ability to end such compromise — we must. Mr. Wilhelm Steinitz, the first chess world champion and a founding father of chess theory, has formulated one of the important strategic principles — if a player gains a positional advantage over another it must attack to win. This is no chess game, so the price we pay for losing that game could be catastrophic. One of the founding fathers of the United States of America, second president John Adams, stated: “Our Consolation must be this, my dear, that Cities may be rebuilt, and a People reduced to Poverty, may acquire fresh Property: But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever. When the People once surrender their share in the Legislature, and their Right of defending the Limitations upon the Government, and of resisting every Encroachment upon them, they can never regain it.” Or if you prefer George Orwell's shorter version: “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.” Over 70 years later, we couldn't be any closer to 1984.. Fortunately Satoshi Nakamoto invented the economic incentives and technology for running a decentralized computer network. Such a supposedly simple idea gave human individuals an advantage in the game against a human collective. Ethereum has invented turing complete-programming for it and Free TON has invented its operating system. The Operating System of Freedom, that is. The tool to fight a Borg within us, the conveniences of surrender, the evil gifts. Meritocratic Token Distribution One of the most advanced arguments against the trustless system is that such a system, as decentralized as it may seem, is only so on a level of technical and economical properties. That such a network will always scale back into centralization when needed to reach certain decisions (both technical and social) for continuous operations. That once decision making is involved, it necessarily will lead to centralization if the system wants to be somewhat efficient. And despite the efforts of the crypto community to bring decentralization into the protocol governance itself there are still plenty of examples where this argument prevails. For example, Bitcoin is still keeping its software code base in a centralized repository. Very few Ethereum and Bitcoin mining pools control most of the mining power of both networks. The blockchain foundations are everywhere, centrally running core development of their protocols and distributing grants to developers teams. Most of the newer proof-of-stake networks pre-sold their tokens to a few large venture investors and now control their grant system and protocol development. Most of the tokens of leading blockchains are controlled by a very few investors. We will discuss how Free TON tackles all those issues throughout this paper. Let’s start from the most obvious one, how the tokens are distributed in the first place. One of the problems of proof-of-stake (POS) design is that it requires validators to have a material stake in the network which they would be afraid of losing. This assumption provides a basic game-theory ground behind POS. Participants are motivated to ensure the correctness of the blockchain by the possibility of losing their stakes if they don't. Usually POS blockchains begin with selling their tokens to future validators to create a starting point of this game economy. For Free TON it was very clear to everybody from the very beginning that we would never sell tokens to anybody. The puzzle that we had to solve was how to distribute the tokens in such a way permitted by the game theory of POS. I believe we found a revolutionary solution to that problem. It’s something we call Meritocratic Token Distribution (MTD) model. It starts with the community proposing a Contest in which all other members of the community may participate. The contest is discussed and if the community agrees that the end result of this Contest will benefit the community and the network as a whole, the budget for this contest is voted for, the Jury is selected, the participants are providing solutions according to the contest specs, the Jury is voting for the solutions and tokens are distributed to the winners. All those activities are concluded on-chain. Pareto optimality is achieved as follows: token holders are distributing tokens for the perceived increase of the value of the network. This is obtained through the efforts of different active participants from the decentralized communities which exchange their labor for native network tokens turning them into token holders. Tokens provide an opportunity to participate in all projects that are run on Free TON by having a share of their governance. The Byzantine Fault Tolerance Governance (BFTG) is an ever-evolving set of rules implemented as smart contracts, ensuring that the system is not gamed by all sorts of collusion between all kinds of parties. So to summarize, instead of minting tokens by burning electricity or for production of empty blocks, the tokens are distributed meritocratically. Of course Free TON is paying for empty block production as well, but the mechanism of such payment is quite different as will be discussed below. Yet even with probably the most advanced and decentralized method of token distribution, the question remains that if for a right market price (as high as it might be) the tokens will eventually end up with the same crypto investor, what difference does it make how they were distributed in the first place? The difference between Meritocratic Token Distribution and public or private placement of those tokens are attributed by two facts: Read more.....