The given document is addressed mainly to beginners. It answers the questions that may arise while working with VIZ. Communication with other VIZ users, application manuals and independent study of the ecosystem of digital social capital will help you with the remaining aspects of the service.
There are no ‘correct’ or ‘official’ terms in VIZ. There are different points of view that are accepted by participants and services to one degree or another. We at VIZPLUS decided on the following:
VIZ is an ecosystem where all applications, blockchains, tokens, instructions and everything else is related to VIZ;
Viz or the ‘VIZ blockchain’ is just the blockchain part, thus, it is the most important software, or the ‘core’ of the ecosystem.
viz is a measurement unit of social capital. A person’s height is measured in centimeters, their weight – in kilograms, and social capital – in viz. We do not like to call viz a ‘coin’, ‘cryptocurrency’ or ‘digital currency’, since it does not refer to money, but is more like points, rating points or even airline miles. When we talk about viz as a means of capital accumulation, we call them ‘tokens’ by analogy with the tokens of other blockchains and blockchain-based applications.
You can write and pronounce it the way you like, as long as those around you understand you well.
You can use social capital (as well as other functions of the Viz blockchain) through the applications. These apps help you reward people, vote, express gratitude, and do other things with social capital.
Applications create a context for the use of social capital, that is, they tell you why to use it:
The context is limited only by the imagination of the authors in the applications. Technically, applications translate your ‘social’ actions with different contexts into a standard language of the blockchain and conduct a transaction on your behalf.
Novice VIZ participants sometimes find themselves in a situation when ‘something did not work’: a reward did not go through, the tokens were not transferred to another account, a delegation was not canceled, etc. Why is this happening and what is the next step?
Obviously, first, you should make sure that you are not trying to carry out an impossible operation, for example, delegate 1,200 viz, if you have only 800 viz available in your capital. Alternatively, you are trying to use 5% of the energy with a reward, despite the fact that only 3% of it remains.
In the vast majority of cases, the application’s refusal to conduct a transaction means the user has entered a wrong private key.
First, the key must correspond to the operation you are trying to perform: different types of keys are used for different transactions in Viz blockchain. This makes life a little more complicated, but it makes using VIZ much safer. The correct application should tell you which key you need to enter (simple, active, or even main/master). Save the keys correctly with the appropriate description (sometimes users confuse the key levels when saving) and carefully check which key you enter.
Second, when copying a key from a storage location to an application, users accidentally ‘forget’ 1-2 characters or vice versa, and put in an extra character at the beginning or at the end (space, comma, etc.). The keys are long, anyone can make a mistake. Make sure that you copy the key correctly.
The application is much less likely to make mistakes or the blockchain node is disabled (the server that the application contacts to record your operation), but still this possibility cannot be excluded. The correct application will tell you the type of error that has occurred and how to avoid it — in this case, follow the instructions. If something completely indescribable happens, wait a couple of minutes and try again.
Finally, the rarest, but possible option is that you do not have enough social capital to conduct a transaction with in the first place. This happens either with very ‘minor’ accounts, for example, with 0.1 viz in the capital, or with a very heavy load on the blockchain (usually during a spam attack).
The fact is that the Viz blockchain has limitations on the speed of recording information from users, therefore, it lines up transactions received for saving in a queue under high load. First, the operations of the accounts with the largest capital are executed, then with the smaller one, etc. At the same time, if a transaction from the tail of the queue did not get into the nearest record (in the block), it is rejected.
Let us repeat the aforementioned: a sharp increase in activity on the blockchain is a rare phenomenon. Accounts with at least several viz in the capital should not have problems with recording transactions.
If you have followed all the recommendations, but ‘something still refuses to work’, contact the developers of the application or refer to the chat rooms, where more experienced users will help you with troubleshooting. For example, there is a group for mutual support in Telegram: VIZ+Help.
The operation of creating an account in VIZ requires the use of a small amount of social capital or viz tokens. These funds are not spent, but transferred to a new account and frozen on it for a while.
The amounts are set by the delegates and may change occasionally. They amount to at least 10 viz for delegating capital or at least 1 viz when transferring from a wallet. Therefore, to create a new account, you must already have an account with a small number of viz or a check for the required amount.
However, there are helpful people in the VIZ ecosystem who use their resources to help newcomers create accounts. For example, VIZPLUS has such a service: start.viz.plus. Simply put, if necessary, you can create an account for free (at someone else’s expense), but you should not abuse this, as well as any help.
You can create accounts in applications that provide the given opportunity at your own expense. This function is available, for example, in Personal Portal my.viz.plus, in the social Telegram bot and in other applications.
To create a new account using the funds of an existing one, you need to log into one of the appropriate applications, enter the name of the new account in the appropriate section, select the payment method (from the capital or from the wallet) and click ‘Create’ or similar. At this point, the application will check if there is no account with the same name, whether you have enough funds, and if everything is in order, it will perform the operation of creating a new account. You will receive the keys of the new account, which must be saved in several safe places.
You can also create an account by depositing the required amount by check. The sequence is the same: you use an application that provides such a service, enter the name of the future account and the secret part of the check — and if everything is right, you get the keys.
Finally, there is a slightly more complicated way — using a special anonymous account. First, you have to generate a key (public and private parts), and then transfer the necessary amount to an anonymous user by writing an account in the comments. Include the key (without spaces), where the account is the name of the new account, and the key is the public part of the key. The transfer can be made from anywhere, for example, from an exchange or from an exchanger, which makes the new account almost anonymous. On the other hand, if there are services like start.viz.plus, where new accounts are initially completely anonymous, this option does not make much sense.
A subaccount can only be created when using resources and signing an account or subaccount of the previous level. For example, if you have a primer account, you can create several subaccounts like second.primer, new.primer, etc. However, the next-level completely.new.primer subaccount can only be created using an active key from new.primer. The key from the primer account will not help in this case.
The cost of creating a subaccount is the same as with a regular account.
The application through which you create a subaccount will definitely request an active key from the previous level account (or use it silently if you entered it during login).
Otherwise, everything is easy – just check whether you have enough funds, enter the name of the subaccount and the amount of tokens to be transferred or delegated and click the ‘Create’ button.
If you want to give away an account with a specific name, create it yourself and give the person the master key to the new account, reminding them to reset the keys and save the new ones allowing you not to use this account. Keys can be reset no earlier than an hour after account creation or the previous reset.
If you prefer the name of the new account to be chosen by the recipient of the gift, give them a check for any amount from 1 viz or more. In this case, the receipt works as an invite. The recipient will create an account on start.viz.plus by entering the secret part of the receipt at the appropriate step. The entire amount of the check will be transferred to the social capital of the new account.
The easiest way to change the keys is to ‘reset’ them. Just refuse to use all the old keys with one click of a button in the application and get a set of new ones. To do this, you need to enter the master key.
If you want to change only one key, go to the Settings — Access section in my.viz.plus, find the access you need, generate a new one (there is a special button for this), add it, write it down in several places, and then delete the old key. You will also need to enter the master key to perform this operation.
If you have lost the master key, it is impossible to restore it or get a new one. Also, in this case, it is impossible to change other keys (but you can still use them). If you lose the master key (and keep the active one), we strongly recommend creating a new account and withdrawing all viz to it, and just forget about the old one. If you lose all the keys, you have to accept this hard lesson for a lifetime.
If your master key was stolen and changed, but you still have the old one, you can try to restore access to your account through a special and very complicated procedure. To do this, you will have to find the account owner with whom you created your account and ask them to conduct a special access restoration transaction. Unfortunately, VIZPLUS does not provide such a service for accounts created through start.viz.plus.
If less significant keys are lost, then reset them as described above and save the new keys in a more secure place.
The VIZ has a unique feature built directly into the blockchain. With the help of the corresponding application, you can put up any of your account or subaccount for sale or buy the one you like in a couple of clicks. Payment, of course, is done using viz. There is a corresponding section on the my.viz.plus website.
Putting up an account for sale costs a small amount in viz. This is done to protect the blockchain from spam attacks. In addition, it will be possible to buy it only 7 days after it is put up for sale to prevent attackers from quickly selling the stolen account.
Also, the owners of ‘custom’ accounts can give everyone the opportunity to create any subaccounts for a fee. This is similar to registering a domain on the internet. For example, you can create any (unoccupied) subaccount for a com or blog account, etc. At the same time, the owner of the main account will not be able to do anything with this subaccount, since they will not know its access keys.
On info.viz.plus/accounts page, you can find information on accounts and subaccounts created by VIZ participants. If you know the name of the account you are interested in, start typing it in the search bar on the page, all suitable accounts will immediately appear in a dropdown list below. Clicking on the name opens the account page with full information and transaction history.
You can also see various sorted lists of accounts in the dropdown.
Not all accounts and transactions are represented on info.viz.plus/accounts, as the blockchain is periodically raided by spammers who create a lot of meaningless operations that are deleted from the site.
All operations in ‘raw’ format, without any filtering, are presented in VIZ-API service. Specify the account name, the number in order of the last transaction you are interested in, and the number of earlier transactions to display on the screen. A little trick: if you just want to see the last 20 transactions, and you do not know the number of the most recent one, enter -1 instead.
The main way to reward other participants in VIZ is to use the appropriate applications. For example, a ‘social’ bot in Telegram allows you to reward discussion participants in groups where it is connected. To do this, it is enough to start responding to someone’s comment with a ‘+’ sign (from one to five, the amount of the reward depends on this), and the author of the comment will receive a reaward, that is, increase the social capital. A button appears under posts in the Telegram channel with the bot, allowing you to reward the authors.
In the Readdle.Me social network, the button for awarding is built right into the pages with posts.
A special Vizonator plugin for Chrome (link) and Firefox (link) browsers adds its own reward button to pages and messages on Twitter, YouTube, and some other sites very natively, as if it has always been there.
The list of applications can be viewed on the main page viz.plus. Gradually, many services with applications (separate or universal) for VIZ rewards will be added on the internet and will be incorporated into everyday life.
The second way to reward someone is to do it directly by the name of the recipient account. To do this, in Personal Portal my.viz.plus, find the page for rewarding, enter the name of the awarded account in the appropriate field and select the percentage of energy used. If desired, you can add a comment to the recipient — for which you reward one.
There are two ways to connect an account to any VIZ application. The first is to transfer to the application the private key (simple or active) required for its operation from your account. The second is by granting the application the right to act on behalf of your account without transferring the key. When you connect, the application will ask you for permission with one method or the other.
For tips on how to protect yourself as much as possible when working with VIZ applications, read the ‘Best Practices’ section on this page below.
Your digital social capital increases when other people reward you in gratitude for something. Therefore, the most obvious and correct way to increase social capital is to give benefits or simple pleasures to other people.
A simpler and faster option is to buy a certain number of viz tokens and invest them into capital. There is not and cannot be a single token seller in VIZ. The system is decentralized, so participants sell and buy viz from each other at a negotiable price.
The sale and purchase of VIZ is offered in some applications, as well as in crypto-exchangers (including ones for ordinary money) and on crypto-exchanges. There are also ‘shops’ where you can quickly and easily buy a viz check. In addition, one can always negotiate a direct deal with another participant in popular VIZ chat rooms. Links to many relevant resources can be found on the main page of our website.
Social capital can also be rented. In this case, you pay another VIZ participant a little money and receive an agreed amount of capital for a certain period through delegation.
Social capital can be transferred for a while (until revoked) to another account. At the same time, the recipient only uses it, but cannot withdraw it into tokens, steal it, sell or transfer it to someone else. This function is called ‘delegation’ of social capital.
The easiest way to delegate social capital is through an application, for example, Personal Portal my.viz.plus, where it is done with a couple of clicks in the appropriate section. Other apps may also offer this feature. Be careful and check who is asking you to delegate capital and why. Nothing terrible will happen in any case, but if some scammers use your capital for something bad, it will be a shame.
To revoke the delegated capital, contact the same application or any other that you trust. Some applications may not have a separate ‘revoke’ button, in this case delegate 0 viz to the same account. The withdrawn capital will be deducted from the recipient’s capital instantly, but it will be returned to you in 7 calendar days.
Please note: an increase or decrease in the delegated capital is not an ordinary operation. If you had previously delegated 1,000 viz to someone, and now you want to delegate another 400 viz, then you need to state 1,400 viz in the field with delegation amount, which is the final amount. Similarly with a decrease, if you want to reduce the delegated amount of capital by 400 viz, then you need to specify a new size of delegation, that is, 600 viz, not ‘minus 400’.
The energy in VIZ limits the use of social capital. As you know, with rewards, the capital itself is not spent, so one may decide you can reward infinitely and very often. This is not so. To reward someone, you need to spend the energy available on your account. When all the energy is depleted, the account will no longer be able to process rewards, as well as perform other actions on the blockchain (they also require energy). The energy is restored over time (see below), so nothing terrible happens when it drops to zero — you just have to give it some time to recover.
The more energy you spend when rewarding, the larger the reward amount will be. The percentage of energy used for a reward can usually be set in the application you use, but in some cases, the application itself determines what the percentage should be. Therefore, it is better to study this issue in advance in the application, so as not to spend too much energy. When rewarding via Personal Portal, you choose the percentage of the reward yourself.
There is no need to constantly keep the energy of the account at 100%. It is not the total energy reserve that is important for the size of the reward, but the percentage one spends when rewarding. If one rewards with 5%, then the reward will be exactly the same with 10% of the total energy supply, and with 45%, and with 100%. Active VIZ participants often maintain an energy reserve of 10-20%, spending 1-2% of energy on each reward.
Energy is gradually restored by 20 percentage points per day. Thus, if your account has 28% energy left and you do not use it anymore, then the energy will rise to 28.83% in an hour, to 38% in 12 hours, to 48% in a day, to 68% in two days, etc. But the energy cannot rise above 100%.
You already know that the amount of the reward in VIZ depends on the capital of the rewarding account and the energy spent on the reward. Sometimes, it turns out that a VIZ participant had rewarded someone by doing everything right, but the reward was not sent. The fact is that VIZ has restrictions set by the delegates on the minimum size of the rewarding capital. They are there to protect the blockchain from spam with a huge number of microscopic rewards: such a stream of meaningless rewards can complicate the work of common users and congest the blockchain nodes.
At the moment, the minimum parameters of the reward are: capital 5 viz at 100% energy. It is easy to calculate that with a capital of 100 viz, it is necessary to use at least 5% of the energy for the reward, with a capital of 500 viz, 1% is enough, and with a capital of 1000 viz — 0.5%. If you spend less, then the energy will be wasted. Over time, delegates can change the size of the minimum rewarding capital, for example, with a significant increase in the value of the viz token.
Sometimes, you may need liquid viz tokens. For example, to replenish the social capital of your other account, give viz to a friend or sell them through an exchanger.
If you have enough social capital, you can withdraw (take, convert) the required number of tokens from it. The Viz blockchain is built so that it is impossible to instantly get liquid tokens from the capital. The withdrawal takes place in parts — no more than 1/28 of the capital per day. Therefore, a small amount can be received in 1-2 days, and it will take weeks to ‘cash out’ a significant part of the capital.
A faster and more obvious way to buy tokens is to resort to an exchanger, an online store, on the exchange or ‘directly’ from other VIZ participants. The list of relevant sites is changing all the time, so it is better to clarify the places and terms of transactions based on official VIZ informational resources.
In any application like a ‘wallet’ or ‘Personal Portal’ in VIZ, you will surely find a section for transferring tokens. You will only need the name of the recipient account and your private active key. If desired or necessary, you can write a message, comment or service data with the transfer. The recipient sees the transfer information almost immediately, then about a minute later, the transaction is finally saved in the blockchain.
Checks allow you to transfer liquid viz tokens outside the blockchain. You create a check at the expense of your liquid tokens in the application (one or another wallet or Personal Portal) and save the public and secret parts. Then, in any way — either via the internet or on paper — you transfer the secret part to another person who ‘cashes’ it into their account in the same application by entering the secret part received from you into the appropriate field.
When creating a checks, tokens are withdrawn from your ‘account’ to the check, so you will not be able to spend them. But if the check is not used, it can be ‘cashed’ back to your account.
The second way to use the check is to deposit funds when creating an account. In this case, all tokens from the check are transferred to the social capital of the new account.
Regardless of the method of use, funds are withdrawn from the check only in whole, i.e. the check can be cashed only once in full. There are no commissions when creating and using checks.
Unlike the elections to the parliaments of countries, the elections of the delegates of VIZ DAO are conducted non-stop. You have the right and the opportunity to vote for delegates (one or more) or withdraw your vote at any time.
Voting is the same transaction in the blockchain as any other is, as it is carried out in the application. For example, in Personal Portal on a special page, it is enough to put a check mark next to the corresponding account and your choice will be taken into account.
When voting, the power of your vote, equal to your social capital, is equally distributed among all the delegates you voted for. Therefore, it is worth deciding in advance whether to give all your votes for one delegate, to help them rise higher in the list or divide them among several ones.
VIZ participants who have applied for a payment from the DAO Fund usually try to attract as many social capital holders as possible to vote for. Therefore, if you follow VIZ news updates, you will surely find out that someone has applied.
If you want to support or reject the application, you can do this in the corresponding section of the Personal Portal or in other applications that provide such a service.
When voting, you choose the percentage of approval for the application: the higher the average percentage received by the application, the more viz the applicant receives from the Fund. Voting for 100% means you agree to allocate to the applicant the amount that they request. A smaller percentage will lead to a reduction in the amount.
You can also set a negative percentage (up to -100%): this means you do not want to take it from the Fund to the applicant.
You can change your decision at any time until the end of the voting. Please note: when voting on an application, the effective social capital of your account is taken into account at the end of the review period. This means that if you voted and then delegated part of the capital to another account or transferred part of the capital to liquid tokens, then in the end, only the remaining part will be considered. And, vice versa, if your social capital has increased after the vote, but before the counting of votes, your vote will become more significant.
Separate the keys. The system of keys in VIZ significantly increases the security of using the account compared to the usual ‘login + password’ system.
Of course, storing three keys that cannot be remembered is more difficult than entering memorized password 12345asd. But if there is a leak from some site or from an application of ordinary keys (with which rewards are made), you will not lose anything. And even if the active keys leak, the losses will be minimal, especially if you use subaccounts from the next board and do not store liquid viz in your wallet.
Use subaccounts and delegation. On the one hand, VIZ is convenient, because the same account can be used in all applications, accumulating social capital on it and rewarding other participants. On the other hand, it is not very secure, since the application may turn out to be fraudulent or be hacked, which will lead to trouble with the account.
A fine way to increase the security of using a VIZ is to have one ‘main’ account with your social capital and one or more subaccounts for different purposes and separate applications.
For example, your main johnnydepp account. You bought 12,500 viz and put them into the social capital of this account. Now you can create a twitter.johnnydepp subaccount and delegate 2,400 viz there, a telegram.johnnydepp subaccount and delegate 5,800 viz there, as well as the iam.johnnydepp subaccount and delegate the remaining 4,300 viz to it. You connect the first two accounts to the corresponding social gateways, and use the last one for all other tasks. On the main account — almost completely safe — lies your social capital and, if desired, liquid viz in your wallet.
Even if you lose or compromise the keys to some subaccount, up to the master key, nothing terrible happens: you will simply revoke the delegation and create a new subaccount.
Rewards will accumulate on subaccounts. They can be gradually transferred to the main account or left to increase your social capital on Twitter and Telegram. At the same time, you will log in to the main safe account only through the most trusted application, quite rarely.
Try to use local applications. Some VIZ applications are able to work directly with the blockchain, without accessing their own server. This is safer and more convenient, since an intermediary disappears from the chain, who may be a fraudster, or their servers will be hacked, or they may disconnect at the most inopportune moment.
On the other hand, without a server, it is unlikely to be possible to build a developed application with complex functions. In some cases, the same application can be presented in two versions — ‘basic’ local and ‘advanced’ server (in the form of a website or mobile application). It is up to you which option to choose depending on what you want to do with this application.
For example, Personal Portal works both as a website and as a local web page, which you need to download to your computer and open in a browser. The local version will work even if the server is completely disconnected, because it does not communicate with it, but it does directly with the blockchain.
