My main project is an online digital goods marketplace called flurly.com, and I’ve learned how hard it is to pay people globally. If Stripe/Paypal doesn’t exist in your country you’re basically out of luck.
Coinbase is a great first step, but the platform has high instead of low fees, and people save coins instead of spending coins.
I wanted to build a globally accessible, low cost way of facilitating payments online. Centralized Coin is my first attempt. A few highlights of the coin
1) Anyone with an email can participate
2) Each transaction is an efficient atomic database write (no proof of work)
3) Every transaction is publicly accessible and verifiable via an API
4) Two variables in the system - transaction fees & community compound rate. Read the whitepaper to learn more
5) Coins are minted by a central authority (me)
Shoot me an email at hi@flurly.com and say hi and I’ll send you 250 coins to play around with.
> Any thoughts on an affiliate program or incentives to onboard more users?
The primary incentive to onboard is the compounding. Similar to the investing advice of "Time in the market > Timing the market", "Time in CC > Less time in CC" due to the compound reward.
Fun fact: a service like this is illegal in the USA without a money transmitter license (which costs around $1mm per state) in each state in which you send or receive money. There are additional regulatory requirements demanding that you collect the identity of each person you send to or receive from.
This is one of the reasons cryptocurrencies are so successful: they are money transmission systems without an operator to prosecute. Money transmission is extremely useful.
It sure would be nice to be able to start and run businesses like this without a ball and chain around one's neck.
Is it illegal if you can't convert it to actual money and can't buy the coin (as seems to be the case here)? How's it any different then video game currency in that case?
Close but not quite right. Money service business licensing will cost you a few hundred thousand to get for all states. [1] Second, there is a loophole at the federal MSB level at least where you can be a seller of prepaid access. That makes your life a lot easier, you just need to list all your "partner" businesses and keep amounts reasonable (sub 1k iirc).
I've looked into this thoroughly and even applied to YC on the idea. It's the right solution for micro transactions in my opinion. Just very regulation heavy and finding a partner bank is hard.
Is there anything to stop users (or a single person with two emails) from sending money to each other over and over again to abuse the "one lucky user" system?
- It's centralized: so all the issues that come with that, plus the authority is some random person somewhere, rather than the european central bank or something like that. And people die and individual computers catch on fire and get hacked.
- It's a new digital currency: so it's completely useless as of today.
I'd consider it way more likely that I'll get hit by a meteorite tomorrow than this becoming somehow useful.
Sorry for being blunt, I guess it's a cool way to spend some free time, but I really don't think a number database on your computer is going to be of any use.
You distribute it yourself. This is what most distributed systems do, and this is how gmail, facebook, etc. Can remain up even when there’s a number of servers down or a fire in one of their data centers.
That way you distribute data, not power. That way you are resilient against a single computer catching fire, but not against the computer the dictator writes his stuff in getting hacked.
Yes, but that is usually what resilience and high availability means.
Btw what you’re talking about is interesting because decentralized systems are often decentralized until you start thinking of implementations. Since most cryptocurrencies have a single software, one bug tend to affect the entire network. Some cryptos are looking into having several implementations but I think we’re not there yet.
I'm under the assumption (and hoping) this is just another gag project that was made in light of DeFi crypto projects getting funded without anything backing them.
They always seem to popup whenever crypto becomes sexy again. This one is just a little bit more deadpan than others.
Accountability - I believe users should know when I mint coins. They should also be able to verify that no double spend is possible
Your structure isn't a blockchain though. Transaction 0 does not indicate where the original coin value came from (there was no "minting" transaction).
You can only verify double spends if the integrity of the chain is intact. Since its not a decentralized database, and your service can "go down" at any time and "pop up" with amended transaction history, its just the illusion of transparency.
If you know that, and your users know that, why not just keep transactions private like PayPal.
On a similar fashion (centralized alternatives to crypto ideas), there is Etleneum[0], which is a centralized smart-contract platform built on top of Bitcoin (lightning).
> Why should anybody trust you as central authority?
You don't have to.
Regarding reasons to trust me - I build in public (https://twitter.com/TheBuilderJR). All transactions are published on the "central chain". The story of how CC came to be seems reasonable
> How is this different from an Ponzi scheme?
There is no cashing out. All transactions are transparent as opposed to opaque.
> What prevents you from just making up accounts and printing coins for yourself and your friends?
You are trusting me the same way you trust Gmail. It’s a tradeoff between trust and efficiency that I think should exist in between banks and crypto.
However, since all transactions are published + there is no off ramp, I have very little incentive to tank the coin. Also, the more people who use it means more donations for me!
> What happens if your datacenter catches fire?
What happens if GCP's data centers catches fire?
> What happens if hackers get write access to your database?
What happens if GCP's databases get hacked?
> How do you 'encrypt' and email address, do you mean salt and hash?
Poor word choice. Perhaps obfuscation is a better word. I've updated the whitepaper accordingly.
47 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 74.7 ms ] threadMy main project is an online digital goods marketplace called flurly.com, and I’ve learned how hard it is to pay people globally. If Stripe/Paypal doesn’t exist in your country you’re basically out of luck.
Coinbase is a great first step, but the platform has high instead of low fees, and people save coins instead of spending coins.
I wanted to build a globally accessible, low cost way of facilitating payments online. Centralized Coin is my first attempt. A few highlights of the coin
1) Anyone with an email can participate
2) Each transaction is an efficient atomic database write (no proof of work)
3) Every transaction is publicly accessible and verifiable via an API
4) Two variables in the system - transaction fees & community compound rate. Read the whitepaper to learn more
5) Coins are minted by a central authority (me)
Shoot me an email at hi@flurly.com and say hi and I’ll send you 250 coins to play around with.
Thanks!
- JR
Any thoughts on an affiliate program or incentives to onboard more users?
64 bits
> Any thoughts on an affiliate program or incentives to onboard more users?
The primary incentive to onboard is the compounding. Similar to the investing advice of "Time in the market > Timing the market", "Time in CC > Less time in CC" due to the compound reward.
[0]: https://medium.com/@chamirachid/on-blind-signatures-for-untr...
Send 13.5 coins to hi@flurly.com and I'll give you the details!
https://twitter.com/TheBuilderJR/status/1381983145151537158
Liberty Reserve learned this the hard way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Reserve
This is one of the reasons cryptocurrencies are so successful: they are money transmission systems without an operator to prosecute. Money transmission is extremely useful.
It sure would be nice to be able to start and run businesses like this without a ball and chain around one's neck.
I've looked into this thoroughly and even applied to YC on the idea. It's the right solution for micro transactions in my opinion. Just very regulation heavy and finding a partner bank is hard.
1. https://www.grimeslawaz.com/home/technology-and-licensing/mo...
So in other words if you do that, you're actually losing purchasing power due to the transaction fee.
- It's centralized: so all the issues that come with that, plus the authority is some random person somewhere, rather than the european central bank or something like that. And people die and individual computers catch on fire and get hacked.
- It's a new digital currency: so it's completely useless as of today.
I'd consider it way more likely that I'll get hit by a meteorite tomorrow than this becoming somehow useful.
Sorry for being blunt, I guess it's a cool way to spend some free time, but I really don't think a number database on your computer is going to be of any use.
Btw what you’re talking about is interesting because decentralized systems are often decentralized until you start thinking of implementations. Since most cryptocurrencies have a single software, one bug tend to affect the entire network. Some cryptos are looking into having several implementations but I think we’re not there yet.
They always seem to popup whenever crypto becomes sexy again. This one is just a little bit more deadpan than others.
So you basically just took away user privacy for no good reason?
1) Accountability - I believe users should know when I mint coins. They should also be able to verify that no double spend is possible
2) Extensibility - By having all transactions public, it's much easier to build integrations on top of CC
Your structure isn't a blockchain though. Transaction 0 does not indicate where the original coin value came from (there was no "minting" transaction).
So users can't actually verify double spends.
Then you can verify double spends
If you know that, and your users know that, why not just keep transactions private like PayPal.
It's no different than when the NYT changes their article. People have screenshots and can show the discrepancies.
[0] https://etleneum.com/
- Why should anybody trust you as central authority?
- How is this different from an Ponzi scheme?
- What prevents you from just making up accounts and printing coins for yourself and your friends?
- What happens if your datacenter catches fire?
- What happens if hackers get write access to your database?
- How do you 'encrypt' and email address, do you mean salt and hash?
You don't have to.
Regarding reasons to trust me - I build in public (https://twitter.com/TheBuilderJR). All transactions are published on the "central chain". The story of how CC came to be seems reasonable
> How is this different from an Ponzi scheme?
There is no cashing out. All transactions are transparent as opposed to opaque.
> What prevents you from just making up accounts and printing coins for yourself and your friends?
You are trusting me the same way you trust Gmail. It’s a tradeoff between trust and efficiency that I think should exist in between banks and crypto.
However, since all transactions are published + there is no off ramp, I have very little incentive to tank the coin. Also, the more people who use it means more donations for me!
> What happens if your datacenter catches fire?
What happens if GCP's data centers catches fire?
> What happens if hackers get write access to your database?
What happens if GCP's databases get hacked?
> How do you 'encrypt' and email address, do you mean salt and hash?
Poor word choice. Perhaps obfuscation is a better word. I've updated the whitepaper accordingly.
It’s not meant to be the method of value exchange of the future, but I bet it was a cool project to work on.