Show HN: Centralized Coin – A Centralized Coin | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Centralized Coin – A Centralized Coin

centralized-coin.com

40 pointsflurly46 comments

Hi everyone,

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.

Thanks!

- JR

What's the max precision?

Any thoughts on an affiliate program or incentives to onboard more users?

> What's the max precision?

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.

You might consider offering something for services that adopt your coin and refer new users.

Did you consider doing it as Chaumian-style cash[0] and if so, what made you decide against it?

[0]: https://medium.com/@chamirachid/on-blind-signatures-for-untr...

I didn't know this existed. Will take a look!

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.

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.

One of the pros of decentralisation is there's no-one to blame when regulations are broken, centralised systems have a face that can be sued.

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.

1. https://www.grimeslawaz.com/home/technology-and-licensing/mo...

Those are just the fees from the states; it doesn't include the legal fees you have to pay to have all the applications prepared.

As long as it’s funny money and there is no on/off ramp it’s fine no?

Oh man then it should be careful! He was sentenced to 20 years in 2016

I first thought this was a parody, but apparently this is serious, so here are some serious questions:

- 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?

> 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.

IMO this is kind of the worst of both worlds:

- 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 centralized doesn’t mean not distributed. And so it doesn’t mean that it’s not highly available/resilient.

Sure, the white paper mentions that this is supposed to be a dictatorship, how should power be distributed while still remaining a dictatorship?

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.

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?

The lucky user is randomly selected from the network. The selection has nothing to do with the users associated with the transaction.

So in other words if you do that, you're actually losing purchasing power due to the transaction fee.

UNLESS -- you control a meaningful % of the accounts

The compound rate is proportional to your balance. So if you do that you'll simply dilute your compounding.

Why make transactions public if you don't need to? If its centralized people won't trust that you're revealing all information anyways.

So you basically just took away user privacy for no good reason?

2 reasons

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

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).

So users can't actually verify double spends.

If you assume that 9447ffe1633c73206d9e775762fae7c5e6f3a926ba83f862c2774491d53a3a4b has infinity coins (which it effectively does)

Then you can verify double spends

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.

In the same way that the bitcoin ledger is decentralized because nodes keep copies, you can similarly have people keep copies of this central chain.

It's no different than when the NYT changes their article. People have screenshots and can show the discrepancies.

Just played around with this for a bit, the "one lucky user" aspect looks like a really interesting mechanism: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1snxGwvS_VSlLr9fW7fcZaTS6...

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).

[0] https://etleneum.com/

Are you planning on offering CC as a payment method for flurly.com? If so, only as a cash-out or also as a payment method?

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.

Yes definitely. It's on the roadmap. One thing that's cool is since the chain is public, anyone can build integrations, not just me!

Cool idea! I have some coins. Excited to give them to some cool people!

I am a cool person! :D

Thank you, cool idea and so far it works.

Nice! Can the mint (you) revoke coins?

Yes

That sucks

What can I spend the coins on?

Mostly exclusive events. I have an upcoming clubhouse event with a CFO that has raised 100m+ from VCs including A16Z.

Send 13.5 coins to hi@flurly.com and I'll give you the details!

https://twitter.com/TheBuilderJR/status/1381983145151537158

Stellar meets PayPal?

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