Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

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I cared about the technology: https://intercoin.org

Sadly I was too much of a socialist and there for the tech and utility. Suffice it to say that people threw money at memecoins way more than they threw up money at us, but we did raise a respectable amount in 2018: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1733567/000173356718...

My vision was mainstream adoption of crypto for all the right reasons. Every community having their own coin and their own monetary policy. https://intercoin.org/communities.pdf

I already had an open source social platform (https://github.com/Qbix) with people in over 100 countries so it seemed like building a payment platform on top of it made sense. So this is what I did:

Architected all the smart contracts on https://github.com/Intercoin

Bootstrapped with revenues and customers and paid our developers for years

Released all the smart contracts and documentation on our own platform here: https://intercoin.app

Got CertiK audits of our smart contracts: https://skynet.certik.com/projects/intercoin

Launched a show where I interviewed economists, regulators, and people like Noam Chomsky and Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton Friedman) https://youtube.com/intercoin

Made ways to raise money that are actually legal: https://community.intercoin.app/t/how-intercoin-helps-to-rai...

Built technology for people around the world to raise money for refugees: https://community.intercoin.app/t/fund-for-refugees

By the way, if you want to come and hear more about it, you're welcome to, we have demos at the end of every month: https://intercoin.app/event/ITR/Qwwsjokht

And we do it on our own platform, livestreaming through peer to peer broadcasting, the works!

Next on our roadmap is to release Intercoin Wallet (completely web-based wallet will try to fix major security flaws in the current Web3 ecosystem) and Intercloud (decentralized layer 1 solution that is NOT a blockchain)

But on HN we get lumped in with the rest of the Web3 bullshit and scam artists, so what can I say. This will probably be downvoted by people who never click a single link in the comment :-P

> But on HN we get lumped in with the rest of the Web3 bullshit and scam artists

Any community is typically judged by their worst members. Much like a parent is judged by their worst child.

Don't feel too bad about it, its just the natural course of things.

Is it a dead project now?

I searched on the coingecko link you provided and only see $3.9k in liquidity and a single $65 trade in the last 30 days.

Just because speculators aren’t actively trading the token and volume bots aren’t creating fake volume wash trading doesn’t mean the proejct itself is dead at all.

One thing about US regulations… we did not want to get involved with making the secondary markets or whatever. Expect the community to do it. We don’t care about attracting speculators to pump and dump. We believe that once we attract CUSTOMERS then the speculators will turn up to make the market.

I'm very curious the overlap of socialism and the design of intercoin, I wouldn't have picked up socialism by looking through the intercoin site.

I'm used to seeing socialism used at a national scale, was your vision to allow a much more local version of socialism with every town effectively running it's own socialist bubble? If not, how would a larger socialist system tie together all the individual currencies used managed by each town?

Sorry for the tangent, I've just never really thought of a hyperlocal version of socialism before!

Sure. I consider utility tokens as libertarian socialism online. They are voluntarist (you opt into using them) and eliminate the extractive shareholder class (which is the reason why, say, Uber drivers pay half their salary to the “owners” of the platform). Selling shares was the old way of raising money and it is the reason why all Big Tech are monopolies. Facebook and Twitter are each controlled by one guy (Elon or Zuck), while gift economies like Linux or the Web enrich the world without a shareholder cabal around Torvalds or TimBL extracting rents. No one advises them “Competition is for losers, Build a monopoly” like Peter Thiel did. By being permissionless and open they have created far more wealth for the world than their capitalist counterparts.

Airdrops are a form of UBI, and can be used to put money in the hands of the public. Towns can use software to run their own monetary and fiscal policy without relying on the Banking system as the source and sink of their money supply. Banks do not issue money on the basis of public good, the more people need money the less likely they are to issue it to them in the form of credit. They make the rich richer and it is about generating about profits for their shareholders and depositors. In a UBI scenario, money is issued to everyone equally. Even the game Monopoly (which was originally designed by a socialist to illustrate the perils of capitalism!) has a UBI every time you pass Go, or the game doesn’t work.

A socialist alternative to a bank is a Credit Union. Imagine Intercoin letting anyone create a credit union and connecting all of them together like the Internet did for communication.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

It has been practiced by everyone from prehistoric tribes to today’s Housing cooperatives and worker-owned cooperatives and universities.

One of the oldest sites on the Web is run by an anarchist socialist, serves local communities and it has outcompeted all capitalist attempts to disrupt it and extract rents. You’ve definitely heard of it:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/craigslist-ceo-jim-buckmaster-...

Another of the oldest sites on the Web has quickly outcompeted all capitalist encyclopedias including the most famous ones like Britannica and Encarta, making them mere rounding errors in usage. That of course is Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales is not a socialist, he is a libertarian however.

I think the record is clear: open, permissionless systems outcompete closed ones in the end.

The word “socialism” triggers people to think “big government” even though capitalist systems typically have just as big of a government. But actually I want more decentralization, everyone to have access to tools to self-organize. I want a UBI and gift economies to voluntarily replace the contradictory for-profit capitalist institutions, like private ownership of public forums.

So I often say I’m a left-libertarian (like George Carlin or Russel Brand). I am trying to make an alternative to Big Government and Big Corporations, by giving software to empower people and unite communities.

Eventually, when towns have this system, people will be able to work 20 hour work weeks and spend the rest of the time with their family and voluntarily working on cool projects. However, until then, since we do still live in a largely capitalist system, I need some people to invest in our project so my team and I can pay for food and housing :)

If you want to get involved, you can invest your time and skills as a developer, designer, promoter, or you can invest money. If you want to know how investors can make a profit without buying shares just take a look at Ethereum’s early buyers, it’s a great example. It’s a pure utility play. No extractive shareholder class and no one restricting the ecosystem. It’s an even freer ecosystem than the Web!

So anyway if you want to get involved email me at greg at the domain intercoin.org

Every community having their own currency and monetary policy makes no sense at a fundamental economic level.

If each member of my family has their own individual currency and monetary policy it would make economic sense for us to form a higher level structure and just have one currency and monetary policy for our whole family to make trade easier within our family. That process scales up to the level of country.

This idea failed because it doesn't solve anything economically. It actually just creates an economic bug.

Do you know how the Internet is designed? It is a network of networks, and protocols like SMTP and HTTP can run over it to create global applications.

Why don’t we have one big network for everyone, and one-size-fits-all policies?

Well that would have been my initial thought as well, but I don't know nearly enough about the project to say why it may not have gained a much traction as if hoped for. A team of likely very dedicated people put a ton of effort and passion into the project, I'm not willing to just write that off.

Agree with the specific is it not, we need more projects like this testing unique idea and sharing their lessons. In the crypto space specifically, we have learned very little to nothing from most projects because they just try the same model. I'm happy to see a project thinking differently regardless of how it turns out.

Now with regards to your specific argument, centralization and standardization aren't always the answer. It's a web of hyperlocal currencies the answer? No idea. But does that really mean we should centralize all power and stick with one currency and one monetary policy? Should we do that with other things like communication platforms, social media networks, and move all state powers up to the federal government? Would we all be better off with one global currency and one global back driving monetary policy?

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