Bitcoin Forum

No doubt this will be labelled as "pointless promotion" within the hour and moved to the trash bin, but IMO it's too important not to share.  Regardless of the fact that it's something I've been involved with developing, even if it wasn't I'd still make some noise about it.

A critical goal of eMunie has been the ability to perform payments, independent of the Visa and Mastercard networks, on existing EFTPOS terminals that you find in everyday merchant stores.  We've worked long and hard on this and finally, as of yesterday, it was achieved.

So whats special about this?  There are Bitcoin mobile wallets already that can do that, and Bitcoin debit cards which do the same.  The problems though are many:

1.  Mobile wallets and debit cards on Bitcoin (and others) all involve a "middle man", who take a hefty chunk of fees for the privilege.  Fees for loading the card, fees for spending, fees even if you don't use the service.

2.  Your account with these service providers can be cancelled at any time, and you lose your money.  Or your transactions can be censored and rejected at will.

3.  They all use the VISA/Mastercard/Other networks, which again means the card can be cancelled, or be subjected to transaction censorship.

Our goal was to create a platform, that aside from a plethora of improvements overall, would also support Decentralized Debit Cards on existing hardware (which is critical) and not just virtual cards in a mobile phone, but physical ones too (as mass market consumers overall still don't like, nor trust the idea of money in their phone).

When I say decentralized debit cards, what do I mean?

1.  They interact directly with the eMunie network (which itself is decentralized) and do not transmit transactions over an intermediary network such as Visa.

2.  You are in control of the card, which means no cancellations, no transaction censorship.

3.  Using off the shelf hardware costing around $20, you can create your own debit card!

Point number 3 is probably the most important.  Anyone with $20 of hardware can create a new debit card, load it with funds, then go to the local store and spend it in the same payment terminal they would their regular bank card.....a libertarians dream!

In fact, here is a video link showing exactly that, with some commentary by me all in under 5 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqE-7R8liMU

Please excuse the shaky camera work, I wanted to do a video that was uncut and raw, which meant a single cut with no editing.  I wanted to show that it was possible and that there is no trickery involved with fancy editing, what you see is what you get.

Can a card be used at any terminal

So long as the merchant has opted to accept the eMunie cards and the patch to the terminal that allows them to do so, yes.

In reality we're working on building relationships with the major terminal manufacturers and obtaining the required certification so that they will be able to do an over the air update to all their payment terminals.   Then the merchant will be ready to accept EMU when ever he likes without doing anything.

Thanks for the update.

  Any timeline yet for the launch date or when wallet will be available?

That's so totally amazing! I can't believe how easy your demo looked. Congrats!

When is your EMU system launching? What PC resources are recommended for mining/hatching (CPU, RAM, HD, bandwidth)?

I hope you have plenty of user tutorials, I think you've cracked the crypto user-friendly roadblock wide open, so you need to be ready for mass noobies.


edit: how does one mine EMU?

You need to have your logo linked with your site

whats the difference to the e-coin.io?  They're into BTC Debit Cards too.

AFAIK, the difference between the OP's card platform and all others comes down to fees, freedom, and privacy.

..................	OP's eMunie debit card	All others AFAIK
fees	customer: 1 cent * merchant: zero	customer: varies ** merchant: ~1%
freedom	yes	3rd party or govt can block funds
privacy	yes	3rd party or govt can track your purchases.

*(eMunie) customer pays 1 cent per transaction but initial card cost can be ~$4 - $25 depending on if you create it or order it. Card never expires.  Transactions are in native crypto (EMU or one of many token assets) without involving fiat conversion. Speed  < 10 seconds.
**(others) customer has to provide 3rd party info to satisfy AML/KYC regs.  3rd Party conversion required to fiat for merchant along with those fees.

Edited with footnotes, etc.

Definitely a good thing to try after all everyone has to have a card when doing transactions. $20 is nothing as compare to being tracked.
This may seem to attract a lot of criminals who hides from being caught. I like the idea. i hope they will develop a token too so we can invest to its development.

if it is so decentralized where do we get these debit cards from? is there a new git command that produces ccs?

2. I still love you

3. Launch already

[edit] 6. ffs man, you know you have something better than most, if not all that is out there. whip that shit out on the table and show these mother fuckers what you are packing. it is time. we need it.

Privacy will be a big selling point for sure!  Will there be website to get a card balance away from home?

@billotronic, why did you leave emunie? why don't you re-join the community again? It sounds like you want to bro, and that'd be a good thing all round

How much was your coin trading for?

Everything is different!

e-coin.io is a good service (I have one of their cards), but they charge fees for everything and they use the Visa and Mastercard networks.  That is bad, as while Bitcoin is decentralized (can of worms?) you're using it with a centralized service.

If you have the ability to create your own cards cheaply, you are then still in a decentralized system.

Also these cards can hold not just EMU currency tokens, but any asset that is represented in the eMunie network.  One card can hold EMU, USD, GBP, loyalty tokens, everything.

Any monetary payment system will attract criminals in some form, it's the way of the world and it'll never be stopped.  So long as the majority of people using a system are doing so honestly, then everything should be just fine.

So you can buy the cards themselves from anywhere, along with the reader writers.  The software that needs to be installed on the cards will be open source.

Hah, I know I have something better than most, but that alone wasn't good enough for us to take mass market.  Just having fast transactions, or efficiency isn't enough, there needs to be many other things to really attract mass market use.

If I'd of already launched I would be doing the vision and platform potential an injustice, and penetrating the mass market would be 10x harder if not more.
 
Mass market is huge, $40t per annum, and no one other than us is looking at it seriously...thats a big incentive to do things right the first time!

There is no mining as such (or hatching anymore).  Rewards are distributed between all nodes that assist the network, which simply means turning it on and leave it running.  Something as low powered as a Raspberry PI can be used and actually earn a steady income.  It's basically "proof of service" full node incentivization which everyone wants, but no one has been able to solve.

As for the launch schedule, (billo will be pleased about this) all the critical requirements that I decided upon 3 years ago are now in place, with minimal work remaining.   There is going to be an open beta in June where people can test drive all the platforms features and it'll run for a few months while we do fine tuning/bug fixes/etc

Save for any critical issues in the open beta, a launch date is then imminent and will likely follow a month or so after.

thank you for your info they are very important for me.

I appreciate your responses to everyone. I can tell that you truly care about this project.

Question. ..I am still confused about the coins. Will you start off with a pre-mine? What algorithm are you using?
Will you keep this coin off the exchanges and only trade in house?

Thanks

There is no mining as stated above, EMU is earned in a more efficient, fairer manner.

The consensus algorithm is new and has been developed by us called EVEI (Evolving Voters (via) Endorseable Interactions).

I'm writing details about it on our wiki as we speak regarding how it operates, but simply it could be classified as "Proof of Service" (though there is more to it than that) for which a solution has eluded crypto for quite some time until now.  

Simply if your node is online and doing work, you get paid for exactly how much work you do...no waste, no need for ASICs or special hardware, no pools.

As for exchanges, the platform has its own decentralized DEX and fiat conversion functionality built in, but external exchanges can hook in via APIs if they like.

I'm putting a lot of content on the wiki this week in preparation for some meetings I have next week, I'll share the links to the relevant documents once ready instead of scattering it though a lot of unorganized posts, then you should get a better understanding of how it all operates.

touche

but

man that is what version's are for. I've got this drawer full of arm boards collecting dust just waiting....

That's actually one of the most exciting altcoin innovations I've seen a quite a while - great job!

The whole supporting existing infrastructure is a great idea as it  could increase adoption.

Jacob

Hey billo, well part of the problem was that 150 tx/s was not fast enough using the using the block-tree technology from the 2nd rewrite. Now it is a pure transactional DB technology and fast a greased shit.  But the real hold up was getting all of the pieces of the DEX in place to get the market and economics to work correctly.... AND soon the kraken will be turned loose into the wild.

watching this

Do all nodes generally do the same amount of 'work' over a period of time (say a month), or would some devices and network connections have an advantage? Would a pi and a i7 do the same amount of work on the same net connection? What's the recommended setup to optimize the amount of 'work' done?

That all sounds great! Are you worried about bots and malware? I imagine a botnet of emunie nodes would make some $$$, especially if the requirements for work are so low.

I would have to agree with you. As all eyes are on eth and smart contracts right now, this is a opportunity to capitalize on.

My eyes are watching this one!

Not all nodes do the same amount of work. The client nodes are designed for multiprocessing, so the more logical cores/threads you have the more work you will be able to do.  The client also is very read intensive against the database files, the faster the storage media the more work can be done.

I have a 17 inch notebook 4th gen i7 with 8GB memory and 240GB SSD, all of which cost me $800 from ebay.

Right but you gotta remember than everything in eMunie has been written from scratch with a number of long term goals in mind....you've had a front row seat to that.  Also remember that when I laid these goals down, while I was sure they were possible, I didn't yet have a solution to implement them (R&D).

Now, lets say that 2 years ago, I'd launched with a few of these goals in place....great, PARTY!.  Then I move onto the next goal, get into the R&D and I have to change something significant in the earlier release to support it....shit, party over!

The only options available at that point are:

• Try to hack/bodge the new feature in *ugh*
• Perform a hard fork of the platform *double ugh*
• Drop the feature entirely *triple ugh*

It's much more sensible to get solutions to all the goals in one hit and frustrating an impatient few ( wink wink ) than rushing things out the door and risk pissing off everyone should it go wrong.

Thanks guys!  You ain't seen nothing yet :)

Would it also be an added bonus that eMunie can do "smart contracts" too? :)

Absolutely it will. Is that a hint?

Question,  how will the original coins be created?

Thanks

Bots are not an issue as the EVEI consensus protocol handles such things as bot nets, Sybil attacks and similar.  Things get VERY expensive rapidly if you are trying to game the network with these kind of strategies.

Haha not really a hint, they have been functional for over a year already and are used internally extensively for escrow and DEX trades.

Contracts are written in Scrypto, which is a JavaScript/Java hybrid language and can be deployed to the integrated app store.  An added bonus is that included in Scrypto is a graphics library, so that you could write rich 2d/3d games and front ends for apps.

Your last question about how they are created involves a LARGE answer, and as I'm writing up exactly that on the Wiki this weekend, I'll ask you to wait until I have done that and can post a link.

Willing to wait with excitement!  Do you have a slack channel?

Not at the moment, you can sign up to forum.emunie.com though, drop me a PM on there and I'll get you access to the forum chat where everyone hangs out, plus you'll be able to test drive the next beta test.

Ok, do you mean expensive in terms of tx fees, or costs of running nodes?

Depending on the attack the costs are working capital, fees, node expenses and combinations there of.

The document that explains EVEI is almost done, I'll be dropping the first draft shortly that contains all the major information then add the more minor things over the next couple of weeks.

Its quite a radical step in a different direction though, so make sure you clear your mind, are awake, and have a strong coffee (I'd also recommend reading it a couple of times)

This sounds exciting. Checking out your video next!

Looking forward to reading that doc ... crypto needs a some radical changes in thinking

A very dedicated genius (and team)!. Your work continues to amaze me.

Looking forward to the 'launch'

looks like a great project to me. anticipating the launch with interest. good luck to the devs!

Same here.