Bitcoin Forum

Hi everyone. I have been posting here over the years, and I hope it's okay if I linked to my own project.

TLDR:
Master link: https://intercoin.org
Video explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wf4Y6Wk5lo
I'm happy to answer any questions in this thread.

APPLICATIONS

Okay, so I know there are a lot of people wondering, why does the world need another crypto if Bitcoin already exists and is the best at everything? I guess the short answer is ... crypto has to go mainstream so people use it in everyday life. To do that, we need to build applications for communities, not just peer to peer. There are a ton of applications that can be powered by decentralized, trustless smart contracts, to serve entire communities. Here is a list of some of the applications: https://intercoin.org/applications

Imagine if communities could do the following, without the state:
* Manage roles and permissions
* Voting and decision making
* Issuing their own currency
* Paying a Universal Basic Income in it
* Getting a Consumer Price Index and other stats
* Paying employees and contractors
* Running Contests with Entrants and Judges

PUTTING IT IN PERSPECTIVE

Shortly after computers came out, we had giant mainframes and people rented time on them and sent punchcards with compressed data. That's essentially where we are today with Blockchain technology, 10 years after Bitcoin was introduced. "Gas" or "mining fees" are essentially similar to "time on a mainframe", and only one transaction can run at a time for the whole world (which is why Ethereum can have flash loans, for example).

Later, personal computers emerged, and then got networked into the Internet. That's when computers really took off, and today everyone's got one in their pocket, it's connected wirelessly to the Internet most of the day, and many people are in fact totally addicted to them (as opposed to before, when it was just for the engineers and geeks). That's because operating systems were built, with graphical user interfaces that were user friendly that even a grandma could use them.

The EVM is like Java or Microsoft.Net . It's a runtime environment / compilation target with opcodes that can run inside a virtual machine. The actual networks running the blockchain are like operating systems - Windows and Mac. Applications are what really makes it sing, though. An operating system without applications is just a massive opportunity. Let's build them and serve humanity at large!

Intercoin's suite of applications is similar to Microsoft Office, or Adobe Creative Suite. Except the applications are open source and decentralized. But they are designed to serve entire communities, beyond simply peer-to-peer transactions. In particular, we want to realize the dream of a peer-to-peer cash system, but it will be done using local currencies that gradually depreciate in price (demurrage) backed by a reserve currency (Intercoin) that gradually increases in price but is designed to hold its value (so the local currencies don't have to be over-collateralized, like DAI). The system is designed to be completely autonomous, with no one controlling Intercoin itself.

HOW WE GO TO MARKET:
All the centralized social networks have been launching payment networks (WeChat, Facebook, iMessage, Telegram etc.) because once people are interacting, they can pay each other. And also, people can pay businesses this way.
But we need to build a decentralized payment system that isn't owned by Facebook, Amazon, or your friendly federal government CBDC, because otherwise we'll be living in their world pretty soon with no alternatives.
For the last 10 years, my team and I built an open source social network (to be an alternative to Facebook and other Big Tech) and reached 9 million people in 95+ countries. Now we plan to launch an open source suite of smart contracts to serve the communities (https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf)

TOKENOMICS:
In case you're wondering how Intercoin compares to Bitcoin in terms of tokenomics, it is explained at https://intercoin.org/tokenomics
Basically there are two tokens:
* ITR is the InvesToR token, and we have been selling it to early investors. A maximum of 2 million tokens per month can be minted, until the total reaches 200 million. Exchanges like ExMarkets and UniSwap are the first to list, followed by others. The design of ITR is to go up in price over time.
* INTER is not owned or sold by the team or investors. It's managed entirely by a DAO smart contract, meant to be purchased by communities, who then use it to settle trade balances between each other. The community coins are essentially sidechains of it, and the whole thing works a bit like gold in the free banking era. The design of INTER is to not go down. From every sale, 80% goes on reserve for merchants to cash out, 5% to liquidity on exchanges like UniSwap, and the remaining 15% goes to ITR holders. Thus, INTER is completely insulated from the speculation on ITR.
* INTER is designed to be a more stable store of value than Bitcoin and other cryptos, in that the DAO sells it on-chain and raises the price linearly. It never lowers the sell price, but the buy price might go from 70% of the all-time-high sell price, as low as 10% (unlike a bank which redeems its banknotes at 100% until it runs out of them, then closes or needs a federal reserve bank to bail it out). Everything is above board, it acts as a market maker with a spread and encourages others to make a market in INTER on various exchanges, thus promoting its availability.
* As long as people trade within the growing Intercoin economy of community currencies, they won't need to redeem any INTER for BTC/ETH/fiat/whatever. Their communities will just send each other INTER periodically. Meanwhile, within the communities, the sidechains can be very fast, and you don't need to look for double-spends between, say, HarvardCoin and WikipediaCoin.
* In fact, you will be able to peg a local coin to pretty much anything that INTER trades against on the EVM, such as wrapped Bitcoin, or USDC, meaning you'll have faster, virtual versions of them, which is superior in many ways to centralized "layer2" payment systems that are being set up all over the place with PayPal, Visa, etc. If you have a virtual Bitcoin with all the security of an Ethereum network, but a lot more speed etc. that may be good enough.

The relationship of INTER to ITR in Bitcoin terms is as if instead of a miner securing a block and earning Bitcoin, a community would send ETH / BTC / whatever and buy Intercoin, and 80% of that would go to reserves, while 15% would go to Satoshi (the ITR holders). So it's not really premined, rather it's sold into the market at the all-time-high price when the market demands more of it. When Bitcoin came out, there was no support for Smart Contracts, Bonding Curves, Automated Market Makers, Stablecoins and the like. So it couldn't know its own price outside of itself, without having to trust some oracles. Now, we can do much better, and have the DAO issue INTER exactly when the market is willing to pay more than the all-time-high price for it.

INTEROPERABILITY:
* You can see the open source code we've written (https://github.com/Intercoin) and it's already able to run on any EVM-compatible network, including Ethereum MainNet, Binance Smart Chain, Tron, xDaiChain, Polygon (MATIC) and soon Solana and Cardano will support EVM.
* Stacks. It's related to Bitcoin and recently was used for CityCoins. BlockStack is not exactly the most "native" implementation of Bitcoin smart contracts (that would be RSK) but it has a way to do timelocks and verify ECDSA signatures, so that means we can make atomic swaps of STX and CityCoins to Intercoin local currencies. Meaning you can trustlessly deposit STX and CityCoins and the community smart contract on the EVM will give you local coins (and buy INTER and put it on reserve) ... all without having to use oracles.
* Bitcoin itself. Yes we aren't leaving Bitcoin out! Since Bitcoin's Script can also verify ECDSA signatures (and became more versatile after Taproot) we should be able to make a trustless oracle-free way for someone to trade BTC for any local community currency on Intercoin, including ones that are pegged to BTC! That is to say, given two people A and B, let's say A sends BTC to B on the Bitcoin blockchain, while B sends the local community currency to A. Neither Bitcoin nor the community currency is locked up after this, they can continue to be traded back and forth, and swapped back between any two parties whenever they choose to make a cross-chain trade.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:
* Follow the links above and ask any questions, I will try to answer them as best I can.
* Let's discuss whether there is a need for something like this, given that Bitcoin's been around for 10 years and if someone doesn't step up, there won't be good decentralized payment alternative to the CBDC and Big Tech payment networks that will be coming out
* If you want, check out ExMarkets.com (https://exmarkets.com/trade/itr-btc) where you can buy the ITR investor token. You won't be able to buy the INTER token, though.