Bitcoin Forum

http://www.coindesk.com/hullcoin-worlds-first-local-government-cryptocurrency/

I can just see it happening.....
Most governments will create their own cryptocurrency (altcoins) whose value will be based on Bitcoin.

Interesting development.  Hopefully more city councils take this approach and it will lead to a much wider knowledge and understanding of cryptocurrencies in general.  Consequently a faster adoption rate too.

yes get the government involved so we can no longer have privacy and taxless transactions. Morons...

You are forgetting about one thing. Bitcoin :)
Governments can have their own cryprocurrency just like they have their own fiat currency.

Does that stop you from using Bitcoin?  ;)

Living in Hull, this has peaked my interest more than most. Knowing our council, they'll manage to mess it up at some point, though.

I grew up in Lewes (mentioned in the article). I forgot about our Lewes pound! It was a total pump and dump! They were selling for up to £20 on eBay at one point. People just snapped them all up and sold them out of town. Haha!

That is an international issue.
I have yet to meet a competent government.

Have you?

Did it have the queens face on?  ;D ;D ;D ;D

Yeah,but it's pegged at 1 pound now, I think. But according to the Wiki article,only 130 odd businesses accept it,so that's not widespread adoption certainly.


Yeahh,go Rob Karen,go Hull City!  :P

Good idea, but poor execution. They should be issuing colored coins.

haha, you are very (or too) optimistic  :D

True, but then again...
What are the governments options?

when did I say it did? I'm simply making the point that government having anything to do with money is a big no no. It's evil...

Yeah but if there's government coins, then completely decentralized anonymous markets to move in and out of bitcoin from govcoin are possible.  It makes the current point of privacy failure (exchanges) go away completely.

Govcoins would be really really good for bitcoin, because it would be so easy to maneuver in and out of govcoins.  And of course, literally everybody would get used to using crypto-coins.

Govcoin would be amazingly good news.

This here is the secret sauce of implementing cryptocurrencies in real communities.

I find it interesting and great that helping the impoverished is a critical point of this project, and they decided a blockchain was the way to go over another fiat type currency like the Brixton. More power to them!

That incentivizes larger competing governments to attack the cryptocurrencies of smaller governments to exploit them. It's better to issue colored coins on the Bitcoin blockchain for the added security. Sure, governments could use pure PoS, but that would expose them to bad agents in their own government. Colored coins can be more easily managed and recolored for economic controls.

Why didn't they buy a Gridseed miner which can do 350 MHS and is uses way less power than their 1.6 MHS GPU rig? Also better for the environment (which local governments always proclaim to care so much about). ::)

 ;D i don't think so ...

OK, don't laugh at me but....
What are colored coins???

It is a layer over Bitcoin using metadata to issue coins as small as one Satoshi using the Bitcoin Blockchain. The color means that you add counterparty risk to back the coin. It can be anything from stock, to metals, or even fiat.

OK, sounds interesting.
Any colored coins out there?

hullcoin should not be treated as decentralized. because the council is the miner and distributor

but hull coin has these benefits:
not using a banking system:- replaces the old banking system of databases, for a next gen system of blockchains.

no chip and pin:
no need for people to pay using card machines, meaning fruit-stall owners or butchers at the weekly market not needing pin machines and subscriptions to payment processors, all they need is a phone

local currency:
where funds do not end up going to international banks. where the distributor, agents and gateways are all people employed in the Hull area creating jobs in that area, instead of banking customer service jobs in asia, or exchange jobs in wall street. which will boost th local economy instead of making people thousands of miles away richer.

There are colored coin wallets to create your own, but they are still using testnet coins in beta. You know, if there weren't so many people trying to compete with Bitcoin and stealing its thunder to make a quick buck, then maybe more would be actually helping with the actual Bitcoin products. Hullcoin is another failure to understand this.

Couldn't agree with you more  ;)

I guess this kind of thing should not happen, governments have their own money, they won't be foolish to create virtual currency caused disorder monetary system in their own country.

That is widespread when considering a town population of 16000, it covers most the independent high street shops and number of pubs and eateries in town. The objective is to get money circulating in the local economy.   Something Bitcoin should be mindful off, as purchases are being transferred out when people use bitpay and the like.

btw the value was always intended to be pegged, note collectors made the price £20 (and likely a few fake sales/bids).

Hull have form in this area, running their own telephone/ISP company, this isn't "the government", its a city council.

whats next? Hull being the next 'New Hampshire', but of england instead of america

I genuinely thought the more active/more experienced members of this forum were the wiser ones, oh how you have just destroyed that idea. Switching govcoins to altcoins without an exchange, the very point of complaint in the beginning of your post? I can only assume you're from Hull and have the IQ of the average resident.  

Forget about non-privacy, not-decentralized and all that typical crypto-currency stuff you have been talking about Bitcoin for a moment.
A government body officially accepting crypto-currency for a means of social/economical development is good for Bitcoin or the virtual currencies in whole.

why cant people just use bitcoin ???. this way there will be 10000 alt currencies of no use

Isn't this weak? Surely a miner could easily 51% attack these local coins.

I think building on top of Bitcoin is the better way, the 51% problem is no longer yours and you also increase the value of Bitcoin itself.

I don't think they will let anyone else mine.
They said they will be giving out the coins in paper wallets.

Don't know how that will work out for them though....

IT would take team work this is something most governments don't have. It would cost to much to implement, a price tag of 1m would balloon to 100m. Also it would take to long as civil servants often die at their desks with no one actually noticing  ;D

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

what does the town council do when hullcoin is down? Play crysis? Lol.

That mining rig can be more than enough if they're the only one mining Hullcoin.
And they said they were going to expand their rig.

PERFECT!  just make it purple for stocks, blue for bonds, and green for weed, bro (i support legal weed yo)

Eventually the Worlds fiat "paper money" will be tethered to a cryptocurrency!

That is after the four major Unions evolve in the world (aka top global 'bullies', United States+EU+South America / Russia / Asia / Middle Eastern countries)

Can one Mine HullCoin????

If so, how do you go about doing such. (Links to software etc)

you cant mine it. you can only purchase it for £1 per coin. thats the whole point. they dont want people making free money
as i said before its not to be treated as decentralised. but as a way of sowing that blockchains are better then current banking databases, and the speed of transactions is faster then wire transfer/visa/mastercard can ever be.

onc people realize that blockchains are better in Hull. people will then expand their investments to realise bitcoin is even better with even more freedoms then Hull coin can offer.

Hullcoin will be just a demonstration of the differences of bank accounts vs phone app services, were true value is transmitted instantly

Sorry but my argument is completely valid.  More people using crypto is good for bitcoin.  Being able to anonymously exchange bitcoin for fiat is good for bitcoin.  And govcoin enables those two things exactly.

If you find fault with the logic of that argument, expose it.  Incorrect ad hominem are not valid rebuttals.

Has anyone even noticed that Hullcoin is not a new coin but uses an existing UK crypto coin?

The article is not well done and is misleading as to what that government is doing over there. I have suspected that CoinDesk is becoming increasingly biased of late. The recent Dogecoin to the moon article was particularly suspect since it followed a week of constant market decline for Doge.

-the part that makes me laugh is that they are the sole miners of their hull coin.. there is no competition/different pools mining hull coin..

and as such they get 100% of every block. yet they say they wish to get a KNC miner.....
,.,,,,,,,,

dont they realise adding miners is only needed if there is competition.. of they keep the mining process closed so no one else mines it. then there is not any need to out compete THEMSELVES.

the mind boggles

Read my comment, there are not launching their own coin but using an existing one rebranded :D

ouch.. if that is true which i hope not. then people that already have millions of that coin can go to hull and withdraw millions of pounds..

stpid idea it would be to use a coin that is minable for anyone and premined by different people..

imagine it. day 1 a customer buys £10 of hull coin. putting £10 into the economy. day two.. someone cash's out 500k of coin mined before the software branding. now hull is £499,990 in debt.

the only way for hull to succeed starting a new economy for swapping for Pound coins. is a closed blockchain and sole supply..

I'm pretty sure that is exactly what they have planned.

I was thinking of putting up some Little Britain vids.

Heh, a single CPU would do the same thing.

hey i am from hull .... first i have heard of it lol  :D :D

There is some contradictory info in the media reports.  Looks like the best place for official news is on their twitter or facebook page - https://twitter.com/HullCoin (https://twitter.com/HullCoin)

I am all for reintroducing local currencies. Having wealth cycle around a community is a lot better for that community than having that wealth leave. The concept is great, implementation could have been done better though. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

This should be an interesting experiment.

Governments and their own crypto. lol

Who processes transactions? Are the miners centralized in a government warehouse? :D

where can we buy hullcoin

You can't (at this moment). As I seen you have to go to Hull, then start doing some voluntary work and you will get some.

After reading the related articles I think Hullcoin isn't fully implemented at this time. It looks like a pilot, where the basic infrastructure is there but only very limited services are available. Anyway it's a good experiment and the next logical step after Bristol Pound and similar things. According to my readings Ven has some kind of voting procedure but I have no idea if that's part of the system or a parallel thing on Hubculture.

combination of feathercoin and ven? seems an interesting idea.

All I can say after seeing the item on Sky News the other night is - great...

This raises the general public's awareness of cryptocurrency in general and helps to counteract all the negativity i.e. Chinese/Russian stance on BTC, mt.gox etc. etc. etc.

Of great interest is the statement that DWP do NOT consider crypto as income...

If one of our City Councils is actively promoting the use of crypto then the wider acceptance cause, hopefully, must be aided.

I did chuckle at their super-dooper mining rig..!  ;D

Shame DWP isn't HMRC. They are probably decentralising the idea of income within govt so they don't have to pay tax.

Please go sit in the corner.

imagine you go to Hull and use your 1hull coin to buy a loaf of bread. then you want to go to manchester and use... "manc" coin instead of cashing out back to fiat and then going to the manc coin exchange to buy manc coins.. you would use bitcoin as the middleman..

Remember that the technology is neutral. Some of you are assuming that just because a bunch of libertarians have adopted Bitcoin (and tried to push out anyone who isn't a libertarian), that people with other agendas can't adopt the technology for their own purposes.

Actually anyone can make a cryptocurrency, including a city council and there's nothing you can do to stop it.

Hull council are being rather revolutionary:

* they haven't used taxpayer money for this, it's funded by a donation
* they've creatively thought of a way for people to earn these coins through work (a key part of a crypto-economy, and one that bitcoin hasn't cracked yet, though other alts like devcoin are actively working on this)
* they are going to use their influence to try to get local supermarkets to accept the coin, probably in it's raw form without an exchange, like some many local "trading points" schemes. If successful, they'll have a real economy around their alt.

Suppose we have another 2008 banking meltdown and this time govts arn't able to unblock the system and people simply don't get paid their wages and businesses can't buy and sell stuff.

Well, Hull will be well placed, because they'll have done the ground work to have a payment system that by-passes the banks, so people can buy their groceries and pay their rent.

For everyone else it'll be hell. It'll be hell even for bitcoin people, because many of the businesses that pretend to accept bitcoin do nothing of the sort - they rely on intermediaries to change the money into dollars, and pay them in dollars, and they receive their dollars via the current banking system.

So all power to the elected representatives of Hull - they're trying to achieve something bitcoin hasn't managed yet.

Also, Hullcoin may succeed because they're simply talking about supporting the local economy, there is no ideology involved. Bitcoin's biggest achilles heel is that some people are trying to force a libertarian agenda on everyone, and the majority of the world isn't libertarian. Trying to insist that anyone who adopts bitcoin must adopt libertarianism is the biggest thing holding bitcoin back - people don't like to be forced into anything.

+1 Spot on.

Im pretty sure this was just an April Fools joke.

MancCoin already under development www.MancCoin.org - to come Scouse coin Geordie Coin Essex coin