We now have a website at https://futurecredit.org.

Also, when we started, there was nowhere you could spent futurecredits. Now there are several things you can spend them on directly and there are markets on counterparty (see https://counterparty.io) where they can be exchanged for XCP, the counterparty currency and Tetlas. Tetlas are a local alternative currency we previously created that is accepted by dozens of local businesses on Vancouver Island, mostly in Victoria, BC. (see https://tetla.org for more details)

We have had some interesting results with FCR. It is exchangeable for other crypto currencies on counterparty and has risen against TETLAS and XCP by about 1000% since inception on October 1, 2015. We are considering putting up a website and asking to have FCR listed on an exchange or two. We would be interested in getting advice from someone with experience in getting a crypto currency or asset listed on exchanges. Does anyone here know much about how that is usually done or have any experience at it?

I noticed that the rise in the price of bitcoin has made it a lot more expensive to do a transaction on counterparty. You can designate a transaction as low priority, but sometimes, it costs more than that anyway. I've been charged as much as .02 BTC per transaction.

Does anyone know what can be done about this? Will Ethereum have a similar problem as the price of ethers goes up?

The electronic version of tetlas is also mentioned on our news website tetlanews.com. You can see that the two websites are affiliated because if you go to tetla.org and click on the "Tetla News" tab on the left, it will take you to a page that is mostly articles about tetla in other media. But at the top, there is a link to our own news site, TetlaNews.com. Currently, (as of Jan 16, 2016) the top article on TetlaNews.com is the one about the "TETLAS" counterparty asset. If it's not the top article anymore when you read this, you can find it in the archives, posted on December 31, 2015.

You are right to be concerned about whether a counterparty asset is really associated with the organization with whom it is said to be associated. I'm going to add a reference to the electronic tetlas to the main website. I'll post when that's done, but the Tetla News article is already there.


To answer your other questions, yes, the electronic tetlas can be exchanged for paper tetlas at a one-to-one ratio. Just contact the tetla organization. Contact info is on the website at www.tetla.org. So far as I know, none of the businesses accepting paper tetlas are set up to accept electronic tetlas at this point. Most of them probably don't even know electronic tetlas exist yet.

The main tetla website (www.tetla.org) now mentions electronic tetlas in the FAQ section. Just click on the FAQ tab on the left and scroll down. It's the last one on the list. Here's a direct link:

http://tetla.org/index.php/faqs

Currency Announcement: Electronic Tetla [TLA]


Website: www.tetla.org



Tetla is the name of an alternative currency that has been in use since 2012, mostly at the southern end of Thi Skwthe (Vancouver Island). It is most widely used in the city of Victoria, the provincial capital of British Columbia, Canada.

Dozens of local businesses in Victoria accept payment in tetlas. This includes restaurants, a clothing store, a pharmacy and many others. It is now possible to use tetlas to pay for part of the purchase price of many homes, condos and other real estate. All businesses in the tetla economy charge the same price in tetlas as they do in Canadian dollars so the value of the tetla is approximately the same as the Canadian dollar. The tetla was designed to maintain a relatively stable value at parity with the Canadian dollar and it has done so for nearly four years (as of late 2015). Whether this will continue to be true now that the electronic tetla can easily be traded for other assets on the counterparty platform is unknown.

We didn't announce the creation of the Tetla alternative currency here earlier because it was not derived from bitcoin and wasn't even electronic. Also, we didn't know about this forum back then. But now that there is an electronic version that runs on the bitcoin blockchain via counterparty, we thought it might be appropriate to mention it here.

The original Tetla was announced to the news media years ago. It was featured on the front page of the business section of the Times Colonist Newspaper (main newspaper in Victoria, BC) in April of 2013. It was also covered by other news media.


We're not trying to recruit miners since Tetla cannot be mined.

We're not trying to get anyone to buy Tetlas since we don't sell them for money.

We're not trying to get anyone to invest in Tetlas since they are designed to hold the same value, not to go up.
 
We're not trying to get anyone to accept payment in Tetla unless they live in the vicinity of Victoria, British Columbia or nearby in Coast Salish territory.

We're not trying to claim to have developed better altcoin software. Tetla doesn't use any new software. Our strength is knowledge of economics, not software. The original tetla consists of paper certificates and the electronic version is an asset called "TETLAS" on counterparty (www.counterparty.io).

We are open to the idea of helping others start similar projects in other places. We think it would be especially valuable in Greece with the economic problems they are having right now. Possibly also in Sweden for different reasons. Also, any country that has rapid price increases (inflation) might be a good place for something like this. Or any country or place which is economically depressed or there is a lack of money. It can be done anywhere, but those situations make the need more obvious to people. Feel free to contact us at info@tetla.org if you are interested.

The project already has income. The Future Technology Fund has already raised about $4,000 (Canadian) and invested most of it. The fund began operations on October 1, 2015. Although the primary purpose of the fund is to invest in technology, funds not yet employed for that purpose are invested in other things just to generate a financial return. So far that is going well and generating income for the fund. It's not much, but the plan is to raise more money via crowdfunding and invest that.

There is no website up yet, but the domain names futurecredit.org and futuretechnologyfund.org have been registered for our use.

We have not published a paper on what we're trying to do. We're not even familiar with how that is usually done in the bitcoin and altcoin community. We know that in academia, various journals are the usual forum for publishing papers. Of course, you can just self-publish things on your own website. What is the usual way altcoin papers are published?

Is [FCR] taken? I can't find any altcoin with it. If it's not already in use, we're claiming it.

There are several purposes for the Future Credit. I just didn't want to sound like I was trying to hype it so in the announcement I just talked about what it is now which is close to nothing. There are several ideas on what it could be used for:

1) As a perk to be given away in crowdfunding campaigns to raise money for technological research via what we are calling the "Future Technology Fund". I didn't mention it because no such crowdfunding campaigns have been launched at this time. Discussions with researchers have begun, but we haven't gotten very far with that at this point.

2) To be (hopefully) accepted as payment someday by businesses that commercialize new technologies funded by the crowdfunding campaigns mentioned above.

3) Perhaps to be used in a simulation game that explores possible future scenarios. Different scenarios would have different assumptions about how fast various technologies could be developed and which technologies are even possible.

4) Possibly to be a voting mechanism for people to vote on research priorities for the Future Technology Fund.

That's the thinking at this point.

Thanks for the input. I have deleted the reference to FTC. Did not know it was already taken.

Currency Announcement: Future Credit [FCR]


We heard that it is customary to announce new electronic currencies here. We have created a "currency" mostly as an experiment to explore the possibilities of what can be done with the counterparty platform. (see www.counterparty.io)

It is associated with a small group of futurologists which is why we chose the name. Our new "currency" is an asset on counterparty called the "FUTURECREDIT". (If you don't get the name exactly right on counterparty, you can be dealing with a completely different asset issued by someone else.)

Like bitcoin and most altcoins, the future credit has no fixed value at its inception, has no businesses accepting it as payment, cannot be redeemed for anything by the issuer, is not directly backed by any assets and may or may not be worth anything depending on whether people decide it's worth having.

Issuance of new future credits is not locked and there is no limit on the amount that may be issued. The notional initial value is 10,000 future credits to one Canadian dollar, but that could fall even lower. Millions of them have already been issued.

Future credits cannot be mined.

We have not developed any new software or technical advances for this. Future credit is just an asset on counterparty. We are not associated with counterparty except as users of it.


We're not trying to recruit miners since the future credit cannot be mined.

We're not trying to get anyone to buy future credits since they can't be spent anywhere.

We're not trying to get anyone to invest in futurecredits since they are obviously not suitable for investment.
 
We're not trying to get anyone to accept payment in futurecredits since there is currently no way to spend them or convert them to any kind of real money.

We're just impressed with counterparty and want to experiment with it among ourselves and try out some ideas. If it starts being used, trades at a higher value or, for that matter, has much trading activity at all, then some of our ideas might be working.