We have explored possibilities to use one of existing platforms. However, it seemed impossible to achieve lossless microtransfers because of blockchain maintenance fees, price volatility and other restrictions. We have decided for a specialized coin not even competing with most cryptocurrencies in terms of transaction speed, investment possibilities and other derivative uses. The trade-offs help minimize costs, leaks and vulnerabilities.

Thank you bringing this up, dael. Just checked - bitcointalk.org is not in at 5,116 - no good! : )
Joking aside, anybody has the ability to join thank-u either by generating an account and placing it on their web pages or associating the account with their domain name. The questions is how to distribute the emitted liquidity in a way that is fair, lossless, fraud resistant and attracts early adopters. We design money supply controlling algorithm to distribute or withhold money among the biggest recipients in accordance with their activity. (The platform emits to those who are most likely to be there if/when some of this money would need to be destroyed.) There will be no limiting site lists, once the platform stabilizes but when there is no reliable statistics during warm-up we chose to use a conservative limit for the seed emission to protect against fraud and keep tranche amounts reasonably attractive.
What would be the benefits if we spread the 5M among hundreds of thousands domains? More participants with less chances to win?

Good point. We don't have an illusion that we can reform the industry the way we like. It is stuck at the moment: consumers block ads, publishers loose revenues. Let's see how the situation develops, whether some publishers will find our solution a valid alternative. Ad-sponsored, subscription based and thank-u models can co-exist after all.

If you look at our testnet ledger, you will see that the mentioned publishers get transfers accumulated on their accounts. No wonder - they provide great services. If they don't claim the money, transfers will return to senders. You are perfectly right by implying, that despite of becoming the top recipients at thank-u, switching to a fairer model could mean readjusting their revenues according to whatever consumers consider fair, which brings uncertainty. However, such decentralization of wealth distribution could have a great positive effect on the economy overall. A good metaphor could be watering the garden: spreading water evenly across the lawn instead of pumping hundreds of billions trough a dozen of major players.

On the other end, lot's of smaller publishers, bloggers and authors can benefit immediately by converting their loyal readers to revenues in a meritocratic manner - 100 followers of quality content may be worth 10000 following clickbait with no satisfaction.

The total supply is not limited. When signing blocks, miners (publishers) provide their votes on money emission/destruction rates to balance supply with demand at the target price level (1RAY:1USD). That is if a speculator or investor takes hold of a significant share of money supply, causing the price to go up, consumers will delay their buys, while publishers will vote for emitting more coins to come back to the Nash equilibrium which is minimizing transaction losses and increasing exchange velocity.
We design a coin that doesn't have value on its own but rather serves as a lossless medium to transfer consumer's gratitude to publishers and authors. (It may eventually go beyond its first practical domain towards a form of gift economy in the future, as CoinCube pointed out.)

There will be no crowd sale. The newly emitted money is distributed pseudorandomly among the biggest recipients who are most likely to keep using the platform (alexa top 5K to start with). On absorption, the money is primarily taken from the accounts it was previously emitted to, those with poorer activity at first place. Publishers and authors can be seen as shareholders of the platform with their shares changing in accordance with the relative volume of their transactions and the value of their shares with the total supply.

Although emission for the bounty campaign doesn't follow the logic, it might be a justified exception at start to help spreading the word and overcome the chicken or egg challenge.

It is a cryptocurrency tuned to solve a practical problem - collapse of the ad-sponsored content distribution. To help those adblock users who can't stop enjoying their freedom but wouldn't like letting their favorite sites down at the same time. This is the primary application to start up the ecosystem. The coin can find more general uses in the future.

Eventually, yes. However, we cannot technically expose the platform to attacks with zero costs for the attacker. That's why we lock a commission (of 1 or 2%) on the recipient's account to either automatically unlock it after a period of time (a few weeks at start) or let publishers unlock it earlier as a reward for mining which is computationally cheap. No entity collects the commission, it is temporarily frozen for security reasons. The period can be decreased once the network stabilizes.

Motivation and Context

The reason we come up with yet another cryptocurrency is that we could not find an existing one that meets requirements of our project - the need for true commission-free micropayments.
We aim to solve the problem of ad-sponsored content distribution caused by consumer revolt against ads, disruption of their content providers' food chain.
In the last year there have been a few announcements of similar attempts (Flattr+, Mass, Brave and others). However, judging from the first reaction of the community, to get a chance to be accepted as a fair alternative, replacing a chain of intermediaries between content consumer and publisher with a lighter and fairer version might not be enough, such micropayment platform should better be:

• free - where publisher or author gets 100 cents from each transferred dollar;
• anonymous, open and transparent, controlled by community consensus, not a company that can be sold or go bankrupt.

thank-u doesn't propose to reform the industry in a particular way, but rather attempts to build a two-way bridge between publishers and authors on one side and consumers on the other, inviting them to meet somewhere in between. At one extreme, some consumers might prefer to install an app that, in addition to ad-blocking, lets users assign a monthly amount of money they consider fair to be proportionally distributed among their favorite (most visited) sites, or use "like" button for one-click micropayments to thank for a touching article, a movie, or a song. (Check out thank-u chrome extension beta, for example. More details here.)
At the other end of the bridge, some publishers might still opt for preset content prices or subscriptions. thank-u can help here as well with 0% commission transfers, one-click micropayments and sign in.
Although lossless micropayments are difficult to achieve, we propose to make use of the voluntary (gratitude or donation) nature of transfers and specialize the cryptocurrency for this case.


Cryptocurrency parameters

To achieve frictionless and free transfers we promote the primary function of money, medium of exchange, trading off fitness for derivative uses. The parameters will be tuned by the consensus once the platform is up, until then we propose to start with conservative ones to deal with main costs and leaks of a micropayment platform:

Processing

• the method of achieving distributed consensus is a variant of PoS - PoB, proof-of-benefit (if the name is vacant), where chances to sign next block depend on current volume of transfers an account receives and are decreased once the account gets rewarded;
• protection against spam and attacks is implemented by freezing commission on recipient accounts for a period of time (a few weeks at conservative start);
• blockchain maintenance is rewarded by unlocking collected commission and by emission lottery. PoS maintenance will not require additional resources from publishers in most cases making processing virtually free.
  

Speculation and volatility

• exchange rate is anchored to fiat currency (1 RAY : 1 USD). While both sides of transaction are interested in minimizing losses, volatility and speculation is discouraged with the following counterweights:
  
  - publishers interested in increasing exchange velocity control monetary mass by voting on emission/absorption rates when signing blocks. They are further incentivized to vote towards consensus by adjusting commission unlock speed;
  - consumers who buy and voluntary send thank-u rays have an option to do it on credit, delaying exchange if the rate deviates from the anchor; such credit transfers (pledges) remain locked on publisher's accounts until repayed or expired;
  
  
• functions of money that are different from the target one are suppressed with negative interest rates (collected rates are destroyed) and other restrictions.
  

Fees for exchange to fiat currencies

• given the gratitude nature of transfers, exchanges can be performed on the network blockchain - consumers can choose to buy rays directly from their favorite sites they trust and usually send rays to. In this case it is possible to save on transaction arbitrage achieving commission-free exchange (users can adjust their voluntary transfers in case of fraud; bank transfer costs are often included into user banking package);
  
• online exchanges will be used at start and for users requiring stronger transaction anonymity.
  

Bounties

thank-u cannot offer coins to investors or developers as in a common ICO because this would conflict with the goals stated above. Initial liquidity is distributed among early adopters from the most likely payment recipients and the community within the PR campaign:

1. Publishers: 5M rays will be distributed pseudorandomly among the top 5K sites listed by alexa.com, depending on the volume of transfers they receive, provided they help maintaining the blockchain by installing nodes.

2. Community: PR program will be encouraged by an adequate bounty campaign including:
- articles and blogs;
- translations;
- social network reposts;
- bug and vulnerability reports, improvement proposals.
Details will be presented shortly. Reservations are recorded here.


Technology

We build upon the blockchain implementation by nxt.org inheriting its basic specifications and are thankful to the developers. A contract is set up on the blockchain to share rays received by thank-u.org with nxt.org, when there are any. No benefits or rights are reserved for development needs, but when the project takes off and is good, it can be financed by the same gratitude based model being proposed.


Challenges

Chicken or the egg problem at start is handled in the following way:

• users install the browser extension and start sending rays to domain names and URLs on credit, which can be later either repaid by adding funds to the account, when there is ray supply on exchanges, or cancelled with no obligations (credit transfers expire);
  
• without having to register, publishers receive rays from emission lottery and collect transfers on their domain name, connecting an account to the name with their current SSL certificate credentials (transfers are returned to senders when publisher does not join). The platform starts working in trial mode with no real money involved. Publishers can assess potential money flow, are incentivized to recommend the tool to their audience. (They can create different accounts for different authors and products which can result in significant byproducts - the true ratings and major quality improvement, when clickbait is replaced by seeking gratitude. Accounts can be contracts sharing incoming rays between authors and publishers to provide a fair and lossless alternative to bloggers, youtubers, journalists in relationship to their publishing platforms.)
  

Roadmap

• February-March 2017 - Community building and technology tests - tuning parameters.
• March-April 2017 - Community bounty campaign - spreading the word to publishers and consumers.
• May 2017 - Publisher bounty campaign - the start.

Dear gurus, we need your critics to challenge and tune the parameters. If you have ideas, do join us. thank-u!

thank-u.org