Why Potatocoin?Citizens of third world countries rarely have a stable national currency, thus they have to look to alternative methods of payment such as M-Pesa, a mobile phone currency transaction service. The problem with using something like M-Pesa is that it is completely controlled by a single entity which is able to adjust fees at its own discretion, regardless of the effect on its users. This is clearly not a viable financial system in countries such as Kenya, where wages are extremely low. Given that most of these people have access to cheap phones, the obvious solution (to Bitcoin users anyways) is to create a service that allows these people to safely transact bitcoins via text; for example,
Coinbase's SMS service. Unfortunately,
this won't work. Bitcoin is far too volatile for third world countries to rely on. If it were widely used in say, Kenya, a price drop could ruin thousands of lives. Our proposed solution is to give third world farmers a currency of their own, that they control. We will create an SMS service to transact PotatoCoins with, giving poor farmers the ability to safely sell their products without the risk of massive inflation/deflation/fees crippling their livelihood.
Premine & GoalsPotatoCoin will have a premine of 2.5%. Once the SMS service is completed, the PotatoCoin development team will create a payment processor similar to BitPay, whereby shopkeepers can accept PotatoCoins and receive dollars (or other currencies). We will then travel to Kenya with our own funds and distribute the PotatoCoins to poor farmers. There are two reasons for this: One, the farmers will immediately control a large amount of the coins, but not so many that they become worthless; Two, providing farmers with PotatoCoins will give them the ability and incentive to use the coins. Once we have distributed 90% of the premine, we will go to large distributors and get them set up using the PotatoCoin payment processor, giving the farmers previously given PotatoCoins the ability to purchase all necessary supplies with PotatoCoins. We would like to do this in more countries than Kenya, but we won't be able to afford this as we are paying for the trip out of pocket.
Specifications Algorithm: X11
Block Reward: 500 (decreasing by 0.0002 per block)
Block Time: 30 seconds
Maximum Coins: 625 Million
Launch DateFriday, August 8th 2014
PoolsPool owners can PM me to be added to the OP.
We will be making a website where you can exchange PotatoCoins for actual potatoes that will be mailed to you.
Poll
