First.. a question
What are the long-term strategic plans to increase adoption of TiPS and its use as a currency?
I had a look at the first post in this thread, and a quick scan of the reddit and FB pages, and am none the wiser.
Ok, so that was a loaded question. I like TiPS - for a few reasons.
1. Lots of coins = enough for actual use as public adoption of cryptocoins grows
2. Age of the coin - time and declining value is a really good fix for distribution, and more holders means less chance of a HUGE dump killing the value for users (spenders/merchants)
3. POW-based (POS has some inherent long-term issues)
4. Active community
5. Coin mixing (if its still working? I should investigate this more - might be willing to be a node too)
So this next bit I posted for another coin I follow, but after thinking about it this morning, I decided that it applies equally well, if not better, to Fedora TiPS.
IMO what we need for TiPS to succeed as a currency is:
1. Commercial purpose (utility = value)
2. Marketing
Marketing is the easy part. The tricky part is commercial purpose and making a currency which works i.e. which can be used to obtain goods/services or as an exchange of value. We need things like:
commerce tools for merchants
- Plugins for supporting ECC on various ecommerce carts (Woo-commerce, Magento and Opencart)
- Check-out payment with ECC
- Pricing in ECC (i.e. treat similar to Forex - price based on exchange rate)
- Merchant wallet integration for said carts (transaction lists, balances, outstanding invoices etc.)
- 3rd party hosted wallet service integration (so merchants don't need to run their own wallet server/dameon/blockchain host)
- Direct wallet/daemon wallet (for merchants who want control, have the space, and can set it up and run it themselves, and be a node)
Improved tools for users
- mobile wallets for android, iphone
- merchant directory of supporting vendors (geolocation, search, etc.)
- crypto-ATM support
- p2p marketplace
Sure, all the things like decentralised marketplaces, online contracts and asset-exchanges are sexy, but this is an emerging market, and the fact is 99.9999% of online and physical commerce happens via existing retail channels, and its a market which is being largely ignored by the crypto market in the face of fads and fashion, and ideology.
It seems that cryptocoins as a segment are currently failing at being actual currencies. Everyone's trying to think 10 steps down the line to replacing fiat currencies and exchange mechanisms, and ignoring the obvious step of working alongside them using existing infrastructure.
I think a strong focus on leveraging those existing channels, even if we only achieve a tiny percentage of merchants, will show vastly more growth and increased awareness among the general public than any decentralised asset exchange.
The crypto community is small, really small.
The whole market cap of Bitcoin is less than the value of some app-store apps. What we should be trying to do is increase the size/appeal of the crypto market, not fight for a share of it. The old venture-capitalist adage about a smaller piece of a bigger pie applies here. It doesn't take many merchants selling $5 items to create significant buying power. $5 is around 7m TiPS.
