The first big update is ready in 2 weeks. This update contains a complete new design of the ICONIC wallet together with several features. We're also preparing our source for our upcoming username implementation.
Glad for your continuing efforts.
I read the whitepaper but wonder about the giant challenge, like most altcoins: Getting enough users to use it instead of the alternative of bitcoin itself.
For instance, ICON's planned username registration system is indeed superior to bitcoin's meaningless addresses, but it is hard to think of a specific business that would jump over because of it. It is like icing on the cake but not the cake itself. Price volatility is a huge issue in getting businesses to accept any altcoin. They don't necessarily trust that an altcoin will remain worth almost anything.
(Some guaranteed value for ICON might be possible by a simple expedient of maintaining a 520,000 ICON buy order on the exchange at some moderate price, as many as all the coins in existence, but that is a costly way to only somewhat reduce price volatility).
Most altcoins flounder in the doldrums of their only users being a small congregation of miners, speculators, and exchange bots -- not real users in the real world or external internet. My guess is that getting even a hundred people really using a new coin like this as a currency would be a good start to break out of that situation, then thousands, and beyond for critical mass.
Beyond the features mentioned in the whitepaper, you may already have solutions in mind for where you could carve out some special market niches to get started.
But, just to throw out some ideas for optional suggestions:
- Your automated payment system might be made to support a billing system, especially for microtransactions. For instance, imagine a proxy that charged for each hour of use, fancier than could be provided as a free service, but "pay-as-you-go" instead of monthly billing. Another microtransaction example might be donating to some address a tiny bit per week automatically, and ICON price volatility would not be a particular issue in the case of charitable giving which does not demand fixed prices.
- Yet in some ways, getting future versions of your wallet adopted by enough users might be easier if it was made into a dual-currency wallet, both ICON and bitcoin. A feature like your automated payment system probably could be made to function with bitcoin too? Other features would need ICON itself, not functioning with bitcoin.
The idea then would be to drastically expand the total userbase by drawing in existing bitcoin users, figuring that more would slip into the advantages of ICON over time if already having the wallet installed.
For example, right now, my ICON wallet shows a total of 4 active connections, but getting a hypothetical dual ICON-Bitcoin wallet installed on thousands of computers would put ICON on a trajectory to success (even if most initially downloaded it merely for the bitcoin functions, only later gradually easing into ICON more and more).
- Speaking of other feature ideas, there is a computer game, World of Warcraft, with millions of players, in which there are personal banks but also guild banks too. The latter are quite popular, allowing a bunch of money control features like letting some users have partial access with a limited cap on funds they can withdraw per day. Nothing like those money control features exist in current crypto wallets, AFAIK, yet they would actually be useful.
For instance, setting a limit on how much could be withdrawn per day from a wallet, by some user types, could be useful for parents with kids -- or clubs or organizations wanting a group wallet. It also could be a partial anti-theft safeguard, a little like seemingly every ATM card in the world has a daily cash withdrawal limit, so no thief could withdraw $100,000 in the first day.