Get blog updates
Recently, Qbix launched a new spinoff project called Intercoin. As time goes on, you’ll probably hear more and more about this new decentralized currency platform and the technology that powers it. So it would be helpful to have an article that explains the economic design decisions we made along the way to arrive at its current form. This is that article.
(If you want to read the corresponding article about the technical design, stay tuned for the next one.)
What is money?
Let’s start at the beginning. Money is supposed to be used as a medium of exchange. To a person, the value of any given currency is directly related to how easily (people, businesses) would accept it in exchange for things the person may need or want. Thus, currencies benefit from a network effect: the more people in a community accept it, the more valuable it is to each member. How well a currency fulfills this function determines its value for the community.
Social apps benefit from network effects too. Facebook is much more valuable if all your friends are on it, so can see and be seen – photos, comments, whatever. It’s no surprise that social apps have all incorporated payments into their networks: you can now pay via GMail, Facebook Messenger, iMessages, and more. WeChat in China has all but replaced cash.
When a new payment network appears, people cash in by “depositing” value and receiving internal currency which they then use to transact on that network. Occasionally, people cash out by “withdrawing” value from the network. This is true of casino chips, paypal, banks, or local currencies such as Berkshares, Bristol Pounds and Ithaca Hours. (And it will soon be true of estcoins and the petro).
One size does not fit all
Most currencies today are run by huge communities, whether they are Bitcoin, or federations such as USA, EU, Russia or China. As such, they are one-size-fits-all.
For example, the mysterious creator(s) of Bitcoin made a decision early on that the supply would never exceed 21 million. As a result, as Bitcoin’s network effect grew, the value of each Bitcoin kept growing, too. It became a good store of value — a vehicle for investors and speculators — but that made it a lousy medium of exchange. Who wants to spend their coins on a pizza when the same coins can buy a house a couple years later?
Moreover, Bitcoin is one monolithic global network with an ever-growing ledger that records every transaction ever made. This makes it hard to scale: every block must contain a consensus about all transactions in the world made during that time. This greatly limits the number of transactions the network can handle: Bitcoin can handle 7 transactions a second across the whole world. Moreover, having one monolithic global network with a global consensus means innovation is very limited: even something as trivial as increasing the block size leads to infighting and forks.
Internet scale
The internet is not a monolithic network. It is a network of networks, each one able to determine its own policies, membership, software stack, and so on. Computers on the local network can run apps and accomplish many things among themselves without even needing to go outside the network. However, once in a while a message must be sent over the internet to another network. This is done using a standard Internet protocol such as SMTP (Email) HTTP (the Web), FTP, and so on.
The main idea of Intercoin is to make a currency platform architected like the Internet. Each community can run its own payment network, allowing it to issue and manage its own currency. Payments made locally (eg paying for a coffee) do not need to be recorded on any global ledger. Once in a while, someone may move money across communities (eg paying a vendor in another country) and this is where Intercoin can help by providing
a) a standard way of atomically cashing out of one community and into another
b) liquidity to actually complete the transaction with the lowest fees
Implementation
One straightforward way to do this would be to require each community X to have an account on the global Intercoin network and keep Intercoin on reserve to back their internal economy. When someone cashes out some amount of currency X and into currency Y, it can be accomplished easily:
- The payment network of community X receives the local currency being cashed out and takes it out of circulation
- Community X pays community Y the corresponding amount of Intercoin on the Intercoin network
- The payment network of community Y issues the corresponding amount of its local currency to the recipient.
There are two major ways to do step 2:
2A. One way to do step 2 is to have “trustlines” between communities, similar to how banks settle their accounts at the end of the day. This form of money is credit-based: the more communities there are, the more credit can be extended. Thus, the money supply grows over time.
In this approach, every community will have to maintain credit with every other community, or find a path to route payments through intermediate communities.
The volatility of Intercoin on the markets would probably be lower, because communities would individually determine how much credit they can extend each other.
However, fees for Intercoin transactions would be higher as intermediate communities would take on counterparty risk as they route arbitrarily large amounts via ILP. Or, the throughput for Intercoin payments would be lower as communities cautiously move a little value at a time, so as not to get stuck holding the bag for another community.
2B. Another way to do step 2 is to have Intercoin be a value-based currency, like Bitcoin or XRP in the Ripple network. In this case, we can have a limited supply of Intercoin, and it can run an efficient blockchain consensus algorithm, such as XRP consensus.
In this approach, the local community networks would gladly employ their machines in validating the Intercoin blockchain, since it is in each community’s interest to maintain liquidity for Intercoin transactions. Otherwise their members would get upset — especially merchants who need to import materials from outside.
Without counterparties and trustlines, communities could hold full reserves of Intercoin and support arbitrarily large payments across communities without any of the risks associated with routing payments through intermediaries. As a result, the fees can be brought to zero, and Intercoin payments can be made seamlessly across any Community Coins. (Exchanges to external currencies such as Bitcoin or Dollars would still require market makers and fees.)
Steps 1 and 3 can be done very simply without any market makers or fees. The payment networks X and Y know exactly how much of their currency is circulating, and how much Intercoin they have on reserve (or in the first approach, the total Intercoin credit across all their trustlines). Thus they can divide one by the other to get the exact exchange rate that would apply if everyone cashed out at the same time.
With simple math for currency exchange, instead of markets, foreign exchange fees are eliminated and the exchange rate becomes a predictable function of the community’s money supply. This allows the community to reason about the effects of its monetary policies (such as issuing a Basic Income to every resident) and even extrapolate them into the future.
To paraphrase Milton Friedman, this will make exchange rates everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon.
The Intercoin project will produce the software and resources for any community to issue and manage their own currency. However, unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum and other monolithic global networks, each community has the freedom to run any payment network it wants. Intercoin is leading the way with software and apps such as Basic Income, but over time there can be many different systems and platforms, apps and innovations.