Voucher-Safe, a Next Generation Digital Currency – Part III

voucher-safe-icon-256Part I looks at the motivation behind Voucher-Safe, the evolution of digital currency and how Voucher-Safe transactions work.

Part II  examines the Voucher-Safe economy, trust, security and software.

This final part looks at Voucher-Safe’s interaction with Bitcoin, Issuers and OnionPay.

 

Bitcoin

The idea behind voucher-safe is that money can be anything that people value and want to exchange.  Money can be national fiat currencies, silver or gold and increasingly, Bitcoin. Bitcoins can be exchanged via the Voucher-Safe system with the creation of Bitcoin backed Vouchers.

One of the benefits that Bitcoin backed Vouchers have is increased anonymity.  Voucher-Safe’s principal developer Kevin doesn’t see Bitcoin as anonymous.  “You actually see people offering to sell bitcoins that are free of taint now. Because taint means there are certain payment hashes that have been used for criminal activity or looted bitcoins … And because everything is recorded on this massive block chain, it’s like a chain of titles… And so if you end up with a house or car that has been owned by a criminal it casts a taint on your property. And that’s a horrible problem for the Bitcoin block chain.”

Kevin sees a solution to the block chains problems in Vouchers. “If you bailed bitcoins into a Voucher-Safe Issuer that issued Vouchers against bitcoins, they could circulate in the wild without having any foot print in the block chain whatsoever, except in what was created when the bitcoins actually moved in or out of the Issuer. I really think that would be a huge improvement and would solve one of Bitcoin’s biggest problems.“

Kevin sees further benefits adding, “Circulating bitcoins in voucher form would also eliminate problems with clearing times and transaction dependencies, which arise from the fact that bitcoins actually exist in blocks of 20 whole coins. This means that when some of the coins in a block are involved in uncleared transactions, it prevents any other coins in the same block from clearing until the earlier transactions are closed. Bitcoins carry the full transaction history of every coin. Vouchers are always destroyed and replaced any time they are used in a transaction, so they can carry no history.”

A Voucher Issuer for Bitcoin is being discussed.

Issuers

At the heart of Voucher-Safe are the Issuers who put the currency into the system.

One of the first Voucher-Safe Issuers will be PXGold. The business is run by the creators of Pecunix and they hope that Pecunix’s good reputation is also applied to the new business. However, PXGold is a separate entity and will have no direct connection to Pecunix.

As an Issuer PXGold will issue gold backed Vouchers and maintain 100% backing for all their Vouchers.  However, they will not make the location of their gold vaults public. The reasons behind this move is explained in part II.

When demand becomes sufficient to justify it, PXGold plans to do a run of PXGold Medallions, which customers will be able to take delivery of in exchange for their PXGold Vouchers. The business will work with Vouchi.com, the current Voucher-Safe publisher.

There is currently one active Voucher-Safe Issuer, voucher-issuer.com. The site issues Vouchers backed by USD and EUD. The decision to have the first Issuer back their Vouchers with national fiat currencies is explained by Sidd. “People need to come to terms with the fact that these Vouchers can be used as a payment system to pay each other and used as real money. Not just as vouchers to claim back whatever is backing that system. “

“When I’ve spoken to people, often the reaction is that we’ve created this voucher system where the vouchers are for gold. And they say ‘that’s great, so if I want to give my aunty some gold I can give her a voucher.’ And I say yes but you can also buy her a pair of shoes with that Voucher by paying for it with a Voucher. And you could be paid in Vouchers. And that seems to be a difficult problem for some people. And that’s why we are considering an issue with USD and Euro’s, so that they can see that well one Voucher is equivalent to one Euro, that makes sense to me. “

Plans are also in the works for two more Issuers, one for silver and another for Bitcoin.

Issuers and KYC

Any Voucher-Safe Issuer who intends to interface with the fiat banking system will need to be KYC compliant and require ID from their customers. Not doing so would be a violation of AML laws and would risk a shutdown of the business.  However, there are options for obtaining Vouchers anonymously. An obvious choice would be to receive one in trade with an existing Voucher Issuer customer. There is also the possibility of an Issuer which does not interface with the banking system and is not subject to KYC rules.

It is possible to have an Issuer which only trades its assets in exchange for other types of Vouchers or anonymous digital cash.  For example, suppose an Issuer existed for a metal-backed Voucher currency which only bought or sold the metal using Bitcoin. That Issuer could likely get away with not requiring ID from its customers.

OnionPay

OnionPay (The name is a “humorous tip of the hat” to Tor) is add on software for the Voucher-Safe system.  It is essentially a Voucher-Safe based PayPal alternative for e-commerce websites. OnionPay is intended to provide a more traditional merchant checkout experience for websites that accept Voucher-Safe.

The Voucher-Safe payment process involves a few steps; the sender has to send and then the receiver has to pick up. “Well how is that going to work if the receiver, the payee, is actually a website?” OnionPay solves this problem.

As Kevin explains, “the way it works is that it borrows a concept from public key cryptography where you have a public key that you give to everybody and you have a private key. Only here you have a public Voucher-Safe and a private Voucher-Safe.”

To use OnionPay, an e-commerce website would set up what amounts to a merchant account with OnionPay. The service creates a public safe to which both OnionPay and the merchant have joint access. This provides the merchant with a payment gateway that allows customers to check out. The customer can make a Voucher payment that goes to the public safe. OnionPay then logs into the public Voucher-Safe, picks up the payment, confirms that it is the correct amount and then takes the customer to the success page back on the merchant’s website.

After sending a message notifying the merchant of the payment, OnionPay sweeps the money from the public safe to the merchant’s private safe. “This keeps the merchant from actually having to trust OnionPay with any of their money unlike PayPal where it sits there in your account until you withdraw to a debit card or take an ACH payment.”

Auto Exchanger

A planned additional feature of the Voucher-Safe system is an auto exchanger or escrow system.  As Kevin explains, “We used to have this kind of functionality with something called Open to Exchange. And this was back in the day when people wanted to exchange between e-gold and Pecunix, etc. It was mostly exchangers who used it when they had too much of one and not enough of another. But in theory, this is something that can be done by anyone. I think there is room for a lot of synergy there in terms of people using different kinds of Vouchers and being able to exchange with each other.”

“So one of the easy things that we would be able to do is to create an auto exchanger that would act as the escrow system, it would probably be an Onion Pay merchant, that would let people exchange all these different things as anonymous digital cash without ever having to go through an exchange. So for example, you have a Bitcoin Voucher and you want a Dollar Voucher, you just post that on this site for someone who wants the reverse of that trade. Then each of them pays their Voucher to the middle man and he reverses it.”

While the Voucher-Safe system is designed to allow anything to be money, the system offers one of the best options for those who want to transact in gold, silver, etc. Voucher-Safe is about as de-centralized as you can get while still being able to transact with real assets. The system is a versatile, more decentralized, Anti-Money Laundering compliant way to anonymously exchange value. It is a smarter, more resilient generation of digital currency.

 

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2 thoughts on “Voucher-Safe, a Next Generation Digital Currency – Part III

  1. Pingback: Voucher-Safe, a Next Generation Digital Currency | DGC

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