With MicroCash it will be possible to do a variety of non money based activities even though it is only optimized for basic money to money transfers. One of these is linking accounts together to form a data stream. An account in MicroCash allows the owner of that account to store a small amount of data which will likely be around 128 or 256 bytes. Not much when it comes to file storage. But by linking an account to another you can then put as much data as you want into MicroCash.
You may be thinking that this opens up a potential denial of service attack as someone could store the contents of wikipedia in there and make running a node so costly that no one will want to do it. However each account has a fixed daily cost which means unless the owner really wants to pay to keep that data there it will decay over time.
One thing that some people will want to use MicroCash for is to store their web files. This would then allow anyone running a MicroCash node to read a website and have zero trace of them actually ever reading that website. If you are familiar with TOR you will know it roughly tries to do the same thing by allowing users to anonymous read and interact with websites. However TOR whilst fairly good at doing this does have some disadvantages such as leaking information to exit nodes. Some also suspect TOR is traceable (at least to some extent) and point to cases like the Silk Road owner getting busted not long after some weird TOR activity happened. Either way in MicroCash you will be able to read a website and have 100% faith no one knows you are doing it.
It isn’t all roses though as actually interacting with a MicroCash based website will be much more costly and harder to do than is available in TOR, but still theoretically possible and pretty anonymous. But for many people that run such “grey businesses” all they basically need is a way to let customers place orders which MicroCash easily allows them to do. Well it be a WEB 3.0 experience? Probably not, but at least giving those grey markets a way to actually operate within MicroCash will add to its use case.
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It’s great to see progress with MC on a regular basis like this! Thanks for posting!
At the rate you’re working, can you indicate as to when you think MC will be released? I know it’s quite early days to say, but im just interested to know your best guess if possible…
Thanks!
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I think in 2 or 3 weeks we can begin alpha testing. The original MicroCash was nearly completed, my rewrite is just making it more concise and more up to date with the latest cryptocurrency ideas. So it really depends on how much I need to rewrite and the ways I do it. But already I have node communication finished and am working on getting the distributed bank part of MicroCash working. Thanks for you support Jon!
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I’d be more than happy to offer my assistance in the testing efforts (it’ll be like old times when we gave the MC client a test drive a while back 😉
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“An account in MicroCash allows the owner of that account to store a small amount of data which will likely be around 128 or 256 bytes. … However each account has a fixed daily cost which means unless the owner really wants to pay to keep that data there it will decay over time.”
Thats a rather fundamental difference with OP_RETURN or Proofofexistance signing. Designed for running services only, or returning cost of signing stuff in the chain. Can test that?.
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Nothing can last forever. If something is important it will be updated in MicroCash, if it is not, it won’t be. It is a much fairer and automatic system. Nothing is stopping a node from recording every transaction to prove a timeline going to the start of MicroCash if for some reason this is wanted.
If you store everything forever at no cost then it won’t scale. Visa and Mastercard systems don’t work like this because if they did we wouldn’t have a global transaction system like them. In Bitcoin it is possible now simply because there is only one transaction per second on average. If Bitcoin had even 20 transactions per second average the Bitcoin devs would be looking at ways to cull old and useless data with a hard fork. Relying upon it being in Bitcoin forever is likely foolish.
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But this history of transactions is important. The problem is if it’s integrated in the client, it blowt everything.
But the possibility to verify transaction are legit is as really important. I think an optional client/script to record everything should be available at launch.
That way the network would not only be secure but everyone could check it is.
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The history of transactions is important for some period of time. Forever isn’t that period of time though. But all nodes will have the capacity to record all transactions since the start of MicroCash if they want. People will be able to verify the chain is intact by a running hash, similar to the merkle hash in Bitcoin. I think if a group of people record every transaction and even allow it to be searched in a database would be ideal. But the network itself shouldn’t have to carry that burden, if it did it wouldn’t scale and people wouldn’t use it.
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