So, I’ve heard stories in the past of someone minting coins and selling them for a dollar, and buying them back for a dollar, such that people could use them to buy things from merchants at SCA events and then the merchants could trade them in with the individual who minted the coins for actual money. In general, the impression I get is that people thought it was really cool and enjoyed it a lot. Until something happened with the relationship between the person minting coins and the SCA corporate office. I’m not exactly clear what happened, and I’ve heard the story more than one way at this point, so I won’t speculate on what actually happened. As I understand it, though the core problem with the whole scheme was that one person was in control of the currency, in effect.
Which leads me to my weird idea…
Why not an SCA currency?
What if it was a cryptocurrency, like BitCoin? Yes, it sounds completely bonkers, I know. I’ve been doing some reading about BitCoin and other alternative cryptocurrencies like DogeCoin recently and it’s apparently really not that hard to put together a new cryptocurrency. Most of the software needed is open source – it just requires tweaking to get the parameters the way that is desired. The benefit of a cryptocurrency is that it can be tracked electronically, is decentralized, and isn’t really controlled by any one person, as I understand it. In essence, it just requires some people to get together and build the thing, set it in motion, and then poof, you’ve got a currency. The tricky part is apparently convincing others that the currency has value, which, like other real-world currencies, happens when people start to use it.
Now obviously, we don’t necessarily want people having to whip out their smartphones at events to pay for things (although people are already doing payments to merchants at events using things like the Square reader for smartphones, paying via credit card, etc.). So what if there was a way to convert the digital currency to a physical coins? Obviously this would need to be decentralized. The actual logistics of this would need to be worked out, but to avoid the concept of having one specific person who controls the currency, anyone who wants to should be able to mint their own coins and tie them to a specific set of crypto-coins. Anyone who wanted to do this would need some sort of digital platform that ties the coins to the digital coins. I think I remember reading before this has has been done, but maybe not in a way that anyone could make their own coins?
The idea came to me in a flash today when reading an article about DogeCoins. I’m going to continue reading and thinking on the subject. Anyone think this might be a good idea?