I’m going to step back away from the recent posts about nodes to shed some light on what SmartCash is overall.
Here is a great description of the fundamental principles guiding the SmartCash project:
“SmartCash is a project born out of the desire to create a fast, merchant-oriented, community driven cryptocurrency with a decentralized governance system that is user friendly. We aim to quickly grow our platform by supporting community and third party projects, hiring developers, gaining merchant acceptance, and using both grassroots and established marketing methods.”
Everyone can vote on projects to support from the community treasury
Fundamentally, the goal of SmartCash is merchant support and community governance. Everyone who has SMART gets the right to vote on proposals for projects by the community. Here’s a bit about governance in the blockchain space as it stands right now.
This places it next to a few governance backed coins like Dash, PIVX, Decred, Zcoin and Tezos. The fundamental idea of all of these coins, including SmartCash, is that some of the value in the blockchain should be distribuited towards community projects. This sets it apart from blockchains such as Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, or Litecoin which give 100% of block rewards to miners.
There are nuances on how voting works in these communitites, too, so they are not all created euqal. SmartCash takes the inclusive approach that 1 SMART = 1 VOTE and everyone can vote. Coins like Dash only allow those with a 1,000 DASH balance to vote. At present that is less than 1,000 different voting entities controlling the direction of the community. Frankly, having more people incentive to participate in voting increases the motivation of the community to participate, spread good news, and help each other with developing useful projects.
One point to make is that this varies from an ICO situation where everyone buys into a company and then that company can do what they want. With an ICO, the people who have coins have no rights — they literally give their money to the company. With SmartCash, it’s continually community supported and holders have a vote at all times, not just at the very beginning of the project.
Everyone can be a merchant with one simple app
The merchant approach in SmartCash is unique in that they are building an entire ecosystem similar to how PayPal, Visa, or Square did to enable small businesses to accept payments. This payments platform includes two incredibly powerful features: SmartCards and Payment Codes.
SmartCards are like any regular debit or credit card. You use it with a PIN to make payments, no internet or phone required. The merchant accepts this at their SmartPay terminal or app. Payment codes with built in privacy using BIP47 make these transactions private. The best part about this is anyone can become a merchant simply by installing an app on their phone.
Compared to systems like Paypal, Visa, or Square there are a few benefits for people to accept SmartCash for their businesses. First, payments are settled instantly with InstantPay. That means you don’t have to wait 45-60 days for payment card company to process and send you the funds. This helps a lot for cash flow. Second, there are no extra fees to set up accounts and transaction fees are essentially free, so you don’t have to give Visa or Square 3-5% of your monthly revenue. The final thing that really helps is that there are no chargeback risks from consumer fraud. If you have ever sold on Amazon or eBay professionally you will understand the frustration when a consumer makes a dubious claim 29 days into the 30 day return policy to get their money back. Or when you do a sale in person but later the person claims it was an unauthorized transaction. With SmartCash and InstantPay, there are no risks like that.
Privacy with a purpose
One thing to mention is that while SmartCash was based on Zerocoin, the privacy feature is disabled in it for SmartCash. This is helpful because to gain worldwide acceptance there needs to be an auditable trail, and blockchain provides that. However, full transparency is not useful for everyday business transactions. That’s why there are merchant payment codes that provide stealth addresses for people to make purchases. Not everybody needs to know about your hot sauce purchases or what you ate at the taco stand last week. This also is important because some privacy coins are getting extra scrutiny.
More ways to participate! Secure the network with SmartNodes or help provide price stabilisation with SmartRewards
There are a few more unique features, including SmartRewards and SmartNodes. The basic idea behind either of these concepts is that the blockchain rewards those who participate in securing it, so there are rewards to those. Remember, bitcoin when it was created only allocated rewards to Miners to secure the network using computing power and mathematics. Now, mining is still important and is rewarded, but now there are also SmartNodes secure transactions for InstantPay to support the merchant system. Then there are SmartRewards are an incentive to stabilize price, and low volatility is a great thing for liquidity providers, which makes it better for a payment platform overall. In a way, you are helping to provide liquidity the same way Ripple holders do that on their network. The difference between Ripple and SmartCash is that SmartNodes are decentralized using blockchain, while Ripple has a very different kind of byzantine consensus method and is centralized essentially.
You can learn more about SmartRewards at SmartRewards.cc and Setting up a SmartCash SmartNodes with this guide. You can also read more about the project at SmartCash.cc.