TravelCashInc.com and Free Market Money
by Jim Davidson
[email protected]
Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise
"It seems to me to be fairly certain that (a) a
money generally expected to preserve its purchasing power approximately
constant would be in continuous demand so long as the people were free to use
it; (b) with such a continuing demand depending on success in keeping
the value of the currency constant one could trust the [issuers] to make
every effort to achieve this better than would any monopolist who runs no
risk by depreciating his money; (c) the issuing institution could achieve
this result by regulating the quantity of its issue; and (d) such a
regulation of the quantity of each currency would constitute the best of all
practicable methods of regulating the quantity of media of exchange for all
possible purposes."
— F.A. Hayek, Denationalisation of Money – The Argument
Refined: An Analysis of the Theory and Practice
of Concurrent Currencies, 3rd Edition, 1990
All the way back in 1998, I began to use digital currencies. It has been an interesting twenty years, for me, in many ways. At that time, I was working on projects related to freedom in Texas, in Somalia, and in Europe. Since then I have travelled extensively, worked on many projects, encountered some amazing people, and built a few things.
That first digital currency was e-gold. I worked with many people with great ideas for free market money, all of whom were inspired by the digital, redeemable, online gold currency created by Doug Jackson. It was my honor to meet Mr. Jackson in person several times over the following years, as well as Liberty Dollar's Bernard von NotHaus, e-Bullion's Pamela Fayed (may she RIP), GoldMoney's Jim Turk, and worked closely with 1MDC's JP May and also with Pecunix's Sidd Davis although we never met in person. Some of the projects I worked on were GoldBarter Holdings, Cambist, the Private Venture Capital Stock Exchange, Vertoro, and Free Market Monetary Education.
In all of my work over the last two decades one of the most effective software architects I've ever met is Kevin Wilkerson. He and I were both guests of Doug Casey at the Eris Society meeting in August 2002. We started working together right away on several projects in what is now called FinTech. We've continued to work together ever since.
Currently, we are working together on TravelCash, the world’s first cryptocurrency to trade exclusively on the Ascension platform, which Mr. Wilkerson developed with Sean Daley in 2009.
Shortly after the publication of Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper on Bitcoin, Wilkerson set out to improve upon what he saw were many glaring deficiencies with Bitcoin. It was then that he developed a new voucher technology, pivoted and reorganized with his business associates to form the Ascension.Foundation. What is it? It is a digital wallet software system that allows for voucher representations of currencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, and others. More, it is capable of issuing new currencies, such as TravelCash.
How does it work? It prevents double-spends by having the server software deliver vouchers as a result of every payment event that is completed. The old voucher used to pay for the payment is destroyed, a new voucher is issued to the recipient when they pick up the payment, and the change is returned to the sender in the form of another new voucher. Everything is handled over an encrypted network. There are no public-facing IP addresses for the system.
Among its advantages, Ascension technology is scalable, so it can process more transactions by adding more servers to its network. That matters in a world where every Bitcoin transaction awaits the mining of the next block which can only happen every ten minutes, before any new transaction is confirmed. At times in the recent past, for small payments, Bitcoin's network has processed very slowly, with more than 24 hours wait time—entirely unworkable for retail transactions.
Privacy is a key advantage with Ascension. None of the wallets are associated with any personal information. You never have to register for an account to use the Ascension technology, you simply download the free, open-source client wallet—available from SilentVault, TravelCash, or DigitalCash.to in various implementations, and create a new wallet. Ascension is built on an encrypted chat technology called XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) using a purpose-built plugin. It works with Jabber's OTR (off the record) end-to-end encryption. One of their important insights: payments are just another kind of message.
There are other advantages. You start with a seed word, such as a name or noun or verb and the server gives you a wallet address like [email protected] which is somewhat easier to remember than a Bitcoin address. Wallets are stored encrypted in the cloud. You can recover your wallet if you forget your login codes but remember the answers to the five security questions you were asked when you set up your wallet. An Android version of the wallet has been designed (by TravelCash) and is being built this summer. You can never spend to a "dead" wallet because if the person you spend to does not pick up their payment before the deadline you set (or a max of 7 days) then the payment is returned to you.
TravelCash
As a result of investigating a number of technologies, including
blockchain, ERC-20 "smart" contracts, and directed acyclic graphs,
TravelCash chose Ascension. We have licensed various technologies,
released white label versions of the Ascension desktop wallet app for Mac,
Windows, and Linux, and have organized in Delaware. Currently,
TravelCash is engaged in an offshore-investors-only "pre-initial voucher
offering" which, necessarily to comply with existing securities laws,
involves certain "know your customer" procedures in forming an
account to buy TravelCash. There is no public market for TravelCash
yet, but there have been demonstration payments using TravelCash, and there
are several beta test sites lined up for testing in the near future.
An impressive team of professionals has been assembled to not only make TravelCash the travelers check of the 21st Century, but also to navigate the somewhat choppy waters of government regulation, while building new technologies to serve merchants with a much lower cost of transaction processing—saving them 50% to 70% over credit card transaction fees.
Regulatory Uncertainty
It isn't the case that anyone in FinTech today really understands what
is expected of them by the various governments around the globe. In the
United States, four agencies have claimed total responsibility for
offered differing opinions of crypto-currencies:
- The Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) claims position is that crypto-currencies are commodities and that it regulates them.
- The IRS claims position is that crypto-currencies are property, and cannot be regarded as securities, so when you sell any crypto-currency it is a taxable event, and must be accounted as revenue, rather than as paid-in capital.
- The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) current position is that crypto-currencies are securities, and that there may not be such thing as a utility token.
- The FinCEN folks believe all crypto-currencies are currencies and therefore regulated by FinCEN.
You can see right away the inherent conflict between the various agencies.
Why does this situation exist? Congress has yet to make any legislative ruling as to what crypto-currencies are, since January 2009 when the Bitcoin genesis block was mined. By itself that is no bad thing, because in the absence of legislation or regulation, a growing new industry has a chance to set its own course.
In that environment, TravelCash is working with Ascension to develop what is often referred to as the travelers check for the digital age. We envision a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use payment processing system that will provide substantial savings to merchants and peace of mind to consumers.
There exist many people not only in the USA, but around the world, determined to set up competing currencies. FA Hayek foresaw this development. The future belongs to the innovators.
Jim Davidson is a storyteller, a scholar, an author, a world traveller, and an entrepreneur. He wrote a business plan for Travellers Cash between 27 December 2017 and 16 January 2018 He currently lives in Dayton, Ohio and works in Columbus, Ohio. He also co-owns a private equity firm in Kansas City, Eldar Capital.
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