FedoraCoin TIPS - Alt Coin Review

FedoraCoin is a low cost digital currency which aims to be the number one method for people to leave tips or make micro-payments over the internet. The coins themselves are called 'TIPS', as you 'tip your Fedora' to people when you make a payment (in case you didn't realize, a Fedora is a type of hat).

In addition to micro-payments you can also use TIPS for online shopping, sending money internationally to friends and family, and for trading against other digital currencies.

There is a small but growing community of FedoraCoin users who like to tip each other for contributions to the community, whether it be an interesting forum or Reddit post, developing new applications and uses for the coin, or promoting TIPS outside of the community. This means that newcomers may find it easier to get their hands on a worthwhile amount of free coins in comparison with other digital currencies like Bitcoin, whose users are a little bit more tight with their money (joining the reddit community is a good place to start if you want free coins, see the links at the bottom of the page for more info).

The main competitor to FedoraCoin is DogeCoin. DogeCoin (pronounced Dog-ee, or Doggy Coin) is a humorous meme-based currency which was originally designed as a tongue in cheek way to introduce people to the ideas behind more serious digital currencies like Bitcoin, but which has seen an explosion in popularity recently and is often used to give people small tips.

FedoraCoin appears to have one of the most active development teams of any digital currency, meaning that new features are being added and improvements are being made all the time. A good range of off-the-shelf tools are already available, and more are being developed. There is also a development fund and an advertising fund which enthusiastic members of the community can donate to in order to help improve and promote the currency.

Micro-payments are one of the most exciting uses for digital currency in general, but some are better suited to this purpose than others.

A micro-payment simply means a very small payment, perhaps for a few pennies, or perhaps for even less than a penny. The fees association with traditional payment methods such as credit cards or Paypal make it uneconomical for people to accept such small payments, but with digital currency it makes much more sense.

There are many possible uses for micro-payments. One of the most popular is to reward people who make great content and publish it on the internet for free. This allows everyone from writers to music artists to film-makers and more to make their work available for free, perhaps even under a creative commons license so that others can use it and remix it, and still make a bit of money from people who enjoy their work and choose to leave them a small tip.

Another interesting use is charging small amounts for access to premium content. For example, rather than filling a website up with advertising, or putting content behind a broad pay-wall which requires you to take out a monthly membership, internet publishers could charge a tiny amount of money for you read a particular article or watch a specific video.

There are a couple of things which stop Bitcoin from being well-suited to use for micro-payments, although it is certainly better for this use than credit cards or paypal. Firstly, the high value of each coin would mean that small payments would be expressed as a tiny, tiny fraction of one coin. This makes them difficult to read and can lead to people making mistakes or paying more than they would have liked to. For example, it takes more concentration than you would like to tell the difference between 0.000001 and 0.0000001 - and both may be fairly meaningless to you anyway without performing some awkward maths in your head. Also, Bitcoin transaction fees depend on the amount of data in a transaction, which ultimately means that if you receive lots of tiny payments you will find that you are charged higher transaction fees when you try to spend the money you have received.

Algorithm: Scrypt
Max Coins: 500,000,000,000
Block Time: 60 seconds
Difficulty Retarget Time: 10 minutes
Premine: 3 blocks as test.

One of the most unique features of FedoraCoin is the built in 'coin mixer'. Although Bitcoin has gained a reputation as being a way to make anonymous payments, this is not really true - anyone can easily trace which wallet a particular payment came from, so it is only anonymous as long as the connection between a wallet and its user is concealed.

Coin mixers are a tool which are used to enable truly anonymous payments, by breaking a payment up and sending it around the block a few times between different wallet addresses to make its original source impossible to trace. FedoraCoin is the only digital currency with a coin mixer built into its standard wallet (although AnonCoin claims to have one in development).

The code behind FedoraCoin TIPS was originally based on Litecoin, the most popular Bitcoin alternative.

FedoraCoin is all about giving tips - so I might as well put out my fedora hat and ask for contributions!

My address is: EVRR33bJBdKY72Dj8F66RqoHuey9KHYcqn