I am flagging you again since this is the second time I see a clickjacking[1] and investors could think that you are pegging your cryptocurrency to fiat currency when indeed is something completely different.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15796016

What's the problem? He's talking about a projected related to TFA. We do that all the time on HN, in fact it's encouraged. And if you look at the other responses, people are clearly interested in this project, although many are skeptical (justifiable in the world of cryptocurrencies). I know nothing about it, but on face value it doesn't look like any type of a scam. In fact, it looks like he's trying to solve a big problem of Bitcoin, which is the volatility.

If you have information that this project is unethical, please spill it. Otherwise, please don't flag comments like this. It's clearly of interest to hackers and thus is appropriate on HN.

Edit: Also, as others have pointed out, you're misusing the term "clickjacking".

His token is not pegged to USD dollars since he doesn't have the reserves to convert back and forth between his token and USDs. Full stop.

He should clearly explain upfront what he is doing for the massive public and the risks involved following his approach, which is perfectly understandable as it happens with every other investment.

There's a big difference between a currency being "pegged" to another currency and being "backed" by another currency.

I do agree that it would behoove his project to clearly enumerate that it's experimental and the risks involved. But that's a good comment for him, not a flag.

Edit: The article you linked to is incorrect, unless the word "pegged" is different in cryptocurrencies than elsewhere in the world of finance. Please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_exchange-rate_system

What is a Pegged Cryptocurrency? https://themerkle.com/what-is-a-pegged-cryptocurrency/

You can decide to talk about stable coin approaches which is a more precise term.

Sorry, that's incorrect information. I've been to several countries that have pegged their currency to USD or to (long time ago) Deutsche Marks, without every claiming to the same currency in reserve. It leads to currency black markets, but it's possible to do and many countries have done it in the past.

I mean, even China had a currency peg not too long ago. It was an enforced exchange rate, nothing more. No explicit reserve backing it up.

Not in the cryptocurrency field. In this field pegging has a precise meaning.

I don't think that the specifics of his currency add or remove anything from the nature of the comment having merit or not.

The comment is a little bit off topic, but I for one don't mind though I'm not sure about whether or not it's within the rules.

Where's the clickjacking? Both links lead to the urls shown

It is pegged to the USD. A "pegged" currency means it's a fixed exchange rate.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/currency-peg.asp

I do agree that you really need to make very clear that your crypto is not backed by any USD. That's not clear enough reading your description.

I don't understand this. How can you store the USD reserves inside the blockchain? AFAIK the blockchain can only keep track of the cryto-tokens, not of the real money.

The reserve will be in Ethereum (and possibly also in ERC20 tokens like OMG), not USD. You buy Unum using these other cryptocurrencies, and can always sell Unum to buy anything in the reserve, always at the current USD spot price.

This of course raises the possibility of the USD value of the reserve falling below the # of issued Unum. In that case, a sale penalty goes into affect, to discourage selling and increasing the deficit. It's explained more here on the website:

https://unum.one/#!/learn#reserve-deficit-sell-penalty

Lots of issues here...

- Buying Unum is a lose-lose situation. If the USD price of Ether goes down you redeem your Unum for less than you paid for it. If the price of Ether goes up, you redeem your Unum for less than if you just had bought Ether instead.

- Why bother tethering a cryptocurrenvy to Ether instead of just using Ether directly?

- Who determines what is the spot price of Ether at any given moment?

- Unum can be bought for 0.99 USD during "Bonus Sales", which goes against the whole point of it.

tl;dr: this is a terrible idea at best, and a total scam at worst.

- Ether isn't price-stable, which is the whole point of this project.

- The spot price of Ether is found via Oracalize query to cryptocompare's api.

- I'm getting rid of the bonus sale idea, as many people had that concern. The original intent was to use it as a way to build up the reserve.

Sorry, the docs on the site is a bit old. As I said, it's a side project, and I'm incorporating ideas as people give me feedback.

@jatsign, would you address these questions? I can answer the second one (you would tether to Ether in order to establish enough reserve value to back a certain amount of USD, since you can't reliably back a crypto with a fiat currency as we see with this Bitfinex business).

But some of the other questions are good ones, can @jatsign address them?

Doesn't a sale penalty mean the token is not actually pegged to the dollar? It's pegged to the whims of the cryto currency?

So if Ethereum price goes down, you're insolvent.

From where does the contract pull the current price of USD? Wouldn’t it be vulnerable to receiving incorrect pricing data?

Any average will be subject to arbitrage opportunities surely as it necessarily differs from prices being averaged. Or was that not the point? If transaction cost is low enough then one can continuously buy and sell and the only limit to profit would be the transaction rate (and holdings of those buying/selling the coin).

I've gone back and forth on this. Current plan is to use Oracalize.

http://www.oraclize.it/

I might also suggest pulling from as many exchanges as possible and applying something like an average function to them. Of course you need to make sure that doesn’t cause the contract to be even more vulnerable due to outliers spiking the average.

The oraclize query will get data from cryptocompare.com, which is an aggregate.

Can you give me the tldr what a normal person would use this for or what it accomplishes?

For a normal person/business to ever use a cryptocurrency, there needs to be one that is price stable. Meaning it's going to be worth the same $ tomorrow that it's worth today.

Imagine if you could send money anywhere, with almost no fees. That was the dream of bitcoin, but currently bitcoin fees are crazy high, and the community isn't close to solving it yet. Ethereum seems to be more scalable and has a benevolent dictator moving it forward.

BTC fees are crazy high because the coins value is crazy high if I go back and look at some of my transactions when BTC was around $200. today, the low transactions fees of yesteryear are now $15-$20. I think that's the flaw in bitcoin, greed took over and it became something it shouldn't have. miners kept buying more expensive asics to edge out the next guy because of greed and it became an arms race. my asic mining career lasted a whole of several months before I stopped cause I saw the people making money at the time were hardware sellers, pool operators, etc. miners still made money but in small margins. that is until BTC exploded now the coins I mined are worth over $50,000 on an investment of $3,000 of miners ($30,000 of which is still retained). Now I undderstand that miners aren't the entire reason for BTC price increase but I believe they have their share in it.

I think cryptocurrencies like IOTA (I do not currently own a position in IOTA but will be in the near future, hopefully.) have a place with no network fees and primarily no miners. but I still see the greed in messageboards "Buy more!, Eat away at sell walls" yada yada. very sad.

I think it'd be cool if there was a coin that had a fixedish price like tether although I won't touch tether since I don't know a lot about it other than some kind of theft, and the fact that bitfinex doesn't accept U.S customers which doesn't really affect my purchasing of tether but all the same I'd rather distance myself from them. I have been looking at BNB since I do use binance exchange but it's a volatile currency as well from looks of it. and the fact they are destroying them each quarter from what I understand based on their profits or something will lead to shorter supply and more demand since it can be used to lessen exchange fees

I forgot exactly where I was going with this whole thing so I'm just gonna go buy virtual kitties with ETH

How can it be worth the same amount of dollars? I don't understand? How is it even possible to have a stable price of something when it's all relative? Or am I confused... Do you just mean more stable?

bitcoin fees are crazy high but fixed per block, right? in other words, if I were to send 2 mln usd, the fee would actually be low in % terms?

Fees aren't fixed per block, and they're also not a percentage. Exchanges and Bitcoin software suggest a fee that ensures a quick confirmation, but you can choose whatever fee you want. Transactions with a higher fee are prioritized by miners, because then they make more money. Coinbase always uses a really high fee (around $3.50), so your transactions are always confirmed as fast as possible. I made a few transactions recently where I set the fee to $0.20, and it just took a few hours before it was confirmed.

So if it's not urgent, you can send $2 million USD with a fee of $0.20.

Parent was saying that you can lower your percentage by raising your transaction size.

The fee is not fixed but what matters is the size of the transaction (in bytes) and not the amount. So normally it's cheaper to move 1 thousand BTC from a single address to an other than 0.1BTC from 10 addresses to 20 others.

I thought people found USDT problematic because they found no way to audit whether each USDT has a corresponding USD to balance it?