Safe transfer service

Hi, I am a senior developer and IT Architect and my day job is creating business applications solving business processes through IT for major global companies.

I don’t know if this has already been discussed, but i have seen many people concerned about the safety of transferring FTC to other people they are not familiar with, especially with ebay transactions and sales through forums.

If there are no planned solutions then I propose a centralised Safe Transer Service, an Official Feathercoin website ran by feathercoin (we have to increase trust, and provide better security to our community).

So how does it work?
1. When you want to transfer FTC you visit the website, provide the email address of the recipient, your email address and the amount you wish to transfer.

2. You receive an email with a unique wallet address to transfer into, transfer the amount specified. OR ignore the email to cancel the transaction

3. When the server has detected the amount received it then emails the recipient a unique id and the website address. Recipient goes to the website, types in the retrieval id, email address and their FTC wallet id.
OR Transactions not collected after 3 days are returned to originator, both parties receive email notification.

4. Transfer complete, both parties receive email confirmation of transaction complete.

Here we have an email audit trail, we can go better and have a database audit trail, but increases upkeep costs and some people would prefer that their transactions are logged as optional. For large transactions we can add an optional confirm receipt of a small amount.

Wallets are unique for each transaction as we dont want to provide a tumbling service, the recipient receives the same coin as the one sent.

Advantages: we introduce standards into transfers which we can adapt in the future, we have partial auditing and confirmation of transfer, we remove the need to keep track of everyone we are in discussions about transferring with (“hi Dan, did you receive your coins?” … no reply, “Hi Dan, whats your FTC wallet address, the one you provided doesnt work”, “Hi Dan, can you transfer again, i gave you my LTC wallet by mistake, i dont have your email and i hope you read this message board”)

Thoughts?

Glads

wrapper

I also worked in similar level to you in commercial software development.

The main thing I’ve found with my experience of the Bitcoin protocol, is that it is peer to peer. Any centralisation, such as you suggest would be against it’s greatest asset.

Feathercoin has already upset some important people in the Crypto world by using ACP, even though that is not as central as what you describe. We needed to implement ACP, or we wouldn’t be here now, as we were being attacked to death.

The most important thing about crypto currency to me is that it isn’t central. The second that it is open source with everyone given a chance to get involved. I know I have helped Feathercoin because of the principles and how we are putting those into practise.

We do have some rocket scientist developers, and some like me with experience of QA and Software management, but it is a joint community effort. We have done many guides to bring people on, so anyone can be useful in the project.

I would really like to see more crowd programming and us turning off the centralised part of ACP, as soon as our network is large enough to prevent attacks.

I certainly have never seen a commercial company do 24 hour support on there own and other peoples software, like we have managed at Feathercoin these last months. Centralisation would effect that volunteering, e.g. I would be out.

Feathercoin, read the Satoshi Bitcoin protocol paper. and then get involved. The site is here to discus these issues.

Kevlar

I’m not really sure what this service would add in terms of utility.

It’s already impossible to send to a non-FTC address like a BTC or LTC address, so that’s a non issue.

Confirmation of if the coins were sent or not is already provided via the blockchain, which is decentralized and requires no trust. Both the email and the database audit trail are vastly inferior to this, because they are centralized, not publicly visible, and subject to attack or data loss. The blockchain itself IS the only audit trail that matters: Either the coins are spendable, or they aren’t. External databases don’t help here, and can only fall out of sync with reality.

If you already know the email address of the recipient, you can just ask him for his FTC address directly. Going through a middle man doesn’t provide any additional benifit that I can see.

Thanks for the quick feedback :)

I will use FTC a bit more and if i come up with any more ideas or can contribute in other ways.

Cheers guys.

Glads

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I’m sure you will be able to help, cryptographic currency is a very exciting and novel development which we are trying to implement. It has many opportunities to learn new and appropriate skills for the future, as we are open source.

A lot of work has also been done to make the forum as useful as possible and encourage community participation.

Even if you are an old hand. How many times did you see extreme programming in action or have 10 people work on a bug at once? Also, Github is also a brilliant software development tool, if you haven’t got into that yet.

There is so much to do or that could be done, all areas are open for contribution.