“SO IT WORKS AS A NORMAL PREPAID VISA CARD THAT YOU BUY A LOCAL STORE OR GAS STATION. EASY AS THAT.”

Coinist recently chatted with the team at Vicecoin to discuss their proposed anonymous crypto payment system. Before we jump into the interview, take a moment and watch the short explainer video below to help better understand the ambitions of the project.

First of all, thanks for joining us today. Let’s jump in and get right into the heart of things. Let’s talk about anonymity within your network and how it’s achieved from a technical standpoint. You launched your token on Ethereum, so explain to us how you’re building anonymity into Vicecoin as an ERC20 token?

As you know, using blockchain technology (ERC20) provides anonymity. Since the wallet has unique addresses, the users involved in the transactions do not have to reveal their real identities. Also our physical vicecard is not linked with any personal information. Therefore keeps full privacy. You hold vicecoins on your account, which holds the market fiat value (minus fee) of the coin.

What are some of the main features that differentiate Vicecoin from other privacy tokens?

Most of them don’t offer a physical creditcard that offers both off- and online payments in realtime. Also, we are working on a deal that will cover 80% of the online and offline merchant markets. Meaning you will be able to use the vicecoin (when using your vicecard) almost anywhere!

Let’s talk more about the physical card now. This seems to be a major differentiating feature from other privacy projects. Let’s walk through a typical transaction, step by step, so we can get a better understanding about what’s happening (and why) under the hood. Let’s imagine “user A” goes to “website B” (a dating website) and wants to use the Vicecoin card to purchase their membership. Walk us through the steps in a typical transaction including how “user A” loads their card and how the merchant of “website B” receives the funds.

So it works as a normal prepaid visa card that you buy at a local store or gas-station. Easy as that. You will have two locations where you hold your currency. One is your vicecoin wallet. The other is the physical Vicecoincard. You don’t want all your vicecoin stored on your card. If you lose your card, you lose your Vicecoins that are on it. The coins on the vicecard can be spent online or offline like a pre-paid creditcard.

You mentioned that merchants receive funds in fiat. Explain in more detail how this transfer works.

We, as a company hold fiat currency. Your Vice currency is worth the equal amount (market price of the coin minus the fee’s).

Let’s continue talking a bit more about how the payment processing system works and let’s look specifically at how your payment system will impact your token distributing dynamics. In your whitepaper it’s said that the “payment network facilitates the payment to the merchant in dollars and the Vice Coin used will be automatically destroyed.” If I understand this correctly you’re burning tokens that are used (paid to merchants). Can you tell us more about how this process works from a technical standpoint? What is the motivation or technical reasons why burning tokens is necessary?

Our system is developed this way. The value of the coins could rise. The less tokens available, the more the value. We could not develop a system where the coin gets traded in again. We have copied the “prepaid” creditcard construction. Once used, funds are gone. The only big difference is, you can reload your vicecard, which you can’t do (most of them) with a pre-paid creditcard.

By burning tokens you’re either reducing your token supply or you’re replenishing the supply somehow. Which is it and how does it work from a technical standpoint?

Once a coin is burned, the token will never come back. After the burn of the total of 300,000,000 tokens, the privacy system is “done”. But this will take a couple years from now and the value of each coin that is still available will likely go higher.

If you’re reducing token supply, this obviously has a big impact on token distribution and price dynamics. Can you explain in more detail what impact burning tokens will have on distribution and price dynamics.

The idea is to create a system where the token should rise, so its a nice opportunity for the early investors. They can also choose to trade their currency instead of using it as a “payment”.

Let’s jump topics and talk about the merchant onboarding process. Because you’re not using common international payment processors, but you’re using your own system, you’ll be required to onboard and integrate your technology into these platforms. Can you tell us more about how you plan on onboarding new merchants and how you plan on integrating into their existing payment systems?

We can’t really reveal a lot at this point. This will cause an “insider information” problem and will have competitors think twice about their own products, we have something unique. What we can say is that you don’t have to worry about this. We are working on a deal with a potential partner that already covers more than 80% of all these payment processors.

What are the major incentives that merchants have to transact using Vicecoin?

When we close this deal talked about in point 8. It will be good for the “dark” industry because a lot more people will spend a lot more money than they normally will.

You mention that Vicecoin is used for online payments. However, most online payments systems that integrate into third party sites require that users sign up and often verify their email address or phone number in order to control the paywall. This allows site admins to verify who’s paid and who hasn’t and this allows the website to know who to give access to and who to deny. Not all sites require email or phone verification, but many do. And for the sites that don’t require this information, the truth is it’s hard to know what type of data they are collecting and storing. For example, many sites track and store the IP address of their users. And often, when there is a breach, it’s this type of data that’s stolen (usernames, names, email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, credit card information etc). How do you see Vicecoin users balancing their anonymity needs with the technical requirements of third party websites?

No, everything is secured and encrypted on our network. The third party decides if they can comply with the info given, or they simply reject order. Most of the sites will accept it, cause they already do with “pre-paid” creditcards. There is only a hand-full that will decline the payment.

Lastly, what do you see as the biggest obstacles (marketing, technical or otherwise) facing the Vicecoin project this year?

The only problem we have right now is, people holding on to their BTC, Ripple Or Ethereum and hope for a recovery and therefore don’t invest in Vicecoin.

The only thing we could say is.. If you want to place a bet on recovering some of the lost money on your previous ICOs or cryptocurrency investments, buy vicecoin with your BTC/XRP/ETH NOW… this could be your way out.. The Next Big Thing is here, but don’t take our word for it, see for yourself www.vicecoin.com

Thanks for taking the time to chat with us today. We really appreciate you sharing this information about your project. To our audience, if you’d like to learn more about the Vicecoin project you can do so by visiting their website mentioned above!