Jorge Timon

Jorge Timon (@timoncc) captured my attention through his in depth knowledge of Bitcoin. I managed to get a few questions past him. Jorge Timon is the founder of frecoin, a Bitcoin fork which he explains to be an economic improvement compared to Bitcoin. Heavily involved in the Ripple project, Jorge has involved even Jeff Garzik’s opinions to his projects.

Known as jtimon on the forums, here is a look at some of his opinions and contributions to Cryptocurrencies.

An Interview with a Rising Star

Ben: Tell me a bit about yourself. (Web resources will help as well)

JTimon: I will make a quick summary, but most it’s distributed among different forums,
so pretty chaotic.

Apart from being involved in the ripple project and helping to spread the word, I proposed freicoin (not much technical value, but an economic improvement compared to bitcoin IMO). Mark is making most of the development for now, but I hope to help soon.
Here’s a summary of my near future plans I’ll reuse (after Jeff Garzik’s quote “if people are interested”):
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=117800.msg1293663#msg1293663

Ben: What projects are you currently undertaking with your participation in Bitcoin & Ripple?

JTimon: Only discussion (design) for now and proposing many crazy ideas. But I’ll finish university this Friday and I hope to contribute with something soon. Maybe find a less time consuming job too (and more interesting, hopefully related with some of this).

A lot of diffusion too. I gave a virtual conference for the 5^th spanish conference on complementary currencies.

Ben: What are a few ways that Bitcoin & Ripple can integrate?

JTimon:

• Two-phase distributed Ripple can make commits atomic using a blockchain: http://ripple-project.org/Protocol/BlockChainCommitMethod

• Implementing ripple through coloured coins (discussion with Jeff Garzik)
  There’s more discussions on coloured coins on bitcointalk.
  I make some examples of ripple transaction using coloured coins here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=92421.msg1217467#msg1217467

• Modify the Bitcoin protocol to enable ripple without the need of underlying Satoshi is (1 Satoshi is the smallest denomination in Bitcoin, is 0.00000001 btc). I call this one RippleCoin.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3557.0

• Ryan Fugger’s commit blockchain which only acts as a timestamping system without making the payments public.

http://ripple-project.org/Protocol/CommitBlockChain

That conversation with Jeff is pretty technical, but the basic concept is to use Satoshis to represent ripple IOUs. We must agree outside the chain that those Satoshis represent credit and not only Bitcoins

Ben: What is your Vision on the future of money?

JTimon: Ideally, everyone would issue his own credit money (through an implementation of Ripple). Probably local and/or specialized communities will have their own LETS-like currencies too.
Cash monies will be digital, like Bitcoin and Freicoin. Hopefully gold will be demonetized (because people has chosen not to use it anymore, not by decree). Ideally all cash monies will have demurrage and interest rates will be near zero without any authority manipulating it, just the free market with demurrage cash and abundant credit (anyone can issue money through credit instead of only the banks).

Probably the various levels of the state will issue cash too. They will create it directly by spending it and it will be “backed” by nothing but taxes. Ideally the state will stop borrowing and the peoples will suffer the excesses of politicians fast trough taxes increases and inflation. We won’t be as vulnerable to inflation as we are today anyway.

Credit won’t be denominated in cash units, but in indexes defined as non-existent basket of commodities (see Bernard Lieater’s Terra) or CPI’s. After all, debts are contracts.

Take into account that this is a very personal view.

Conclusion

Hopefully not a distraction from our usual banter, here are a few resources for those who are eager to know about freicoin as well.

More resources on freicoin:
http://freico.in
http://www.freicoin.org/
https://github.com/freicoin/freicoin

Local Exchange Trading System – LETS