The time has come!
After a year of careful thinking and design iterations, we are finally revealing to the world our most courageous invention to date.
We at HandCash take pride in tackling the tough user experience challenges, and so far we’ve delivered: $handles, Output Bills, P2P Payments, Keyless wallet, Cashport, Connect SDK, POP!, etc.
These inventions were aimed at removing friction so that anyone outside the cryptocurrency space could see HandCash as an attractive new kind of money app which they could recommend to their friends and family.
Duro is the last piece of the puzzle, and probably the most important one. Get a glimpse of what Duro is on our mainstream introduction video:
Motivation
First of all, we at HandCash realized that for our technology to shine in the public spotlight, we have to move away from crypto. That’s a category led by Bitcoin Core (BTC) and that’s not going to change. It’s a lost battle.
We’re not interested in pegging our future to the coinmarketcap.com ranking of BSV nor to be associated with cryptocurrencies’ stained reputation.
HandCash can instead become the leader of a new category in an unserved market: cross-app digital currencies. We offer startups the best digital cash system in the world, bar none, and that’s what matters.
The way we see it, HandCash is a cutting-edge fintech company — whatever wizardy we are using to serve our customers only matter to us. Or at least it should. As long as we remain associated with the cryptocurrency sector, our choices of technology will matter more than the value we are providing. It’s time to expand into the real world.
Secondly, the existing units of account in Bitcoin suck. They don’t sound like a currency, and simply don’t make sense in the context of nanopayments.
1 Duro (Đ) = 500 satoshis = 0.000005 BSV
Duros are simple: no decimals and a nice ASCII currency-like symbol (Đ).
For example, 0.00050273 BSV and 50,273 satoshis would just become 100 Đ. Much more user friendly, elegant and fit for small amounts. 100 Đ at the time of publication of this article, are worth ≈ $0.10 (USD).
This is key to accomplishing one thing that’s never been done before: pricing digital goods and in-app actions with a common digital currency. In other words, it allows us to put a price on things that never had a real world price.
How much for a Lakers’ jersey on NBA 2K MyPlayer if priced with a real world unit of account instead of VCs? How much for a single icon on a designer asset shop? How much for a single premium episode of a podcast?
With nanopayments and Duro, developers can confidently price their digital goods with a user friendly and universal unit of account.
Our goal is to change 100 Pokémon coins and 5 Candy Crush diamonds for 100 Đ and 30 Đ — pricing digital goods in the same unit of account across different apps and games will create a universal and real value system.
Let’s face it, the Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) brand is a tough-sell. If the reasons are fair or not, it’s irrelevant. The truth is that all companies working with this technology would have instantly more exposure if it weren’t for all the crypto wars and childish gossip going on; we want to give them the chance to break out from that uphill battle, while using the same fantastic technology.
It’s a shame because this technology is the best one out there, by a long shot. Lightning network, Ethereum… they can only dream about one day being able to pull off a game such as Haste with the speed, reliability, multiparticipant payments and low fees that the BSV network offers today.
We think these are sufficient motivators to take action. The alternative is to sit and wait until all of these major issues magically get sorted, but if you know something about HandCash, we’re not afraid of taking risks in order to solve problems and offer a better user experience — and this time is no different!
Why this instead of Stablecoins?
You might be thinking… “Hey but why don’t you just use stablecoins instead?”
HandCash has been the most “fiat-first” company in Bitcoin — even to a fault. In fact, we learned the hard way for this incredible technology to shine, we have to use it “as is”. The more complexity you add on top of it, scalability difficulties, legal and technical challenges increase exponentially.
When you use Bitcoin, with emphasis on the word use, you don’t have issues with fluctuations, specially with small, frequent payments. 1 Bitcoin remains 1 Bitcoin until the moment you spend some.
It’s a perception issue caused by another perception issue: Bitcoin amounts are not user friendly therefore they have never been used for pricing goods.
Why do we want to price things in Bitcoin? Well, for two reasons:
- It makes sense to have only one way of pricing things online when everybody’s using the same currency, regardless of where they live.
- It opens the door to pricing digital goods with a common denominator in all apps and games we use, breaking away from fake game currencies.
In short, although we think stablecoins are an interesting technology for services like fiat-settlements for companies trying to avoid fluctuations, they don’t translate well in the context of nanopayments. Most of all, these add much friction compared to the robustness of just using raw Bitcoin.
Inspiration
The name comes from the coin of 5 Pesetas. The Peseta was the currency of Spain from 1868 to 1999, so this also pays homage to the origins of HandCash, founded in Spain back in 2018.
One duro represented five pesetas. Duros became the most popular way of denominating prices among the population as the peseta increasingly lost value due to inflation and prices got typically rounded ending in either 5 or 0.
The story here is that it became the most convenient way for people to price things and that’s basically what we’re looking for with Duro.
How it works
The best part: Duros are not tokens.
They’re just good old BSV satoshis, 500 of them to be precise. Duro is technically just a new unit of account for BSV.
So it is more of a branding strategy than a technical feat, although in a way it is a good technical solution if you think about it…
“The best line of code is the one you don’t have to write.”
All wallets already support BSV, they don’t need to change their infrastructure. Best of all, we all know how Bitcoin scales — that’s solved!
No wallet or app has to reinvent the wheel, just add an extra unit of account option to their apps to support Duro. No surprises, no bugs, no layers.
“Why 500 of them instead of 100 or 1,000?” you may ask. The goal is to steer the focus away from speculation. By adding an extra perception barrier between the speculative BSV asset, we can redirect the focus to usage.
Rollout
Our plan consists in three phases:
Phase 1
- This is an experimental phase, we will gather feedback from real world usage to polish the experience before it becomes the default way HandCash works.
- We’ll measure the levels of acceptance not just from users but also from app developers. This only matters if the market agrees it is a good solution.
- We think this idea is so good we’re not forcing it on people. Therefore we will be adding a “Duro mode” inside of you HandCash app settings. This mode makes Duro the main currency for the app.
Phase 2
- If Phase 1 is satisfactory, we’ll make Duro the default currency denomination of HandCash and gather more feedback.
- We expect at this time HandCash will already have the fiat ramps system in place — it will only display Duros against the fiat equivalent and test our hypothesis on liquidity, monetization, etc.
- We will work with users, developers and companies on style guidelines in order to have a coherent way of promoting and using Duro.
Phase 3
- If Phase 2 is satisfactory, we will promote the use of Duro to mainstream audience as we think at this point we would have an appealing value proposition without any limitation imposed by cryptocurrencies.
Final thoughts
This is a very bold move by HandCash. All members of our team believe this is the way to go for both technical and perception-related reasons. It can go either way, we know it’s a big gamble, but we think it makes too much sense not to give it a try.
We ourselves have been using Duros internally in our HandCash wallets for a while and we can’t go back to fiat-first, BSV second theme. We love Duro!
Official website: duro.money
