Community Update 9 — Cointigo, first private crypto over SMS products, being built in the Bitcoin Private ecosystem
As we’ve mentioned in the past, one big facet of building a strong, decentralized Bitcoin Private ecosystem is for developers from all backgrounds to bring their ideas & initiatives to the ecosystem. In our last update we were able to highlight BTCPPay, and in this update we would like to highlight a product that is taking a very important step toward financial freedom — Cointigo.
A long-time Bitcoin Private development contributor, Mr.Wh0, has able to bring to life a vision of giving those who participate in the Bitcoin Private blockchain the ability to seamlessly send Bitcoin Private, right over SMS. Mr.Wh0 has first hand seen in Venezuela how important it is for a sovereign nation to have a safe form of currency store and supply. He is taking a serious problem that many great nations like Venezuela face on a day to day basis, and facing it head on with his vision of Cointigo.
There are very few, if any at all, viable cryptocurrency over SMS solutions out there in the marketplace, and the open source community is delighted to have such an innovation being developed on the Bitcoin Private protocol. We were able to get a statement from Mr.Wh0, who so passionately speaks on behalf of millions upon millions of individuals across the world who can benefit from Cointigo.
The lowest technological common denominator, the “short message service” over a cell phone network grants us the optimal way to promote cryptocurrency mass adoption as a new monetary system. A truly non inflationary, decentralized currency without any registrations, computer influence, etc. What we have now in Cointigo is an easy and fast access communication layer with Bitcoin Private coupled with a 3rd party wallet service. There is no accounting, no user data registration, as all transactions on Cointigo run on the Bitcoin Private chain.
There are countries such as Venezuela that can use a solution such as Cointigo, given the current economic / currency disaster in the country. In many cases, companies / people can only withdraw $25 USD equivalent worth of currency out of their debit cards, there is little to no cash supply, and currently people pay exorbitant fees to get cash into the country. Inflation is the largest in the world, and the government is taking control of banks.
Why did we choose Bitcoin Private? Because it’s fast, has a low transaction fee, and lets us implement truly shielded transactions to any BTCP address across Cointigo’s services. We are currently on a beta test until we improve transactions cost, security and quality of services on our SMS wallet platform.
We have a rest API for online merchants to integrate with, and this week we will have beta testing posted on our website. Thanks to my co-developer, j62, who is developing the merchant aspect of Cointigo, we will have point of sales (POS) systems for kiosks and local stores, which are all currently in beta. We are focused and passionate about bringing financial freedom to countries such as Venezuela, and we will not stop until we get there.
Thanks to products such as BTCPPay and Cointigo, we are closer to a world where private cryptocurrency can be integrated into our every day personal and commercial use cases.
Closing thoughts:
We welcome any other developers who are helping sculpt the Bitcoin Private ecosystem to bring their story to our GitHub or other discussion forms and see how the community can help out with adoption.
We continue to work toward any available exchange listings and associations with developments such as BTCPPay and Cointigo that will help bolster the community. We also continue to monitor the community’s sentiment regarding the current Bitcoin Private proof-of-work setup, and continue to be proactive on productive dialogue on that front.
If you’d like to get involved with the development of Bitcoin Private, please join us on our GitHub or in our public Discord server.
We are excited to continue this community driven, open source journey to bring private transactions, both P2P and commercial, to a mainstream audience. Please leave any feedback you may have in the comments below or feel free to tweet at us!
Bitcoin Private Contribution Team
