justmoon

No worries! At the end of the day, it's just a dumb AMA.

Hey, that rhymed!

So why do I need Coil if I have Interledger?

In early 2018, we got to a point where the core Interledger spec was pretty stable. But there's a chicken and egg problem: Why should anyone adopt a protocol that nobody is using yet?

So I founded Coil which meant that there is now at least one company using it: Coil. And of course anyone who wants to partner with us or get an investment from us needs to also use the protocol - that's how [Stronghold](https://stronghold.co/) and [Strata Labs](https://www.stratalabs.io/) became Interledger users. You get enough people that way, suddenly you have a network.

Isn't the point of Interledger to cut out the middlemen?

Not so much to cut them out but to make them compete. Interoperability makes a market far more competitive because a small player has the same reach as a big one.

Imagine if payment networks are not interoperable. A large provider like Visa is much more useful because when I use it I can pay at a lot of merchants whereas a small provider can't offer that. But when networks are interoperable, the small player can have the same reach as a big player. For example, a small Internet Service Provider like Webpass can give you access to the exact same websites that AT&T gives you access to.

Now you might ask: Coil is a for-profit company, why would we want to use a technology where we face competition? Well, I'm not afraid of competition. I think we can do a good job, get some market share, and as long as our users are happy, they'll stay loyal to us. And even if we fail as a company, we may still succeed at getting Interledger off the ground which would make the world a tiny bit better than it was before.

And why are you committed to using the XRP scamcoin for it?

XRP fits our needs well - transfers complete in a few seconds and transaction fees are practically zero. If it affected our customers negatively, we wouldn't use it but our customers never have to touch crypto if they don't want to. Thanks to Interledger, they can always use US dollars. So there is no downside for them.

I'm not telling anyone else that they should use XRP, I'm saying it works for us. If you don't like it, don't use it. I helped to create Interledger so that everybody could use whatever currency and payment ledger they like and still transact with everyone else.

I don't know, I rarely use Reddit, and I'm pretty inept at social media in general (evidently).

If you want my best guess: It was a scheduled AMA. I posted about it on Twitter ahead of time and again when it started. Presumably the first people who showed up were people who follow me on Twitter and cared enough to show up at the scheduled time. Makes sense that they'd be interested in the AMA and upvote it.

What did I learn? Advertising the AMA on Twitter was a major mistake. That's what caused a bunch of people who don't normally use Reddit to make accounts and participate and for u/prozac5000 to suspect foul play which then soured the whole thing.

It was my first Reddit AMA and I made a lot of stupid mistakes. My title was very clickbaity and by talking about my history with Bitcoin and Ripple I obviously invited the whole thing to become about crypto. I also included some things that were intended to be fun conversation starters like my tinkering with BASIC at 4 that just ended up coming across as arrogant.

I will say that I saw quite a few great tough questions calling specific aspects of your business into question that went ignored.

The toughest question I saw was the one about being misled by the OKCoin CTO when I audited their exchange and I did answer that one. Most of my answers were downvoted, so they're a bit hard to find.

There were also some good tough questions that I didn't get to. What I might do is just go over all of the questions again, including the ones I missed and answer them in a different format like a blog post.

so theres no coin associated with coil? so it pays people in USD?

Correct. As a creator you can choose to get paid in US dollars or crypto.

The idea behind Interledger is that it's abstraction layer for payments kind of like the Internet Protocol is an abstraction layer for data transmission. For example: When a new version of WiFi is developed, all of the existing applications built on TCP/IP continue to work. Interledger does the same for payments. It's an API that financial applications can be coded against. Those application can then be used with crypto and dollars or whatever other payment technologies and currencies people come up with in the future.

Edit: Fixed grammar.