Motivation and Context

The reason we come up with yet another cryptocurrency is that we could not find an existing one that meets requirements of our project - the need for true commission-free micropayments.
We aim to solve the problem of ad-sponsored content distribution caused by consumer revolt against ads, disruption of their content providers' food chain.
In the last year there have been a few announcements of similar attempts (Flattr+, Mass, Brave and others). However, judging from the first reaction of the community, to get a chance to be accepted as a fair alternative, replacing a chain of intermediaries between content consumer and publisher with a lighter and fairer version might not be enough, such micropayment platform should better be:

free - where publisher or author gets 100 cents from each transferred dollar;
anonymous, open and transparent, controlled by community consensus, not a company that can be sold or go bankrupt.

thank-u doesn't propose to reform the industry in a particular way, but rather attempts to build a two-way bridge between publishers and authors on one side and consumers on the other, inviting them to meet somewhere in between. At one extreme, some consumers might prefer to install an app that, in addition to ad-blocking, lets users assign a monthly amount of money they consider fair to be proportionally distributed among their favorite (most visited) sites, or use "like" button for one-click micropayments to thank for a touching article, a movie, or a song. (Check out thank-u chrome extension beta, for example. More details here.)
At the other end of the bridge, some publishers might still opt for preset content prices or subscriptions. thank-u can help here as well with 0% commission transfers, one-click micropayments and sign in.
Although lossless micropayments are difficult to achieve, we propose to make use of the voluntary (gratitude or donation) nature of transfers and specialize the cryptocurrency for this case.

Cryptocurrency parameters

To achieve frictionless and free transfers we promote the primary function of money, medium of exchange, trading off fitness for derivative uses. The parameters will be tuned by the consensus once the platform is up, until then we propose to start with conservative ones to deal with main costs and leaks of a micropayment platform:

Processing

the method of achieving distributed consensus is a variant of PoS - PoB, proof-of-benefit (if the name is vacant), where chances to sign next block depend on current volume of transfers an account receives and are decreased once the account gets rewarded;
protection against spam and attacks is implemented by freezing commission on recipient accounts for a period of time (a few weeks at conservative start);
blockchain maintenance is rewarded by unlocking collected commission and by emission lottery. PoS maintenance will not require additional resources from publishers in most cases making processing virtually free.

Speculation and volatility

exchange rate is anchored to fiat currency (1 RAY : 1 USD). While both sides of transaction are interested in minimizing losses, volatility and speculation is discouraged with the following counterweights:

- publishers interested in increasing exchange velocity control monetary mass by voting on emission/absorption rates when signing blocks. They are further incentivized to vote towards consensus by adjusting commission unlock speed;
- consumers who buy and voluntary send thank-u rays have an option to do it on credit, delaying exchange if the rate deviates from the anchor; such credit transfers (pledges) remain locked on publisher's accounts until repayed or expired;
functions of money that are different from the target one are suppressed with negative interest rates (collected rates are destroyed) and other restrictions.

Fees for exchange to fiat currencies

given the gratitude nature of transfers, exchanges can be performed on the network blockchain - consumers can choose to buy rays directly from their favorite sites they trust and usually send rays to. In this case it is possible to save on transaction arbitrage achieving commission-free exchange (users can adjust their voluntary transfers in case of fraud; bank transfer costs are often included into user banking package);
online exchanges will be used at start and for users requiring stronger transaction anonymity.

Bounties

thank-u cannot offer coins to investors or developers as in a common ICO because this would conflict with the goals stated above. Initial liquidity is distributed among early adopters from the most likely payment recipients and the community within the PR campaign:

1. Publishers: 5M rays will be distributed pseudorandomly among the top 5K sites listed by alexa.com, depending on the volume of transfers they receive, provided they help maintaining the blockchain by installing nodes.

2. Community: PR program will be encouraged by an adequate bounty campaign including:
- articles and blogs;
- translations;
- social network reposts;
- bug and vulnerability reports, improvement proposals.
Details will be presented shortly. Reservations are recorded here.

Technology

We build upon the blockchain implementation by nxt.org inheriting its basic specifications and are thankful to the developers. A contract is set up on the blockchain to share rays received by thank-u.org with nxt.org, when there are any. No benefits or rights are reserved for development needs, but when the project takes off and is good, it can be financed by the same gratitude based model being proposed.

Challenges

Chicken or the egg problem at start is handled in the following way:

users install the browser extension and start sending rays to domain names and URLs on credit, which can be later either repaid by adding funds to the account, when there is ray supply on exchanges, or cancelled with no obligations (credit transfers expire);
without having to register, publishers receive rays from emission lottery and collect transfers on their domain name, connecting an account to the name with their current SSL certificate credentials (transfers are returned to senders when publisher does not join). The platform starts working in trial mode with no real money involved. Publishers can assess potential money flow, are incentivized to recommend the tool to their audience. (They can create different accounts for different authors and products which can result in significant byproducts - the true ratings and major quality improvement, when clickbait is replaced by seeking gratitude. Accounts can be contracts sharing incoming rays between authors and publishers to provide a fair and lossless alternative to bloggers, youtubers, journalists in relationship to their publishing platforms.)

Roadmap

February-March 2017 - Community building and technology tests - tuning parameters.
March-April 2017 - Community bounty campaign - spreading the word to publishers and consumers.
May 2017 - Publisher bounty campaign - the start.

Dear gurus, we need your critics to challenge and tune the parameters. If you have ideas, do join us. thank-u!

thank-u.org