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ikhcoin is a consensus network that enables a new payment system and a completely digital money. It is the first decentralized peer-to-peer payment network that is powered by its users with no central authority or middlemen. From a user perspective, ikhcoin is pretty much like cash for the Internet. ikhcoin can also be seen as the most prominent triple entry bookkeeping system in existence.

From a user perspective, ikhcoin is nothing more than a mobile app or computer program that provides a personal ikhcoin wallet and allows a user to send and receive ikhcoins with them. This is how ikhcoin works for most users.

Behind the scenes, the ikhcoin network is sharing a public ledger called the "block chain". This ledger contains every transaction ever processed, allowing a user's computer to verify the validity of each transaction. The authenticity of each transaction is protected by digital signatures corresponding to the sending addresses, allowing all users to have full control over sending ikhcoins from their own ikhcoin addresses. In addition, anyone can process transactions using the computing power of specialized hardware and earn a reward in ikhcoins for this service. This is often called "mining". To learn more about ikhcoin, you can consult the dedicated page and the original paper.

Mining is the process of spending computing power to process transactions, secure the network, and keep everyone in the system synchronized together. It can be perceived like the ikhcoin data center except that it has been designed to be fully decentralized with miners operating in all countries and no individual having control over the network. This process is referred to as "mining" as an analogy to gold mining because it is also a temporary mechanism used to issue new ikhcoins. Unlike gold mining, however, ikhcoin mining provides a reward in exchange for useful services required to operate a secure payment network. Mining will still be required after the last ikhcoin is issued.

• As payment for goods or services.
• Purchase ikhcoins at a ikhcoin exchange.
• Exchange ikhcoins with someone near you.
• Earn ikhcoins through competitive mining.

While it may be possible to find individuals who wish to sell ikhcoins in exchange for a credit card or PayPal payment, most exchanges do not allow funding via these payment methods. This is due to cases where someone buys ikhcoins with PayPal, and then reverses their half of the transaction. This is commonly referred to as a chargeback.

Yes. There are a growing number of businesses and individuals using ikhcoin. This includes brick-and-mortar businesses like restaurants, apartments, and law firms, as well as popular online services such as Namecheap and Overstock.com. While ikhcoin remains a relatively new phenomenon, it is growing fast. As of May 2018, the total value of all existing ikhcoins exceeded 100 billion US dollars, with millions of dollars worth of ikhcoins exchanged daily.

ikhcoin payments are easier to make than debit or credit card purchases, and can be received without a merchant account. Payments are made from a wallet application, either on your computer or smartphone, by entering the recipient's address, the payment amount, and pressing send. To make it easier to enter a recipient's address, many wallets can obtain the address by scanning a QR code or touching two phones together with NFC technology.

• Payment freedom - It is possible to send and receive ikhcoins anywhere in the world at any time. No bank holidays. No borders. No bureaucracy. ikhcoin allows its users to be in full control of their money.
• Choose your own fees - There is no fee to receive ikhcoins, and many wallets let you control how large a fee to pay when spending. Higher fees can encourage faster confirmation of your transactions. Fees are unrelated to the amount transferred, so it's possible to send 100,000 ikhcoins for the same fee it costs to send 1 ikhcoin. Additionally, merchant processors exist to assist merchants in processing transactions, converting ikhcoins to fiat currency and depositing funds directly into merchants' bank accounts daily. As these services are based on ikhcoin, they can be offered for much lower fees than with PayPal or credit card networks.
• Fewer risks for merchants - ikhcoin transactions are secure, irreversible, and do not contain customers’ sensitive or personal information. This protects merchants from losses caused by fraud or fraudulent chargebacks, and there is no need for PCI compliance. Merchants can easily expand to new markets where either credit cards are not available or fraud rates are unacceptably high. The net results are lower fees, larger markets, and fewer administrative costs.
• Security and control - ikhcoin users are in full control of their transactions; it is impossible for merchants to force unwanted or unnoticed charges as can happen with other payment methods. ikhcoin payments can be made without personal information tied to the transaction. This offers strong protection against identity theft. ikhcoin users can also protect their money with backup and encryption.
• Transparent and neutral - All information concerning the ikhcoin money supply itself is readily available on the block chain for anybody to verify and use in real-time. No individual or organization can control or manipulate the ikhcoin protocol because it is cryptographically secure. This allows the core of ikhcoin to be trusted for being completely neutral, transparent and predictable.

• Degree of acceptance - Many people are still unaware of ikhcoin. Every day, more businesses accept ikhcoins because they want the advantages of doing so, but the list remains small and still needs to grow in order to benefit from network effects.
• Volatility - The total value of ikhcoins in circulation and the number of businesses using ikhcoin are still very small compared to what they could be. Therefore, relatively small events, trades, or business activities can significantly affect the price. In theory, this volatility will decrease as ikhcoin markets and the technology matures. Never before has the world seen a start-up currency, so it is truly difficult (and exciting) to imagine how it will play out.
• Ongoing development - ikhcoin software is still in beta with many incomplete features in active development. New tools, features, and services are being developed to make ikhcoin more secure and accessible to the masses. Some of these are still not ready for everyone. Most ikhcoin businesses are new and still offer no insurance. In general, ikhcoin is still in the process of maturing.

The ikhcoin technology - the protocol and the cryptography - has a strong security track record, and the ikhcoin network is probably the biggest distributed computing project in the world. ikhcoin's most common vulnerability is in user error. ikhcoin wallet files that store the necessary private keys can be accidentally deleted, lost or stolen. This is pretty similar to physical cash stored in a digital form. Fortunately, users can employ sound security practices to protect their money or use service providers that offer good levels of security and insurance against theft or loss.

To the best of our knowledge, ikhcoin has not been made illegal by legislation in most jurisdictions. However, some jurisdictions (such as Argentina and Russia) severely restrict or ban foreign currencies. Other jurisdictions (such as Thailand) may limit the licensing of certain entities such as ikhcoin exchanges.

Regulators from various jurisdictions are taking steps to provide individuals and businesses with rules on how to integrate this new technology with the formal, regulated financial system. For example, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau in the United States Treasury Department, issued non-binding guidance on how it characterizes certain activities involving virtual currencies.

• Virtual Currency Schemes - European Central Bank
• Application of FinCEN’s Regulations to Persons Administering, Exchanging, or Using Virtual Currencies

ikhcoin is not a fiat currency with legal tender status in any jurisdiction, but often tax liability accrues regardless of the medium used. There is a wide variety of legislation in many different jurisdictions which could cause income, sales, payroll, capital gains, or some other form of tax liability to arise with ikhcoin.

ikhcoin is money, and money has always been used both for legal and illegal purposes. Cash, credit cards and current banking systems widely surpass ikhcoin in terms of their use to finance crime. ikhcoin can bring significant innovation in payment systems and the benefits of such innovation are often considered to be far beyond their potential drawbacks.

ikhcoin is designed to be a huge step forward in making money more secure and could also act as a significant protection against many forms of financial crime. For instance, ikhcoins are completely impossible to counterfeit. Users are in full control of their payments and cannot receive unapproved charges such as with credit card fraud. ikhcoin transactions are irreversible and immune to fraudulent chargebacks. ikhcoin allows money to be secured against theft and loss using very strong and useful mechanisms such as backups, encryption, and multiple signatures.

Some concerns have been raised that ikhcoin could be more attractive to criminals because it can be used to make private and irreversible payments. However, these features already exist with cash and wire transfer, which are widely used and well-established. The use of ikhcoin will undoubtedly be subjected to similar regulations that are already in place inside existing financial systems, and ikhcoin is not likely to prevent criminal investigations from being conducted. In general, it is common for important breakthroughs to be perceived as being controversial before their benefits are well understood. The Internet is a good example among many others to illustrate this.

A fast rise in price does not constitute a bubble. An artificial over-valuation that will lead to a sudden downward correction constitutes a bubble. Choices based on individual human action by hundreds of thousands of market participants is the cause for ikhcoin's price to fluctuate as the market seeks price discovery. Reasons for changes in sentiment may include a loss of confidence in ikhcoin, a large difference between value and price not based on the fundamentals of the ikhcoin economy, increased press coverage stimulating speculative demand, fear of uncertainty, and old-fashioned irrational exuberance and greed.

ikhcoins have value because they are useful as a form of money. ikhcoin has the characteristics of money (durability, portability, fungibility, scarcity, divisibility, and recognizability) based on the properties of mathematics rather than relying on physical properties (like gold and silver) or trust in central authorities (like fiat currencies). In short, ikhcoin is backed by mathematics. With these attributes, all that is required for a form of money to hold value is trust and adoption. In the case of ikhcoin, this can be measured by its growing base of users, merchants, and startups. As with all currency, ikhcoin's value comes only and directly from people willing to accept them as payment.

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money, or the money paid by subsequent investors, instead of from profit earned by the individuals running the business. Ponzi schemes are designed to collapse at the expense of the last investors when there is not enough new participants.

ikhcoin is a free software project with no central authority. Consequently, no one is in a position to make fraudulent representations about investment returns. Like other major currencies such as gold, United States dollar, euro, yen, etc. there is no guaranteed purchasing power and the exchange rate floats freely. This leads to volatility where owners of ikhcoins can unpredictably make or lose money. Beyond speculation, ikhcoin is also a payment system with useful and competitive attributes that are being used by thousands of users and businesses.

ikhcoin is the first implementation of a concept called "cryptocurrency", which was first described in 1998 by Wei Dai on the cypherpunks mailing list, suggesting the idea of a new form of money that uses cryptography to control its creation and transactions, rather than a central authority. The first ikhcoin specification and proof of concept was published in 2009 in a cryptography mailing list by Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi left the project in late 2010 without revealing much about himself. The community has since grown exponentially with many developers working on ikhcoin.

Satoshi's anonymity often raised unjustified concerns, many of which are linked to misunderstanding of the open-source nature of ikhcoin. The ikhcoin protocol and software are published openly and any developer around the world can review the code or make their own modified version of the ikhcoin software. Just like current developers, Satoshi's influence was limited to the changes he made being adopted by others and therefore he did not control ikhcoin. As such, the identity of ikhcoin's inventor is probably as relevant today as the identity of the person who invented paper.

Yes. History is littered with currencies that failed and are no longer used, such as the German Mark during the Weimar Republic and, more recently, the Zimbabwean dollar. Although previous currency failures were typically due to hyperinflation of a kind that ikhcoin makes impossible, there is always potential for technical failures, competing currencies, political issues and so on. As a basic rule of thumb, no currency should be considered absolutely safe from failures or hard times. ikhcoin has proven reliable for years since its inception and there is a lot of potential for ikhcoin to continue to grow. However, no one is in a position to predict what the future will be for ikhcoin.

ikhcoin is as virtual as the credit cards and online banking networks people use everyday. ikhcoin can be used to pay online and in physical stores just like any other form of money. ikhcoins can also be exchanged in physical form such as the Denarium coins, but paying with a mobile phone usually remains more convenient. ikhcoin balances are stored in a large distributed network, and they cannot be fraudulently altered by anybody. In other words, ikhcoin users have exclusive control over their funds and ikhcoins cannot vanish just because they are virtual.

Much of the trust in ikhcoin comes from the fact that it requires no trust at all. ikhcoin is fully open-source and decentralized. This means that anyone has access to the entire source code at any time. Any developer in the world can therefore verify exactly how ikhcoin works. All transactions and ikhcoins issued into existence can be transparently consulted in real-time by anyone. All payments can be made without reliance on a third party and the whole system is protected by heavily peer-reviewed cryptographic algorithms like those used for online banking. No organization or individual can control ikhcoin, and the network remains secure even if not all of its users can be trusted.

ikhcoin is designed to allow its users to send and receive payments with an acceptable level of privacy as well as any other form of money. However, ikhcoin is not anonymous and cannot offer the same level of privacy as cash. The use of ikhcoin leaves extensive public records. Various mechanisms exist to protect users' privacy, and more are in development. However, there is still work to be done before these features are used correctly by most ikhcoin users.

Some concerns have been raised that private transactions could be used for illegal purposes with ikhcoin. However, it is worth noting that ikhcoin will undoubtedly be subjected to similar regulations that are already in place inside existing financial systems. ikhcoin cannot be more anonymous than cash and it is not likely to prevent criminal investigations from being conducted. Additionally, ikhcoin is also designed to prevent a large range of financial crimes.