Grantcoin interest piqued at #Tuttle

This is the third week that attendance at Tuttle has qualified people to an allocation of Grantcoin. You can read the original thinking here. I'm publishing allocation posts too (1st and 2nd) and they're surprisingly more popular than pictures of my breakfast.

At last week's meeting there was some giggling and leg-pulling about it, but yesterday people were actually engaging seriously in what it meant and asking some questions.

What does it mean?

Well as always it means nothing - we're just playing, just playing seriously with funny money. We have easy access to a token that has some small (at the moment) market value but for most purposes is just a token. I think of it as a token of appreciation that you got out of bed on a cold Friday morning in London to come and have a coffee and chat with me. And then I'm interested in how that appreciation gets either stored up or passed around. It's a game for you to play, that's all for now.

What should we do with it?

An interesting question, don't you think? It reminds me of the question that some people asked me about Tuttle when we first started. "If we can talk anything, what should we talk about?". Of course I think it's up to you. You might have by now, say 100 tokens. There are less than ten other people in the group who've been allocated roughly the same. What should you do with it? What could you do with it?

What's it worth?

At the time of the last distribution three weeks ago it was worth about 70 satoshi. That means that a Tuttle pocketful of 90-odd tokens gives you 6300 satoshi or about 3p (this sparked a conversation last week about the decimalisation the UK went through in 1971 and gave the older members a chance to talk sixpences and thrupenny bits) So each one is not worth very much. At least not right now. The price of the currency could go up or down. It could go up or down a little or it could go up or down a lot - if it hits parity with bitcoin and bitcoin is still at its present levels, please don't tell my wife that I started out with about 11,000 and gave most of it away to anyone who'd turn up at a coffee morning. If it hits zero, who cares? If it goes up a hundred-fold and we're giving you the equivalent of £3 to come to Tuttle (assuming attendance numbers don't change), would you still want me to do that? Or would you rather I used it as a bar tab and saved you bringing cash?

Isn't it all too complicated?

Well no because of the twitter wallets. If, in order to play this game, you needed to download a wallet (and the accompanying blockchain) and then learn how to send coin around and all that, most people would be even less interested than they are already. But with the twitter wallet (long may it last!) you can check your balance, send to other twitter users or withdraw to a desktop wallet if you really want to (which you might if you see it heading to ETH parity let alone BTC parity!) I think it gets people thinking about what it means to have a programmable, highly divisible currency without having to know about merkle trees and mining and without having to register for anything except Twitter.

But it's not fair, I live too far away to come to Tuttle!

Yep. Soz. It is unfair. Access to Tuttle is unfair. It's a great resource for a few people who can travel to London and spend their Friday morning there. And here I am boosting their privilege by giving them currency to play with. But!! Also you can set up your own little meetup wherever you are and you can apply for the next round of Grantcoin* and play your own version of the game too, perhaps trade with us!

*that link is a referral link that gets me/Tuttle more coin in the next round so use it wisely!