Kirk St Johns on MerchantCoin
In this episode
Jay Addison Technical and Media Advisor for CryptoBiz Magazine interviews Kirk St Johns the founder of MerchantCoin at inside Bitcoins conference in Las Vegas MerchantCoin.net
- MerchantCoin is a digital currency ecosystem designed to promote Bitcoin adoption through a marketplace where merchants and consumers can transact.
- The platform accepts Bitcoin and the top 25 altcoins by market cap, with XMC tokens gaining immediate value through merchant acceptance.
- MerchantCoin operates point-of-sale wallets that function as mini-exchanges, allowing consumers to convert fiat currency directly to Bitcoin at merchant locations.
- The project had registered merchants in over 60 countries and hundreds of advocates before launch, using word-of-mouth marketing as its primary growth strategy.
- Users can join MerchantCoin through registration at MerchantCoin.net or participate in pre-sales and an international crowdsale scheduled for March 2015.
Transcript
Read the full transcript
this is Jay Addison from Crypt Biz magazine we are live in Las Vegas at inside Bitcoins with KK St John the founder of merchant coin Kurt how you doing today doing great Jay thanks for having us what exactly is Merchant coin Merchant coin is an ecosystem that is coming out as a digital currency uh we're the first digital currency that I'm aware of that was brought to market
for the promotion and Adoption of Bitcoin as well as other digital currency but right now Bitcoin is the digital currency so Merchant coin is an ecosystem that will allow the consumer and Merchants to come together for a cheaper easier smarter and faster transaction process it'll be constituting a portal which will be a lot like an eBay environment where
anybody can go and upload their products and services and sell them for Bitcoin uh it'll include the shopping cart of course the payment Gateway uh the wallet and all of this will be recorded on the blockchain and the Bitcoin block chain uh for security and those types of things is it true that Merchant coin is accepting other coins yeah it is Merchant coin's going to do initial coin
exchange um and we're going to deviate from somewhat of the norm of accepting primarily Bitcoin in that uh exchange process but we're going to add also the other 25 top altcoins uh denoted by market cap which is a blend of some of the indices like coin uh Market cap.com or coin gecko or one of the exchanges like BTC or BTC China so we thought it would be a opportunity to you know try
to promote a little Community Unity um some of the other coins that we would accept have maybe less liquidity or or uh tangible currency value but the teams behind those tokens um have either a personal relationship or some kind of strategic technological advantage that we would find uh to be beneficial to us in our overall ecosystem so how is Merchant coin different from all the
other out all coins out there well I think the primary difference that we're going to bring to the table is that Merchant coin itself will have immediate value the xmc because any of the merchants that we've registered and frankly we've been extraordinarily successful even before our launch we've got uh merchants in over 60 countries around the world and hundreds of
Advocates that have signed up for us an advocate is a Enthusiast who will go out and talk to folks and try to get them to accept a merchant coin wallet as a means of entering the digital uh Commerce system and and be able to accept and and spend Bitcoin cool so by doing this we are driving a promotion uh or a um excuse me by doing this we are driving
the adoption of Bitcoin through a word of mouth advertisement campaign coupled with an incentive which when you look back historically is really the best form of marketing that's ever occurred in history so by creating an ecosystem where people can come and barter and trade you know not only different tokens but their services and products we create a liquidity because all of our
Merchants will not only accept Bitcoin but they'll accept the xmc so our tokens will have an immediate value as soon as a you know mer Merchant signs up how does xmc have an intrinsic value Itself by being a currency right from day one many of the all coins have a wonderful theory behind them or even a wonderful technology behind them but where can you
spend them how do they become a currency just because they called a currency doesn't necessarily make them a currency sure it has to be accepted somewhere it certainly does and that's where Merchant coin uh hopefully will continue to separate itself from the crowd uh by creating our own Marketplace as we grow um so that right from the start and throughout the history of our token we
will have a liquidity a little bit different approach that we're doing with our point of sale wallet system is we're making every single Merchant a mini exchange so we call that the on-ramp to the digital currency so a consumer walks in they've never heard of Bitcoin before the merchant may have a discount right there and say hey well why don't you translate your Fiat right into Bitcoin
today and we'll go ahead and conclude this transaction and when they do that the currency itself that they that they use whether that's a a a pound or the Euro or the dollar immediately gets translated into Bitcoin so this we hope is going to create a situation where we have more people coming into the digital economy rather than having the downward
pressure to sell the Bitcoin they'll have different places that they're going to be able to use it how does someone get involved with Merchant coin well getting involved with Merchant coin is really as simple as going to our site so we have uh two basic websites they're both Merchant coin.com which is our community portal and our training center uh and we have Merchant coin. net which
is our early stage uh registration page so you get involved with us there uh you also have an opportunity to get involved with the exchange meaning if you want to trade your tokens for merchant coin tokens uh both in a pre-sale we're doing now and then our our our International crowd sale that'll come out in March of uh 2015 fantastic Kirk thanks for
joining us today I've got one more question for you sure January 1st 2015 what do you think the price of Bitcoin is going to be I think it's going to be $511 fantastic people love to hear that thanks kindly for joining us today thank you this is Jay Addison from Crypt Biz magazine live from meckler media's inside Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas remember to subscribe to cryptz magazine
at Crypts mag.com follow us on Twitter at cryptz magag thanks for joining us and learn more at crypts magazine.com
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