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At long last, a blockchain-based, digital token designed to make buying and selling guns easier. Why yes, of course it's called FreedomCoin.
ICOx Innovations, the ICO-innovatin’ team that brought you the controversial, blockchain-based, image-rights management platform KodakOne, is launching a new “regulatory compliant corporate currency” tailor-made for the patrons of Gunbroker.com. The online firearms merchant boasts "over 4.7 million customers and $600M in yearly transactions,” according to a press release on Tuesday, but its CEO Steven Urvan says it can be “painstakingly brutal” for his customers to deal with “traditional credit card companies and other financial institutions.”
There’s got to be a better way. Introducing: FreedomCoin.
“This is the one of the first use cases that I’m aware of where a compliant cryptocurrency can truly replace the need for other costly and time-consuming payment options which is something of extreme value to GunBroker’s users," Bruce Elliott, president of ICOx Innovations, said in the release. (Requests for comment from the three people listed on the press release went unanswered yesterday.) "With hundreds of millions of dollars transacted annually on GunBroker.com, this may potentially become the most retail transacted cryptocurrency in the US.”
Well hot damn, best line up and get it while the getting’s good then!, you eager, freedom-loving crypto fanatics might say. Easy there, partners. It’s a stablecoin. Here’s how it works:
As a Gunbroker customer, you’ll have the option buy up dollar-pegged FreedomCoins with, er, dollars, and stockpile those bad boys in your digital wallet. Then, when the time comes to pull the trigger on that Midnight Special you’ve been eyeing, lock and load those FreedomCoins and fire away. There’s almost nothing to it.
So why all the runaround?
Well, for some weird reason, credit-card companies consider gun purchases to be “high risk.” Fearing chargebacks or fraud, major credit card processors such as PayPal, Stripe, and Square don’t accept gun purchases at all, and the ones that do typically charge an added “convenience fee” or surcharge, according to personal finance websites WalletHub and FiscalTiger.
On top of that, there is a growing call among gun-control advocates to demand credit-card companies (and banks) do more to make buying guns through credit an even bigger “painstakingly brutal” pain in the ass. Articles in the New York Times, for example, have repeatedly called for credit-card companies to ban the sale of certain guns outright, or more closely monitor sales to prevent certain people from buying weapons. (Incidentally, the Times suggests the precedent for this kind of thing was set when “JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America banned the use of their cards to buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.”)
It seems, then, that from the gun enthusiast’s perspective, there does appear to be some need for a disruptive solution that defends against the prying eyes of Big VISA. Still, couldn’t Gunbroker or other gun-slinging retailers just start accepting Bitcoin, or a privacy coin—or even one of the dozens of stablecoins already in the market?
Nah, better to create a new one from scratch, apparently. The whole thing seems a bit desesperado.