Philosophy

This is just a collection of more or less random thoughts around the ideas of Wisp, i.e. regarding decentralization, control, blockchains, freedom of choice, anonymity etc.. It is meant to serve as a reference, as well as a starting point for further discussion.

Blockchains and Freedom

The starting point for Wisp was the plan of Spectrecoin to introduce development fees into the protocol. This affects the freedom of Spectrecoin users, because compared to the original protocol (no development fees), a certain part of your staking rewards would be sent to a wallet of the Spectrecoin team. You don't have a choice to keep your staking rewards for yourself, which means that theoretically, the value of your holdings would decrease: The inflation would be greater than your income.

Now, what does freedom even mean if what you are "forced" to do is what you would be doing anyway? It would be rational to donate to development in order to increase the value of your holdings. But freedom means having a choice, having a choice empowers, taking a choice takes power away. Having a choice would empower you to donate to development depending on what they are doing, and to not donate if you don't support the taken curse. Not having this choice gives the current development team the permission to do whatever they want, and still receive funding for it.

At Wisp, we believe that power should belong to the people. Money is power, and making a choice who to give this money to means exercising your freedom. Centralizing money and power has lead our current financial system exactly to where it is now! By introducing a true inflation that empowers a small group of people, they are only copying the existing financial system. So we have no other choice than to disagree.

However, the beauty of a blockchain is that an open blockchain in itself is a means of consensus! You can not forcefully change a consensus, you can only try to split off into an alternative branch that has a different consensus. That is what a fork does, so Wisp will maintain the existing consensus protocol, and Spectrecoin will fork the blockchain to match their new funding model. Nobody is forced to switch, which is exactly the function that Wisp is giving to Spectrecoin users: Having a choice!

Ironically, because Spectrecoin is a Proof-of-Stake coin, you don't even have to choose! You can "mine" Wisp and Spectrecoin at the same time, without any additional effort. What this means is that the main function of Wisp is to enable people to spend their money differently, based on developments that they want to see, or to not donate for the development of Wisp at all. We hope to make Wisp a truly community-funded project that empowers its users and contributes to the democratization of money that is so urgently needed in our today's world.