The Case:
Enabling micropayments for any digital transaction

Dear Community,

🎉 TF v0.2.2 is available now for use with Geeq’s Chrome extension GoMicro, in the Chrome browser, on a desktop. 🎉

Today’s release of Geeq’s in-browser Micropayments Testing Framework (TF) will be familiar to those who have already been following how we plan to deploy Geeq Pay to create markets for video, audio, and other kinds of content and services on the web. Geeq has tools well suited for this purpose: multiple chains that use the same efficient protocol to validate, settle, and keep track of micro-coin transactions in a blockchain. (See the definition of Current Ledger State here.)

Some might refer to Geeq Pay as a base layer or a Layer 1 solution. Regardless of terminology, scalability is possible because there is no limit to the number of chains that may be launched to work contemporaneously. Having the capacity to scale seamlessly to handle traffic at low cost is critical for customers to know, if they are going to be first movers in creating the micro-value chain economy, which was the theme of Chief Economist John Conley’s talk on Cloud Day last week.

Keeping a Customer-Centered Format

In TF v0.2.2, we continue to show how easy it is to use an in-browser wallet to communicate directly to blockchain nodes, which track every micro-coin account balance. These accounts are generated when a user converts Geeq into micro-coins, for example, to spend at any website that adopts Geeq Pay.

We also have kept the home ‘protocol’ page that demonstrates how Geeq’s code and networks configuration systematically processes micro-coin payments behind-the-scenes. This home page has proven to be a handy tool when showing how Geeq’s protocols handle incoming requests. It is an important selling point to show that Geeq Pay processes transactions as they arrive. Customers who want an easy experience do not want to worry about delays, especially if they suspect some transactions may get preferential treatment to theirs.

If you ask one hundred people to name their most preferred idea to use micropayments, you may get nearly a hundred different answers. Besides the creator economy, which focuses on peer to peer interactions, several new cases caught our attention. As a result, we’ve added two new “stores” to TF v0.2.2.

We’d like to focus your attention on one of these stores in particular, because it is relevant to how Geeq Pay introduces new ways of doing business that can improve existing enterprises’ abilities to adapt quickly, in ways that decrease risk and increase their chances to improve their bottom lines.

Using Micropayments to Match Payments to Services

Economic conditions are changing so rapidly that businesses across the spectrum are under pressure to make significant decisions about how they adopt technology and change their work processes. How can Geeq Pay help them make informed decisions more efficiently? Using a micro-coins payment system to target specific needs while staying within budget means existing work product may find significant new demand through unbundling, expert curation, and repackaging – all without having to impose ads on customers, who don’t want to see them or be bombarded with attempts to up-sell them.

Customers generally want to satisfy what they need, now. Providing them with a good experience in the moment is a time-proven way to start relationships that build loyalty, yielding repeat customers who seek you out, rather than the other way around.

As in all new markets on the internet, when customers find value in the product, word spreads, and more traffic is organic. Unlike traditional markets with significant fixed costs, markets for digitally provided information can sustain themselves while charging prices closer to marginal costs. Illustrating the potential for these kinds of more efficient markets is the reason we added the DATA UP storefront to TF v0.2.2.

DATA UP

If you have ever conducted research for a business or non-profit, or have had a reason to try to fact check a statement yourself, you know it can be frustrating to find reliable information online.

For example, in academic publishing, much of the quality research is behind very expensive paywalls. If you don’t have an institutional login, the prices publishers charge to view a single book or research article can be prohibitive. Furthermore, these choices are often framed as a gamble. You may see the title, a short abstract, authors, and ranking on search results, but is that enough to pay $30 or more to download an article? It’s a risk. Meanwhile, the authors who deserve credit for their work and the business entity who wants good information miss the opportunity to gain from trade.

Similarly, business reports often cost thousands of dollars to access, pricing smaller companies out of the market. Even if you know exactly what you want: access to a single graph, table, chapter, map or finding, you need to pay to view the entire report, or take out a subscription to the publication. The siloed nature of online research and information acts as a barrier to innovation.

Services like DATA UP or Navigate, powered by Geeq Pay could provide a more open system of information exchange, while enabling businesses and research institutions to monetize their intellectual property more effectively. Imagine being able to access a curated list of validated research in your field and only pay for what you need. Research providers could charge per page, per chapter, per minute, per chart, per map or per statistic. By making information more divisible, affordable, and accessible, users could gain targeted access to specific information. As a result, such a system could form the foundation of richer, more nuanced data markets which would make it easier for everyone to build on existing knowledge.

Having a more open and accessible system of information exchange through micropayments was, indeed, part of the original vision of the internet. Walled gardens are the antithesis of the original vision. Geeq Pay restores and advances the ideal of an open platform and we will continue to follow paths for its adoption.

Outlook: Tech Update and New Cloud-Based Testing Framework Coming Soon

Later this month, we will provide a more technically oriented update, as well as release the cloud-based version of TF v0.2.2. Hosting the Geeq TF in the cloud rather than in a user’s browser will enable us to remove some of the current limitations that have been imposed to allow you to simulate the entire blockchain in a single tab. The cloud release will provide a more realistic simulation of how the final version of Geeq Pay will perform in real-world scenarios.

Putting the TF in the cloud is a commonly perceived milestone for the blockchain community. For those unfamiliar with blockchain, however, it also may add an aura of mystery – which runs counter to our intentions to demystify and encourage adoption.

In the cloud, your interaction with the blockchain is confined to what you can see and do as your own computer communicates with nodes in the cloud. In other words, you will lose the “all-knowing” perspective that you have when you are able to see everything on the home pages for TF v0.1, v0.2.1 and v0.2.2. That is why it has been important to put these demonstrations of Geeq Pay in the context of use cases, so we can show you what Geeq Pay can do and why you can count on it, even though it is happening via the cloud.

If you are new to Geeq and would like to learn more about Geeq’s Proof of Honesty, we encourage you to explore TF v0.1 and its FAQs and our accompanying collection of video explainers. Of course, as the Geeq community grows, we hope it will become easier and easier to spread the collective knowledge we acquire.

Thank you for being a Geeq

As always, we look forward to hearing your comments and feedback. To keep informed about the latest Geeq updates, including our forthcoming tech update and cloud TF launch, make sure to follow our feeds on Telegram and Twitter for up to date announcements, and please stay tuned for our second Newsletter, for an overview of all of our recent activity.

The Geeq Team

We have put together a visual guide on how easy it will be for end users to use micropayments for content, and for payments to go directly into creators’ accounts.

No muss, no fuss.

Enjoy!

The Geeq Team

Note: The activity on the Home Tab shows what is happening in the background. The Home Tab is running Geeq’s code and shows what it means for onchain activity to be transparent. Essentially, the Current Ledger State (CLS) allows people to check the accounts were updated automatically and correctly.

“Jane” is a name included here for relatability. Generally, users do not have to identify a name with an account. For example, even though the top row of users have names, you won’t see names anywhere in the ledger or the blocks. All that matters to the code are the account numbers, which are long strings of characters.

The ways to use Geeq for payments will be limitless, which keeps us incredibly motivated because we have no idea how you will express yourself. We only know we want you to have the freedom to reach your potential.

For us, that means making sure Geeq’s decentralized payments platform is optimized for efficiency and easy enough for real people to use.

That means providing a settlement layer so a sender can make a small payment on chain, like a Geeq penny, at such low transaction costs they can be sure nearly 100% of that payment will reach its destination.

Even if online payment providers onboard crypto, they still will have to conquer the scalability-cost problem for micropayments. (Hint: They should partner with Geeq.)

How can You reinvent Donations?

Geeq Pay is Geeq’s automated solution to receive (micro)payments onchain, through the open garden of websites that will be Web3. What if you used Geeq Pay to collect micro-donations for your favorite cause? We could have talked about the possibilities for hours.

Every one of us encounters causes we want to support every day. Many more of us would send micro-donations if we had access to small payments and that would add up quickly. Lowering the costs and increasing the ability for people to do good should … incentivize more people to do good and it will give them the ability to do more with what they have.

Using a transparent funding mechanism like Geeq Pay has the added benefit of being able to build a track record and a reputation that donors can check for themselves, without having to depend on a third party’s report. Geeq’s unique technology provides an avenue to credibility and trust that has never existed before.

Let’s think about why this hasn’t happened yet. What has gotten in the way of matching resources to good work? We’re sure you know why.

From our point of view, efficiency of payments, ease for small donors and, ultimately – providing a tangible path toward accountability – will knock over those impediments one by one.

Long-time supporters should be noticing a theme. Geeq provides the technology to bring together both sides of new markets.

Build the future with us. Watch this space. Be a Geeq.

Previously, we talked about micropayments in the context of sending a transaction.

This time, the conversation turned to the other side of the transaction. The how, why, and who will be able to receive payments through Geeq Pay.

MicroCommerce and mass adoption depends on being able to bring both sides of the markets together.

For that, people need more freedom i.e. permissionless payment systems to send and receive. Let’s make it so.

In case you missed our other videos, they are all in a handy archive. And if you are inspired, please drop by to leave a comment in our community chatroom. We always welcome feedback and get excited to hear how you might use Geeq Pay in the wild.

What do you get when you combine known technology (pre-images and hash digests) with:

• Geeq’s bearer token technology,
• A relentless focus on efficiency, and
• Geeq’s multi-chain platform?

Micropayments on decentralized blockchains.

How many?

All of them.

Tell your friends: this is the most fun they will ever have with algebra.

Please stay tuned! We’ll be back to share more soon.

Three decades of the world wide web have not been enough for news publishers to figure out how to survive in the digital age. Maybe the problem was that catchy but ambiguous slogan, “Information wants to be free.” Maybe it was the expectation that the long established business models for print journalism would work just as well online. But it’s become clear that neither advertising nor subscription paywalls are delivering the revenues needed for a healthy industry.

The expectation of free content was set early on, but online advertising prices are extremely low and under constant downward pressure, with many internet users installing ad blockers (Hootsuite research puts the global proportion at around 42%) and big brands slashing their spending on digital ads. Meanwhile readers are hitting subscription fatigue. With monthly payments becoming common for everything from music to software, customers are overwhelmed and unable to commit to yet another subscription just because they have hit their limit of free articles. Sure, a handful of papers with global reach – such as the New York Times – are successfully shifting their earnings base from advertising to digital subscriber revenue. But their success often comes at the cost of local or regional papers, since customers are likely to cancel an older subscription in order to afford a new one.

Can articles be sold as singles?

The obvious solution would be to charge readers per article. But this idea raises equally obvious problems.

For starters, no customer will spend a minute or two entering their login and payment details just to satisfy a casual curiosity. For micropayments to work, they need to be frictionless; but a pooled solution such as Axate faces the great difficulty of getting many publishers to commit to one platform. How can users be empowered to access single-portion content quickly and easily without either publishers or readers being locked into a single ecosystem?

Fortunately, the advance of technology has a way of resolving problems on that level, and attempts are being made. A number of apps have popped up to offer readers access to a wide range of participating publications. Dutch startup Blendle, which sold individual articles with a satisfaction-guaranteed refund promise, was particularly hyped. Unfortunately, despite a promising start, the app failed to make money and Blendle ultimately pivoted to – what else – subscriptions for a daily selection of articles.

Journalists, though, have deeper concerns: chief among them the fact that – as baldly set out in the Columbia Journalism Review– “no organization… can produce only hits.” That is, readers may only want to pay for the “best” articles, but that is not how newspapers are made. Each issue comprises a wide range of subjects and different kinds of articles, from news and sport to opinion, features, reviews and more. Some of those are cheaper to produce than others. Some have more social media appeal. The actual value of any individual piece is not easy to determine, nor to convey, since they all depend to some extent on the context of the whole.

It’s also important to consider that from a publisher’s perspective, direct subscription revenue isn’t the whole story. The price of a publication’s advertising space depends on subscriber numbers (especially those who also receive the print issue). So when customers choose to buy a single article rather than subscribe, it can have unpredictable knock-on effects on ad revenue. Given these considerations, can pay-per-click really pay-off?

Psychology holds the key

The traditional subscription model has already failed. It is perhaps pointless to dwell on the drawbacks of micropayments in comparison when readers have long since moved on. Articles are already consumed individually, even by subscribers. Consumers have given up on subscribing to most of the publications they would like to read. It’s time to rethink the lessons learned.

Blendle may have struggled to make pay-per-click work, but it did prove two crucial points. First, it attracted new, younger readers (who do not typically buy subscriptions), rather than cannibalizing existing subscribers. And second, it showed the market what kind of content was considered worth paying for. Refunds were commonly requested on clickbait articles, where the headline wasn’t backed up with substance. Users, it turns out, are happy to pay for quality journalism.

This lesson is further demonstrated by The Guardian’s groundbreaking model. It eschewed a paywall, and enlisted reader support to turn around a 20-year loss-making streak. The ongoing appeal to readers has two distinct strengths, both of which contain relevant lessons. First, readers are free to choose how they contribute (annually, monthly or just once), as well as how much. (Like many charity websites, the contribution page offers various suggested amounts as well as the editable option “other”.) Second, it relies on a psychological, not economic argument.

The choice of which newspaper to subscribe to isn’t just a rational one; it is layered with highly emotional questions of identity. A customer may see themselves as a Guardian person – not just a Guardian reader – and feel a personal stake in that paper’s survival. This emotional motivation can also be seen in the rise of platforms like Patreon, which invite users to contribute a small monthly fee to support their favourite writers, artists, musicians and so on. As with Guardian membership, these commitments are driven by loyalty, identity and perhaps a little altruism – not pure utility. Crucially, the platform also makes it easy to pay small amounts, which lowers the mental barrier as well as making it more affordable. Any pay-per-click model for journalism must exploit these factors to work with, not against, consumer psychology.

The only question is how

It’s clear that journalism as an industry needs subscribers. Pay-per-click can’t be designed as a replacement for that – the price would be too high to be acceptable to readers, and no doubt certain kinds of content would become unviable. But surely there is a way for individual article sales to support subscription revenue, rather than undermine it.

Perhaps it’s time to rethink free-to-view article quotas? Most sites allow visitors three or four articles each month before the paywall comes down. Writing in Forbes, crypto commentator Alastair Johnson argues that these publications are leaving money on the table by not monetizing their occasional visitors. In other words: use seamless micropayment technology to pay for every view – and he proposes a price cap, beyond which readers would enjoy an automatic subscription upgrade. That does leave all the benefit on the side of the reader, though, and none for the publisher. An alternative might be to invite the reader to subscribe, once they have hit that level. That would foreground the value they are already getting from the publication (so many articles read this month!) and encourage them to support it in future, but it leaves the choice open. Maybe they’ll read less next month, after all. The reader is still in control, but the newspaper has opened the door to a stronger relationship.

Reviewing all the evidence, it’s possible to glean a few rules of engagement for pay-per-click publishing.

1. Execution is critical. Publications must be free to implement their payment layer independently, and collecting payment must be smooth, fast and commitment-free. A cryptocurrency solution such as Geeq bearer tokens lends itself particularly well to this problem, since the tiny transaction cost makes super-low prices viable, and the payment layer can be applied to any interested publication without the need to collaborate with rivals. Since customers are equally free to spend their tokens anywhere (including on other digital goods, such as videos or music), to send them to other wallet bearers or exchange them for fiat currency, there is no commitment.
2. Paid content must be worth paying for. It is likely that some kinds of article, such as straight news, should remain free; it will always be easy to find out what has happened without paying. Intelligent analysis, however, will be valued.
3. Subscribers may be best recruited once they have been convinced of the quality on offer, by offering options. That could mean a price is suggested, but they can change it, as is familiar from digital content platforms such as Bandcamp. A subscription could be proposed once they view a certain number of articles, but not forced. There could even be a refund for disappointing content, as Blendle implemented (with perhaps a monthly cap on the number of refunds allowed).
4. Remember the role of loyalty. Publications that are well differentiated, with a high level of reader identification, will be best placed to convert casual readers into subscribers.

The only sure thing at this point is that publishing is in dire need of a new model. Emerging micropayment technology has the potential to finally enable pay-per-click readership, offering an alternative to the diminishing returns of traditional subscription and advertising models. But publishers will need bold, creative thinking to leverage that tech for a viable business model. Let’s see who is up for the challenge.

Introduction

Imagine your favorite author proudly announcing on her social media feed the latest article she published in a popular newspaper. You enthusiastically click on the link, hoping for a deep-dive into the thoughts of your intellectual role model… only to discover that a paywall blocks your way! For a moment, you might consider buying a month’s worth of subscription – but then you realise you already pay a monthly fee for two other magazines.

If you already found yourself in such a situation and were left irritated by it, you’re not alone: according to a study in the Journal of Marketing, user engagement on The New York Times website significantly decreased after the introduction of a paywall, especially among the most active users (a drop by 57.2%). And remember, The New York Times offers one of the most affordable subscription models due to its phenomenal scale and global recognition. So you might wonder: why can’t I just pay for this one article, say, 10 cents? The idea is not new, but for several reasons, such payment models have failed to gain ground in recent decades.

The opportunity

When you were about to commit 10 cents to access the desired article in our imaginary scenario, you were about to make a so-called micropayment. Definitions vary, but such payments are generally smaller than 10-20 dollars, and can even be as small as a fraction of a cent.

The Internet seems to be the natural habitat of such transactions, given the obvious limitations of cash for fractional payments. Interestingly, the term was coined back in the 1960s by Ted Nelson, who envisioned an interconnected world different from the one we have today. Being an artist himself, he proposed the concept of micropayments to enable creators to own and directly sell their work.

Adoption has not been hindered by a lack of economic potential or possible applications. In fact, web analysts like Jacob Nielsen pointed out way back in 1998 that the main problem with subscription fees is that they provide a single, binary choice: you pay nothing (and get nothing) or pay a significant fee. More than twenty years have passed since then, but the fundamental problem of the subscription model persists to this day. As Kevin Westcott, vice chairman of US media and entertainment lead at Deloitte remarked in a recent interview, an over-saturated streaming landscape has caused media consumers — especially millennials — to suffer from “subscription fatigue.” Instead of accumulating multiple subscriptions, these people want on-demand access to the content of their choice. In future, an “iTunes for journalism” is envisionable, whereby articles or videos from various providers and authors would be accessible on a pay-as-you-go basis.

However, the potential of micropayments extends far beyond access to content. Micro-tipping or sending micro-transactions to our friends are likely to be popular use cases too. It is no wonder that the biggest social media platforms see huge potential in peer-to-peer payments, as they can easily leverage their massive user base. A growing number of people use centralized peer-to-peer payment solutions, like Facebook Payments (a feature available only in the US) or WeChat Pay to send money to friends, with the latter having reached nearly 800 million users in China at the end of 2019.

Another potentially fruitful area is the computer games industry. While games used to be one-off purchases, the rise of gaming on mobile devices and internet-enabled consoles has led to the increasing importance of in-app purchases. These transactions enable gamers to purchase additional upgrades or virtual goods. Micropayments could lower the minimum spend necessary to participate: for example, rather than buying a pack of virtual clothes for $5, they could buy a single virtual item for $0.30. While in-app purchases remain controversial among some hardcore gamers, developers could use micropayments to fine-tune their business models and untap new revenue streams.

The market appetite is clear and growing; in 2017 alone, Activision Blizzard made $4 billion on microtransactions, roughly half of which came from the company’s mobile subsidiary that operates Candy Crush. Fortnite, the most popular title internationally in 2019 and 2020, earned 1.8 and 2.5 billion by selling purely cosmetic items that enhanced the gaming experience for its fans. Playing Fortnite itself is free, and Epic Games announced in May 2020 that it had registered over 350 million users. These gamers are largely in the Zoomer Generation (those who have never known life without the internet). An estimated 22.5 million play Fortnite daily.

The cost of trust

As described by JP Koning in a 2019 op-ed, however, the clearing and settlement fees of payment networks like Visa and Mastercard remain a barrier to wider adoption of micropayments. In his example, a writer who expects to sell a short story for 25 cents per view has to pay not only a 0.05% charge, but also a $0.21 fee on each “small ticket” debit card transaction on the Visa network. As a result, credit card fees would consume almost all of the writer’s revenue for such a transaction. In short, micropayments will never be viable as long as transaction fees exceed the value being transferred.

In the music industry, while Apple did make it possible to purchase single tracks on iTunes, this model has now largely been supplanted by streaming, which is a far less favorable arrangement for most artists. According to the BBC, Apple Music pays about £0.0059 (around $0.0084) per stream. The artist typically receives only 13% of the revenue, which roughly equals to $1 for every thousand streams. The inequality of payouts can reach shocking extremes: last year, violinist Tamsin Little tweeted that she had received only £12.34 for 5-6 millions streams over the previous six months. The effects of this unbalanced allocation of streaming revenue have been particularly pronounced during the coronavirus pandemic, when earnings from live performances suddenly dried up.

Security is another key point of concern, as users need to provide access to their digitally stored money to make frequent, automated micropayments feasible. According to the latest Capgemini World Payments Report, 87% of payments managers think their companies face a high likelihood of cyber attacks. Here, the ostensible convenience of centralized payment gateways comes at a cost, as a successful hack could potentially expose the personal information and bank details of millions of users.

What’s blocking blockchain?

The emergence of blockchain technology promised to greatly reduce the costs associated with centralised financial intermediaries. A blockchain is akin to a decentralized database, whereby information is distributed among thousands of separate computers called nodes. Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin can be divided into eight decimal places, making it seemingly ideal for microtransactions, while networks like Ethereum hint at the potential power of smart contracts to automate financial transactions.

Unfortunately, however, blockchain technology fell short of its promise. Firstly, the average user cannot handle the technical complexity of managing wallets and security keys on their own. Crypto exchanges flooded into the market to facilitate access, but introduced some of the drawbacks of the old system in the process, namely centralization, high transaction fees and security risks. For instance, Coinbase charges $0.99 if the total transaction amount is less than or equal to $10. Secondly, the extreme price volatility of popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin makes them unfit for most retail transactions. As trader and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently observed, “a currency is never supposed to be more volatile than what you buy [and] sell with it”.

However, arguably the biggest barrier to blockchain-powered micropayments is systemic. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum coined the term “scalability trilemma”, which means that a distributed ledger can maximise only two of three key attributes: decentralization, security, and scalability. Unfortunately, a micropayment system cannot compromise on any of these attributes, as it must be able to securely manage transactions in large volumes at rapid intervals.

Typically, the more nodes a blockchain network has, the safer it is thought to be. However, as the system expands, processing payments will take longer and consume more electricity, to the point that the system becomes unworkable for processing microtransactions.

Changing the game

Scalability was one of the key challenges that we sought to overcome when developing Geeq. We set out to reengineer decentralized consensus to make it possible to securely transact micropayments for fractions of a cent without a central intermediary. After years of modeling, analysis, and community participation, we achieved our goal. We did this by altering the incentive structures of nodes to make them compete in terms of the accuracy of their work rather than computing power or cryptocurrency wealth. We call this new consensus mechanism “Proof of Honesty”. While a detailed technical explanation is beyond the scope of this article, you can find more details in our whitepaper.

Due to its scalability and low transaction costs, Geeq is an ideal basis on which to build a decentralized micropayment network. In the future, such networks could help to rebalance the economy away from content aggregators and payment intermediaries and toward content creators. This would benefit end consumers too, giving them some respite from subscription fatigue and greater choice over the content and services they wish to consume and how they pay for them. Ultimately, a larger share of the population could use micropayments safely in everyday situations, without having to worry about the security of their payment details or private data. Although we are just at the beginning of this transition, we see an exciting road ahead.

Bitcoin and Ethereum (among others) famously use mining in their Proof of Work (PoW) protocols, why doesn’t Geeq?

The short answer is: mining creates problematic incentives from the point of view of the user of a blockchain-based application.

Who Benefits from Mining? Miners.

Mining can be profitable for miners, who are in charge of the construction and maintenance of Proof of Work-based blockchains. That is why they do it.

An interesting feature of the mining market is that profits can be uncertain. The rewards change and sources of income are also fairly dynamic. In fact, the “block rewards” portion of their earnings are explicitly based on a mechanism that is a bit like playing a lottery. In a competitive market for mining, miners are incentivized to adopt strategies that give them an advantage.

We have already seen miners’ strategies adapt over time to maximize their profits. One response to the bitcoin blockchain, in particular, has been to set up mining “farms” comprised of many high powered computers. As the owner of many computers, a mining farm increases the odds it will make profits. This should not be surprising: it is like someone who buys many tickets to a lottery in order to increase their chances of winning.

For the user of PoW-based blockchains, these two features of the mining market introduce risks to the users that are out of their own control: a) miners have incentives that diverge from the users’ and b) mining sets up an uneven playing field. A more concentrated market for mining also concentrates power over the construction and maintenance of the Proof of Work-based blockchain. This means a PoW-based blockchain database is vulnerable to attack.

The most well-known vulnerability is the 51% attack, which has happened several times. There are other threats that are more complicated and also relatively unknown, so we will not include them here. Suffice to say that every potential threat introduces risk of disruptions in service and controversy, especially when attacks within protocol yield unexpected results. Some of the outcomes may result in transactions that are rolled back or censored, which is exactly what blockchain-based DApps are supposed to disallow.

Geeq is focused on providing value to the end user of any Geeq-enabled service.

As you use the Geeq platform, you have the security of knowing Geeq’s blockchain-based payment system is at the leading edge of blockchain technology. All Distributed Applications (DApps) built on the Geeq platform are based on underlying blockchain databases that have the integrity and dependability blockchains are supposed to have. As a result, DApp providers and consumers are able to focus on the quality of services DApps provide, with an emphasis on making them useful and easy to use.

Conclusion

Geeq’s Proof of Honesty^TM (PoH) is a next generation, proprietary blockchain technology that enables a new hybrid platform. The platform itself is truly decentralized.

Geeq was built with the end goals of a blockchain-based, decentralized economy in mind. In order to arrive at that destination, we had to re-think all the layers of the blockchain “stack”, from the market for nodes and validators up through the final markets for new DApp-based goods and services.

Simply put, Geeq doesn’t have miners because their incentives are not aligned with our vision of a decentralized economy. In Geeq’s ecosystem, all incentives are aligned with those of the honest user, including the nodes and validators who construct and maintain the blockchains. At Geeq, market power doesn’t matter. Honesty does.