Interview with ClockUniverse, lead developer for Terracoin.

What are the objectives of Terracoin?

We want to offer a viable alternative to fiat currencies while helping out the world.

I know that seems like a line, but that is the long term goal.

I don’t think a cryptocurrency should only have one “use case,” or objective, but instead, it should be a broad goal of moving into each niche that it can, while it grows to replace common monetary transactions. At the same time, it should be innovating as quickly as possible.

Besides Bitcoin there isn’t really any “use case” of most altcoins at all, or they are so niche that the whole concept is ridiculous.

I think it is a long series of steps to get to this goal, and for Terracoin the first step is getting decentralized governance. The next step is working with our community to find vacuums in the current cryptocoin environment and filling them. We will do this through masternode owners putting in proposals via decentralized governance, and ideas and feed back from our community.

The whole while we get to help the world through donations and Terracoin Foundation owned masternodes.

Who is the team behind Terracoin?

We have about 4 core members who do a variety of things, and we pay a couple of freelancers. All of the core members besides me are happy to provide their identities, but since I am unwilling I haven’t posted their identities.

I work a day job for a crazy person and I think if he found out that I was heading up a cryptocoin, I would immediately be fired. He doesn’t understand that cryptocoins aren’t funding ISIS or drug dealers.

Once I can work on Terracoin full time I plan to unmask.

What is the culture of the community behind Terracoin like?

I like to tell everyone that Terracoin is the kinder gentler coin. I also mean it. Our community is really awesome. Four or so years ago when I started trading cryptocoins I was really disappointed in how no one would help new people with simple questions about how things work. Sure, people can google stuff, but if you are so new you don’t know what to google, it doesn’t help much.

When I took over Terracoin I promised myself that I wouldn’t do that.

I try to make myself available to help people and when I don’t know the answers to their questions I try to track down help.

The community has really picked up on this, and I notice people helping each other all the time.

We were all new at some point, and I think the community has embraced that.

What cryptocurrency model has Terracoin adopted and why?

Originally Terracoin was a fork of Bitcoin with just a few adjustments, which was pretty normal at the time. Remember there were only around 10 cryptocoins back when Terracoin first appeared.

Once I took it over about a year and a half ago, one of the main goals I wanted was to continue adding new tech to it.

With the help of community donations we added Dark Gravity Wave difficulty adjustment, and merge mining.

After that many people had a lot of good ideas, but without a steady supply of funds and volunteers it was really hard to get anything done.

Eventually a community member mentioned DASH’s decentralized governance, so I read about it and I was immediately sold on the idea.

Not only did it give funds to the team, but it also allowed the community to direct how the funds were spent.

It also enables masternodes which allows community members to get a passive income while they take part in the future of the coin.

Once decentralized governance and masternodes are in place it will allow us to grow, innovate, and start getting into places for real life use.

What is the minimum requirement in coins and for the hosting server to run a master node?

5000 TRC is required to run a Terracoin masternode. A low end VPS or server, and a computer with your wallet is required to run a masternode. Though you can run a masternode from a home server it does require a public static IP, which we don’t recommend. You want the masternode to show the public IP and your wallet to be hidden.

What is the block reward for masternode owners?

Currently the Terracoin block reward is 10 TRC (which halves in about 4 years), and that is split 45% to the miners, 45% to the masternodes, and 10% to decentralized governance.

What will be the ROI of Terracoin masternodes?

ROI depends on how many masternodes there are and since we haven’t launched masternodes yet we don’t know how many there will be right off the bat.

Will there be any third party service providers that will host master nodes for those who are not technically inclined?

One of our goals has been to make sure that people from all over the world can benefit from the passive rewards that masternodes provide, so we want to partner with as many third party services as possible. We also are going to set up Terracoin Foundation masternodes for people who can’t afford a whole masternode of their own. We also want to try and set up the TRC Foundation masternodes to not only allow people to buy shares, but for them to provide TRC for donations to non-profit organizations.

We will be on nodeshare.in soon after the hard fork, and will be reaching out to other third party providers once masternodes are available. We will be setting up the Terracoin Foundation masternodes some time after the hard fork as well.

Would you like to add further info?

We currently have 80,000 TRC that has been donated to be given away to non-profits once TRC hits one USD or above, and holds for a month.

We are giving it away in 20,000 TRC chunks.

We have only decided on the first non-profit which is the EFF.

We have also been talking about a non-profit for clean water for developing countries, and cancer research.

If any of your readers have ideas for non-profits to donate to, they can join our slack and post on the #donations channel, or if they would like to donate, our Terracoin Donations for the World Address is 1BQH6gBzkxxyMQG3VSJCHnmVGfWu64nbPL

For more information please visit: http://terracoin.io/