Viacoin is a digital currency similar to Bitcoin that allows the creation of applications on top of the Viacoin blockchain in a similar way that email and web are built on top of the internet protocol.

This allows the building of fully decentralized exchanges, issuing of new currencies, asset tracking, betting, digital voting, reputation management and even form the basis of fully decentralized market places. Our protocol for this will be called ClearingHouse.

At this stage, you may ask the obvious question of “why not just build services on top of the Bitcoin blockchain for this?”. The answer is simple: there have already been similar attempts to build out services that utilize the Bitcoin blockchain but they have faced strong resistance from Bitcoin core developers who consider this kind activity as “blockchain spam” and in some cases made attempts to block and inhibit such activity.

We do not consider it safe or viable long-term, to build out potentially billion dollar ecosystems that rely on an upstream service we don’t have control over. The current attempts at embedding services in the Bitcoin protocol are constantly having to design workarounds as Bitcoin plays “whack-a-mole” with them.

Viacoin is designed from the ground up to be both a digital currency and provide the backbone of ClearingHouse protocol, there is a 100% guarantee that ClearingHouse will always remain compatible with Viacoin.

Furthermore Bitcoin is just too slow for these kinds of applications with 10 minute confirmation times which are often much longer (up to 1 hour). For decentralized exchange or shopping, that latency is simply not viable. Viacoin is blazingly fast, utilizing block targets of 24 seconds, it is 25 times faster than Bitcoin.