General
What is Boex?
Boex is a consensus network that enables a new payment system and a completely digital money. It is a decentralized peer-to-peer payment network that is powered by the Binance Smart Chain. From a user perspective, Boex is pretty much like cash for the Internet.
Who controls the Boex network?
Nobody owns the Boex network much like no one owns the technology behind email. Boex is controlled by all Boex users around the world. While developers are improving the software, they can't force a change in the Boex protocol because all users are free to choose what software and version they use. In order to stay compatible with each other, all users need to use software complying with the same rules. Boex can only work correctly with a complete consensus among all users. Therefore, all users and developers have a strong incentive to protect this consensus.
How does Boex work?
From a user perspective, Boex is nothing more than a mobile app or computer program that provides a personal Boex wallet and allows a user to send and receive Boex with them. This is how Boex works for most users.
Behind the scenes, the Boex network is sharing a public ledger called the "block chain". This ledger contains every transaction ever processed, allowing a user's computer to verify the validity of each transaction. The authenticity of each transaction is protected by digital signatures corresponding to the sending addresses, allowing all users to have full control over sending Boex from their own Boex addresses. In addition, anyone can process transactions using the computing power of specialized hardware and earn a reward in Boex for this service. This is often called "mining". To learn more about Boex, you can consult the original paper.
Is cryptocurrency really used by people?
Yes. There are a growing number of businesses and individuals using Cryptocurrency. This includes brick-and-mortar businesses like restaurants, apartments, and law firms, as well as popular online services such as Namecheap and Overstock.com. While Boex remains a relatively new phenomenon, it is growing fast. As of May 2023, the total value of all existing cryptocurrencies exceeded 500 billion US dollars, with millions of dollars worth of BEP-20 tokens exchanged daily.
How does one acquire Boex?
- As payment for goods or services.
- Purchase Boex at a Decentralized exchange.
While it may be possible to find individuals who wish to sell Boex in exchange for a credit card or PayPal payment, most exchanges do not allow funding via these payment methods. This is due to cases where someone buys Boex with PayPal, and then reverses their half of the transaction. This is commonly referred to as a chargeback.
How difficult is it to make a Boex payment?
Boex payments are easier to make than debit or credit card purchases, and can be received without a merchant account. Payments are made from a wallet application, either on your computer or smartphone, by entering the recipient's address, the payment amount, and pressing send. To make it easier to enter a recipient's address, many wallets can obtain the address by scanning a QR code or touching two phones together with NFC technology.
What are the advantages of Boex?
- Payment freedom - It is possible to send and receive Boex anywhere in the world at any time. No bank holidays. No borders. No bureaucracy. Boex allows its users to be in full control of their money.
- Choose your own fees - There is no fee to receive Boex, and many wallets let you control how large a fee to pay when spending. Higher fees can encourage faster confirmation of your transactions. Fees are unrelated to the amount transferred, so it's possible to send 100,000 Boex for the same fee it costs to send 1 Boex. Additionally, merchant processors exist to assist merchants in processing transactions, converting Boex to fiat currency and depositing funds directly into merchants' bank accounts daily. As these services are based on Boex, they can be offered for much lower fees than with PayPal or credit card networks.
- Fewer risks for merchants - Boex transactions are secure, irreversible, and do not contain customers’ sensitive or personal information. This protects merchants from losses caused by fraud or fraudulent chargebacks, and there is no need for PCI compliance. Merchants can easily expand to new markets where either credit cards are not available or fraud rates are unacceptably high. The net results are lower fees, larger markets, and fewer administrative costs.
- Security and control - Boex users are in full control of their transactions; it is impossible for merchants to force unwanted or unnoticed charges as can happen with other payment methods. Boex payments can be made without personal information tied to the transaction. This offers strong protection against identity theft. Boex users can also protect their money with backup and encryption.
- Transparent and neutral - All information concerning the Boex money supply itself is readily available on the block chain for anybody to verify and use in real-time. No individual or organization can control or manipulate the Boex protocol because it is cryptographically secure. This allows the core of Boex to be trusted for being completely neutral, transparent and predictable.
What are the disadvantages of Boex?
- Degree of acceptance - Many people are still unaware of Boex. Every day, more businesses accept Boex because they want the advantages of doing so, but the list remains small and still needs to grow in order to benefit from network effects.
- Volatility - The total value of Boex in circulation and the number of businesses using Boex are still very small compared to what they could be. Therefore, relatively small events, trades, or business activities can significantly affect the price. In theory, this volatility will decrease as Boex markets and the technology matures. Never before has the world seen a start-up currency, so it is truly difficult (and exciting) to imagine how it will play out.
- Ongoing development - Boex software is still in beta with many incomplete features in active development. New tools, features, and services are being developed to make Boex more secure and accessible to the masses. Some of these are still not ready for everyone. Most Boex businesses are new and still offer no insurance. In general, Boex is still in the process of maturing.
Why do people trust Boex?
Much of the trust in Boex comes from the fact that it requires no trust at all. Boex is fully open-source and decentralized. This means that anyone has access to the entire source code at any time. Any developer in the world can therefore verify exactly how Boex works. All transactions and Boex issued into existence can be transparently consulted in real-time by anyone. All payments can be made without reliance on a third party and the whole system is protected by heavily peer-reviewed cryptographic algorithms like those used for online banking. No organization or individual can control Boex, and the network remains secure even if not all of its users can be trusted.
Can I make money with Boex?
You should never expect to get rich with Boex or any emerging technology. It is always important to be wary of anything that sounds too good to be true or disobeys basic economic rules.
Boex is a growing space of innovation and there are business opportunities that also include risks. There is no guarantee that Boex will continue to grow even though it has developed at a very fast rate so far. Investing time and resources on anything related to Boex requires entrepreneurship. There are various ways to make money with Boex such as mining, speculation or running new businesses. All of these methods are competitive and there is no guarantee of profit. It is up to each individual to make a proper evaluation of the costs and the risks involved in any such project.
Is Boex fully virtual and immaterial?
Boex is as virtual as the credit cards and online banking networks people use everyday. Boex can be used to pay online and in physical stores just like any other form of money. Boex can also be exchanged in physical form such as the Denarium coins, but paying with a mobile phone usually remains more convenient. Boex balances are stored in a large distributed network, and they cannot be fraudulently altered by anybody. In other words, Boex users have exclusive control over their funds and Boex cannot vanish just because they are virtual.
Is Boex anonymous?
Boex is designed to allow its users to send and receive payments with an acceptable level of privacy as well as any other form of money. However, Boex is not anonymous and cannot offer the same level of privacy as cash. The use of Boex leaves extensive public records. Various mechanisms exist to protect users' privacy, and more are in development. However, there is still work to be done before these features are used correctly by most Boex users.
Some concerns have been raised that private transactions could be used for illegal purposes with Boex. However, it is worth noting that Boex will undoubtedly be subjected to similar regulations that are already in place inside existing financial systems. Boex cannot be more anonymous than cash and it is not likely to prevent criminal investigations from being conducted. Additionally, Boex is also designed to prevent a large range of financial crimes.
What happens when Boex are lost?
When a user loses his wallet, it has the effect of removing money out of circulation. Lost Boex still remain in the block chain just like any other Boex. However, lost Boex remain dormant forever because there is no way for anybody to find the private key(s) that would allow them to be spent again. Because of the law of supply and demand, when fewer Boex are available, the ones that are left will be in higher demand and increase in value to compensate.
Can Boex scale to become a major payment network?
The Boex network can already process a much higher number of transactions per second than it does today. It is, however, not entirely ready to scale to the level of major credit card networks. Work is underway to lift current limitations, and future requirements are well known. Since inception, every aspect of the Boex network has been in a continuous process of maturation, optimization, and specialization, and it should be expected to remain that way for some years to come. As traffic grows, more Boex users may use lightweight clients, and full network nodes may become a more specialized service.
Legal
Is Boex legal?
To the best of our knowledge, Boex has not been made illegal by legislation in most jurisdictions. However, some jurisdictions (such as Argentina and Russia) severely restrict or ban foreign currencies. Other jurisdictions (such as Thailand) may limit the licensing of certain entities such as Boex exchanges.
Regulators from various jurisdictions are taking steps to provide individuals and businesses with rules on how to integrate this new technology with the formal, regulated financial system. For example, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau in the United States Treasury Department, issued non-binding guidance on how it characterizes certain activities involving virtual currencies.
Is Boex useful for illegal activities?
Boex is money, and money has always been used both for legal and illegal purposes. Cash, credit cards and current banking systems widely surpass Boex in terms of their use to finance crime. Boex can bring significant innovation in payment systems and the benefits of such innovation are often considered to be far beyond their potential drawbacks.
Boex is designed to be a huge step forward in making money more secure and could also act as a significant protection against many forms of financial crime. For instance, Boex are completely impossible to counterfeit. Users are in full control of their payments and cannot receive unapproved charges such as with credit card fraud. Boex transactions are irreversible and immune to fraudulent chargebacks. Boex allows money to be secured against theft and loss using very strong and useful mechanisms such as backups, encryption, and multiple signatures.
Some concerns have been raised that Boex could be more attractive to criminals because it can be used to make private and irreversible payments. However, these features already exist with cash and wire transfer, which are widely used and well-established. The use of Boex will undoubtedly be subjected to similar regulations that are already in place inside existing financial systems, and Boex is not likely to prevent criminal investigations from being conducted. In general, it is common for important breakthroughs to be perceived as being controversial before their benefits are well understood. The Internet is a good example among many others to illustrate this.
Can Boex be regulated?
The Boex protocol itself cannot be modified without the cooperation of nearly all its users, who choose what software they use. Attempting to assign special rights to a local authority in the rules of the global Boex network is not a practical possibility. Any rich organization could choose to invest in mining hardware to control half of the computing power of the network and become able to block or reverse recent transactions. However, there is no guarantee that they could retain this power since this requires to invest as much than all other miners in the world.
It is however possible to regulate the use of Boex in a similar way to any other instrument. Just like the dollar, Boex can be used for a wide variety of purposes, some of which can be considered legitimate or not as per each jurisdiction's laws. In this regard, Boex is no different than any other tool or resource and can be subjected to different regulations in each country. Boex use could also be made difficult by restrictive regulations, in which case it is hard to determine what percentage of users would keep using the technology. A government that chooses to ban Boex would prevent domestic businesses and markets from developing, shifting innovation to other countries. The challenge for regulators, as always, is to develop efficient solutions while not impairing the growth of new emerging markets and businesses.
What about Boex and taxes?
Boex is not a fiat currency with legal tender status in any jurisdiction, but often tax liability accrues regardless of the medium used. There is a wide variety of legislation in many different jurisdictions which could cause income, sales, payroll, capital gains, or some other form of tax liability to arise with Boex.
What about Boex and consumer protection?
Boex is freeing people to transact on their own terms. Each user can send and receive payments in a similar way to cash but they can also take part in more complex contracts. Multiple signatures allow a transaction to be accepted by the network only if a certain number of a defined group of persons agree to sign the transaction. This allows innovative dispute mediation services to be developed in the future. Such services could allow a third party to approve or reject a transaction in case of disagreement between the other parties without having control on their money. As opposed to cash and other payment methods, Boex always leaves a public proof that a transaction did take place, which can potentially be used in a recourse against businesses with fraudulent practices.
It is also worth noting that while merchants usually depend on their public reputation to remain in business and pay their employees, they don't have access to the same level of information when dealing with new consumers. The way Boex works allows both individuals and businesses to be protected against fraudulent chargebacks while giving the choice to the consumer to ask for more protection when they are not willing to trust a particular merchant.
Economy
Why do Boex have value?
Boex have value because they are useful as a form of money. Boex has the characteristics of money (durability, portability, fungibility, scarcity, divisibility, and recognizability) based on the properties of mathematics rather than relying on physical properties (like gold and silver) or trust in central authorities (like fiat currencies). In short, Boex is backed by mathematics. With these attributes, all that is required for a form of money to hold value is trust and adoption. In the case of Boex, this can be measured by its growing base of users, merchants, and startups. As with all currency, Boex's value comes only and directly from people willing to accept them as payment.
What determines Boex's price?
The price of a Boex is determined by supply and demand. When demand for Boex increases, the price increases, and when demand falls, the price falls. There is only a limited number of Boex in circulation and new Boex are created at a predictable and decreasing rate, which means that demand must follow this level of inflation to keep the price stable. Because Boex is still a relatively small market compared to what it could be, it doesn't take significant amounts of money to move the market price up or down, and thus the price of a Boex is still very volatile.
Can Boex become worthless?
Yes. History is littered with currencies that failed and are no longer used, such as the German Mark during the Weimar Republic and, more recently, the Zimbabwean dollar. Although previous currency failures were typically due to hyperinflation of a kind that Boex makes impossible, there is always potential for technical failures, competing currencies, political issues and so on. As a basic rule of thumb, no currency should be considered absolutely safe from failures or hard times. Boex has proven reliable for years since its inception and there is a lot of potential for Boex to continue to grow. However, no one is in a position to predict what the future will be for Boex.
Is Boex a bubble?
A fast rise in price does not constitute a bubble. An artificial over-valuation that will lead to a sudden downward correction constitutes a bubble. Choices based on individual human action by hundreds of thousands of market participants is the cause for Boex's price to fluctuate as the market seeks price discovery. Reasons for changes in sentiment may include a loss of confidence in Boex, a large difference between value and price not based on the fundamentals of the Boex economy, increased press coverage stimulating speculative demand, fear of uncertainty, and old-fashioned irrational exuberance and greed.
Is Boex a Ponzi scheme?
A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money, or the money paid by subsequent investors, instead of from profit earned by the individuals running the business. Ponzi schemes are designed to collapse at the expense of the last investors when there is not enough new participants.
Boex is a free software project with no central authority. Consequently, no one is in a position to make fraudulent representations about investment returns. Like other major currencies such as gold, United States dollar, euro, yen, etc. there is no guaranteed purchasing power and the exchange rate floats freely. This leads to volatility where owners of Boex can unpredictably make or lose money. Beyond speculation, Boex is also a payment system with useful and competitive attributes that are being used by thousands of users and businesses.
Doesn't Boex unfairly benefit early adopters?
Some early adopters have large numbers of Boex because they took risks and invested time and resources in an unproven technology that was hardly used by anyone and that was much harder to secure properly. Many early adopters spent large numbers of Boex quite a few times before they became valuable or bought only small amounts and didn't make huge gains. There is no guarantee that the price of a Boex will increase or drop. This is very similar to investing in an early startup that can either gain value through its usefulness and popularity, or just never break through. Boex is still in its infancy, and it has been designed with a very long-term view; it is hard to imagine how it could be less biased towards early adopters, and today's users may or may not be the early adopters of tomorrow.
Won't the finite amount of Boex be a limitation?
Boex is unique in that only 200 million Boex have been created. However, this will never be a limitation because transactions can be denominated in smaller sub-units of a Boex. Boex can be divided up to 18 decimal places (0.000000000000000001).
Won't Boex fall in a deflationary spiral?
The deflationary spiral theory says that if prices are expected to fall, people will move purchases into the future in order to benefit from the lower prices. That fall in demand will in turn cause merchants to lower their prices to try and stimulate demand, making the problem worse and leading to an economic depression.
Although this theory is a popular way to justify inflation amongst central bankers, it does not appear to always hold true and is considered controversial amongst economists. Consumer electronics is one example of a market where prices constantly fall but which is not in depression. Similarly, the value of Boex has risen over time and yet the size of the Boex economy has also grown dramatically along with it. Because both the value of the currency and the size of its economy started at zero in 2009, Boex is a counterexample to the theory showing that it must sometimes be wrong.
Notwithstanding this, Boex is not designed to be a deflationary currency. It is more accurate to say Boex is intended to inflate in its early years, and become stable in its later years. The only time the quantity of Boex in circulation will drop is if people carelessly lose their wallets by failing to make backups. With a stable monetary base and a stable economy, the value of the currency should remain the same.
Isn't speculation and volatility a problem for Boex?
This is a chicken and egg situation. For Boex's price to stabilize, a large scale economy needs to develop with more businesses and users. For a large scale economy to develop, businesses and users will seek for price stability.
Fortunately, volatility does not affect the main benefits of Boex as a payment system to transfer money from point A to point B. It is possible for businesses to convert Boex payments to their local currency instantly, allowing them to profit from the advantages of Boex without being subjected to price fluctuations. Since Boex offers many useful and unique features and properties, many users choose to use Boex. With such solutions and incentives, it is possible that Boex will mature and develop to a degree where price volatility will become limited.
Transactions
Why do I have to wait for confirmation?
Receiving notification of a payment is almost instant with Boex. However, there is a delay before the network begins to confirm your transaction by including it in a block. A confirmation means that there is a consensus on the network that the Boex you received haven't been sent to anyone else and are considered your property. Once your transaction has been included in one block, it will continue to be buried under every block after it, which will exponentially consolidate this consensus and decrease the risk of a reversed transaction. Each confirmation takes between a few seconds and 90 minutes, with 10 minutes being the average. If the transaction pays too low a fee or is otherwise atypical, getting the first confirmation can take much longer. Every user is free to determine at what point they consider a transaction sufficiently confirmed, but 10 confirmations is often considered to be as safe as waiting 5 months on a credit card transaction.
How much will the transaction fee be?
Transactions can be processed without fees, but trying to send free transactions can require waiting days or weeks. Although fees may increase over time, normal fees currently only cost a tiny amount. By default, all Boex wallets listed on boomerang.exchange add what they think is an appropriate fee to your transactions; most of those wallets will also give you chance to review the fee before sending the transaction.
Transaction fees are used as a protection against users sending transactions to overload the network and as a way to pay miners for their work helping to secure the network. The precise manner in which fees work is still being developed and will change over time. Because the fee is not related to the amount of Boex being sent, it may seem extremely low or unfairly high. Instead, the fee is relative to the number of bytes in the transaction, so using multisig or spending multiple previously-received amounts may cost more than simpler transactions. If your activity follows the pattern of conventional transactions, you won't have to pay unusually high fees.
What if I receive a Boex when my computer is powered off?
This works fine. The Boex will appear next time you start your wallet application. Boex are not actually received by the software on your computer, they are appended to a public ledger that is shared between all the devices on the network. If you are sent Boex when your wallet client program is not running and you later launch it, it will download blocks and catch up with any transactions it did not already know about, and the Boex will eventually appear as if they were just received in real time. Your wallet is only needed when you wish to spend Boex.
Security
Is Boex secure?
The Boex technology - the protocol and the cryptography - has a strong security track record, and the Boex network is probably the biggest distributed computing project in the world. Boex's most common vulnerability is in user error. Boex wallet files that store the necessary private keys can be accidentally deleted, lost or stolen. This is pretty similar to physical cash stored in a digital form. Fortunately, users can employ sound security practices to protect their money or use service providers that offer good levels of security and insurance against theft or loss.
Is Boex vulnerable to quantum computing?
Yes, most systems relying on cryptography in general are, including traditional banking systems. However, quantum computers don't yet exist and probably won't for a while. In the event that quantum computing could be an imminent threat to Boex, the protocol could be upgraded to use post-quantum algorithms. Given the importance that this update would have, it can be safely expected that it would be highly reviewed by developers and adopted by all Boex users.
Help
I'd like to learn more. Where can I get help?
You can find more information and help on the resources and community pages.
