How it works.

Loom Gold users pay each other by moving gold around from location to location.

Users of Loom Gold set up online secret locations within the virtual 'Loom Gold Web' where they can deposit gold. A location is a name which designates a place where gold may be stored. The name can be anything the users would like, as long as it is between 16 and 255 characters long.

Here are some examples:

Make sure to use locations that are hard to guess. For example, if you keep gold in a location that's easy to guess, such as your name and birthday, you run the risk of losing that gold. Locations are case-sensitive. They may contain punctuation characters and spaces. Even leading and trailing spaces are allowed.

Here is an example to illustrate how people pay each other using the Loom Gold system.

Let us say that Alice has a secret location with 50 grams of gold there. Bob has a secret location with 20 grams of gold there. Alice decides to pay Bob 8 grams of gold.

First, Alice moves 8 grams of gold from her secret location to another location which Alice and Bob will share. This shared location is known as a "drop point." Then, Bob moves 8 grams of gold from the drop point to his own secret location.

After the payment is complete, there will be 42 grams of gold at Alice's location, and 28 grams of gold at Bob's location. Nothing will remain at the drop point.

It is possible for Alice to use a brand new random drop point every time she pays Bob. But that can be inconvenient, because then she would need to notify Bob of the new drop point every time.

Instead, Alice and Bob may prefer to use the same drop point for all transactions between them. They'll use different drop points when paying other people.

The Loom Gold system lends itself nicely to recurring payments as well. Let's say you wanted to pay for a subscription to an online newsletter that charged 1 gram per month. You could simply move 12 grams to a drop point and disclose that location to the publisher. Every month, the publisher would remove 1 gram from the drop point to keep your subscription active. Any time you wanted to cancel, you could move the gold back to your own location.

Getting started using our own Loom Gold

Sell goods and services to a merchant who uses Loom Gold. Some of these merchants, known as "exchangers," will accept cash from you and pay you in Loom Gold. Another way to get some gold on this site is to bail gold into the system. That means you bring in some real physical gold, in the form of bars or discs, and give it to us for safekeeping. We put the gold in our vault, and then create the proper amount of digital gold in a new random location in our system and tell you where it is. You can then use that digital gold however you wish.

Using Loom Gold is simple and fun, and you'll be pleased with our low fees. For now, there are no transaction fees or storage fees. You can move gold around all you want and pay no fees whatsoever.

There are two main rules to follow:

Also, before doing any operation at the Loom Gold site, you should look in your browser's location field at the top of the browser window and verify that it says:

https://loom.cc/gold/

At present, it is not possible to 'pay' a location in terms of currency such as USD or EURO, all transations are done in gold by weight. However, very soon users will have a new feature that lets them do transactions in terms of US dollars, euros, and other forms of fiat money instead of just grams of gold.

How to try out the system at no risk

If you would like to test out Loom Gold and these routines, it might be safer to use the artificial test credits at https://loom.cc/spangle so you don't risk losing anything. Just post to that URL instead of loom.cc/gold.

Patrick Chkoreff is the system designer and operator.

Loom Gold already offers a small but impressive list of issues, exchangers, and merchants. (shown below)

Loom Currencies

There are now three Loom issued currencies.