No Complaints about ComplaintCoin

Another Possible Product Review, by TBD Insider

John Wolpert
Jul 24, 2017 · 3 min read
Image courtesy of pixabay.com (No…this picture doesn’t have a lot to do with complaints or coins, but it was just too cool not to use. He does seem like he has a complaint to make though, right?)

After the Trump administration defunded the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), consumers lost an important way to make businesses pay attention to their grievances. The Bureau’s online complaint database contained millions of public searchable complaints on predatory mortgages, bad credit reporting and onerous debt collection. All of it is gone now.

Until now, it’s been impossibly difficult to balance consumers’ need to express their complaints when businesses ignore their issues against the need to protect businesses against getting burned by spurious accusations.

The team at ConsumerCoin, flush with billions in both fiat and cryptocurrency after their last project, have cooked up a promising solution. They’ve teamed up with scores of retailers and loyalty points services (most of which have now moved onto the Internet Transaction Fabric) to mint a new token that consumers can accumulate, trade and use to either spend loyalty points or complain about a company.

Here’s the idea. When you add participating vendors’ loyalty programs to your personal identity vault—I can’t believe people ever got by before the advent of the PIV—they grant you ComplaintCoins. These act as a multiplier for any loyalty points you accumulate, and they can be spent across all loyalty systems connected to ConsumerCoin. So they’re worth something.

If you want to file a complaint, you pay out your ComplaintCoins by the word. That provides an incentive to be brief, and while it doesn’t prevent you from filing a false claim, you are giving something up to do it. The company asserts that this reduces spurious filings by 80% (though data on that have not been provided so far).

You can also buy ComplaintCoins in fiat from holders on the inter-coin network. And you can pay for a complaint investigation and verification audit for additional coins, if you really want to prove your complaint is serious.

One of the things I like most about this scheme is how ComplaintCoin solves for the identity problem. One one hand, providing your identity on a complaint adds credibility, but it also exposes you. ComplaintCoin creates a verified but anonymized identity for you, using the Internet Transaction Fabric’s personal identity service (which uses attestors to vouch for your identity without revealing your details). So readers and the company you’re complaining about know you’re legit, but they only have your public fabric anonymous location. If they want to address your issue, they can run a smartcontract with your address to either give you ComplaintCoins or make some other offer, like a straight refund or return.

*The history of how the CFPB met its demise starts way back in 2017, with this report in the Wall Street Journal.


This story is fiction, based on our fevered imagination of products and services that could be delivered to market based on current and emerging know-how — given sufficient resource and intent. Any resemblance to real products, either released or planned, is coincidental.

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Tomorrow’s Breaking Delivery: Insider Product Reviews from the Near Future

John Wolpert

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Seeker of Awesomeness: The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of my employer, ConsenSys.

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Tomorrow’s Breaking Delivery: Insider Product Reviews from the Near Future

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