The idea
A gift you are not allowed to keep.
Almost everything you can buy is designed to stay bought. This is the opposite: an object whose whole purpose is to leave, and to keep telling you where it went.
It is not an app with a coin. It is a coin with a memory.
The coin does the work. It is brass, it has weight, and handing one to somebody is a small ceremony that a notification could never be. What the software adds is the only thing brass cannot do on its own: it remembers.
Every hand it passes through writes one line — what they did, and roughly where. That record travels with the coin for the rest of its life, and anybody holding it can read all of it.
The part that surprises people
You hear about kindness you had nothing to do with.
One coffee in Atlanta becomes nine acts on three continents. You met exactly one of those nine people. The other eight will never know your name, and you find out what they did anyway.
The stranger you handed it to. You were there. You saw their face.
Whoever they gave it to. A city or a country away, a week or a month later.
Somebody who has never heard of you, doing something kind you read about on a Tuesday afternoon.
Why we think it works
People have been doing this for twenty-five years.
Tracked objects passed between strangers is not a new idea and not an untested one. Where’s George has followed dollar bills since 1998. BookCrossing has followed books released into the wild across 132 countries. Millions of people have registered an object and passed it on for no reward beyond finding out where it went.
What neither of them had was a reason for the pass. This coin adds one, and it is the whole product: you do not simply hand it over, you hand it over because you did something first.
“Nobody deletes an app that might tell them tomorrow their coin just skipped to Osaka.”
What we will not do
The things that would break it.
The moment kindness has a score, it has an optimal strategy. There are no points, no streaks and no ranking.
A toll on the moment somebody does something kind would be the worst possible way to make money, and we would rather not make it.
A public map, stranger-written text and uploaded pictures is a combination that ends badly. One line of 140 characters carries the feeling at a fraction of the risk.
We check a handoff happened in person and publish only the neighbourhood. The two are different pieces of data and are treated differently.
Start one.
One coin is one chain. It costs about as much as lunch and it will outlive your interest in it.