Stan Higgins calls attention to his “Strange alt of the week“: Confessioncoin, which launches Monday.
It’s not clear what the theoretical or theological basis may be for this coin, but it is a strange and intriguing mashup of social and crypto technology (described here).
Apparently, you request penance from the web site, which algorithmically determines how many coins you have to pay. (!) The atonement is then recorded for posterity in the block chain–anonymous, but permanently recorded. (!)
Presumably, this process is supposed to relieve guilt and bring peace of mind. (Note that this requires the Confessioncoins to have sufficient value to be psychologically relevant.)
But maybe not completely anonymous. It is suggested that everyone can explore the database of confessions, “like” and/or “up vote” selections, and even “tip” entertaining confessions. (One wonders if there are really any new or interesting confessions in the world.)
These features seem to turn what would be a quite, private, very personal service into a spectator show. Sigh.
This whole thing is kind of interesting, in the way it mixes assertions about the psychology of guilt and atonement, inventing a new kind of value for a cryptocurrency out of thin air, and possibly monetizing the confession process.
And I’ll be very interested to see the algorithm for assigning penance. What moral rules will it embody? Where do they come from? (Crowdsourcing moral judgement seems like a long shot to me.) Are the rules the same for everyone, or will it try to “localize” the meaning of the transgressions? How will the transgressions be judged to determine a sufficient but appropriate penance?
Many otehr questions come to mind.
I’d be surprised if conventional theologians are completely on board with this concept. Many religions provide this service, and have deep beliefs about the proper way to do it.
I wonder if psychologists will endorse this as either safe or effective. Does it work? Who does it work for? Will totally impersonal absolution work the same as confession in person? Will paying virtual coins be an effective “punishment”?
And I wonder just how “anonymous” this is going to be. When people are confessing to wrongs and even crimes against other people there will be intense pressure to identify the guilty.
Robert McGrath's Blog 
Hello, thanks for writing about us, I’m on the dev team of ConfessionCoin. If you have questions, feel free to ask on the bitcointalk forum or reddit group as well (just easier for us to find). I can address some of the ones that you’ve asked here by stating the following:
1) The dev team is largely agnostic.
2) The algorithm that picks the penance is simply a random number from 1-5 ConfessionCoins. It does not judge based on content, or even parse the content.
3) Any information in any blockchain is completely open and public, so the fact that we’re adding a site that allows searches across some of the data in the blockchain doesn’t necessarily make it any more of a spectator show. We understand if you think confessions should be private, in which case, we respect your opinion that perhaps they don’t belong in a blockchain.
4) As to how anonymous this is, we can only say that we do NOT intentionally block proxies or Tor connections to the site, and the ConfessionCoin itself can be mixed (i.e. CoinJoined) like any other coin (not available today, but anyone in the community can help with this effort) to make tracking next to impossible.
Lastly, I just want to add that we want this coin to be fun. We find it an amusing and fun idea and wanted to share it with the world. Here we have this amazing Cryptocurrency technology to use for any purpose, and we are experimenting to see if others will find this as fun and amusing as we do.
Hope this helps!
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