Private Ethereum as private payment system

Question

Case

This is a hypothetical question. Let us assume we own a group of stores, restaurants or cafes and want to give our customers the opportunity to pay per App, with our own system not an external system like credit card (e.g. stripe) or alipay, amazonpay, paypal, ...etc

Therefore the company thought about launching a clone of Ethereum or an other Altcoin. For this chain exist some special rules for example only our miners are allowed, no transaction fees, which basically turns it into an centralised system, but that would be fine. To get the coin customers would be able to recharge their account/wallet (special app for our group) in those shops with cash or some sort of atm which exchanges cash in coins and vice versa.

Questions

• Does it make sense to use an entire clone of Ethereum?
  • Should the consensus be changed to proof of stake then?
• If not, is it possible to launch an ERC20 Token or co, which prices stays constant for example always 3€ or 1€
  • In that case the customers would need to pay transactions fee?
• Or should the company create their own system which wont use base code of blockchain?

Answer 1

• Does it make sense to use an entire clone of Ethereum? Should the consensus be changed to proof of stake then?

You can create a private Ethereum blockchain. However, as you said, this solution is fully centralized. In the case of a private chain, a Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm is not suitable. A Proof-of-Authority is a good alternative when dealing with private networks.

• If not, is it possible to launch an ERC20 Token or co, which prices stays constant for example always 3€ or 1€. In that case the customers would need to pay transactions fee?

Yes, that's called a stablecoin. You can do it by backing your token with a real asset. For example if you want a token aligned with the price of euro you need to own 1€ for each unit of your ERC20. If you use the Ethereum mainnet network, users will have to pay the fees for each transaction they send.

• Or should the company create their own system which wont use base code of blockchain?

If the solution is fully centralized, the company should in fact thinks about the contribution of the use of the blockchain compared to the use of a "traditional" database. However, there are others parameters which must be taken into account such as the cost of deployment or the maintenance for exemple.