Topic: [ANN] Freicoin: demurrage crypto-currency from the Occupy movement (crowdfund) - page 14. (Read 67963 times)

I still don't think $28k is necessary to get a project off the ground.

You absolutely can. There would be little need to even make the distinction of a "lite-client" with an account ledger. Try thinking outside the box just a little bit.

That wouldn't be progress. You can't operate a lite-client with full-node security using an account ledger.

At the very least you could stop wasting thought energy on how to implement pruning. Switch to an account ledger instead of a transaction ledger. If at the very least you want to accomplish something, you should try some major improvements on the protocol. That way at least there is actually progress instead of sidegress.

@Etlase2, @jtimon and I simply don't agree with your conclusions, and we'll have to leave it at that. Let's please leave discussion of your proposal to its own thread.

You claim that bitcoin is doing well, but we don't know what could have happened had it not already experienced a bubble. But c'mon, the system is just designed to bubble and burst. It may always end up better than before the bubble, but the waves created in the mean time will be fierce.


I have definitely conceded these things with my own latest proposal, and I think it is a much saner system than bitcoin's or freicoin's.


This all sounds nice, but you still need to get away from limited supply and the rest of bitcoin's archaism such as using energy to secure the network.

EnCoin is "manipulated" by predetermined rules. Instead of a specific quantity of coins, it has a specific difficulty based on Koomey's law. This introduces trust/coordination problems that are addressed in different ways, but it doesn't introduce money supply manipulation.

Why does cash-money require a compulsion to circulate? I'm sure you'll explain this away as saying you didn't really mean this word, but something like "incentive", but I find it interesting nonetheless.


Do you understand the concept of time preference? Even if the exchange rate between bitcoins and some good I desire is constantly changing in my favor, I still desire that good and at some point my preference for the good now overrides my preference for a lower cost later. For a real life example, you must look no further than consumer technology like computers and televisions. If I wait a year to buy one, the cost will go down and the quality will go up. Yet, I still buy one today because otherwise I will be forced to go a whole year without.

Yes, freicoin will have price deflation when the network expands.
But who exactly need t worry about it? Mainly borrowers, so they won't denominate their loans in neither bitcoin or freicoin, at least until those risks become smaller. I don't expect merchants to price in freicoins neither, at least not soon. But bitcoin seems to be dealing well with that "problem".
You can define a stable unit like usd1970, terras, a basket of 30000 different goods and services or whatever you prefer. But you cannot create a cash-money that ensures a stable price. Well, you could do it with a central bank issuing monopoly freigeld. But you can't do it without manipulating the market or redistributing wealth somehow.
The only thing a cash-money needs that bitcoin doesn't have is a compulsion to circulate.
For the financial problem, I think we will see some innovations too. Decoupling loan contracts from cash-money units and using indexes or virtual baskets instead. That way you may not need to factor the inflation premium into the interest rate.

But this simply is not true. They will have to worry about it greatly appreciating every time the network expands, just like bitcoin. It's going to take what, 15 years for half of the money supply to recirculate?


And I don't see any evidence that you guys are working on anything either. Just asking for $28k for a couple line changes and to create advertisement. Freicoin was proposed over a year ago and the best this group has come up with is a webpage to ask for money. Demurrage is not some precise mechanism that will bring a stable value on top of an inherently unstable coinbase, no matter how well Mark may be able to spell.


Anything built off of bitcoin just isn't worth the time. And you guys should be very careful about merged mining when there are 12-year-old l33t h4x0rz running large pools.

Many in the community think Bitcoin has value something simply because scarcity is programmed into it. I agree that this, alone, is meaningless.

Freicoin will be more stable for those that actually want to conduct business with the currency and not have to worry about it greatly appreciating (or depreciating) due to external circumstances.

As to your currency proposal, Decrits/EnCoin -- I don't to see any evidence you are actually working on it, or know how to make it happen.  Other than "it would be nice if my currency had a stable value" I don't really see anything. Mark spells out precisely what the mechanism is used to achieve stable value, and it will work.

I do not have the technical ability to make Freicoin or any other cryptocurrency happen. Mark does. So I help in what ways I can. If you believe in your EnCoin idea you should help too, because this is your best bet for it to actually happen. One step closer is vastly superior to nothing at all.

"Mythical" is correct. Your "third option" is just a point close to the boundary line, but still on one side or the other. If the way a resource is allocated matters--if there is any need whatsoever to balance competing demand for it--then it's scarce. Otherwise, it's superabundant. There is no middle ground.

This is a blatant non-sequitur. If businesses can't get loans in BTC because the rate of deflation is higher than the prevailing interest rate, that means BTC is more valuable, and the demand for BTC as payment will be higher, not lower. Businesses are not going to arbitrarily turn away a form of payment which will increase in value after they accept it. The problem (if any) is getting buyers to part with it.

The more typical complaint regarding appreciating currency is that no one will want to spend it, knowing that if they wait it will buy more in the future. Of course, that doesn't take into account that at some point present demand exceeds the net present value of the currency, even if that currency is appreciating, or that the seller can take appreciation into account when setting the price (which generally works out to the seller's benefit, as the party with the lower time preference). There have been markets with consistent relative currency appreciation before (e.g. electronics), and trade didn't come to a halt because of it.

The alternative to scarcity is not necessarily "superabundance", there might be a mythical third option where there is "just enough."


Because an appreciating currency is a bad thing for investment. I've mentioned in other threads, if businesses can't get BTC loans because they are untenable compared to fiat loans, businesses are not going to accept BTC for payment. This means, wait for it, in the real world, BTC is never going to become as popular as it could be. The price fluctuations, up or down, are going to be very unappealing. Instead of BTC bleeding value off of fiat currency to itself, it feeds from its very own instead. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/decrits-proposal-solution-for-an-unbound-energy-related-stable-value-currency-91183 if you have any questions about that, ask in that thread.

Scarcity obviously does matter. The alternative to scarcity is superabundance, and why would you offer goods or services in exchange for something you already have in whatever quantity you happen to need? A currency has to be something people desire, and thus will trade for, and that means it has to be scarce.

Of course, there are different ways of ensuring scarcity. You can trade in something that is inherently scarce, like gold (due to nature) or bitcoins (due to math), or you can take something which is not inherently scarce and use force to make it so, as in fiat currency. This seems like a third way, where the scarcity rests on the difficulty of getting existing currency-holders to agree to devalue their own shares, with no apparent benefit to themselves. I'd say that represents a fairly strong guarantee of scarcity, though why anyone would expect others to prefer it over BTC is a bit of a puzzle.

A system where the people who have the money control the money. Money needs to be a tool, not a scarce resource to be manipulated. It stores value and facilitates trade. The bitcoin mentality has it so ingrained that scarcity matters because that's how gold works, and gold was less abusive because it was somewhat harder to control than fiat. But gold was still controlled very heavily. This control was originally separate from government so you can't go blaming them. The same thing will happen with bitcoin. If it were freicoin, I don't doubt it would happen there too because you will eventually get an upper class that can start manipulating supply--it would be more expensive though.


:shrug: I don't worry about that stuff anymore. Now it's just about refining all of the ideas.

What is a "closed" monetary system? A link to those posts where you show how Bitcoin enslaves people would be helpful. I've just been skimming over the EnCoin stuff until it has a working alpha, and almost entirely tune out the "I discovered Bitcoin's fatal flaw!" posts.

No, hindsight shows that people think that they're not making a mistake when they are. I can posit scenarios which I've done in several threads, but I can't prove anything beyond the fact that the sheep go "baa". Did you actually have a change of heart mid-post? Or did you just remember some bitcoin gospel that says that I must be crazy to think there is any potential problem with the bitcoin monetary system?

Either way, this is a thread about Freibitcoin, and I won't change your mind about anything so I won't waste anymore time.

Ah, so hindsight enslaves people. Interesting.

So here you agree that it is a possibility, and quite easily identify some popular mechanisms for the status quo enslavement.


... and within the span of a sentence doubt yourself. Hindsight is 20/20 cbeast, and most people don't learn very much from history anyway.

Perhaps, but at least they won't enslave people through crony capitalism and printing money with zero percent loans for the elite. In fact, I'm really not sure how they could enslave people at all with Bitcoin. Please enlighten me.