Topic: [ANN] Freicoin: demurrage crypto-currency from the Occupy movement (crowdfund) - page 24. (Read 67963 times)

If I run the freicoin client once a year will I get my portion of the 4.4%?  I would do that.

My first impression of freicoin was 'trick coin'.  The bitcoin elite are hoarders but the want a society with growth.  This is sort of like when the gold standard was lifted and the dollar was free floated. The analogy here is bitcoin is gold and freicoin is USD.

I agree, this concept seems impractical to me because it would cause a huge number of transactions with each block. In fact, the transactions would grow O(n²), with n being the number of account holders.

Depending on the assumption that they somehow manage to force miners to include transactions: No transaction fees, miner income is paid from the demurrage.

Since the miners will probably anyways need a way to know how much money currently is on each account to pull out their annual 4.4%, they'll have to create a huge number of bitdust transactions each block anyways. Maybe they'll need to include currently pending transactions for that? Anyways, the number of inflation transactions is likely much higher for a long time than the number of actual user transactions...

I asked a similar question above and didn't get a reply either. Freicoin can only "work" if you FORCE people to use it.

"Gold is not necessary. I have no interest in gold. We will build a solid state, without an ounce of gold behind it. Anyone who sells above the set prices, let him be marched off to a concentration camp. That's the bastion of money." -- Adolf Hitler

If I want 4% inflation I will leave my money in the bank....

i think demurrage is an interesting idea and has its place, but in lieu of a real response i will post this  

http://www.theonion.com/video/internet-scam-alert-most-kickstarter-projects-just,28655/

I don't get it. If I want to save Bitcoins, and the guy I'm paying wants to save Bitcoins, why would we convert to Freicoins and back just for the transfer? Or any optional inflationary* currency for that matter?

* Demurrage in this case appears to work exactly the same as an increasing block subsidy would.

This is in addition to Bitcoin's current transaction fees, right?  Seems like demurrage would change that fee structure because-- at least in the end game of Bitcoin-- they pay for the system to operate and protect against spam, but with Freicoin you're already paying for the system through demurrage so you just need it for spam protection.

Carry a few extra cents? Or more likely merchants will price their goods at slightly less than whole-dollar values, as they seem to do anyway. It takes about 2 months for $1.00 to turn into 99¢.

"Brother can you spare a dime for the bus?"

"Depends on what time the bus departs."

How does the user get a sane experience when the balance is changing every 10 minutes?

Demurrage is applied uniformly, not based on age (which of course would be easily avoidable). With each found block outstanding outputs are reduced by a factor of 8 x 10**-7 (1/1250000). Once difficulty stabilizes so that blocks are found with an average interval of 10 minutes, the comes to a cumulative rate equivalent to 4.4% annually.

Yes, I'd love to meet up with anyone interested and local. PM me.

Hmm.... How is inactivity defined? What if someone wrote a program to automatically transfer the balance every X number of days?

Track

If you want to erode the value of all coins held, just "print" more of them at whatever percentage you want to erode at.  It's called inflation.  It's no different from your method of forcibly removing a percentage of all holdings and transferring them elsewhere.

The more important question is -- who gets the advantage of those freshly printed or forcibly extracted currency units?

In bitcoin it's the miners; and we bitcoiners all know that.  We understand that that inflation is the tax we pay to the miners for them to secure our holdings for us.  You will presumably not do that (which raises the question of how you're going to secure your coins), and will instead spend on centrally selected winners?

You objected to the Occu because it was centralised; Freicoin is no better, you're just using a decentralised cryptocurrency to funnel money to central point.  I've already got a currency like that it's called "pounds sterling"/"US dollars"/"euro"/$EVERY_OTHER_FIAT_CURRENCY_IN_THE_WORLD.

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I've just read your giant post in more detail.  You are paying the miners the fee.  WTF?  You've made an identical system to bitcoin; but instead of paying miners from inflation you're paying them with a direct tax.  A new question then:

If miners are only paid by taxing existing holdings; how are you going to pay the first miner?  How are the freicoins being issued?  Do we "buy" them from you?

This would actually be funny if you weren't so obviously serious about it.  You've spent a year on this?  You poor deluded fools.

Thats actually a pretty good answer for a leftwinger. You must be one of the 0.0001% within the Occupy movement that actually understands economics.

If you give 4.4% of the value of peoples savings, back to the miners as compensation for their work. But you still have an overall finite number of Freicoins. Then that currency will still be a better savings vehicle than most fiat currencies around the world. Major currencies like the Brazilian Real and the Indian Rupee typically lose around 7% of their value every year.

I wish you the best of luck with the Freicoin project.

Also I probably shouldn't call them inflatacoins as they are actually evaporating like dry ice.  Or rather, decaying like radioactive substances.  Dry ice coins?  Decayingcoins?  Half-life coins?

The current banking system already offers this feature anyway. Open an account at Chase, stick $1000 there, and it will be eroded by fees (e.g. minimum balance fee) until it is gone. Nobody is going to stick their money there even if thoroughly convinced that they are "taking one for the team" (for the whole economy) by doing so.

Besides, how would this work? Mom gives son 35 inflatacoins to pay for soccer registration, but by the time he gets there to sign up, he doesn't have enough because he only has 34.99982731 left.

Sorry, but the whole concept of artificially implementing demurrage into a a mechanism of trade and value storage is antithetical to what having a free-floating value is. It is not a means to keep currency flowing around in the economy, it is a means to have an authority (be it your General Assembly, or your blockchain structure, or your whip-yielders in government) to force the loss of value over time. Those in such an economy, having only the ability to spend to avoid an artificial devaluation of their labor or investment, will actively seek an alternative to that economy. Far from investment in entrepreneurial experimentation, a demurrage-based coin will do nothing but bolster all OTHER currencies as a means to avoid having an external power destroy some of the value of my work.

I salute the outside the box thinking, but the reality is, just as with the Occu, this is just a way for a proto-nomenklatura within the Occupy movement to try to find a way to game the economy and find gross profits for themselves, while cloaked in the rhetoric of the revolution. $ 28,000 for branding and development? You couldn't find one earnest programmer, host or product design expert in the movement who would gladly give you free labor and resources in exchange for being in the bleeding edge cadre of the 99%? Nobody wants to work for pay that declines automatically over time? This sounds more like a creative approach to try to fleece $28,000 out of simple-minded sympathizers who will believe that crowd-funding this kind of absurdity is a blow against the empire. And that smacks of elitism, exploitation and all that Occupy holds evil and wrong.

Still working on that, but it's a different project. Doing it “right” would take a bit of effort, more than Freicoin, so it's on the back burner for now. But we are moving in that direction.

I agree with the premise but not the conclusion. The creation of wealth requires entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship requires capital. In a deflationary universe getting investment requires being able to beat bitcoin's ROI, since the investor's alternative is to buy bitcoin and sit on it. Depending on how bullish you are about bitcoin, that could be a tall order.

With Freicoin, on the other hand, if all you can do is break-even, you are already ahead. It'll be MUCH easier to find investment in Freicoin. (And before anyone says “but you could just buy bitcoins with freicoins!”--that's true, and it will be compensated for by the Bitcoin/Freicoin price.)


A chief value of Freicoin would be in eliminating that inequity--demurrage has a similar pressure as inflation, but is assessed fairly against all. But I do not agree that elimination of inflation entirely is a good thing.


Agreed. But that's why Bitcoin is a non-perishable commodity/store-of-wealth, and will, IMHO, *never* be a viable currency. Bitcoin is valuable for what it is, but it's properties are only well suited for a currency if you believe in the gold standard (I don't).


For inflatacoin/expcoin, yes. Demurrage throws a few kinks in there that make it slightly more difficult in terms of user interface and such since accounts are continuously decreasing in value. But that's not where most of the money will be spent.

The other things we will do is definitively solve the blockchain pruning problem, which is currently being discussed in the technical subforum and would be back-ported to bitcoin, and provide a website, animated video, and marketing materials to explain Freicoin to the non-bitcoin crowd. All of that takes time and money, and for some of resources we don't have in-house.