The same 'consumability' issue exists for Darkcoin of course.
I think, in the context of monetary properties, the term "unconsumability" refers to the coin's lack of domestic or industrial utility......
That's exactly what happened in my XCP example. Evidently some people valued the utility of Counterparty more highly than Bitcoin, and therefore took 2130 Bitcoins out of circulation. They were 'hard' consumed, or removed from circulation permanently. As you well know, Darkcoin has another problem in that the coin has a utility as a security token for operating a masternode. This extra utility leads to 'soft' consumption where the coins stay parked in 1000 tx vin increments on the blockchain. So my 2 cents would be to drop the 'unconsumability' comparison.....
You make some interesting points.
I hadn't thought of it that way because I regarded Counterparty's "proof of burn" well and Darkcoin's masternode security as still performing a monetary function. But your right that strictly speaking, those coins are removed from circulation so it does adversely affect "unconsumability".
Think I'll have to go off and digest that. Thanks for pointing out !
Good discussion gentlemen; If I may be so bold as to offer a refinement here (no pun intended;-). I believe in a monetary sense, that we may be confusing the concept of unconsumability, with the idea of indestructibility. As I understand it the idea was originally used to qualify why gold made a good monetary medium, while eggs did not. The point was not (as I understand it) that gold could not be destroyed or lost, but rather its intrinsic nature was permanence. Whether eggs were consumed, rotted, or thrown at neighbors houses, was not the point, it was that gold being relatively permanent, could be counted on to retain value, and that there was no
intrinsic drain on supply. This was not construed to imply that heavily laden ships of the Spanish Armada could not sink, and their contents effectively removed from circulation. That gold was not "consumed" in any normal sense of the term, but it was lost.
The same can be said for both DRK and BTC; they can (and have been lost) but they are not consumed in their use as monetary instruments. The case of burning BTC or DRK does not argue against this understanding. It would be as if someone said, "If you give your gold coin to Neptune by throwing it from the deck of the ship so that this storm may pass, I will let you marry my daughter if we reach port." The fact that the gold was removed from circulation does not argue against the nonconsumable nature of gold as a monetary instrument.
FWIW...
