This is longwinded but please take the time to read:
I feel like some of you are being close-minded; somehow equating giving a few cents more buying power to everyone who holds bitcoins, to saving starving human beings in africa. They are not the same, they are not equally beneficial.
In order to save human beings in Africa you have to give them Bitcoin wallets and Internet access. It's certainly possible to do it by crowd funding an Internet cafe, giving Bitcoin wallets, or providing Bitcoin wallets via MPESA.
No one is saying that CounterParty in it's current state will be able to do this. But what I am saying is that when buying power is strong you actually have more power to crowd fund / invest in people who live in places like Africa. When buying power is strong the people who work in the USA can use Bitcoin for remittances back to Africa.
If you dilute Bitcoins by infinite inflation then you reduce the buying power which means the person who has less than 1 Bitcoin (that is actually going to be the majority of the people on planet earth) will have significantly less buying power and most importantly their percentage of shares in the total supply will constantly be shrinking which favors big rich people who can keep buying. Deflation helps the little guy who is willing to save whatever small portion they can afford so that you don't have to keep buying to maintain the same position.
There are roughly 12.3 million bitcoins in circulation (not accounting for lost or deleted coins). Taking 1600 out of 12,300,000 is a difference of 0.000130081300813%
And out of 21 million Bitcoins every person on the planet can have around 0.03. That isn't even 1 Bitcoin. Only around 5 million of the 7 billion people on planet earth will ever get to own a Bitcoin.
Having said all that, no one is saying that 1600 out of 12,300,000 is going to make more of a difference than the millions that will be mined before the block reward halving.
You increased the value of everyones coins by not even a fraction of 1%
Wow, woopdie friggin doo it's so much better that we got that .01% increase than we saved some lives. Good call dudes.
You're missing the point. It's increasing the value of everyones coin by a fraction of 1% but when you generate new altcoins you're actually increasing the total supply of cryptocoins which is actually inflation. If you create 10000 Bitcoin clones and release them then you're affecting the buying power of Bitcoin because people will have to either sell Bitcoins to buy these coins or they'll not buy Bitcoins at all to buy Dogecoins for example. How exactly is that better? It's inflation for inflation sake because Dogecoin could have been mined by Proof of Burn which would mean we wouldn't need any of this.
Saying I don't understand proof-of-burn because I don't agree with it is childish.
So everyone who "understands" proof-of-burn is immediately in love with it? Like understanding old world eugenics makes it a good idea?
You don't agree with Proof of Burn but you think mining is okay? You think it's a good thing that there are 100,000 different altcoins all which have to be mined and all which inflate into infinity? If we used Proof of Burn and just minted the coins similar to how CounterParty is doing it then all those altcoins wouldn't have to negatively impact the price of Bitcoin or artificially inflate through mining.
So the real problem is Proof of Work mining. The real problem is inflation. Proof of Burn avoids Proof of Work and inflation and does it without requiring we trust a central party. It solves two problems in a very efficient way.
understanding != accepting
And the comments of "it's so the developers don't run off with it!" are baseless because we already discussed the concept of DAC's and/or bounties.
The funds don't have to go to the developers, but they could be used to fund future bounties by a community system.
I actually proposed a bounty system to the developers. If they built the system I proposed then we can say that CounterParty will have funding but as of right now it's not built so we cannot discuss it until it's built.
This is going up against Ethereum.
Ethereum with its big public flashy IPO, which will have millions of dollars to hire, develop and promote a very similar system.
I actually believed Ethereum would be successful until I learned that they are going the mining route and will have infinite inflation. There is no cap on the amount of ethers.
Knowing this, I don't believe Ethereum can work. If you can secure the network without mining and without inflation that is technologically better. You can have no cap and still make it work but the inflation rate has to be extremely low. Peercoin for example has no cap but the inflation rate is lower than Litecoin so it's eventually going to work out in Peercoin's favor.
Ethereum from what I understand of it has no cap and has an insanely high inflation rate for no apparent reason. They need to either make the inflation rate extremely low by design (Peercoin has a good algorithm to limit inflation and they should look at that), or they should go with a strict cap and mint every coin over a period of time either by Proof of Burn or by a crowd funding address like with angelshares or exodus. The way it's looking right now Ethereum has a lot of changes to make.
You want this coin to succeed? Well you aren't making a very good case for it.
It's not a coin, it's a platform. I'll use it if it's useful. I proposed an idea to help the development team in private. If they go with that then the spec is laid out for them as to how to do a decentralized autonomous bounty distribution.
I'm not saying that handing money over no-strings-attached to the developers is a good idea.
But at least I'm trying to think of ways to help. Unlike some asshats who think the original devs were infallible in their logic behind proof-of-burn and that we should never question anything because everything was created perfectly.
You've done nothing to discredit the logic of Proof of Burn. Proof of Burn does everything we want it to do and is a proven success. 1600 Bitcoins have been burned.
In my opinion Proof of work mining is what is wasteful. You're telling me that having people buy CPUs and GPUs to calculate worthless numbers is somehow more useful than burning Bitcoins? Proof of X is just about some kind of sacrifice or cost. Burning Bitcoins is a cost, burning CPU cycles is a cost, burning GPU cycles is a cost, you could even give people chess puzzles to solve and that would be a cost.
lulz, their new .01% increased buying power is surely going to solve a few problems in many lives.
Why should you give to charity indeed... how dare other people or animals find themselves in need of help.
If you want to give to charity why not just give your dollars to charity? Dollars don't have volatility and are currently still a better store of value. It's true that Bitcoins price is going up quicker but that is because it's in the exponential growth phase.
Inflation is what makes something a poor store of value. Mastercoin currently is an excellent store of value. If it becomes useful it will be the best store of value (far better than Bitcoin) because your shares in the Mastercoin protocol will never be diluted.
The same can be said about CounterParty. If you buy XCP through Proof of Burn rather than mining then you know after the IPO that you'll never have to worry about your shares being diluted. People do not want their shares to be diluted through inflation.
If you bought a stock issued by a company and toward the end of the IPO some guy posts on a forum that not enough stock was issued, that there wasn't enough time and that we need to issue more stock at the last minute, all the people who purchased the stock expecting it to be a good store of value and not to inflate are going to feel scammed if at the last minute developers change their mind and decide to dilute everyone's shares.
Why is it wrong to do this? Because the only measurement which matters is the percentage of shares out of the entire supply that you own. If the supply keeps growing then your percentage keeps shrinking which means you have to keep spending more and more to keep from losing your position. At that point it starts to look like a pyramid scheme or something.
That is why you want to have a fixed supply with minimal inflation or a fixed supply with no inflation. There is no reason to have inflation post-IPO. And I don't see a better way of doing it than Proof of Burn, your idea clearly wasn't better because it asks for increased centralization, trust, and inflation, all the stuff we don't want.
