Snip - planning to get back to these points later...for better or worse depending on my mood...
Anything cold serve as a 'reserve currency' that met the demands of those using it.
That's true enough, taken alone. usually such need-meeting things have a set of common characteristics that lead most people to collectively refer to such things as "money". So deliberately creating a currency that is the reverse of good money seems like a poor design decision.
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In this case I think that the most critical aspect would be that people trust it. A good part of my design philosophy here is to reduce the reason for people _not_ to trust it and/or trust it more than other things as a basis for notation.
So that I am clear on this, are you trying to move the trust metric away from the unit of currency? Bitcoin tries to eleminate the need for trusted intermediaries and onto the collective protocol & network; are you trying to create a currency that no one trusts for anything
It is a misnomer to think of 'bakcoin' as money or currency at all. If anything, it is simply a notational instrument that helps gauge the popularity of crypto-currency solutions.
or are you trying to move the trust onto the exchanges that would be using bakcoin to start their own smaller cryptocurrencies?
The bold part is as close as one can come to encapsulating the very core goal of the project.
The 'exchanges' part are not really a factor, and not of much interest to me personally. The free market will work things out in this respect. Hopefully most people who are particularly interested in exchanges would not find bakcoin very appealing and would mainly ignore it.
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My document currently does not expand on the concept that all of the 'sponsored exchange currencies' may gain some significant advantages by sharing the workload or supporting bakcoin. For instance, they can use it as a free-form notepad (of modest size) and everyone will be securing everyone else's notes. So, there may be other advantages that gold or seashells don't really provide.
I see a number of reasons that I wouldn't trust it for anything, based on just your implied design. If I, as an end user wouldn't trust it as a medium of exchange, why would I trust an exchange that used it as a backing for their own vanity cryptocurrency? In turn, why should the exchanges trust it, or each other?
Trust in just about anything has a significant 'monkey see, monkey do' component. That's why Au which is actually quite useless is highly sought after. (Parenthetically, I contend that the very simple nature of a chunk of gold has more than a little to do with it's reliability and thus the trust that it can muster. This gets back to my 'simpler is better' philosophy.)
Trust can evaporate very quickly if people get burnt by trusting something, or see other monkeys getting burnt. Indeed, my trust in many of the efforts to centralize control of masses of BTC value is quite low due to a fairly impressive legacy of fail here. Similarly, I have more than a small amount of suspicion of those who make a profit by snatching fractions of BTC as they pass through time and space. That renders the Bitcoin solution close to par with existing fiat solutions at a functional level and from the standpoint of the user (me.)
Yes, I considered jumping on-board and gearing up to run transfer nodes in a datacenter for fun and profit. I still might, but the reality is that it is not my thing and I believe I would feel better about applying any effort I might put into crypto-currencies in a different direction.
