Topic: Bitcoin trades the inequity of dynastic power for the inequity of early adoption - page 12. (Read 11076 times)

To pay for mining, you can either tax the holders of coins (through minting new coins) or the users of coins (through TX fees). For a variety of reasons, I would rather tax holders than users of a currency.

BTC mining is supported at first with a tax on holders in the mining phase and then changes to a tax on transactions after the mining phase. This is not my preference. If you stick with taxing holders of currency, you give better incentive to use it and you prevent the "ponzi scheme" characteristics of Satoshi or the Winklevosses owning > 1% of your economy for all time.

On top of this, PPC coin uses proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work, which makes mining much cheaper in the first place and less vulnerable to attack by owners of large amounts of TH/s. It's a strictly superior system.

Frankly, it doesn't matter how you disperse the coins. In a capitalist economy, money is always going to flow out of the hands of those who are worse at handling it, into the hands of those willing to take risks and know how to manage money. It's a meritocracy, where losing your place is easy, and gaining it anew is hard. Ask Donald Trump.

Fire away red... This is great ..

I came here ( to bitcoins ) by curiosity

I am getting educated in practical cryptography, communism, hoarding, emotions, economy and a lot more

Wow !!!

It's also problematic in cryptocurrency, because anonymity as a system design principle means that Sybil shenanigans are trivial.

It turns out the the computing power to coin relationship is a red herring. More people doing something completely unnecessary doesn't create more value.

Currency value must be bound to real world economic value. A loaf of bread today needs to trade for pretty close to a loaf of bread tomorrow. Otherwise, as you pointed out at the beginning you get into a hoard and dump mindset. Not exactly the point of a "currency"

If a million more people want to trade loaves of bread tomorrow you're going to need more coins to enable the transactions. If they eat all the bread, you may need less coins to rectify the glut. The real interesting questions are where to do they come from, and where do they go?


There have been some really interesting an maddening threads in the past. A french guy proposed what he called the Universal Dividend. Everyone should get coins every year just for being alive. He argued it evened out the early adopter problem. I argued against him!

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/universal-dividend-796

(UD is a proposed real world solution that goes way beyond bit coin!)

Personally, I'm really excited about colored coins, since they'd allow a single blockchain (read: unified infrastructure) to handle all of the different digital assets in question.

Exactly.  Another point to add here that most miss is the inclusion of technical expertise required to maximize gains for the small player.  You can play small in this game, but unlike the old-school fiat capitalization game, when you play small here you can further increase your gains with small amounts of technical expertise that might have previously been learned from another field or hobby.  i.e. if you enjoy both A) building rigs and B) burning out video cards, then mining is appealing at any profit level.

In other words, even an S-Curve model like Kárhozat proposed would still have the tail of the S, which you argue will be indistinguishable from Bitcoin's logarithmic curve once you get past the bend.

Decent argument, unless the bend is placed such that the currency must be assumed to be either widely known (so that you can credibly state that people "had their chance") or dead.

(Like I said earlier, the placement of the bend is the trick here.)

I like LETS. Cyclos has some promise also:

http://www.cyclos.org

One argument against the Shamir paper. A large bit coin balance and NO transactions could be just pure neglect or a screwed up hard disk with NO back up

I've read it on reddit..one chappie lost 5 or 10 thousand coins and still had 5000 left on another hard disk / machine that he cashed at around 200 per coin and became a millionaire

I don't think  the lost 10 thousand had any transaction , but essentially is NOT an evil get rich hoarder

Having said that I am all against evil get rich schemes

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One way of diffusing that "get rich" idea is to start alternate crypto currencies

Call them litecoins. Call them ripples call them what you want

Already there are venture capitalists investing in the ripples

If you look at hoarding value of bit coins - say anywhere between 0.5 to 1 billion USD as of date versus 'the actual commerce day to day ...again as of date,  the actual commerce would be nothing

Amounts traded on mt gox could be 100 x amounts used to order any of the goods or services including shady drugs

Bit coins don't even have the ornamental value that gold has

So bit coins are just being hoarded ...not just by early adopters, but by who ever buys this tulip mania including many a chappie having just 5 or 10 coins and holding on to it for dear life

True ...lite coins and ripples are much less accepted in real commerce as of date,  but you..me...late adopters...any large store chain...or the  bunch of venture capitalists behind ripples and others behind other currencies could easily reverse that situation ( of better commercial adaptability for the next crypto currency )

I'm beginning to believe that the bitcoin experiment has been allowed to survive so far and even the FINCEN paper has sort of regulated and NOT banned crypto currencies for this precise reason ..this is an experiment and more is yet to come . There is more drama left and we have seen only the first few scenes here

It would need to, or we'd rapidly hit that bound, and then new users would come in and post threads like this one, whining about the early adopters having all the coins.

Thanks Coincrazy.

Of course bitcoin's transaction graph is the implementation of that central party. However the task of recording entries into the transaction graph is distributed via random chance.

The major difference between LETS and bitcoin is that LETS usually presumes that everyone is non-anonymous.

I mention LETS not as a possible replacement to Bitcoin but as a concrete example that stable value (or unbounded coin) implementations are indeed within reasonable possibility.

I've written threads on stable money before. There have been three possible implementation proposed that I know of GEM, EnCoin, Decrits.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/gem-as-a-potential-stable-value-currency-47628
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/encoin-proposal-v40-scads-of-technical-details-now-with-a-wiki-49683
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/decrits-proposal-solution-for-an-unbound-energy-related-stable-value-currency-91183

I'm partial but I like my GEM discussion best. I think it's easiest to follow.

But in general I think stabilizing currency values based on energy use is un-necessary.
I've been working on some new ideas for stabilizing values while preserving the anonymous nature of bitcoin.

NOTE: I'm not a crypto anarchist. I came to bitcoin because I want to preserve the anonymous nature of physical cash, in an internet environment. Privacy is under greater threat than my money will ever be under.

Is your objection that the monetary base would grow without bound?

Do elucidate as it seems you've jumped to an erroneous conclusion about what I proposed.

Mathematics isn't your strong suit, is it?

5 minutes and a bar napkin should tell you why not.

Right, so why not do the inverse? The more users the easier to generate? The way things have been done the distribution is so ridiculously skewed to a tiny base of early users it is a systemic risk.

Difficulty is high because hashpower is high. It has nothing to do with the total # of coins mined.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-and-me-hal-finney-155054

Thanks for pointing me towards this - everybody should be required to read the inspiring story of the first miner before crying about current exchange rates etc.

The Shamir paper makes it clear that early adopters went to significant lengths to hide the true extent of their hoarding of Bitcoins. frankly the more you look into the history of Bitcoin, its origins, and the actions of the early players, the more it seems like a big trojan horse.

Send some my way please! I have almost none as I was not fortunate enough to be able to pay for expensive mining equipment and don't have enough wealth to buy my way in. You will be distributing them in a more fair manner this way. Share the wealth my friend. Very much appreciated!

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