Topic: Bitcoin vs ideal coin (Read 2475 times)

Bitcoin is definitely far from being an ideal coin. However, it doesn’t mean that it’s not going to be a good alternative currency. In fact, many people are already considering this cryptocurrency as real money.

OP, you might want to think a bit before telling others your fail ideas:
- contract, each coin is a unique - read about fungibility, you don't want each coin special, each coin should be like any other coin, otherwise this is not money, so not a real coin
- No mining needed, Proof of Stake used - bullshit has zero value, you need actual work to secure a coin like Bitcoin, not a cartel of owners profiting at infinitude
- Unlimited - this makes the value drop constantly against other better things... like Bitcoin
- Nobody is rewarded since coins are free - good luck with that, no rewards, no actual value, no value flow into coin
- Promots usage in commerce - how? by making each coin differently valued, with only arbitrary wishes of an oligopoly and making it drop in value even below zero value?
- No volatility - zero value forever is clearly no volatility not even difficulty based reward coins have this (each coin costs the same to make)
- No possibility of tracking, like dollar bills - how do you track dollar bills? or bitcoin?
- Distributed blockchain, no limit on transactions per second - as opposed to what? which coin has centralized blockchain and limits to transactions per second?
- No need to download 100% of blockchain - like bitcoin?
- no mining needed keeps the network decentralized - you force by law that users obey this rule or what?

OP, your ideas are bad and you should feel bad. What you just described is worse than Bitcoin in each aspect presented, it is actually everything that Bitcoin solves, yet you present your version as superior. This is of such intellectual denigration that you should visit your local psychiatric ward and have your head examined before your forum posting licence is returned.

It seems the ideal coin OP described is exactly fiat money, it is a promise that backed by assets from governments, then just use them, no need to do anything

A digital currency backed by gold. Now where have I heard that one before..

Also, backed by gold and unlimited supply?

The money to be considered "coin" should have 3 qualities:

* Be considered an instrument of change:

a) People with bitcoin can exchange it for products/ services.

b) People with services/ products can exchange it for bitcoins

* Be considered a means of payment:

If there were no coin, one would have to have two matches. (if I sell a service, I would need the other one to have a product I wanted and the other way around). If a coin is accepted as a means of payment, the seller would be satisfied by receiveing the payment. The acceptance of the coin is based in trust and habits. The coin has the quality of liberating debts.

* Be considered a means of Value Reserve:

You can store it now and spend it later. People will store money with intentions of transaction, safety and speculation.

I think Bitcoin has the qualities to be considered coin.

A coin would be more usefull for society if its value is stable, as people could predict investments and offer products and services. So, it is a question of more people using bitcoin.

Yes, thats why we got 100 different alt-coins, people have different opinions and goals with crypto currencies.

Today billions of dollars are invested in Gold ETF's on the stock exchange, some of that money would instead be invested in a gold backed crypto currency if such coin existed,
a coin backed by Kitco or Perth Mint. Trillions of dollars are invested in bonds, some issuers could sell coins based on government bonds and corporate bonds.

I know this sounds like going against Satoshi's original idea (a crypto currency living on it's own without a mint), but ironically I think a mint-based crypto will be the best competitor to fiat currencies.

"ideal" coin: peer-to-peer just like bitcoin but we let the mint, a trusted third party, decide the intrinsic value of each issued coin.

OP's idea of "ideal" and my idea of "ideal" are worlds apart.

That said, I fully support alt-coins competing with Bitcoin on the open market. Bring it!

We already HAVE ideal coin.  it's called US Dollar

the problem being, we have to trust the supplier of the note (the US Government) that it's worth something

what happens when China takes over the world.  then what

What does it mean for something to be real?  For something to be physical?  I would argue that the DNA that provides the blueprint to our bodies is both real and physical--each cell in our body contains a redundant copy of this information.  What's important about this DNA is the information that it encodes.  And the distributed nature of this information is what gives life its robustness.  

The bitcoin network is analogous to the network of cells in our body.  As each cell carries a copy of our DNA, each bitcoin node stores and builds upon the blockchain.  Instead of genetic information encoded with amino acids, the blockchain encodes ledger entries using electric charge.  At the physical level then, bitcoins are just as real as a gene sequence in our DNA.  Each transaction is accepted by the cells, and through an innovative process known as mining, they agree to add another amino-acid sequence to the blockchain.  

Based on this analogy, I would argue that bitcoins are more robust than conventional physical objects like a gold coin, and definitely more robust than any living organism.  The robustness is more akin to the robustness of an entire species of animals, for example, ants.  You can try and try, but it's pretty difficult to eliminate all the ants in this world!

Or, looking at it from a different angle, think about that embarrassing picture of a friend that got posted to Facebook and copied/emailed all over the place?  Now even Google finds the darn thing!  Bitcoins stored in the blockchain are like this, but even more so.  I would argue that the blockchain is the most highly-secured piece of information mankind has ever created.  

In conclusion, bitcoins are very real.  

Ideal coin looks like US dollar pre 1971!

why? Every good could be theoretical money. Medium of exchange, value storage and value measurement. Some goods just qualify more for money than others (gold vs. iron or horses)

Money is an information system, if you back it by something physical you are not achieving the ideal.

This would be a nice other altcoin and users could decide. But how do you want to do that for the same low costs? Explain the mechanism
For sure the coins would be not unlimited but limited by the real real ressources.

My ideal coin would have a proof of work with real life usage. Like Curecoin, but better

Agreed.

• On top of that, a backing asset can become more available or scarcer. That in turn influences the value of the coin.
• Every coin in circulation has an asset sitting somewhere doing nothing.
• If for example gold is the most used asset, not everybody finds it equally valuable. Hungry people can't eat it.
• The coins would be a promise to pay the asset. So not the assets make the system work, but the reliability of promises to pay the asset. In turn not assets or needed to have a working currency.
• Some people could issue contract or promises resembling too much value in comparison to the assets backing it up. After all, if people used this system they probably would never claim the backing assets, and thus it can be fiddled with.

True but for the 1st 2 years of Bitcoin, Satoshi controlled obscene amount of total BTC.
Even NXT with only +-70 initial adopters was better distributed.

As for owners of coins earning coins, it's better than miners who can afford most expensive rigs earning coins.
Last I read, GHash.IO which has biggest Bitcoin hashing pool is owned by interests in the city of London.

So with Bitcoin for example, you're already paying $20-40 per year for every $1000 of Bitcoin you own to the City of London based on GHash.IO hashing power. I think the fees being paid back to the actual owners of the coins is a better model.

The dollar was a contract where the issuer promised to hold a certain amount of an asset for each bill issued at some point. And look at it now.

A currency is not a commodity and therefore doesn't need intrinsic value in the form of a backing asset.

PoS rewards early adopters because you have to have coins to gain coins and the early adopters have all the coins.

I agree that POS is an advancement over POW but that might not be enough to unseat Bitcoin.

As for the rest, your post is hysterical! No-one on a crypto-currency forum will fall for an unlimited coin that has centralised counter-party risk, tell your banker friends to try again.

The hoarding argument is false. The US grew rapidly into the largest creditor nation in the world in the 1800's using a slightly deflationary currency.


http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi

Of course using an inflationary currency for the last 100 years has left them in pretty much the opposite predicament today. (Well even worse actually the $ has lost 96%+ of it's value and it's the biggest debtor nation.)

As for being backed by something physical, there's a market for that, like e-gold. But the millennial (Internet) generation has already shown it generally prefers something decentralised that exists in the digital world with less counter-party risks whose existence is verified/validated by the laws of mathematics.

But good luck, so far every iteration of a very inflationary crypto has struggled/failed.

haha well played.  In truth money's value comes from the goods and services it purchases and the faith people have in it. Anything can 'be' money. I could see bitcoin as a viable place to store money in the event there is a major economic disaster, but it needs support from services that can convert between it and other currencies, online marketplaces that will continue to accept it, and I suppose at the very least the government to look the other way, which I suspect they will not do forever. If they said that no company could accept bitcoin... and tigerdirect and overstock.com and every other business vanished.... that could be a problem... that's why this is still the 'wild west'

Yes why not cap the limit at 21 million, pretend we got intrinsic value and reward early adaptors for selling to greater fools in the ponzi scheme.
After all it's safer to pay 1000$ for 1/21 millionth of a ponzi, then to pay 0$ for a blank sheet of paper that could be used to sign a contract for gold, stocks or real estate.