We're all for savings, just not in a way that suppresses other people's ability to exchange and work (to prosper). Not in a way that obstructs competition.
Sorry if I'm repetitive, but costless hoarding (the source of time preference/basic interest) is a barrier to competition as positive capital yields (a form of profit) show. The more competition, the less profit. Until costs equal prices.
What is wrong with costless hoarding? I'm not convinced there is any problem with it. Some people will hoard and some will invest, it all depends on the person and their incentives.
If there is money to be made through investing, people will invest. If not they won't.
That's the central point where we disagree. I claim that because of the basic interest, there's profit to be made through capital competition which is not made so that capital yields can stay above liquidity premium. As you've said before, liquid cash is like an insurance against uncertainty. By the way, you're enjoying this insurance for free, so here's an externality that someone has to pay for. I'll leave who for later. The point now is that won't accept any positive return on your investment. You rationally want a return that is greater to the value of this insurance. That's where the barrier for competition appears. You could make an investment that yields 0.1% and it would still be profitable, but you're just better off keeping the money instead. This barrier to investment creates an artificial scarcity of real capital (it can be education, knowledge or code, just saying real as opposed to money-capital, which is only a symbol of value). This scarcity protects capitalist's profits from competition, another externality. Who pays for all this?
1) Obviously, consumers pay higher prices since the capital profits never disappear through competition.
2) The artificially scarce supply of capital contracts the demand for labor, giving workers lower wages and unemployment.
3) The more hidden and catastrophic cost for the whole of society is that cyclically, when the labor of workers and the audacity of entrepreneurs and investors has lowered capital yields below the liquidity premium, money stops flowing on a positive feedback loop commonly named by its symptom: deflation.
Not part of the previous externalities, but also an indirect effect...Of course, the State tries to fix 2 through counter-productive actions such as minimum wage laws or hiring more public employments. To blindly try to fix 3, Keynes and central banks appear and vainly try to reestablish velocity by driving us into the hyper-inflationary oblivion (at first is only inflationary, but you know, these things accelerate). So instead of destroying enough real capital by cyclically wasting huge amounts of labor and other resources and opportunities so that the yields get back to the minimums required by the liquidity premium, paper currencies without demurrage allow us to cyclically destroy our currencies (even more resources wasted in the process than with gold's deflation) and go back to a national gold standard. This time is different though, since now we're all on paper at the same time.
Sorry for this long summary on how gold can be dangerous for freedom.
People won't hoard if they dont' have some better alternative. Currently hoarding is the status-quo among cryptocoins because there just isn't very much of value to do with the coins themselves.
FRC is obviously a very idealistic experiment, but it's difficult to see how it addresses a real world need. If Bitcoin had demurrage, do you think it would be farther along then it already is? The problem FRC seems to be addressing seems to be a theoretical problem "hoarding", which is not a 'real' problem. Hoarding in CryptoCurrency land isn't (in my opinion) because it's free to hoard/save coins, it's because there is nothing reliable/worthwhile to spend it on.
I get your point, and maybe it was better that "first there was bitcoin" after all. But this is something that we the coin users (well, with the help of our great pool of hackers and entrepreneurs in the community) have to change. We need more merchants accepting them and more users. My hope is that demurrage will help users ask the question to merchants more often "Do you accept FRC? What a pity, I had some of them here that wanted to spend, but, you know what? I'm going to spend them elsewhere."
As we are without any government that would enforce our Bitcoin contracts with Violence, we are left with securing investments between people who don't know each other and who identify each other.
I see "crypto-contracts" (such as the probably fair games that you mention) as a sometimes superior (and others, maybe useless) alternative to legal contracts, but not necessarily as mutually exclusive. I fail to see how a signed legal contract between two private parties is less enforceable when it contains the word "bitcoin". Manually signed contracts can also make digital signatures legally valid. Some countries even provide digital signature systems to their citizens which are legally valid by default (for example, Spain). Maybe, as you say, I'm too idealist, but I see clearly how the future of
monies lies on the internet.