@Sunny King
As Imapler has said, I was assuming a risk free loan. So the options if you're paid with freicoin and don't want plan to spend them soon would be:
1) 0% risk free loan
2) loan at risk for some interest
3) convert them to bitcoins and hoard them.
You're assuming that the third option is free, but it has costs too. Apart from the exchange's fee, you will lose something from the spread between bids and asks.
Good. Now we can focus on the concept of basic interest. First of all I don't agree that basic interest constitute 'usury' and should be eliminated. When I lend money out, even if it's completely risk free (although I doubt there is such a thing but that's another topic), I still sacrificed my ability to use these money as I wish at any time if instead I just kept them. So why shouldn't I be compensated for the sacrifice?
To complete other answers...When you receive money, you've made some good to society (to someone) and you deserve to be compensated back. But why does the rest of society have to wait for you to decide how? How long should we wait?
Maybe you could argue that under perfect competition that the rate should be tending to 0%, then again I don't see how demurrage is going to help much at all.
As I explained you before, the basic interest represents an artificial barrier for investments that causes unemployment, higher prices for products, rents (unearned income) and cycles. This is how production goods owners (capitalists) benefit from the operation of capital-money:
http://www.community-exchange.org/docs/Gesell/en/neo/part5/4.htmCan you tell what's the 'basic interest rate' under the current fiat system? I am sorry but no the US treasury is not risk-free to me
The other issue is that even if you can manage to lower basic interest rate with demurrage, why is it such a good thing? If we say that the current fiat system with central banking already reduced real (basic) interest rate to negative, so isn't that already a solved problem (albeit through state coersion)? So I assume that advocates of Gesell's theory all agree that central banking with fiat is a superior system than gold because it can lower basic interest rate? Instead I could argue it's bad because it distorts the free market interest rate and encourages a debt society which has it's own set of malaises.
They achieve low interest by manipulating the financial market. There's no interest free loans for everyone though, just for the privileged banking cartel.
Even if that were the case, they just moving the rents somewhere else, not suppressing it. But basically is just that, market manipulation is always wrong and has unintended consequences. Besides it is not sustainable. Here's Gesell predicting the hyperinflationary collapse of the current monetary system (global fiat paper without demurrage):
http://www.community-exchange.org/docs/Gesell/en/neo/part3/13.htmTo reiterate, our aim is to suppress unearned income.
Regarding demurrage: Sorry if that question was asked already - why 4%/year and not 3%? As far as I understand, the purpose of demurrage is to create a strong inflationary force to prevent large capital to build up within the freicoin money supply and thus limit it's use to money-as-exchange. But how does that help freicoin compete against currencies like bitcoin, where you have have both properties? Aren't you effectively "removing" a property from the currency and claim that this is beneficial for other properties?
I recommend to read the whole book or at least the three parts on money, but in this chapter he explains the 4-5% number:
http://www.community-exchange.org/docs/Gesell/en/neo/part5/8.htmThe other question...I just don't think that a money needs to store value.
Regarding market capitalization: With money-as-value you asymptotically increase market capitalization until a saturation point. Ideally the market capitalization is high, which makes it impossible for anyone to manipulate the price levels easily. How does this work in a system where you systematically converge against a low market capitalization (since you have no store-of-value)? Don't you expose yourself to serious economic attack vectors?
To complete Mark's answer, since there will be less speculation (practically reduced to arbitrage), there will be less opportunities to manipulate markets. Why there will be less speculation? Because they will be losing money while sitting on cash. People won't sell their investments so quickly if they don't know where their putting their money later. Maybe this helps:
http://www.community-exchange.org/docs/Gesell/en/neo/part4/5f.htm