Stablecoin
With Stablecoin, you have the same bitcoin like program and exchange as with Goldcoin with only a couple modifications.
The exchange is in USD. However, instead of targeting USD directly, we target a specific date. Let's say we use the date Stablecoin comes into existence. From then on, we keep track of how much USD has inflated/deflated using something like CPI or the Billion Price Index or even a combination of indices. If USD inflates say 1% we increase the target to $1.01 for one Stablecoin. On the other hand, if USD deflates by 1% we target $0.99 for one Stablecoin. Over time the increase and decreases would be added together to get some strange multiple as the target for Stablecoin.
The ultimate goal for Stablecoin would be to target a value not a price, and thus never inflate or deflate over time.
Stablecoin would be a great benefit to any merchant. They could simply price their goods and services in Stablecoin once, and never have to change the price again. They also know, no matter how long they hold Stablecoin, the value of Stablecoin would never increase or decrease significantly. If it does, they can wait until it makes it back to it's target.
Once Stablecoin is used to price goods and services online, you could then drop the use of CPI and Billion Price index and simply use a basket of goods priced in Stablecoin. If merchants start charging more or less on average for their goods, Stablecoin could adjust the number of coins accordingly.
Stablecoin could become the perfect currency for merchants. Which would make Stablecoin perfect for customers who want to buy from those merchants. Once enough merchants and customers adopt Stablecoin, everyone else would follow.
I very much like the idea of stablecoin. This would be a version of bitcoin that's better suited for commerce than the original. In order to use a currency in commerce, stability is very important. No merchant wants to constantly have to change prices.
What I do not like in your proposal (and in your subsequent amendment to 1971 coins) is the proposal to target a certain dollar value. Someone said Euro would be better, but I think we could do away with targeting a fiat currency value altogether.
We would need a good way to release more coins into circulation (which is available in the bitcoin software, as it is).
We also need a good way to lower the number of coins in circulation, in case the user base contracts. jtimon has proposed to do this by introducing demurrage, i.e. to take a small percentage of the amount transferred at the moment of transfer, and to destroy that small percentage. The percentage would increase depending on the time the coin had been held onto before being spent, making demurrage a powerful incentive to not hold on to stablecoins but to actually use them in commerce.
How to achieve stability without external inputThe way to have a stable currency without the need for either a price index or a steward of the currency holding the value constant, is to target a fixed ratio between the size of the stablecoin economy and the total number of stablecoins extant. It is not really important what value that ratio produces, the important thing is that the ratio can be kept stable with only internal inputs.
The inputs we would need are:
- volume of trades in a determined time interval (I believe the system can supply that data).
- number of coins existing at the moment (also a system internal datum)
Using a fixed ratio (I am saying just for example 1:10 but it could be anything that's decided) we can now calculate the target amount of coins. 5,640 in trade would give us a target of 56,400 coins. Please don't hold me to the numbers, it's just a made up example.
Since demurrage is constantly lowering the amount of coins in existence, we can now adjust the degree of difficulty of creation of new coins to get us as close to the targeted coins total as possible.
Since we have the volume of trades as an internal input, we can constantly update the targeted coins total.
Since the value of a currency depends on the number of coins times velocity of circulation in relation to the volume of trade, we have a reasonably stable currency that does not depend on external inputs.
We do not know what the value of each coin will turn out to be before putting this in practice, but it is of no concern because all we want is stability of the value of each coin over time.
Could that work?