Author

Topic: Making Bitcoin economically neutral (and a better currency) (Read 578 times)

legendary
Activity: 1153
Merit: 1012
Bitcoin is building momentum, and will soon change finance, ushering out some of the old order, but ushering in some new order as well. Bitcoin is wonderfully democratizing in many ways, but staggeringly autocratic in other ways.

Just like most financial instruments, Bitcoin rewards the rich and the speculative. If someone got it early, and Bitcoin makes it, they're gonna be rich! Also, if you can afford to buy the equipment it takes to mine nowadays, you can scoop up some strong ROI as well.

We can do better.

What if coins were mined when any human did one small piece of digital work? You might think of it as a global minimum wage. ...

I smell the rotten miasma of socialism. No thanks! Socialists' call for more equality are in all cases born out of primitive envy and greed targeted at those people who are successful innovators or entrepreneurs. Socialists want a free ride with no risk or effort involved. They are parasitic in nature and try to degrade freedom and self-empowerment.

Bitcoin rewards the intelligent and courageous. It can't be more fair than that.
newbie
Activity: 2
Merit: 0
Thanks, kanzure. Yeah, so one challenge gmaxwell shared is this:

"[the idea] undermines the decentralization of the system (e.g. by depending on trusting the operators of recaptcha)-- and without that property, p2p cryptocurrency is kind of pointless."

I've share the idea before, there any other useful points of challenge as well.
8up
hero member
Activity: 618
Merit: 500
What are you aiming for? Bitcoin is free to use. It offers choice and competition in the mono-cultural world of "modern" finance.

There is no enemy. Volatility is neither good nor bad - it is pure information. Like the price.

Humanity has to learn to distinguish between the material world (which will always be polar - it's how the universe (our perception) is designed). And the state of empathy/oneness/love.

Fairness has a lot to to with the state of your mind. You can choose to be fair in every kind of system - you don't need to change a system to start beeing "fair"!
newbie
Activity: 13
Merit: 4
You forgot to include a link to the criticism you already received; see https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/6756
newbie
Activity: 2
Merit: 0
Bitcoin is building momentum, and will soon change finance, ushering out some of the old order, but ushering in some new order as well. Bitcoin is wonderfully democratizing in many ways, but staggeringly autocratic in other ways.

Just like most financial instruments, Bitcoin rewards the rich and the speculative. If someone got it early, and Bitcoin makes it, they're gonna be rich! Also, if you can afford to buy the equipment it takes to mine nowadays, you can scoop up some strong ROI as well.

We can do better.

What if coins were mined when any human did one small piece of digital work? You might think of it as a global minimum wage. This digital work would need to be performable by almost any human at almost the same pace and be verifiable by a computer. CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA are good examples; Foldit and Eyewire as well.

If this were true then a whole lot of people would get to work playing Eyewire or digitizing books (reCAPTCHA), minting new Bitcoins as they went, pushing the total volume of Bitcoins up and decreasing their value. Eventually, this digital work would not be worth the time. This would be the floor of Bitcoin's value, and the global bottom minimum wage.

To balance this downward force on the value of Bitcoin there would need to be deminting (destroying) going on somewhere. One option would be to redirect part of the transaction fee to deminting, another would be to set some kind of expiration date on coins. The first option would support savers and the second spenders.

Summary:
1. Mint new coins when people do a small piece of digital work.
2. Miners still verify transaction but they only get transaction fees, no new coins.
3. Coins either have a probability to expire, or a fraction is deleted upon transaction.

Why is this better?

The two forces, minting and deminting would push the value of Bitcoin in opposite directions. This would neutralize volatility. Even if someone speculated that Bitcoin were going to take over finance and they tried to secure their position all they would succeed in doing is temporarily raising the global minimum wage. So, no volatility (technically deminting would need to exactly meet minting to get zero volatility; an interesting technical challenge).

Economic policy is possible by adjusting between rewarding savers or spenders. Personally, I wouldn't touch savers, I'd take the full cost of deminting from transactions, but the option is here technically, or you could split it 50/50.

Doing this wouldn't make anyone rich, which is why it isn't likely to happen, but it would mean having far less volatility, and a bluntly fair and equitable system of exchange.

Critiques welcome. Everything else too, would love to hear thoughts.
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