So what profit motive do you have to buy GC at 50% backing over just owning MC?
The motive would be because you want to own GoldCoins, and you believe the escrow fund is still healthy enough to maintain their values. Maybe that will be too risky for some people. For me, 50% does seem dangerously low, but not necessarily destined to crash. I think I'd be just fine with 75% though.
Hopefully I'll have a lot better idea of what level is safe once we create a few unsustainable ones "just to watch them die".
Despite my seeming to have a bias against what I have read so far, to be fair I think one ought to remember the concept of stability aka peg right about here.
Supposedly one of the nice things about a pegged cryptocurrency is that a merchant can accept it from a customer without finding that by the time it is turned to fiat in their bank account it turns out not to be worth what they thought it was when the customer handed it over to them in return for merchandise.
So how long does it have to be stable, in practice, for actual real online shopping use or actual buying of a coffee at a coffeeshop or whatever?
If the merchants are confident that the amount of actual fiat (or actual gold or actual barrels of oil, or whatever it is pegged to) they will end up with by the time they take delivery of the actual [whatever] that it is pegged to will be close to the amount they supposedly were being paid by who-ever they accepted the coin from, isn't that good enough, for the merchants?
If the shoppers considering buying something from a merchant are reasonably confident that the prices the merchant is going to charge them in whatever weird currency the merchant is asking for in return for things the shoppers are considering buying from some merchant who is asking for some weird cryptocurrency instead of the normal fiat the shopper normally uses at their corner-store and to pay their taxes are not going to change by the time they have bought some of the specific cryptocurrency the merchant is asking for, isn't that good enough at least for shoppers who don't happen to stock their pockets with some of each of the hundreds of weird currencies various merchants might or might not turn out to be asking for before setting out on a shopping expedition or surfing some online shops?
What other major use-cases are there for "stable" units of value? Speculators prefer unstable ones, right?
Who in addition to merchants and maybe their customers actually values stability of unit of value in and of itself?
(And how much premium is that preference worth to them?)
-MarkM-