Topic: PPCoin is the only ALTcoin - page 4. (Read 15080 times)

Once again. Bitcoin is not deflationary.

Right now it is inflationary, increasing at ~10% yearly.

Once it reaches 21 million units, the amount of units will not change, unless you account for lost/destroyed coins.


Firstly, money has different value to different people. Everybody has a unique demand for money relative to how they value it against what they must trade for the money.

For example, a thirsty man in the desert would likely trade more bitcoins for a sip of water than would a man who has a water well on his property.

A market value for money is only established after individual value assessment of buyers and sellers are considered.

Secondly, now that we understand that money cannot keep its value static over time, because we know that this value is not actually measurable, and that demand/supply schedules will change as exchanges are made, we must consider the idea that a perfect money does change its market "value."

The changing market valuation of money plays an important role in the economy.

Lower interest rates signal to entrepreneurs that there are savers in the economy, with a time preference to spend later, not now. These entrepreneurs may decide to embark on grander endeavors because they know that there will be sufficient demand in the future.

On the other hand, when consumption increases, the interest rates will rise, as lenders compete to attract borrowers. There is a time preference to spend money now, and less of a savings pool will be collected for future spending.



Money must be able to change its value in accordance with market forces. Otherwise, the prices of all goods would be badly skewed.

Imagine if a bitcoin was always worth 1 gallon of milk, 1 hamburger, or 1 t-shirt, and that this value did not change.

What do you think would happen to the economy if an epidemic caused a shortage of cow livestock? In this hypothetical there is a shortage of cows, which means a shortage of milk and beef. Milk and burgers should cost more in terms of money units, assuming that demand has not changed. But with some external force pegging bitcoin to 1 gallon of milk, the milkmen and burger flippers would be getting a bad deal.

I think the value/worth of a currency should not change over time - that's when you know you've created a golden system. The purpose of currency and money is to facilitate trade, and also as a store of value that remains for the excess work you have contributed to the economy. If currency rises in value (deflation) then it will take away from the trade facilitation aspect as people will hoard, if a currency loses value (inflation) then it will take away from the store of value aspect. The perfect money should find a middle ground between these two aspects, which gold has done remarkably well in history, and which is why it is so beloved my people who understand money.

So, a bit of extra money coming into the system is good as long as it stays in line with the general economy/population growth. The current system has abused this system, and way more money is coming in than any sort of growth in the economy. That's why fiat is coming crashing down.

Question about this: Is nothing really at stake? To POS mine, you need to have a decent chunk of coins. If there's honest chain A and attack chain B, I do agree that a rational miner doesn't waste any of his coin-age mining on both chains, though he would waste hashing if the coin were using POW. However, it doesn't seem completely free to me to mine on chain B, you still need a client running to work on POS blocks for that chain which consumes a bit of resources I believe, but more importantly it seems you risk compromising the value of your coins on chain A. Miners have an incentive to preserve the value of their coins, and since POS mining requires quite a few coins that is not negligible and attacking the chain for no good reason is victimizing oneself. Does this make sense, or am I missing something?

On an unrelated note, I believe this talk of ppcoin being inflationary is nonsense. A currency whose money supply increases a maximum of 1% per year (but in actuality quite a bit less due to coins not used for stake, transaction fees, and lost coins) is not what I would consider inflationary. Furthermore, the coins generated from the 1% increase in money supply are rewarded to the coin holders, which doesn't create any additional incentive to spend (either a good or bad thing depending on your econ school of thought I think). With USD, money supply increases much greater than 1% per year on average, and any new dollars created are spent by the government, not by the people who hold dollars. Therefore, holders of dollars have an incentive to spend, knowing their $100 could buy 100 widgets today but probably only 95 widgets in a year or two. This is why, as I understand, most mainstream economists see inflation as a good thing - it encourages spending and thereby increases GDP (not necessarily a good thing). With PPCoin, that's not going to happen. See Freicoin if you want a coin that does that, not that I'm a fan of their model.

I have not checked out Freicoin, I heard something bad like its either premined/dead/51%'ed/scam or something of that sort but probably worth a look considering all the BS flying around on these forums.

Me neither. Then factor in TRC does nothing new that Bitcoin or Litecoin don't do already, whereas PPC takes an innovative approach and has it's own unique advantages (e.g. energy efficiency+ proof of stake). Energy efficiency is a going to be a biggie in years to come, when Bitcoins are commonplace people will look at the billions of units of electricity being wasted and look for a 'greener' alternative.

Fiat's value is usually guaranteed by the government by using law and police/military force, but those are forced trust. (And that trust will disappear when the government went insolvent)  If you have choice, you will select a volunteered trust instead of a forced trust

I don't have it, and I don't want it, if you are a friend of FED, you will get it for sure

Did you check freicoin? They also seem to try addressing same problems which you mention here, but different way. So, it is also not just a clone of bitcoin.

Right to the point.  The long term future depends on the quality of design.

is it because PP inflates, and no limit

Don't look for too much sense in the valuation of altcoins at the moment, it's pretty much driven by crowd mentality and pump & dumpers at BTC-e for now. The good ones will rise, bad ones will fail eventually when the craze dies down.

I don't get why TRC is currently worth more than PPC. They are both speculation coins, acceptance is pretty much non existing.

That's not true, 'fiat' is worth a great deal, you may not like it but you can buy anything with it.  The world is run by it.

I see ppc as high risk high potential gain. 

I'm have 5% in PPC, 10% in LTC and the rest in BTC

I'll admit I don't know enough technical details to really comment on how 'future-proof' PPCoin is, but my point was that it was an actual alternative that provided enough differences in ideology and code to serve as a real Plan B if the whole Bitcoin experiment met a critical flaw. It still seems PPC is in its infancy so I think its healthier to discuss its potential as a theory rather than how its performing current day. Hopefully the new round of attention will help boost development on it, or a similar fork that addresses its problems if necessary.

I'm certainly not going to sit here and defend Paul Krugman and his flawed Keynesian principles either (that experiment is failing before our very eyes), but I do believe that the built-in deflation in Bitcoin is too extreme, even gold which Austrian economists swear by experiences 2,500 tons of new gold mining supply every year added on top of a 180,000 tons stockpile (there's also recycled gold which hits the markets when price rises too much).

 As for the energy aspect, it might not seem a problem now to have to extend such energy to keep it running, but looking at world trends one can't help but worry if it will be a problem one day in the distant future. And I've heard claims that transactions fees are what will give miners incentive to keep mining after no new currency is left, but I'm not sure how the promise of extremely low transaction fees and ever-rising electricity costs go hand in hand (even today there seems to be a 5 cent + transaction fee if you want to get your transaction through in a reliable manner, so how much will that become when there's much less miners, more transactions, and higher electricity costs?).

Literally just did a facepalm.

How is he employed by Forbes?

Can I have all your "worthless" fiat then? 

Maybe you can use this argument to go sort out Paul Krugman....

Or better yet - please go post a comment on this dumbass' article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2013/04/05/krugman-baby-sitting-co-op-bitcoin/

Just read the PPcoin paper, seems quite complex. Little energy consumption and inflative, sounds more like a fiat currency

There are huge problems with cheap and inflative money, that's the reason bitcoin is so different, it is designed to be an expensive and deflative currency. One of the most foundamental support for bitcoin's value is its energy cost, current value is an estimation of the total energy cost for daily output

If you don't use any energy to create the money, then the money itself worth nothing, just like fiat

This is actually another potential danger with PPC's difficulty algorithm -- someone with a very large hash rate can buy hundreds of thousands of PPC and then hit the network hash rate very hard for a few days.  Because difficultly increases AND reward decreases, the supply will be restricted severely for everyone than would be for just bitcoin.


Still, to achieve a 16x increase in difficulty is difficulty for most miners... except for a large one like ASICMiner.  If ASICMINER, with 7 TH/s, were to buy a ton of PPC under the table from someone and then suddenly hop onto the PPC network, they could very easily completely destroy the supply of PPC for normal miners and drive up the price so long as people didn't quickly catch on to what was happening.  Then they could dump their massive stock of PPC, hop off the network, and let the whole chain enter an inflationary spiral.

The same could be said for BTC or LTC, but the problem is exacerbated by the manipulation of both subsidy and difficulty at the same time by miners.

  more ZEROs is a good thing!