Topic: rpietila Altcoin Observer - page 11. (Read 387455 times)

Perfect distribution would be achieved in an economy with a GINI of 1.0

But that ain't gonna happen.  Last time I looked, the USA has a GINI of about 0.41.

Bitcoin's distribution is somewhere around GINI 0.86 IIRC.

What is "perfect" distribution? Is it a power law distribution?

While this is true for fiat held in bank accounts it is not the case when fiat is held as cash.  Some of us are old enough to remember the days when a significant proportion of the population held their fiat as cash, and cash was the primary method used for day to day transactions. In addition securities were also in many cases held as bearer instruments. It is only in the last 40 years that fiat has changed in this way.

By the way XBT and XMR are also vulnerable to this issue. Holding XBT on deposit with MtGox is like holding EUR on deposit in  Cypriot bank. Holding XBT on the blockchain is like holding EUR is one's pocket. A similar argument can be made for XMR.

The one advantage that XBT and XMR has over fiat is that it is possible to securely hold substantial amounts in "cash" form, provided that one takes some simple but unpopular precautions. One has say a flat no to DRM infected propriety operating systems such as those sold licensed by Microsoft and Apple, and only use FLOSS operating systems such as GNU/Linux and rooted Android.

Edit: Why someone will blindly trust Microsoft or Apple, and at the same time not trust the NSA or GHCQ, with their data defies any rational explanation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29#mediaviewer/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg.

Especially including fiat currencies.

The main difference with fiats vs. BTC is that practically all fiats in the world are controlled by a small clique, who use the BIS (Bank of International Settlements) as their front. Even if somebody had an inordinate sum in his bank accounts, he does not have any control over it. It can be frozen or deleted by the decision of BIS (or by many other bodies).

With BTC, some have more than the others, but nobody can control what the others do with their own. This is freedom.

105 Bitcoin Addresses own 2milion BTC total(avg 20% of BTC supply). No currency on earth has perfect distribution, it's impossible(including FIAT currencies). As you can see Bitcoin's distribution is not close to perfect(Satoshi owns 1million coins himself, and the like).

As long as a currency doesn't have a really screwed up distribution(Like darkcoin and the like), then I deem it fair.

In order to do that, you need to set the right exchange ratio. If it is 1:1, then it will make XMR a muiltibillon coin quickly.

It's targeted distribution. If XCoin has been fairly distributed and fits your target demographic, you can just piggyback on that fair distribution and target your product (YCoin) at them by giving YCoin to XCoin-holders in the same proportion that XCoin-holders hold XCoin.

If you look at all coins as DACs, then mining is a wasteful, expensive activity. If you can achieve fair distribution at another coin's expense, why not just use their blockchain to distribute your coin?

Monero for example, could've just said "OK, bitcoin is fairly distributed. Send bitcoin to this address and you will get XMR. And because XBT is fairly distributed, then XMR will be fairly distributed as well." And then there could still have tail emission with XMR's mining algorithm (1% inflation target per year afterwards). But you would've been able to skip the main emission period (80% mined in 4 years) and save a lot of time by moving directly to tail emission. In addition, you could've said "And we're reserving 1.5% of all coins for the development fund."

NXT, Bitshares, Counterparty, Ethereum, etc. have all piggybacked on bitcoin's distribution in one way or another.

I don't understand the insight & conclusion and can't see the consequence & implied recommendations of point 1.

Point 2 and 3 are very basic general knowledge.
(AFAIK at least for everybody with an professional or educational business background or everyone doing systematic research (or just longer thinking) about altcoins & crypto currencies.)

Looking at 2-10, each one has had some shady event(s) in its history.

That's a pretty good summary to me.

I'd also add that time after time Larimar has stated Bitshares would be X and changed it to Z. I'm guessing at each change too some nice profit ended up in his pocket.

Good post in Speculation subforum re alts: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.10675534

Being here you just have to open your eyes to see what kind of scamfest it is.

Looking at the top 20 coins you can find at least 7 coins which are very close to complete scam - at least two of them are complete scams. below that you probably do not find 7 coins that are not scams.

Hmm, makes sense on their reference to altcoins.

And apparently, the Bank of England assumes i was 1 of 20,000 people in the UK, late last year....

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/quarterlybulletin/2014/qb14q3prereleasedigitalcurrenciesbitcoin.aspx

The European Central Bank has released a new report on digital currency, describing it as “inherently unstable” but potentially transformative in the realm of payments.

As well as including refrains of central bank warnings about digital currencies, such as a perceived lack of transparency and market volatility, the ECB also touched on the growth of altcoins.

The report suggested that altcoins may one day serve as future payment networks that, in the eyes of the ECB, could compete with bitcoin given the differences in design, distribution and implementation.

At the same time, the report highlighted how altcoins pose added risks for investors because of the nebulous nature of some projects, noting:

“It is too early to tell what the future of these altcoins will be. A great many of them could be nothing more than “scamcoins”, ie VCSs that are created with the main objective of swindling naive buyers, either as consumers and payers or as investors.”

Specific risks named in the report include a lack of specific information about an altcoin network's management, premining and market illiquidity.

http://www.coindesk.com/european-central-bank-digital-currencies-inherently-unstable/

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ECB talking altcoins?
Nice
Feels like the times of opportunity when they noticed Bitcoin on the horizon.

Okay, I unkinked it.  I finally know the RIGHT way to do a PoW/PoS hybrid coin.  I haven't made the blog post yet, but my thoughts drifted back to it in the context of another discussion and I thought about how to get the people who provide security paid in proportion to the security they provide, and I sat down and did math and eventually came up with something that will definitely work.  The coin remains a PoW/PoS hybrid forever - but proof-of-stake becomes more important (because the coin supply is increasing) so proof-of-work becomes proportionally less important as time goes on.

First of all, there's a mining subsidy for hashing.  It could decline over time - that's up to whoever sets the coin parameters - but it need not.  For purposes of the example, I'm going to say the miner gets one 'dirt' every time he mines a block, forever, but this becomes less important as time goes on because the stake portion of the system starts dominating security - and eventually provides the bulk of the awards generated by the coin.  

When a transaction is made, it has to be 'staked' - that is, it has to commit to a past block and can be included only in block chains generated from that block.  This means that if an attacker is mining a chain that he has not revealed, transactions made by other people cannot be included in his attack chain.  Transactions once staked, have become a finite resource that can be counted in support of one side of a fork and CANNOT be used to support the other.  So the only txIns that can count for both chains are the ones that are explicitly double spent by their owners.  If you stake your transaction on the losing side of a block chain fork, the transaction 'Never Happened' and cannot be replayed into the new block chain.

The owner of each txIn gets "Head Stake" (calculating as compounding interest) for the interval between the generation of the txOut and the block where it gets staked as a txIn.  The miner gets "Tail Stake" - the same rate of interest, but for the interval between the block the transaction is staked and the block the miner puts the transaction in.  

Where "Split Stake Awards" is defined as the amount of stake interest awarded for a single block for all txouts created before the fork and used as txIns in transactions staked after the fork, and the Mining Subsidy is the subsidy for a single block, the priority of any chain as compared to another is calculated as

(Hashes since fork) X (Split Stake Awards + Mining Subsidy)

Which is to say, the miners and the stakers are counted as amplifying the security of the total hashes by exactly the same proportion in which they get paid on a single block when they commit resources that can be used only once to one chain and not the other.

This starts out as straight proof-of-work, because there is NO split stake award for the first block, but after a while, depending on the staking interest rate, split stake awards get bigger than mining subsidies.  By the time we're talking about a block chain that carries a significant transaction volume, split stake awards would be the main reason why one fork is accepted over the other given remotely comparable amounts of hashing.  The odds of forking the chain with a block chain that you've prepared in secret would rapidly approach nil unless you have more than half of the (dirt X hashing power), and the importance of the dirt would far exceed the importance of hashing power.

Cryddit

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/01/19/the-one-world-currency-cryptocurrencies/

Do you think this post on Armstrong Economics helped the latest Darkcoin pump

Interesting article. Thanks for the link.

http://observer.com/2015/02/the-race-to-replace-bitcoin/

Very good read regarding ripple/stellar, and sillicon valley/crypto world in general. It's long, but well worth it. 

This is a (high quality) content thread.
===> Please give a good, compact & comprehensive introduction and description of EXCL.

One we can all learn from or leave EXCL out of this thread.