Topic: The deflationary problem - page 4. (Read 32479 times)

Hello. This is a lively debate..  

I'll be honest, I kinda agree with Sweft, that the txn fees are NOT going to sustain as secure a network as I would like..

I don't want more than 21 million coins, I like the whole FIXED-amount-of-coins thing, so that only leaves the txn fees.

What I'm wondering is : If txn fees were set to a percentage of the transaction, say 0.1%, would this not fix the 'potential' problem ?

1 1-thousandth seems a fair price to pay, for a functioning super secure network.. no?

I don't know why everyone is so against paying the miners A LOT. They are the backbone of the whole network and should be rewarded..

I am working on a new coin, and would like to put a fixed percentage as the fee. Remove confusion and doubt.  

You would of course also need a minimum TXN fee, to stop DOS attacks.
..

[cough] Don't all shout at me at once.

I dunno.  Watching Deadwood series there was one night a week that was nickel whore night.  I guess they was rented, though.

Fractional Reserve Banking worked to bring about a power shift from feudal monarchs to the merchant class. FRB is in itself dishonest when you think of money as a commodity (say wheat) it is a flawed human construct. FRB also creates money inflation which is a cause for malinvestment in an economy, the net byproduct of inflation is continued economic growth, (the result of the additional Labour needed to offset the increase in the money supply)   which is now unsustainable.


Price inflation and deflation is not in itself good or bad, it is natural market feedback, information provided to members of an economy to make optimal use of resources available. It should be respected not feared and manipulated if the goal is to live sustainability and in peace.

The metal smiths who originally invented "counterfeit reserve receipt-token fiat-bankstering" were enabled to do so because gold and silver were too fungible, risky and bulky to handle and secure in the marketplace. This technologically-harder to counterfeit stamped-coin "reserve fiat bankstering" actually began with cheaper "private" coinages all much like the Levitican's "Temple Shekels" whose intrinsic values and utility values actually were token for much-larger exchange valued assets as determined by the "fiat" of the "money-changers" currency exchanges. Bronze age coins were the antecedents of (far far cheaper and actually easier to counterfeit) paper phony-receipt-note "currencies" that came along much later.

It was Julius Caesar in 48 BC who first set up a "central" publicly owned for public profit "counterfeit reserve receipt-token fiat-bankstering" system for Rome that put the smiths out of business, making a single, common public currency standard and plentiful to facilitate commerce and industry, and (by public lending) to thus finance public projects free of armed-marauding public-shakedown "taxations". This was why he was assassinated.

The simple fact is that the "original debt" in "reserved" gold always was, is and always becomes continuously more and more irrelevant. Sure gold has an inescapable "exchange value" (due solely to it's ever-increasing rarity) but it's intrinsic and utilitarian values are actually squat, save as a decorative or luxury plating metal. It never or very, very seldom if ever needs to be "paid back", because that is why the pretty junk was all laboriously and hazardously carted-over and dumped-off into a "reserve" in the first place! It ends up there because nobody can bear with the nasty bothers of dealing with it.

You see many people with wheelbarrows full of gold out car shopping? Or truckloads of gold looking for a new house? As a "money" gold has been practically obsolete for well over 3 hundred years.

Reserve bankstering works and has always worked just fine, because a Medium of Labour Exchange is actually backed by the labours that it's earning has, or spending will, represent, ALONE!

In other words, it (a "money") is simply an Exchange Tokenage representative of Labour Values performed or performable, period. It does not ALSO have to be anything else that it is not!

As Julius Caesar, Henry 1st, George Washington and Abe Lincoln (and JFK might also have) proved all you need is a good token supply that is publicly owned, issued and rented-out, who's (hopefully growing) supply keeps up with (hopefully growing) labour force quality and size demands, in order to have perfectly fine "money" and a perfectly fine Freed Market economy (freed from counterfeit private gold-receipt slavery to private gold-Pharaohs)


A Bitcoin is a fiat digital high security internet game casino gambling token of excellent utilitarian value and marginal intrinsic value but it has no exchange value AT ALL. It's inflationary and deflationary "assigned fiat exchange value" properties have nothing whatsoever to do with the supply of them, nor the growth or shrinkage of that supply, and they never ever will! Mining Bitcoins merely finances it's transaction network, period.

A Bitcoin is an "deregulated" Over the Counter derivative. The "exchange-value" (price) inflation and deflation of Fiat Bitcoins has squat to do with any "monetary supply" of them and (foreseeably) never, ever will!

Penny Stock-Market (pretend-exchanges) speculators and their greedy and mischievous fiat-antics capriciously determine the latest (stale) fiat exchange-value of the last fiat Bitcoin that past their way.

The actual "price" of any given Bitcoin remains forever unknown and unknowable until after it has been re-sold (re-exchange valued) to the next guy, in the future.

A Bitcoin functions exactly in much the same way as a "funded" Credit Default Swap (fCDS). You fund it's former owner's "loss" (costs) on it, and the next owner funds yours.

A Bitcoin is a commercial "over the counter (OTC) derivative" of the current-past value and future possible values of itself and it's network, which are only (at best) completely deregulated commercial resources, and neither "commodity futures" nor "securities" as per the CFMA of 2000. This is why, with it's "market" exchange-value changing every two seconds, it is useless as a "money" because you need an hour to accept and/or spend it. It's exchange-values are really only very useful as a delayed-exchange "funding" medium.

The intrinsic and utility values of the "futures derivative swap-contract token" no matter how attractive or quantitatively prearranged, are materially too small to be any more than a very, very minor factor in it's (inflationary or deflationary) exchange-value (aka price)

Buying a Bitcoin futures derivative swap-contract token is simply gambling that the value of it's current "fiat" exchange-value will be close to or less than the value of it's future "fiat" exchange-value.

Yes inflation (and deflation) are ALWAYS everybody's and everything's enemy!

Yes I generally think you will see either high transaction fees, or lower hash-rates, in BTC eventually, both are bad but I'm more worried about transaction fees rising and think that's the more likely effect because of an overhang of hardware capacity.


I'm skeptical of the long term viability of PoW as a concept because of its high cost that someone in the system must ultimately bear.  That said I think the FRC demurrage solution is the best way so far developed to bear that cost for the long term.  I favor keeping transaction fees to a minimum because of the dead-weight loss that transaction fees cause, instead putting it all on the block rewards should give greater economic activity over-which to spread the costs.

True, but they can just turn up the transaction fees. And not every transaction will be made under time pressure. If you leave transaction fees on the table, someone else will get them.

If you really believe that, then Bitcoin should result in a high transaction fee too, since miners can effectively choose the transaction fee by selecting which transactions to include. We'll see if they can organize to push up the transaction fee as the block reward drops. I hope so, at least a little, because otherwise we're going to have big problems with blockchain security.

With a proof-of-work based system to prevent double spends, we need something to reward miners or it's unlikely the system will remain secure. That can be the block reward, transaction fees, or something else. Essentially, I'm suggesting a blend between a block reward and transaction fees for the long term, rather than just transaction fees. Effectively, the block reward would be managed much the same way the transaction fee is, but with (I think) a bit less power to the miners.

(Of course I'm not suggesting changing Bitcoin. I'm just adding this to the pile of ideas as probably the most sensible way to build in active money supply management to a coin that is otherwise as much like Bitcoin as possible.)

This is somewhat similar to proposals by maaku for an extension of FRC, but the factor being decided would be a split between miners and charity.  ElectricMucus also proposed something similar in which miners and stakeholders conflicting interests balance out.  I'm very skeptical of the idea though as I don't see any reason for this to balance out at a point of lower inflation or lower transaction fees then our current monetary regime, for one thing miners are VERY organized compared to normal spenders, miners can simply set their rigs to reject anything that's not in their favor while people trying to make transactions will be under time pressure.  This power dichotomy will generally result in the miners having their way and we end up with a high inflation and or high transaction fee system.  I dose have the benefit of breaking the back of the perpetual deflation expectation which would be good, but it doesn't get us to the ideal situation which is 0% inflation, 0% transaction fees, and 0% interest.  Despite all that I'm willing to endorse this as an experiment, at the very least it would teach us something.

You don't "buy" whores, you rent them. And they get more income per hour than most miners.

Is that like ppcoin? They use a combined proof or work/proof of stake.

Sorry for asking without having really studied it myself, im just asking in case you haven't heard of it or in case you want to expound on the differences for all of us who are vaguely familiar with the concept of proof of stake and know of the existence of ppcoin, like me.

I proposed a Bitcoin-like scheme but were the mining reward is controlled by a blend between proof of stake and proof of work. Basically, transactions propose a mining reward which is weighted based on bitcoin days destroyed, but miners have to include the transaction in a block for it to count. Here's the proposal:

You'll never win on the inflation vs deflation thing... (sorry).

As I've already pointed out, your law is flawed in that it depends on Moore's law... which is already breaking down.

There's no reason you cannot become rich, since you can also mine stablecoins.  The only thing i'm trying to create is an economic algorithm that has the fewest number of flaws.

If anything, he under estimates it.  For the most part, his opposition isn't interested in convincing him of anythin, most who post here are just trolling him.  In the long run, not only are we all dead, our grandchildren will receive the benefits of our foresights.  If Sweft is correct, and he actually does something about it beyond arguing about it with people on the Internet, then his grandchildren will benefit and they will be thankful for it.  If we are correct, our grandchildren will be thankful.  In the near term; however, there is no point in us arguing about it, since Bitcoin is presently, and will continue to be for long after my natural life span, a rather inflationary currency. 

Sweft:  I think you over estimate the depth of thought of your opposition, the argument I hear is simple "Inflation is THEFT!!!" and fractional reserve is just attacked as "Making money from nothing" without really connecting the two as you have done.

That said I don't think your logic is correct in that a commodity money solves a problem with fractional reserve lending.  The key distinction is that their are TWO kinds of money, cash money and debt money.  Cash money is the real thing that acts as a medium of exchange, it is fungible, every unit is identical and once it passes from one person to another its 'history' is forgotten, aka its a bearer bond.  Debt money is not fungible, it is always the debt OF someone and is owed to some else and that WHO always matters, the only relation it bears to cash money is the unit of account which it takes from cash.  But debt money as the name implies CAN be used as money, if I have some IOUs from a reliable person I can trade these to anyone well aware of the debtors credit worthiness at very near face value.

Banks can create debt money and yes they do 'create it from thin air' but their ability to do this is independent of the nature of cash money, it's instead built upon the networks of credit worthiness monitoring, law enforcement etc that makes sure we pay our debts or pay a high price for not doing so.  This gives the would be buyer of the debt a high degree of confidence that it will be re-payed, the higher the confidence the higher the debt trades as a percentage of face value.  Now regardless of if you believe this is good, bad or ugly the amount of this debt money created is going to be determined by repayment confidence and leverage limits (which ever is lower) and not at all on the nature of the underlying cash money.

When you say that monetizing dept by printing money makes them indistinguishable this is not entirely correct, the unit of account is decreased in value and because they share that both debt and cash decline in value.  But the non fungible nature of debt means repayment confidence is always a factor and by reducing the unit of account your making repayment easier and more likely, after a crisis when repayment confidence has crashed it may be possible for lenders to gain by this trade off, they would prefer 80% of dept to be re-payed with money that has lost half its value then for 10% to be payed in undiminished value money.  In general we can always expect a lender to suffer a smaller loss under inflation then dose a cash money holder, because some of the lenders inflation loss will be compensated for by higher repayment rates.

Do you consider the world's gold supply to be infinite?

I think the inflation people have a trouble with is fiat fractional reserve lending.

Why?

Because if you fractionally lend money, that original money that was lent should in theory be distinguished from debt by having some essence.  The issue is with fiat the original money and the debt become indistinguishable when they monetize the debt by printing money.

If you lend based on gold, that original loan is still owed to you, so by default every loan that was fractionally created from gold is still the very same original gold. Therefore the money is distinguished from the debt because it must be returned to the lender since you cannot counterfeit it (print).

The same applies with bitcoin fractional lending as does with gold.  Pre-programmed inflation in bitcoin should behave nothing like fiat inflation, because the debt cannot be monetized.  The debt must be returned to the lender.

And if you notice throughout history gold has inflated and will continue to inflate, but since gold mining requires energy, as bitcoin mining does, the inflation is beneficial to its value because it allows for a larger adoption base and solves the first adopter problem.  

Inflation is not the enemy of bitcoin.

Money is useless to its possessor until it is spent?
Yeah, and a wildcard is completely useless within a game until you show it, right?


Who is the counterparty in this loan?
If it is the economy and thus the society as a whole, why the society as a whole should be forced to accept such conditions?
Why if many people "lend money" like this at the same time they get apparently get all rich by the very deflation their hoarding has created, even if the drop in prices doesn't translates in more investment?
Where is that growth for the hoarders-at-the-same-time comes from?

Then make one. When Bitcoin "inevitably" fails due to the causes you've outlined here, and everyone switches, you'll be rich.

Satoshi made a currency that fixes the problems he saw in the current monetary system, and if you see problems with his, you're free to follow suit. I wish you luck.

Then make one and post all about it in the alt cryptocurrencies section.

This is a discussion about the ramifications of inflation and deflation and I'm sure many people have benefited in their understanding of cryptocurrency economics from my theories.  How am i bugging you?

There isn't an inflationary coin with the properties that i like.