Topic: The RealCoin Idea (Read 5920 times)

You can hold a peg just by controlling the printing process as long as you're likely to have to print in future. As long as that's true, you can incentivize people to destroy coins when the value is too low by giving them vouchers to allow them to print in future when it's too high. These could just be a special kind of transaction on the blockchain that anyone could make, so as long as you have a way for the network to know the exchange rate it's pegging to you don't need any central authority controlling printing or destroying coins.

This isn't a sure thing if you get a lot of demand coming in and you print a lot of money to meet it, then it all goes away and everyone decides your currency is rubbish. But if you're pegging to a regular fiat currency the hurdle you have to clear isn't very high; You don't even have to keep demand steady, because the coinage you're pegging to is gradually getting debased.

You cannot sustain the price of a currency by printing more.
Who has the usd to buy the coin back when market actors want to sell?
Whoever holds the backing of the currency is the single point of failure.

I don't think that's right. The way we'd imagine it done with a crypto-currency the peg would get set as one of the core rules underlying the currency, like the Bitcoin block reward rate. That's sort-of centralized, but it's only adopted by consensus.

Markets tend to have a certain amount of centralization (or have to date) to the extent that there tend to be places - market squares, stock exchanges etc - where all the trading that sets the prices is done. But that doesn't necessarily have to be true, and even if it is the price discovery is still a decentralized process involving a lot of independent traders making their own decisions.

The war-chest model some people have suggested sounds centralized, but again doesn't have to be. I've suggested you can probably maintain the peg without having a war-chest at all, just through the money printing algorithm. On other threads, Croesus has been suggesting a rather complicated idea that I think involves a decentralized participatory war-chest, but I'm not going to pretend to understand it.

If you're pegged to a fiat currency then you're importing centralized control from the central bank of the currency you're pegged to, but even that wouldn't be true if you were pegged to a freely-traded commodity.

Right. The pegging goes with centralization. A place where people look to get "the price" or "the law stating the price".

If you have a centralized issuer there's no point in starting a new blockchain.
Use colored coins or ripple to issue your usd IOUs, backed currencies cannot be p2p, period.

Certainly possible with crypto-currencies.

If you are interested in this,   I can crank out the actual implementation for you.  PM me, or send email to [email protected]

You are looking at something that MoneyGram or Western Union does but using a P2P Decentralized coin.

It is possible to peg a coin,  just create miners that can only collect fees.  no newly minted coins created by miners.   

The only way to acquire a coin is through an exchange.   In that exchange your sell coins only at a fixed price relative to some other currency.    It also means that you buy coins also at that fixed price.     In short, you absolutely need to have the funds in your store so that any run on the bank gives folks there money back.


In short, it is just like any bank... but using p2p to communicate transfers!!

Our team trying to make realcoin to be equal to legal currency like $, 1 REC=1$ maybe, we are not sure about the exchange rate. Because in real life, the purchasing power of 1$ varies at most time.

I think you could, as long as there's an assumption that new money will be need to be created some time in the future. As long as you've got that you can set up incentives so that speculation creates stability instead of volatility:

1) When the currency is too weak, people can volunteer to destroy coins that they own. In exchange, they get a voucher entitling them to a share of the proceeds of:
2) When the currency is too strong, newly-created coins get distributed to people holding vouchers.

The vouchers would presumably be just be another kind of transaction on the blockchain.

What you do need is a reliable source of information about the exchange rate so your network knows when money needs to be created and when it needs to be destroyed. This is a bit fiddly and trust-requiring, but probably much easier to accomplish than requiring a bunch of people to hold real money and not run off with it.

Interesting.

I'm all for more user groups making use of Bitcoins!

"  Only really possible in small tribal communities where everyone knows each other and can hold each other accountable"


I agree Absolutely. I reference timebank : http://timebanks.org/ taking this concept and moving the record keeping to use btc instead of the 3rd party keeping track of who has what coins.
That would also keep eyes from everyone's business.

Again, thanks for your more then honest input.

I think this would be an interesting experiment.  And not even at the "bare minimum of sustenance" level either - somewhere far below that.  But, an experimental currency that would give out an equal (per person) and continuous flow of digital coins to people based on some set of criteria that would most definitely set each person apart from the next.  DNA, maybe?  Certainly, the logistics of identifying a person and making sure they do not receive more than one payout would be by far the most difficult part of such a project.  Regardless, it would be incredibly interesting to see how people valued these coins given out for free.  They could actually provide a bare minimum of sustenance, depending on how much they are in demand.  Or they could be worth all of $0.10 for a month's worth.  Who knows?  The market would certainly set the price...

You are completely correct.  Humans will never rise above doing things for self interest or self preservation.  Humans will always take the easiest path to achieve what they want.  Some people volunteer (and don't get me wrong - I volunteer too on a regular basis) because it makes them feel good, and thus helps them achieve their goal of happiness.  And it only takes one bad apple (AKA, a freerider) to spoil an entire utopia based on everyone "contributing equally".

I do agree that government adds a lot of inefficiencies, but that doesn't mean it still wouldn't take a great deal more effort to become and work as a doctor than it would be to be an assembly line worker, or a barber.

It's a pipe dream, and a ridiculous one at that.  Only really possible in small tribal communities where everyone knows each other and can hold each other accountable, and jobs more or less require the same amount of training/qualifications to accomplish.  Certainly not in the anonymously-global world we live in today with an incredibly wide spread between skills, education, and work load levels.

Which gives rise to the fact that we as humans will never rise above doing things for personal gain.
But as stated, it would take a society that can provide basics of living to everyone, and above that would be your motivation to work for more.
So much for a Roddenberry future.
It must be mentioned that many people in this world actually volunteer their time as duty to fellow homo sapiens (and other animals too).

As for costs of things, our current market is way inflated due to government (and other lobbying corp) influence. So those currently gouging the system would not have the means to do so.

Wages, perhaps a good motivator for going into a more educated profession would be extra time allotted or the society credits you the time spent educating yourself.... Imagine that, being paid to educate yourself for the betterment of society.

Thanks for your views.

Of course it's clear to people with basic understanding of the machinery of free market that everyone's time should not be worth the same. Otherwise it's a system of charity rather than a currency.

On the other hand minting based on time is possible with centralized identification service (i.e. not applicable to the realm of crypto-currency). I think someone published a paper on this recently, this system includes built-in welfare because you get to mint coins by just living your life, but that probably would likely provide only bare mininum of subsistence.

Excellent post DAT, as usual.

Completely terrible idea.  If you pay the same to a doctor as a hairdresser, then no one becomes a doctor.  Who is going to go through an extra dozen years of schooling, have a high-stress, long-hours job, have the threat of malpractice lawsuits constantly hanging over their heads with every move they make, only to make the same amount as the barber down the street who dropped out of high school?  Maybe a handful of people would feel it is their "duty" or "calling" to go through all that to help civilization, but certainly, the number of people who would become doctors would be far fewer than today, and certainly far fewer than necessary to server the general public.

And that could be extrapolated further.  Who is going to be a manager with a degree in manufacturing engineering when they could skip college and simply be an assembly line worker making the same dough?  Who is going to be an assembly line worker when they could do what they truly love and just write music all day?  So, we end up with a society full of a bunch of starving musicians and artists who can't buy food or clothing or shelter or transportation because no one is willing to make any of those things, because everyone wants to be a musician.

The only way to combat the problem is to attach a system outside of fiat currencies. So what concept is universal to most humans....
Well if time is money then it must be the time that is worth something. Time and the Goods that were produced in said time.

Let us say we (the community that accepts the new coin) attached the value of one hour of time per one coin.
Of course to make that work the community would need to understand that everyone's hour is worth the same. If you are a Doctor then your Hour is worth the same as the hairdresser down the street. What matters is the time you put in to your line (or lines) of work. So long as your skill meets a need of the community then your effort is paid by trading the coins for others services.

It runs along the concept of barter system but levels the playing field for all ages.
The time dollar is old hat and has been working well for many communities it would seem. One particular site is already used to keep track of jobs needing done and who has what time creds. What I would like to see is a decentralized form of this system by attaching the value to a btc fork.

Naturally we would need to figure out the least amount of time$s needed to supply basic needs. The community may need to adjust its greed level to make things work for everyone (agreeing to sell necessary goods at affordable levels).

If for some reason it becomes necessary to convert a time$ to a local currency then perhaps we could give its value as the local minimum wage (unless of course that is only an American thing.)

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1145565

In response to a few people claiming that whatever programmer creates a fork is going to imply his own rules, good or bad, I'd like to disagree. I want to program an experimental fork and I'd like to take many things into consideration, obviously. I like the idea of having a backed currency, and I think we should find a way to do this without it being centralized. I am probably going to start programming this this summer, because I'm in school now and I probably should focus on that, unlike all of my previous years.

If anyone would like to help sometime in the future, let me know!

-Garrett

No worries.  It didn't help that I thought you and markm were the same person most of the time while I was reading, so I can't blame you entirely.