Bitcoin Forum

I have 1000 FRC available in trade for TRC, BTC, LTC or BTC. Make an offer.

They are going fast! (literally)

(edit: currently awaiting restocking, if you want to sell FRC please PM me.)

In light of the lack of another FRC thread, this one can continue as a discussion vehicle.

Please try to keep on topic, avoid the same old flame wars, and wherever possible provide links and quote important information.

literally lol firecoin wtf are them never heard of them untill you mention them just now.

looked on other exchanges same thing no word of them nor sight of them.

where u get these from?? got a link to the client / daemon? and whitepaper, pools etc?

Its FreiCoin

http://www.freicoin.org/

website: http://freico.in/ (http://freico.in/)
Forums: www.freicoin.org (http://www.freicoin.org)
Github: https://github.com/freicoin/freicoin (https://github.com/freicoin/freicoin)

The forums are a mess, I'm still trying to sort it out, here's a quick dump.

It was referenced in a "lost bitcoins" conversation recently, so I grabbed the client (released on 12-21-12) and started solo mining.




I'm still looking for more information such as the coin limit (if any) (100 million) but I know this much...

It's been in the works a while:
Original project announcement thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3816.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3816.0)

Article from June
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/06/freicoin-occupys-online-curren.html (http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/06/freicoin-occupys-online-curren.html)

Failed Indiegogo pitch:
http://www.indiegogo.com/freicoin (http://www.indiegogo.com/freicoin)

Beta started this fall, and the chain was reset on 12-21-12 for production.

It's an odd critter. It's a demurrage based currency where your coins are constantly losing 4%/year which is paid to miners as a subsidy. It's brainchild came out of the 99% movement so it's aimed at disincentivising  hoarding and lowering interest rates. I don't quite get how this could work with other currencies in existence, but the slow 4% seep rate may not matter too much in the end. It may just be like bitcoin but with skewed interest rates and less desire to hold.

It's purpose is to lower basic interest rates to 0%, which has far reaching consequences. The best economic overview of Freicoin is available from our about page: Freicoin: a P2P digital currency delivering freedom from usury (http://freico.in/about/).

For a detailed analysis of the economics underlying Freicoin, go to the source: Silvio Gesell's Natural Economic Order (http://ces.org.za/docs/Gesell/en/neo/).

Freicoin outputs lose value by a factor of 2**-20 with each found block, resulting in a loss of approximately 4.9% per annum (assuming constant hash power).

Freicoin has a maximum monetary base of approx. 10**16 satoshis (100MM), albeit with a perpetual reward equal to the number of coins lost to demurrage.

I wouldn't call the Indiegogo failed since it payed for the build and deployment infrastructure and kept us solvent ;) We just had to scale back our scope a little bit.

New coin Freicoin has been added to the explorer

Due to the unique nature of  demurrage, further modification of the explorer is needed.

I will keep you posted in the cryptocoin explorer thread.

Good Luck Freicoin...You have some competition in the Alt-coin world. But I try to support as many as I can.  ;D

@dreamwatcher: are you handling demurrage correctly? I can help you out.

Join us on #freicoin on IRC.

Can someone please explain algorithmically how the reward algorithm works? I'm not understanding the 0% interest rate or statements like

Value of what?  So 5% of any coins I hold are destroyed each year?  Isn't that a disincentive to do anything but spend coins?

As far as the Block explorer is concerned, it just sees the demurrage as a normal coin-base transaction split between two addresses.

One for the miner (246) and the (496) I would assume goes to demurrage .ABE does not care where it goes, it is simply reads the Tx script and reports address and amount of the transactions. If there is a need for special handling of the demurrage amounts, please let me know in the Crytocoin Explorer thread (Do not want to hijack this thread.. ;D)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=124303.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=124303.0)

Transaction   Fee   Size (kB)   From (amount)   To (amount)
eecb4c9348...   0   0.141   Generation: 742.6326965 + 0 total fees   115VoJrLiRfk2Q2ffUfFzJyeVPr7geTV34:         246.60095046
                                                                                                                        1MrQWWNKfVseYyGkyyLsDhFekJWGJNt2i9: 496.03174604

Is an incentive to do anything but hoard (at least hold big quantities). You can always lend or invest. The point is to maintain velocity more or less constant.

1000 FRC still available. (edit, awaiting new stock, contact me if selling FRC)

No thanks. We already have a currency in place that punishes savers. It's called US Dollars.

The problem I have with FreiCoin is that it actually favors the top 1% at the expense of the remaining 99% its origins in the Occupy Movement not withstanding. It does not punish large savers at all since they can cost effectively lend or invest out their Freicoin; however it punishes small savers. This is precisely the same problem with USD.

Consider the following. two cases:

1) Go to JP Morgan with say 100,000,000 USD to invest and say you need to beat the rate of inflation to protect your capital and they will easily be able to accommodate you.

2) Now repeat the above but with only 100 USD and you will be shown the door.

With FreiCoin or USD the person with the 100 USD suffers the ravages of demurage or inflation as the case may be, while the person with the 100,000,000 USD does not. On the other hand with Bitcoin both persons are in the same boat and are protected from demurage or inflation.

People are offering a bitcoin per hundred FReiCoin???

Isn't litecoin only about half a bitcoin per hundred? So that you are saying people are valuing freicoin at about twice the value of litecoin???

-MarkM -

You are conflating money-as-store-of-value and money-as-medium-of-exchange. Which is understandable as nearly every monetary system in existence makes the same mistake.

With Freicoin we are purposefully making a system that people will not want to use as a store-of-value. If you're sitting on a pile of freicoins wondering what to do with it, the answer is simple: invest it in something else. That something else could even be bitcoins, which complement Freicoin as an excellent store-of-value (but terrible medium-of-exchange if you're anything other than an Austrian-school economist).

If someone wants to put up the other 5k FRC I have an offer for 10k FRC. (edit: this deal is planned for after Christmas, if you are mining and want to commit some output please PM)

FRC is REALLY new, which might be part of the valuation, the 80% being given to charity may also play a role.

yay, another pump and dump altcoin :) whos going to scam first? :P

Actually, I'm inclined to believe this one has legitimate roots. It's been over a year in the making and has been done mostly in public.

The problem with this argument is that it is not cost effective for the poor to exchange back and forth between Freicoin and Bitcoin while it is very cost effective for the rich to exchange between Freicoin and Bitcoin. So the net effect is that the poor will not be able to effectively hedge against the demurage while the rich will be able to hedge.

What we have with Freicoin is an effort by the Occupy Movement to make the top 1% richer at the expense to the remaining 99%, and why is Bitcoin such a poor medium of exchange especially for poor people in any case?

Who is the dev or dev team behind freicoin? I haven't really heard much about this one before.

I'm the primary developer. @jtimon originated the idea and has been involved since the start. There's a few other people who have contributed code, and they're mentioned in the "About" dialog of the client.

Looks like maaku did most of the coding work and jtimon is an expert on its economic theory.

I am not a big fan of the idea of demurage but happy to see the work done and being validated on the market. That's always my thinking that you don't have to convince me in theory, you can let the market demonstrate it to me. Of course it's still too early but hopefully we can observe in the future whether bitcoin/freicoin can complement each other with freicoin a better medium of exchange, reducing interest rate and helping credit formation etc.

alright, il watch it ;)

Where can I download a miner for this?

You can use any SHA 256 coin miner you use for BTC/PPC/TRC.

Just use port 8638.

There's also a p2pool instance up at http://pool.freico.in:9638 (http://pool.freico.in:9638)

I have FRC for sale in lots of 100s. I have more than 1000. Message me if you are interested.

What is their value? Your price for an "100" lot?

I will sell at 0.1 BTC or 17 LTC.

Hmm weird, offer on Vircurex right now says BTC/LTC    0.00581002 which looks to me as if it means one litecoin is 5.81002 thousandths of a bitcoin, and that is offer, not ask. SO I do not know how 170 litecoins per thousand comes out as in any way similar to one bitcoin per thousand.

But I am not really awake yet so maybe I am seeing it a wrong way round or something.

A bitcoin per thousand freicoin sounds like a decent enough price to me that it could pry a few thousand freicoin lose from my cold dead hands or even when I actually do wake up my warm ones.

-MarkM-

170 * 0.00581002 = 0.9877034 btc

I have several freicoins as well if someone is interested.

I'm guessing that bit of maths was pre-coffee :)

I now have a lot of these coins. Over the last 40 blocks I've solved I have found every 6th block going by the mean. It actually works out to every 5.9 blocks exactly.

Don't suppose anyone is going to build a Freicoin escrow?

what's the current difficulty?

The difficulty would appear to be 256.

thanks for that :)

Greetings Fellow Freicoiners, I'm a follower and contributor to the Freicoin discussion forums (and if I ever stop playing League of Legends long enough I'll do some code too).  Its great to see this coin being launched and I have the highest hopes for it and for the monetary theories of Silvio Gessel which guides it.  If anyone is still curious about these theories I'd be very happy to help explain them on our IRC channel #freicoin (Freenode).

Sorry to ask again, price in trc???

I've been getting bids for 1,000FRC at 0.5BTC or 85LTC which I have been filling. These seem a fair initial price with each FRC being valued at slightly over half a cent.

The current difficulty is 256, this will soon go up to 1,024 as the difficulty moves in the power of four.

I'm not accepting TRC as payment at the moment as TRC price has dropped and I'm wondering how viable it will be now that the very interesting FRC is out.

Is there any usage of Freicoin at the moment? Many alt coins start off with speculation (and unfortunately stay there) but with Freicoin losing value over time does this mean current speculators are hoping something will happen real soon or there coins will disappear? Or am I misunderstanding how Freicoin works?

I think that as many people want an alt-coin to succeed it will. We have bitcoin as gold, litecoin as bitcoin's silver, so what we need at the moment is an altcoin to be the gold bars of both, one coin that even 0.00001 means something, and its the people (us?) that set the value (subject to other factors ofcourse). Also i think that its a good thing that many alt coins have came to the surface so one must be successful. I want both of them to succeed

Either way, if anyone wants to trade trc for frc, or trc for ltc im here, just pm me :)

Gold bars would just logically be large sums of Bitcoins, furthermore I see no need for coins that are otherwise the same as Bitcoin but with the decimal point moved left or right.  LTC at least aims to be different on technical grounds by using different Hashing functions, people are rightly skeptical of clones that do not have any technological or monetary differences.

The best analogy for Freicoin is a perishable commodity like grain.  The premise of Freicoin is that a fair exchange is created when perishable goods and services (basically everything we actually make, use or consume) are exchanged for perishable money.

So the premine and demurrage go to an unclaimable address, which goes back to the miners.

One question, how many blocks were reserved for the premined coins?

I want to know for my maths :)

Freicoin complements Bitcoin in a way very different than Litecoin. Bitcoin is designed to be a better gold than gold itself, and so we can surmise that switching to bitcoin as a day-to-day currency would be similar to a reversion to the gold standard. The Austrian school of economics is the only framework I know of that actually considers gold as a currency to be good thing. Austrian economics may be popular on this forum and among crypto-libertarians in general, but it's actually not a mainstream position. In fact, most economists would consider it obsolete/discredited, but them be fighting words here ;)

Now don't mistake the above as an apology for central-banker regulated Keynesian inflationary currency. Freicoin is a third option: a currency which is intrinsically perishable was shown first by Gesell and then later Bernard Lietaer and others to be fair for both consumers and merchants, recession-proof, and otherwise solve the problems inherent in both inflationary and deflationary currencies. Freicoin is the medium of exchange bitcoin will never be, but even if freicoin completely supplants bitcoin as the currency of the future (as I obviously think it will), bitcoin will remain a premier vehicle for wealth storage.

Freicoin and Bitcoin fulfill two completely different purposes, although Bitcoin has until now been marketed as serving the same purpose so confusion is inevitable.



Freicoin is not pre-mined in the sense that previous alt-chains have been. It does however set aside 80% of the initial distribution to hard-coded addresses that are currently kept in cold storage. These funds will also be distributed by means of Freicoin Foundation grants. In the next few weeks we'll have a website setup where people can submit and comment on proposals in the categories of economic development and/or charitable work. At regular intervals we'll pick and fund diverse set of proposals until the entire fund is used up. This is just a different way of handling the initial distribution.

@subSTRATA, there will be conflict-of-interest guidelines for dealing with core developers/foundation staff who submit grant proposals.

Make that 80% to 5% and im pretty sure you will have many people behind you, including me. Even 5% will be crazy amount if this coin succeeds.

Let me reiterate: 80% of the initial distribution. This shuts off on block 161280, and the perpetual reward (4.9% of the monetary base per year) goes to the miners only.

This is a different way of handling the initial distribution. Coins will enter the marketplace through mining, and through purchase of goods and services by a community-vetted process of grant proposals.

I want them! Any sellers?? ))

I've got a few for sale

pm me if interested  :)

I'm a bit foggy on the initial reward rate. I read that the genesis block generated a lot of coins like 78k or so and the reward rate has been dropping since then.

Can you give us some total as of block 10,000 like total coins @10k, coins in the wild @10k and coins in the fund at @10k?

Some FRC stats on a website would be a good more. I look forward to seeing your Freicoin Federation site. I'll try and think of something awesome to contribute :)

Wow 80% tax? Is this tax rate also 'community-vetted'? Are you seriously trying to challenge bitcoin through dirty politics? ::)

Here I thought the project was serious. I take it back now. This doesn't look like it's about Gesell or demurrage at all. Why am I not surprised that the advocates of 'mainstream economics' turn out to be a group of control freaks?

Selling FRC in 10k lot @2000:1 to BTC (5btc lot), @2:3 to PPC (15k ppc lot). PM me if interested.

[Edit: adjusted offer based on market rate]

Pass...still overpriced.

I'm sorry you feel that way. Best of luck in your endeavors.

Don't believe everything you hear. For the most part, unless maaku wrote it, it's probably wrong.

The first block generated 750.56846171 coins.

496.03174604 went to the foundation.

254.53671561 went to the abyss, or to maaku. Not sure on that.

   .00000001 x 6 went to addresses of various contributors to the development of Freicoin. These are meant to be like a movie credits.

So looks like galambo doesn't know the coin supply at 10k blocks either.

As far as I see 'coins in the wild' is about 250*10k = 2.5m at block 10k. But since there was no prerelease nor release announcement on bitcointalk so I am guessing a majority of these is owned by developers as well. No idea how many in the tax account or else.

I was asked why I mined freicoin and should have more confidence in ppc.

I have plenty of confidence in ppc and I don't see why I shouldn't value competing cryptocurrencies with interest. And I like competing fairly and dislike monopolies and bullies ;) I reasonably liked what I read about the freicoin project until I learned the 80% tax today.

Actually, Sunny, no. My graphics card only mines at 60MH/s. I have less than 30000 coins at the moment and wish I had more. Other early supporters, like Impaler and jtimon, don't have any mined coins (please correct me if this is wrong, guys). To the best of my knowledge the vast majority of the coins are in the hands of people unaffiliated with the project.  I couldn't be happier with our result.

I have no intention of profiting from the Freicoin Foundation's coins, nor the ability to. I've already trusted maaku with a US Dollar donation to his indiegogo project, and he delivered more than I ever dreamed. I'm not losing any sleep trusting him to hold the Foundation's funds and distribute them fairly. Also, Sunny, you forget that this is Bitcoin. We don't have to trust him because we can all look at the blockchain and see where the funds are going. Eventually there will be tools and websites for Freicoin to do this automatically.

We've worked very hard to attract the sustained attention of miners who were capable of understanding the long term value of Freicoin. After 5 days we already have a hash rate of 30GH/s, which you were admittedly a part of. Ask yourself, why did you rush into Freicoin? We've seen organic, exponential growth with a coin seemingly possessing the opposite values you'd assume a Bitcoin miner would believe in. There are some frustrated people here, including you, on this forum. Why are you frustrated with the Freicoin? Because you feel the Freicoin has to happen from what you have observed with Bitcoin, even though Freicoin may conflict with your personal beliefs. I don't have the luxury of putting our ideologies over what works. I love cryptocurrency and that is why I support Freicoin.

Now, the real work begins. Not attracting miners or mining the coin. The biggest task for Freicoin is to build a market in goods and services that can be exchanged for Freicoin, and we intend to bootstrap this market by providing coins to legitimate and worthy charities. Finding suitable groups is going to be the hardest work yet and we need the community's help.

Tax? I don't see that. Freicoin has a permanent subsidy, which goes 100% to the miners - only a hard fork can change that. The 80/20 split is with respect to the initial distribution. There are many ways a currency can be rolled out. When the Deutschmark was introduced in Germany every citizen was given a one-time equal allowance. Early-on we discussed similar distribution schemes for Freicoin (such sending one-time amounts to email addresses, phone numbers, etc.), but were unable to come up with anything free from exploits.

The Foundation-grant model is a compromise. The currency is given out to grants which promote economic development and goodwill (preferably by means of charitable causes), selected by an open competitive process. Once these coins enter the economy they are not taxed in any way, and the Foundation never sees those coins again. When the initial distribution runs out, the Foundation winds down its activities and disbands.


And yeah, my single Radeon 5850 did a little better than @galambo, but not by much. We had a very long beta process, and a coordinated release with announcements on our forums (http://freicoin.org/), IRC, the ripple mailing list, twitter, and a few other locations. Almost immediately we were all swamped with miners & the network hash rate has been increasing exponentially since launch. Already my mining payout is hardly worth it and I'll probably take it offline after the next difficulty adjustment. To my knowledge, none of the core contributors are professional miners, and mining is an increasingly professional game. Combined together we probably own little more than a shrinking few percent of a rapidly growing pie.

The 254.53671561 in the genesis block went to Satoshi, out of respect.


Here are updated versions of the total-coins-in-distribution graph:

https://i.imgur.com/2no1H.png

and block-reward (miners receive the shaded regions in green and red):

https://i.imgur.com/NtDyf.png

I have mined 13.04109606 Freicoins with my CPU :)

Also not from maaku's graph that Miner rewards are EXTREMELY STABLE over time, block rewards will decline by only about half their present amount by the end of the initial issuance and then stay at that point.  This is quite the opposite of Bitcoin and most alt-coins ware rewards are front-loaded massively, even when developer are not monopolizing that early period its not in our opinion a good way to do a currency because it rewards speculation and discourages circulation.

So after 161280 the reward drops down to demurraged coins only?

Other coins have done similar as well. Solidcoin had a "coin protection fund" IIRC was used to fund projects and help raise funds to protect the chain. Devcoin has a large percentage of blocks go to "open source developers". The distribution of that is controlled by a group of people which would be similar to the foundation you suggest I imagine. Solidcoin wasn't successful but Devcoin seems to be doing ok with this approach.

By the way I contributed a lot of hash power early on before the difficulty quadrupled. I have 46,000 FRC and am selling them, message me for details if you want to buy any.

These are more coins than one person should be holding and I'd rather the coins be distributed for greater good and all that. I'd also like some BTC in my wallet :)

As has been said. The initial distribution is not a tax.
How is issuing the full base through miners fairer then through non-profits?
I would say we would just overpaying for security on an early stage, but others even see giving it to miners as an unfair privilege.
The main purpose of doing it like this is not exactly avoiding the waste of resources (which does) but to distribute it relatively fast to as many people as possible in a fair fashion. While doing it in a transparent, participatory and fair way will ADD LEGITIMACY to the currency, giving it to ourselves or making an obscure process for getting those initial coins will subtract legitimacy and probably destroy the currency all together.

I don't own any freicoin yet, but I'm probably one of the persons who are more interested in this currency to succeed and make sure the coins are distributed fairly. If they're not, not only the idea I've been advocating for two years will fail, but I'll also look as a scammer. Being selfish, the profits would be a one-time thing, but reputation is durable.
I don't think Mark (or anyone that has participated) wants to drop his coding efforts to the trash neither.

Now a question...What's approximately the price?
Since there's no market it's hard to see. Someone is asking for 0.1 btc for each frc on freicoin forums, which seems crazy to me at this stage...

That is pretty crazy. I hope no one bought coins at those prices. I'm selling at 0.5BTC for 1,000FRC to those who I'm guess just want to stick them in an offline wallet just in case FRC goes somewhere.

But if you just stick them in an offline wallet, don't they just disappear at a rate of 4%? The whole idea was to keep people from hoarding, right? So you can't just stick it in an offline wallet. It will just disappear. But of course, there isn't actually anything to do with FRC so what else can do you do with it? 

Yes, any purchasing now would be mostly speculative. So if you hoard them is because you think that they will get more value than you're losing nominally (4.9% annually).
Maybe "disappear" is not the more accurate word. If you hoard 1000 frc, they will take more than 13 years to become 500 frc.

Yes, but only the foundation feels that drop directly. It's a smooth transition for the miners.


We have to be careful to distinguish between now, a scant few days after the currency has launched and no services are available, and years from now when the Freicoin economy is fully developed. In the long term, Freicoin may reach a steady-state value, and not move much up or down in buying power. But for now, any valuation is speculative, and for someone bullish on Freicoin this would be a good time (probably the best time) to pick up cheap coins.

In the long term cold storage of freicoins is a losing proposition, but for now it makes sense under some assumptions. Freicoin's value will be speculative until an economy develops around it.

...but doesn't the development of an economy built around FRC's depend on capital formation? Doesn't this system encourage those that wish to use FRC's as currency to treat them like hot potatoes and dump them for something that's not taxed? Again, it sounds like fiat currency...tell me where I'm wrong.

Yes. Assuming by capital you mean production goods as opposed to monetary tokens.
How that's incompatible with the currency.


To treat them as the medium of exchange only. For example, they will prefer to invest on producing goods (capital) rather than holding freicoins.
But before that, forget about taxation, this is a p2p currency, not a coercive goverment. Freicoin demurrage fees are as close to "taxes" as bitcoin transaction fees are.


It's hard to tell from what you've said...The most accepted definition of fiat money is "whose circulation is enforce by law". Since this is a voluntary currency it is clearly not fiat.

I assume you're equating demurrage with money printing. Apart from representing a transfer of value, money printing does little to maintain velocity during "bad times". They keep on creting bigger and bigger quantities while each time the effect on velocity is lower. They have the limit in zero artificial interest rates and despite what they say they can't destroy money back (reduce central bank's balance sheet) as fast as they've created it when velocity starts accelerating again, when all those previously idle piles of cash flow to the market again and threaten with hyperinflation.
When I say "artificial zero rates" I mean they're unnatural for everlasting money and can be only achieved by manipulating the financial market through an institution that can virtually eat infinite losses such as a central bank.

Silvio Gesell predicted the collapse of paper money without demurrage when it was just starting. Either the money managers accept the deflationary cycle or they will destroy their currency by hyperinflation:

http://www.community-exchange.org/docs/Gesell/en/neo/part3/13.htm

In certain sense he also predicted the Ron Paul/goldbug movement in this sentence in which he refers to a global fiat system without demurrage (basically what we have since Nixon):

"A reform of this kind would be short-lived and would bring the possibility of the greatest fraud ever practised upon mankind. After such an attempt at reform the people, as in the past, would believe that their salvation lay in the gold standard and would clamour for its re-introduction."

I hope this helps. While I would recommend you to read the whole book (skipping the first to parts on free/land if you want), don't hesitate to make "hard questions": we'll try to answer the best we can.

Thanks for responding.

I'm always interested in new cryptos, this one is interesting enough to inspire conversation, but I'm not interested in being penalized for holding them.

Then don't hold big quantities for long and you won't suffer any penalty. That shouldn't be an obstacle for accepting them as payment in your business (if you have one). You can sell them for bitcoins, other currency or just spend them as soon as you receive them.

How much is "big quantities", and how long is "long"? Also we need a value (I know, too soon)
I have about 1500, should i make, lets say 10 addresses for 150frc each or "penalty" will be the same?
Thanks

You mean if/when there's an exchange set up that accepts them and if/when there's a way to spend them and something to spend them on?

Rome wasn't built in a day.

I understand that, I'm just concerned that the way this is structured will prevent Rome from ever being built.

How or where do I add myself to this pool? sorry not used P2Pools b4 and wanted to give it a try

EDIT: ok sorry i got it...
hostname : pool.freico.in
port: 9638
username : My FreiCoin address
P: anything

Just point your miner at it and use your deposit address for a username, and any value for password. P2Pool does a payout split directly in the block.

You can see stats by pointing your browser atthe same exact URL including port number.

When the price of freicoin moves, it will could be by a lot more than the few percent you will lose by holding on to them for a few years. If the price moves up the number of coins in active circulation will also increase as speculators cash out their holdings. Eventually as economic growth levels out even the most bullish speculators convert their holdings into bitcoin, fiat, or real capital, the monetary velocity stabilizes, and the price of freicoin stops increasing.

It'll be a rough-and-tumble couple of years, no doubt. But I don't see any reason that it couldn't stabilize once the real Freicoin economy is built up (and the Foundation funds will play a large part in jumpstarting that).

CAUTION!!!!!

If you are mining, be absolutely sure that you are connected to multiple valid nodes.

I just got done dealing with someone who thought they had hundreds of thousands of FRC to sell, when in fact they had been in an orphan chain connected to a single invalid peer.

Don't waste your mining effort, double-check your connections.

--This Public Service Announcement has been brought to you by the word "DAMMNIT!"--

Keynes said about demurrage that it's a similar provision for economic stimulus as inflation. But inflation is easier to implement.

I read some Austrian economists think that demurrage money results in bubbles. And indeed, long-term investments are encouraged. So which would that possibly be? Land, real estate... http://www.smiley-faces.org/smiley-faces/smiley-face-whistle-2.gif

And indeed, Gesell recognized that problem. That's why he proposed a land reform. He wanted land to be administered as a co-operative. How can that happen with Freicoin? Also, you'd have to turn anything long-term investible into co-operatives then. So why don't we call the child by its proper name at last and do socialism?

The middle point is good, if people are used to demurrage money they should tend to look for durable investments NOT denominated in a demurrage money.

State owned means of production? What does that have to do with the price of Freicoin in China?

Please put down the radical tangent and come back to the conversation.

Just to give everyone and idea of where Freicoin is right now I made a graph of our hash rate. Have a great rest of the week. :)

https://i.imgur.com/TP6oz.png

Why can't mine FRC at coinotron?

What's coin-o-tron?

far as I know the biggest alt coin mining pool

http://coinotron.com

PPS is a little bit harder to setup for Freicoin because each block has a slightly different reward value. A lot of the pool operators are still working on a solution to this. As I quoted before, the easiest way to mine is with p2pool :)

Grunching a bit here, but this post gives me the creeps. It reads like an advertisement. This is the best time to buy! Make huge profits when in a few years everyone uses freicoin!

First of all, the coins have to appreciate by >5% to really be worth investing in now at all. Yes that's humble compared to early bitcoin gains but not really in the grand scheme of things. More importantly, if you truly believed what you said in this post you should be snapping up as many cheap freicoins as possible. Making these claims seems misleading.

Lastly, it's odd to encourage hoarding of an anti-hoarding currency.

I am. Anyone with coins to sell PM me an offer.

More blatant advertising here. Making these sorts of promises, that freicoin will increase in value faster than the demurrage fee, is irresponsible and suspicious. Furthermore, can a coin really be non-deflationary if ore expected to gain purchasing power over time?

I also don't see what advantage this provides over bitcoin or why one would choose to accept freicoin instead of bitcoin. One post suggested immediately selling your freicoin for bitcoin, but then isn't freicoin just an unnecessary step in the middle. The bitcoin payment network and method of securing the blockchain is the same as freicoin, right? I might be missing something and is like to see where this goes but seeing the developers publicly declare their coin is going to gain significant value is making me uneasy.

It's like the spam email promising big returns on penny stocks.

Providing offhand commentary on what's happened over the past week isn't blatant advertising. You're getting confused. Of course the coin's been deflationary over the past week. A week ago it didn't even exist. It exists now and we can agree that it has "some" value. As far as I know no orderbook (bid/ask) exchanges exist for Freicoin so we don't really know what its worth on the market. But there has been some gain far beyond the demurrage fee since December 21, when it didn't exist.


You don't see the value of Freicoin. Like it says on the site "it's not for everyone."


If you see any concrete, material misleading statements made by anyone you feel is associated with this project please point them out and I will issue a clarification. We're excited and in a celebratory mood right now. Especially maaku: the project he's been slaving over for the last year (I know I was there) is taking off, so please excuse us for any personal "irrational exuberance."

Not yet, were hoping it pops up of its own accord (an existing exchange starts trading it) if not then maaku will likely put in the time to create one.

Galambo I'm on a phone right now so not in great positions to debate. I quoted what I believed to be assertions that freicoin will gain value over the next few years and suggestions that now is the best time to buy. Nobody knows that. That is what rubbed me the wrong way, it reads like hype and advertising.

It also seems odd that the developer expects the club to be deflationary for a period of years. Isn't the point for this club not to be deflationary?

And rather than dismiss my concerns by saying freicoin I'd not for everyone, why not explain to skeptical newcomers like myself why freicoin is a superior means of exchange?

I'd like to point out there isn't an orderbook exchange for Freicoin. You cannot "buy" Freicoin because there's nowhere to buy it. Saying "this is a good time (probably the best time) to pick up cheap coins" only refers to people mining the Freicoin, because compared to Bitcoin mining the Freicoin is still super cheap. The difficulty of Bitcoin is 3000 times where Freicoin is currently.


If you haven't noticed we aren't actively promoting this on the Bitcoin forums. We didn't even make a thread here because we prefer to use our own forum and IRC. I'd rather communicate with people that understand what we're trying to do. We're not marketers/advertisers, and we were not optimizing our behavior to maximize your perception of value. All of our decisions have a singular focus, which is getting the coins into as a diverse set of hands as possible.

This is the same with PPCcoin. Each block has a different reward value. One way of solving this is to use "getmemorypool". This returns the reward of the block currently being worked on. The pool then provides PPS based on that.

What's the best approach for services that hold user balances to account for the reduction in value of the users account over time? Exchanges and pools tend to have large balances held for users and will not want to foot the cost of the balance reduction.

Is there an API to get this? Does the "accounts" system that bitcoin have work for freicoin and include the reduction in value in the users account balances? I prefer not using the "accounts" system so I'm hoping it's not the only way.

doublec, I'll make writing up an explanation of best practices for handling demurrage a top priority, but it'll probably have to wait until tomorrow. I might be able to extract out some code from my projects to share.

EDIT: but the short answer is: attach a "RefHeight" field to each balance, and each time a balance is used by the system, check if the balance is out of date and if so apply demurrage for the intervening blocks and update the balance. If you have a double-entry system you can even keep track of the loss due to demurrage in a special system account so the books balance.

That was not my intent. I did not mean for them to be interpreted as predictions of the future; I meant only to express my own opinion of one possible outcome. I have edited my posts to reflect this.

EDIT:

I agree those very well could have been interpreted that way, which is why I edited them (and will go back and review them again as I'm in a rush now). What I wrote and you quoted is my own belief and is not meant as a prediction of the future or investment advice in any way. I was under the impression that people were questioning why a demurrage currency could ever have value, and why if it's not supposed to be hoarded are core developers participating in speculation. I offered up my own viewpoint merely as an example, not as an advertisement.

I thought I had qualified my statements as such, but it seems the irrational exuberance of the last few days I haven't been as careful with my words as I should have.


Yes, but freicoins currently have (approximately) zero value. Any future where Freicoin has even the smallest usage would necessarily involve freicoins having nonzero value. Between here and there deflation is mathematically the only possible outcome.

Fiat currencies have dealt with this by using the state prerogative to set exchange rates and print money or absorb losses as necessary. We don't have that power, so unfortunately we simply need to accept that there will be a period of deflationary speculation prior to (possible) price stabilization, 0% interest, and all the rest. We're simply being pragmatic.

Salty, don't tell me off. If people didn't want all the FRC then I wouldn't be doing this. I did not expect to be speculating this Christmas.

Here we go. I have 12,000FRC for sale. Price is 0.5BTC per 1,000FRC. Send me a message if you are interested.

EDIT: Would some clever fellow make an exchange for FRC :)

Maybe Vircurex will add it soon. Send them a request :)

Well, 0.0005 BTC per FRC seems like a firm ask. Here's my bid, trying to set a bottom price.

I'm buying at 0.0001 BTC per FRC (0.1btc per 1000 frc), I have 24 btc for this. That is, I'm buying up to 240,000 frc at this price.

PM if you're interested. I'll update this if I spend it all on other asks.

jtimon,

you are doing it right, well done, you have made the market by making a bid.

I'm buying at 0.000125 BTC per FRC (0.125btc per 1000 frc).

Pm if anyone is interested.

I've got a few I'm selling @0.5 BTC per 1000 FRC

pm me if interested

No. If we were targeting stable prices we wouldn't have a fixed supply. What we target is stable velocity.
Our concern is price cycles motivated by interest rates cycles inherent in everlasting cash. When capital yields are lower than interest rates lending stops precipitating a deflationary spiral that will reverse the situation by not producing more producing goods (capital) until they're badly needed and yields can pay interest again. War and natural disasters (by destroying capital) can rise yields too. That's the little truth in the broken window fallacy, but it doesn't take much to understand that destruction can't be good for the economy and I don't think I have to convince you on this.
With a money that keeps moving at zero interest rates (freicoin), capital yields can drop to zero as they naturally tend to.
Central bankers can manipulate the financial market through money creation, but that just creates bubbles. That can make the impression that is all good again for those who believe that "it's all about confidence" but savers have in fact less incentive to invest over hoard, so little is done to restore velocity. Each new bigger quantity does less. They either have to accept interest and cycles or wait for all that piled cash to come back to the market on a hyperinflationary race. In that sense, people like Max Keiser are right when they say that low interest rates (he really means manipulated low rates) are in fact deflationary. There's much talk about "system liquidity" but too little on money velocity.

When I said earlier that they could be sold directly for bitcoin or fiat I was trying to make the point that even skeptic merchants should rationally accept them (well, when the market is deep enough for their operations). Just like bitcoin skeptic merchants should accept bitcoin through bitpay or a similar service (in fact, I found that argument very useful when explaining bitcoin to people). Sorry, I probably expressed it in an unclear way.


He was wrong on this point too.


Seriously? Please, post here the link. I've been looking for a serious austrian critique to Gesell's theory on interest for years and I found nothing.
Most of them haven't read anything are happy just saying "Look, Keynes was somehow inspired by a crackpot that proposed negative interest rates, but he doesn't even need a serious critique".


Well calling one of the man that earlier and more insistently advocated for free trade among nations, against protectionism and public subsidies a communist (that's what you really mean by socialist) is at the very least daring. He was a proud "free market socialist" in the same sense Proudhon was. I would say he was an anticapitalist.
Probably all these terms are specially hard to understand for north americans, where free market is usually equated to capitalism and socialism to marxism. Just like it's hard to explain anarchocapitalism here in Spain, where anarchism is usually equated to collectivism and cooperatives. Just read the introduction of the book that inspires this currency (http://www.community-exchange.org/docs/Gesell/en/neo/part1/intro.htm) to know a little more about the feelings Gesell processed for Marx. There you can read: "The abolition of unearned income, of so-called surplus-value also termed interest and rent, is the immediate economic aim of every socialistic movement."
So unless you're in favor of economic rents (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent) you would also fall into the socialist category according to that definition.

In any case, cooperativism is not incompatible free market. And free land is not based on cooperativism but on the state. His point is that like money-capital, land is pure capital (and unlike producing goods, whose capital status is transferred from money-capital (http://www.community-exchange.org/docs/Gesell/en/neo/part5/4.htm)). Don't want to talk much about land taxes, but here's his main advocate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_george


I don't see how demurrage money is necessarily bad as a unit for contracts. It's not the same as inflationary money. If you are owed 1000 usd and there's 10% inflation you will lose 10% on real value. But if there's no price inflation you won't lose even if the reference currency has demurrage. If you are owed 1000 frc to be paid next year, you are owed 1000 frc to be paid next year, no matter the demurrage rate. If the borrower wants to sit on the money and pay the demurrage instead of invest it on something productive that's his problem.
That said (and as I've said multiple times on mutual credit/Ripple contexts), my prediction is that in the future credit will be mostly denominated in stable indexes and basket of commodities (not necessarily stored anywhere) rather than floating cash. Indexes like 1970usd or Lietaer's Terra. Maybe the contract says somthing like this:
"A receives 10 terras in freicoins (X fricoin) today from B. A will have to repay 10 terras in freicoins (quantity to be calculated at the time of settlement) next year to B".
That would allow to ignore the inflation premium when calculating the interest. Ideally the risk premium would be the only interest component.

Sorry for this long post, I really should write a blog and link to it...


Thank you !!

I to would like to read any critique of Gessel's demurrage.

Any coins that I cannot sell for 0.5BTC for 1,000FRC I am keeping for when a FRC exchange opens.

Thanks Jutarul, quick and easy!

Thank you Maaku for a very straightforward, hassle free trade. :)

I've started FRC pool. :)
www.coinotron.com (http://coinotron.com)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49182.msg1422430#msg1422430

Great, please fix share value
Thanks

EDIT: just saw your post on the other thread
im a volunteer tester then

I hope you will not be the only one ;)

He's not ;D

Explanation of the practicalities of demurrage accounting, written with application developers in mind:

https://github.com/freicoin/freicoin/wiki/How-to-properly-handle-demurrage-in-applications (https://github.com/freicoin/freicoin/wiki/How-to-properly-handle-demurrage-in-applications)

I don't see how the claim of 0% interest rate could be a stable equilibrium. If I lend freicoin at 0% interest rate, alternatively I could exchange it to bitcoin and lend bitcoin at positive interest rate. Assuming the exchange rate between the two is stable, then obviously I would choose the second alternative.

Super awesome work :)

I was working on my own pool but I think it best to leave it to those who know what they're doing. There are other FRC pools but they are not as pretty as Coinotron's.

Once shares are paying I'll come join the party.

WWW.CRYPTOCOINEXPLORER.COM (http://WWW.CRYPTOCOINEXPLORER.COM)


New coin Freicoin has been added to the explorer

Due to the unique nature of  demurrage, further modification of the explorer is needed.

WARNING: THE ADDRESS PAGE DOES NOT TAKE DEMURRAGE INTO ACCOUNT WHEN CALCULATING BALANCES

We are working on a solution, until then you can view the demurrage wikki at:

How-to-properly-handle-demurrage-in-applications (https://github.com/freicoin/freicoin/wiki/How-to-properly-handle-demurrage-in-applications)

I will keep you posted in the cryptocoin explorer thread. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=124303.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=124303.0)

I want to thank Maaku for his support in helping to further the functionality of the explorer.

I'm close to mining 1000 FRC with my GTX 580. I think I'll stop at 1000.. MHm.. I don't know whether I should wish to regret mining 1000 coins only or not.. lol.

I observed that you changed type of balance related fields in few rpc calls, for example getbalance, getinfo.
They are no longer decimal. Instead they look like :

"2358.09006344+934850464087855181388968773148467/10384593717069655257060992658440192"

I'm not sure how I should convert those values to simple decimal type.
Ommit everything after "+" ? Or perform whole calculation:
2358.09006344 + 934850464087855181388968773148467 / 10384593717069655257060992658440192

Do the math or you're rounding off too many numbers. You'll find computers are good at doing maths.

934850464087855181388968773148467 / 10384593717069655257060992658440192 = 9.0022825115555227875670197259871

I'd like to think an exchange operator is working to exact figures :)

hehe
Fortunately I'm just pool operator and I'm only working with 0.00000001 precision numbers ;)
BTW 934850464087855181388968773148467 / 10384593717069655257060992658440192 is closer to 0.090022... than to 9.0022..

I just would like to know why those balance fields are not decimal anymore. It is very inconvenient.

Right you are. Windows calculator was dropping the last few number in a copy and paste. I blame Windows calculator :)

This makes me wonder... is there any native type/class on a language that uses 30 or more decimal precision?
I'm most Database focused on my job, so idk pretty good about all programming languages...
The better ones that I can remember is Extended from Delphi and BigDecimal from Java.

As you point out, the lender will try to maximize his profits and currencies can be exchanged. But that also applies to the borrower, who will try to minimize his borrowing costs. That way, bitcoin and freicoin financial markets will theoretically equilibrate and produce the same interest rate.
Now you ask why the equilibrium should be zero interest.
The fast answer is that without an artificial barrier for capital yields to drop, they would drop to zero like all profits do in perfect competition and interest rates are intimately linked to interest rates.
But let's make an example with some imaginary assumptions to simplify things. Freicoins and Bitcoins have the same price.

There's a given market, say car manufacturing, where factories (capital) yield 2% of their producing costs (the cost to build the factory). Of course, their yield comes from selling the consuming goods (cars). Building a new factory would push the yields down, since all compete selling cars. In perfect competition, profits drop to zero, but not yields, since they represent the borrowing costs for the investment. To be profitable with a new factory you need a loan at a lower rate than 2%. Sorry if I'm repeating myself but I want to stress how yields tend to drop by competition, which, by the way, is good for the consumers, since lower yields mean cheaper products.
If lenders/investors can find another market with higher yields they will prefer to invest on that other market first. Higher yields mean that the demand on that market hasn't fulfilled the whole demand at the lowest possible price. There's more margin for the lowest possible price (which is just the raw costs, without profits nor capital yields) on that market so the demand's signal is transmitted to the financial market. But those markets will eventually hit 2% yields and eventually lenders/investors will have to chose between 1.9% or hoarding money.

A bitcoin lender doesn't have any incentive to lend at zero interest, but a freicoin lender has. Borrowers/entrepreneurs will find lower interests on freicoin's financial market, possibly zero. As yields get lower, bitcoin's financial market would shrink in favor of freicoin's. Borrowers don't care about demurrage because they're going to invest the money, spend it on producing goods.

Why an entrepreneur would plan to invest in something that yields 0% ? That means that the factory on its whole lifetime will only pay for itself, not give more return. The lender just wants to spend his money at another time without paying demurrage nor conversion to bitcoin fees. And the entrepreneur is paying his own wage as part of the production costs. Being selfish that could be enough for him. Ideally at this stage the building costs of the factory equal its total outcomes in its productive lifetime and the consumer is only paying for the real costs of production.

I hope this makes sense to you, but of course don't hesitate to ask questions or criticize the parts you don't agree on.

From where did you gather the data for your graph?  :)

 :D

lol

lock this thread and close the topic as this coin is such a fail.

this coin will never be used on exchanges like mtgox or btc-e. and this is why

when depositing funds into the exchanges.. they hold them.

you continue your business trading the price fluctuations of the coin using a database of binary numbers that represent the deposited amount.

so while your profiting. the actual owner of the private key you deposited to (the exchange) is losing out due to the demurrage tax.

simply put. they wont touch it.

stick with the 2 longest surviving coins bitcoin and litecoin. or atleast invent something that has some actual use apart from making the first guy that owns the coin the richest and each subsequent person owning it receive less and less as they receive and hold it.

it also fails the demurrage thing by people just sending it to themselves on different addresses. too many loopholes. too many fails to be a viable candidate for mainstreaming

Hello Mr. Troll...

Demurrage cannot be sidestepped. It happens to coins that stay still, and it happens to coins that move. This would also generally be applied to balances that sites hold in FRC for users. If the site operator is nice enough to "pay" his users 5% per year by not imposing demurrage, he might get (or want) something in return.

I'm not sure what you mean by "fluctuations" since demurrage can be accurately calculated for any given blockheight. Once difficulty catches up to hashing that will be a pretty reliable indicator and potentially a new fee mechanism that site operators will like.

The genie is out of the bottle with alt-coins and there are a huge number of financial theories out there that are begging for experimentation. Watch the experiment if you don't want to participate, and you might learn something.

You can also continue to show your inability to turn a verb into a noun, and we will mock your failure.

Freicoin is performing exact internal arithmetic, using arbitrary-precision rational type (basically two BigNums, a numerator and a denominator). This is for a variety of reasons, but chiefly because tracking sub-satoshi amounts internally allows us to later increase divisibility by switching to a decimal floating point type for CTxOut::nValue.

How exchange operators should handle demurrage in a fair and equitable manner is outlined here: How to properly handle demurrage in applications (https://github.com/freicoin/freicoin/wiki/How-to-properly-handle-demurrage-in-applications)

EDIT: The fraction that follows the balance is always in the range (0, 1) satoshi; in other words it's what's left over if you were to truncate to a "normal" bitcoin balance of 8 decimal places. For many applications it is fine to simply ignore/truncate these sub-satoshi values (and indeed, this is what the GUI does).

Did you ever consider general demurrage to offset the Proof-of-Stake inflation in PPCoin? If the reason is that this introduces extra coding-complexity, would you consider introducing it in a later version of PPCoin? Maybe have a look at the code for demurrage in Freicoin?

Here is FRC discussion, not PPC.

In ppcoin inflation is countered via destruction of transaction fees. No demurrage will not be included in ppcoin. This is irrespective of the fact that I don't like demurrage I think it's effect is sort of equivalent to inflation. Even if I were to be persuade that demurrage has a somewhat positive effect on economy as a whole I would only do it in a separate cryptocurrency instead of messing with ppcoin.

Also I think there is some misunderstanding in your post. Demurrage does not counter inflation. Both inflation and demurrage can be considered a form of taxation on the economy. This tax is paid to miners in the case of bitcoin and freicoin but for ppcoin it's paid to stake minter in addition to miners. Here is a little comparison of mining tax rate between the 3 coins:

asymptotic annual mining tax rate:
bitcoin: 0% + transaction fee tax rate
ppcoin: <1%
freicoin: 5%

freicoin has chosen a rapidly decreasing inflation rate though (inflation stops after 3 years). Comparison of annual mining tax rate 3 years from now (one year before bitcoin's second halving):
bitcoin: ~ 9% (would become 4~5% after the second halving)
ppcoin: unknown (maybe close to bitcoin's depending on market adoption)
freicoin: 5%

So freicoin has one year window where it's mining tax rate is significantly lower than bitcoin's.

However freicoin has an additional centralized tax known as 'foundation tax' at a rate of 80%, on the entire money supply for the first 3 years (80m out of total 100m coins). So the coin's fate will largely depend on the good will of the management of the foundation and the immediate effect is that hash rate of the network will be 'taxed away' and the protection level against 51% attack is lower than a comparably valued (in terms of market cap) cryptocoin. But I think another serious issue is the foundation has too much concentration of wealth and might be subject to confiscation (no plausible deniability as the addresses of the foundation are hardcoded in source code and its accounting is presumably public).

I'm currently buying FRC @ 0.0002 BTC per FRC (0.2btc per 1000 frc)

Pm me if interested :)

I'll buy from you at 0.0000001 btc per FRC ok? Deal. lol  :D

I'm buying, not selling (Don't tell Luke jr) ;D

http://www.examiner.com/images/blog/EXID12799/images/teeth08xo.jpg

I don't know why you insist on using the word “tax” for the initial distribution. A tax is a coercive transfer of wealth; an initial distribution materializes out of nothing. 20% of the initial distribution goes to the miners, 80% is distributed through Foundation grants. We've been upfront about this.

I would not call the demurrage rate and perpetual subsidy a tax either. It is part and parcel with the implicit contract binding the Freicoin protocol together. It's something everyone agrees to by using the coin, and which cannot be retroactively changed. And there's an easy way to opt out: don't use Freicoin.

Yes, I agree that the Foundation represents an existential risk for Freicoin right now. In the near-term Freicoin will succeed or fail based on public perception of how open, transparent, fair, and efficient the grant selection process is. That's why work on the Foundation is our top priority now that the reference client has been released.

However even in the very long-term the Foundation's assets will eventually decay to zero, with those coins re-entering the marketplace through miner subsidies.

I made another graph to celebrate breaking past 50GH/s. Additionally, the difficulty has increased and is now 4096. We now have more hashes/second than any other SHA256 coin (TRC, PPC, etc), besides Bitcoin. The growth in computing power supporting the Freicoin is exceeding all of my expectations.

https://i.imgur.com/lGRYG.png

Hey! I´m probing for a swift merger of PP´s- and Frei´s. I even have the name ready: Creuro (crypto-euro)  :D

I feel that your argument hinges on the idea that savers will lose demurrage if not lending freicoin out at 0% interest rate.

It would be true if the demurrage is enforced via state monopoly and legal tender laws like the fiat currencies. However given a free choice between:

1) 'Hoarding' bitcoin
2) Lending freicoin out at 0% interest rate with all the risk associated with lending money (possible default and total loss)

I mean it's an easy choice no?

So no I don't agree that the expectation of an eventual 0% interest rate can materialize as the equilibrium state without state coersion.

Also I don't see where in your argument this 0% is deduced as the logical end state. Maybe you mean that assuming you cannot ban bitcoins so interest rate would just approach the lower bound of bitcoin interest rate (which is 0%) instead of going lower to negative territory? But in reality bitcoin interest rate would be quite a bit higher to compensate for risks associated with lending.

FRC faucet: http://www.theopeneffect.com/freicoin/ (http://www.theopeneffect.com/freicoin/)
http://theopeneffect.com/freicoin/screenshot.png

LOGO:
http://theopeneffect.com/freicoin/Freicoinlogo.png

I am only thinking of demurrage in the sense of a tool (tax) to benefit the PP-coin stake minter, somewhere in the magnitude of the 1% you have today from inflation by stake minting (minus the tx fees).

So if we keep to discussing this 1% I see the following main arguments demurrage vs inflation (not considering extra complexity in code):

Demurr+:
1) The selling point of a clearly non-inflating coin base in the long term (much like bitcoin), very helpful for convincing the non-technical adopter for which purely digital money coupled with just the hint of some in-built inflation will sound terrifying.
2) The psychological drive will be higher for any stake holder to connect to the network and mint the stake coins: Just compare the slight inconvenience of having a stash of 100 PPC and miss an opportunity to earn one more VS the horror of not being prudent enough to prevent 100 PPC from decaying down to 99. This is such a strong effect that the percentage might be brought down to 0.5 or less, with the same amount of PPC kept as stake for minting.

Demurr-:
1) The inconvenience for any non-stake holder to see the constant small reduction by demurrage, especially for denominated physical coins, or gift certificates, holding demurrage-PP´s
2) If stake minting is exactly equal to demurrage then any destroyed tx fees will lead to shrinkage of the coin base.

BTW: I think the term tax should not be used for any function of distribution limited to 3-5 years, like for the 80% of Freicoins. This is an initial distribution, not a tax.

well besides Bitcoin and Namecoin.

I'm also interested what you estimated the hashes/second of devcoin and ixcoin at.

I've been mining since last night, I didn't get any coins from pool.freico.in

LAst coins were from 6 am, its 4 am now, almost.

ixcoin? LOL
how many *coins are there actually? total mindfuck
bitcoin, devcoin, ppcoin, terracoin, freicoin, litecoin, timecoin, solidcoin, mindblowncoin?

The key here is the distinction between 'Basic' interest and the interest rate on individual loans.  Basic interest is what the lender can demand for a risk-free loan and each individual borrower is then charged a premium for their individual risk factors (or refused a loan all together).  The aim of Demurrage and Gesell's theories is to bring basic interest to 0% as only that portion of a loan is usury, the risk premium portion is completely legitimate and necessary.  Competition between lenders will drive the risk premium down to just paying for defaults and profits which as Jt explains naturally fall to zero under perfect competition.

The reality is that loans in Freicoin won't start until valuation has become stable and a good amount of products are selling in Freicoin.

I'm still currently buying FRC @ 0.0002 BTC per FRC (0.2btc per 1000 frc)

Pm me if interested  :)

Good. Now we can focus on the concept of basic interest. First of all I don't agree that basic interest constitute 'usury' and should be eliminated. When I lend money out, even if it's completely risk free (although I doubt there is such a thing but that's another topic), I still sacrificed my ability to use these money as I wish at any time if instead I just kept them. So why shouldn't I be compensated for the sacrifice? Maybe you could argue that under perfect competition that the rate should be tending to 0%, then again I don't see how demurrage is going to help much at all.

Can you tell what's the 'basic interest rate' under the current fiat system? I am sorry but no the US treasury is not risk-free to me  ;)

The other issue is that even if you can manage to lower basic interest rate with demurrage, why is it such a good thing? If we say that the current fiat system with central banking already reduced real (basic) interest rate to negative, so isn't that already a solved problem (albeit through state coersion)? So I assume that advocates of Gesell's theory all agree that central banking with fiat is a superior system than gold because it can lower basic interest rate? Instead I could argue it's bad because it distorts the free market interest rate and encourages a debt society which has it's own set of malaises.

You are. If you make a 1-year loan at 0%, then 1 year later you get your full freicoin balance back with no demurrage applied. In essence you got a 4.89% return, exactly cancelling the loss due to demurrage.

Let's go back to the apples. Let's say you have 1,000 fresh apples and don't know what to do with them. Most of them will rot before you can eat them, and you don't have any equipment or know-how to preserve them. I own a grocery store and I make you an offer: give me your crates of apples for safekeeping, and I'll give them back one small quantity at a time when you need them. Not the same apples, mind you, but ones of equal quality to the ones you gave me. In other words, I've given you free pass to walk into my store at a time in the future of your choosing and walk out with an apple, without paying, a total of 1,000 times, at which point I will consider the debt repaid.

Have we not both benefited? You're now able to enjoy your apples fresh without fear of rot, and I've acquired inventory/capital for my business. And I did it without charging interest. We both gain because we found a mutually beneficial relationship that allows us to avoid asset depreciation by investing in real capital. That is the essential value of demurrage.

Your now come on to the concept of 'Liquidity premium' which you have keenly stated is the "ability to use money as I wish at any time".  It is this liquidity premium that a lender is losing and that the borrower is essentially buying and the 'cost' of the liquidity premium is basic interest.  Demurrage is a means to cancel out that natural liquidity premium, now you really get to the crux of the issues, WHOM deserves to reap the rewards of the benefit of liquidity premium, I think we can all agree that the person/s that CREATE the liquidity premium deserve to enjoy it, and if someone else were to be receiving it that would be unfair.

Now consider what liquidity premium IS, "ability to use (aka spend) money at any time", to spend money you need two things, first money (duuu) and secondarily you need someone willing to accept that money in exchange for something of actual use value (food for example).  But just one seller isn't providing much choice, you need a multitude of sellers selling everything under the sun to have true freedom to spend money as you wish.  It takes an entire economy of people willing to accept a money to give that money liquidity, it's very much like the network effects were trying to get in Crypto-currency, more merchants, more customers etc etc.  When you look at it from that perspective it's clear that its the wider network that creates liquidity not the individual spender, thus the holder of money has no claim on receiving the liquidity premium and it should rightfully go to those that are expending effort to create it.

Now for your second point, why is all of this 'good', besides the basic point that usury is an illegitimate transfer of a socially created good (liquidity) to private hands, it is bad in a broader sense in that it prevents capital yields from reaching zero as they should, Jt has been over all that in earlier posts.  What your calling the maladies of a 'debt society' I see as the maladies of 'usury society', the inability to pay off debt is almost entirely the result of usury, the systematic pushing of debt on people who can't handle it is motivated by a finance industry that has become 'predatory' (a euphemism for usurious we hear all the time).

First, congrats to starting a new blockchain with interesting economic properties.

I am still a bit pessimistic about the long-term viability of the chain from a network security perspective: Every chain which feeds off the bitcoin mining network (same hashing tech, but not merged mining), can be pushed out by bigger players in the bitcoin community using ordinary attack vectors. However, since freicoin rather complements bitcoin instead of competes (money-as-exchange vs. money-as-value), this CAN be ok.

Regarding demurrage: Sorry if that question was asked already - why 4%/year and not 3%? As far as I understand, the purpose of demurrage is to create a strong inflationary force to prevent large capital to build up within the freicoin money supply and thus limit it's use to money-as-exchange. But how does that help freicoin compete against currencies like bitcoin, where you have have both properties? Aren't you effectively "removing" a property from the currency and claim that this is beneficial for other properties?

Regarding market capitalization: With money-as-value you asymptotically increase market capitalization until a saturation point. Ideally the market capitalization is high, which makes it impossible for anyone to manipulate the price levels easily. How does this work in a system where you systematically converge against a low market capitalization (since you have no store-of-value)? Don't you expose yourself to serious economic attack vectors?

The primary factor in rate selection is the basic interest / liquidity premium, which demurrage is meant to exactly compensate for. Although there are models for determining what this rate should be, pragmatically we should look to history. For the past century (and the 19th century which Gesell looked at in his analysis) the basic interest rate has stayed stable around 4-5%. Even the Great Depression, both World Wars, hyperinflation, and numerous revolutions around the world don't seem to have affected the liquidity premium by more than a percent or so. Basic interest appears to be a general property of money anywhere and anytime.

For simply illustrative purposes, let's put our Keynesian central-banker hat on. The central bankers watch economic indicators and set interest rates in an attempt to control inflation. Why? Not because inflation is bad - they shouldn't print money at all if that were the case - but because historical experience shows that 2-3% inflation combined with 2-3% GDP growth is most likely to result in a sustainable economic growth. Keynesian economists do not satisfactorily explain why this is; they just do it because it works.

Silvio Gesell, on the other hand, does provide the unifying underlying theory. In The Natural Economic Order (http://www.ces.org.za/docs/Gesell/en/neo/index.htm) he explains how the non-perishable nature of money gives rise to the liquidity premium, how the usurious liquidity premium is an unjust negotiation advantage of money-holders over money-borrowers, and how while this does not create economic disparities, it does increase social stratification and entrenchment of the monied elite. Look to the Rothschilds for the most obvious example - Nathan Mayer Rothschild understood this principle very well.

The goal is not to prevent large capital build up, not to coercively equalize society, or anything like that. It's simply to level the playing field, allowing fair competition, in the process creating macroeconomic incentives that will lead to long-term sustainable growth.

Regarding market capitalization, one can expect that the steady-state situation with any demurrage currency is each participant only holding what they need for cashflow purposes. Velocity will be very high but steady, as money doesn't stay in any one account for very long, cashflow needs tend to rather stable, in aggregate. So yes, market capitalization will be lower but stable. However since most coins will be kept for cashflow purposes they won't be listed on an exchange either. So you'd have a hard time executing such an attack.

@Sunny King
As Imapler has said, I was assuming a risk free loan. So the options if you're paid with freicoin and don't want plan to spend them soon would be:

1) 0% risk free loan
2) loan at risk for some interest
3) convert them to bitcoins and hoard them.

You're assuming that the third option is free, but it has costs too. Apart from the exchange's fee, you will lose something from the spread between bids and asks.


To complete other answers...When you receive money, you've made some good to society (to someone) and you deserve to be compensated back. But why does the rest of society have to wait for you to decide how? How long should we wait?


As I explained you before, the basic interest represents an artificial barrier for investments that causes unemployment, higher prices for products, rents (unearned income) and cycles. This is how production goods owners (capitalists) benefit from the operation of capital-money:

http://www.community-exchange.org/docs/Gesell/en/neo/part5/4.htm


They achieve low interest by manipulating the financial market. There's no interest free loans for everyone though, just for the privileged banking cartel.
Even if that were the case, they just moving the rents somewhere else, not suppressing it. But basically is just that, market manipulation is always wrong and has unintended consequences. Besides it is not sustainable. Here's Gesell predicting the hyperinflationary collapse of the current monetary system (global fiat paper without demurrage):

http://www.community-exchange.org/docs/Gesell/en/neo/part3/13.htm

To reiterate, our aim is to suppress unearned income.


I recommend to read the whole book or at least the three parts on money, but in this chapter he explains the 4-5% number:

http://www.community-exchange.org/docs/Gesell/en/neo/part5/8.htm

The other question...I just don't think that a money needs to store value.


To complete Mark's answer, since there will be less speculation (practically reduced to arbitrage), there will be less opportunities to manipulate markets. Why there will be less speculation? Because they will be losing money while sitting on cash. People won't sell their investments so quickly if they don't know where their putting their money later. Maybe this helps:

http://www.community-exchange.org/docs/Gesell/en/neo/part4/5f.htm

Thanks so far. Seems I got some reading to do before I understand freicoin (http://www.community-exchange.org/docs/Gesell/en/neo/). Bitcoin was easy to understand - because it was modeled after gold.

So about this demurrage..... What is to stop people from doing the obvious: creating a script that just shuffles FRC coins back and forth between different addresses/wallets to avoid demurrage?

Shuffling won't help with demurrage - because it's resolved per block, right?

Demurrage is calculated based on block height, so it won't work. The demurrage isn't technically applied until you try to make a transaction.

I'm selling FRC at .0003 BTC per FRC (0.3 btc per 1000frc), Feel free to PM me if interested

SOLD!!!

PS

I'm still buying FRC if anyone has some to trade

please pm me if interested

cheers

Dammn. Freicoin difficulty spiked up a lot, I can feel it.

Next difficulty will be 16,384!

I'm selling 1,000FRC for 1BTC. Anything less and I'm keeping it.

I made a quick graph of the hashrate so far.  :)

https://i.imgur.com/E1h1O.png

My new bid is 0.0003 BTC per freicoin.
PM if interested.

So what does that mean? The coins will just always be subject to demurrage? When does Demurrage actually happen?

Demurrage occurs on a per block basis despite coins being moved. It is applied on the chain only when is moved.
But the user doesn't really care when it is updated on the chain, he can't do anything to avoid paying the demurrage fees while hoarding freicoins.

You missed a point.  ;D

https://i.imgur.com/4EAW3.png

68GH/s!!

I did indeed ;)

Updated it:

https://i.imgur.com/HyXPd.png

That's quite impressive @ 60 GHs already. I was successful in getting goods with FRC today so I guess we can call this currency legit?

The biggest advantage of spending FRC is that you have peace of mind. You know that you won't have lost out or treated your trading partner unfairly due to wild swings in value, because the coins are continuously being recirculated. Congrats on being one of the first people to realize this and take a trade to completion. :)

What is the chance of a Freicoin pirate-ponzi? Just 0.5% per week sounds great when we are talking FRC...

I'll buy 1000 FRC for 0.3 BTC  :)

PM me!

Freicoin is a more political animal that Bitcoin. But it is set up for decentralization in the long run, settling down with a demurrage-tax on the economy that will throttle saving (and lending) to the benefit of miners.

The initital distribution is both centralized and political indeed (80%). If it´s properly managed this will make it easier to sell to the general public.

Just think of the nagging questions non-tech people always ask when they are just about to be convinced of the benefits of the bitconomy: How was bitcoin distributed initially? Who minted what is currently in circulation? I´d rather want to answer that the biggest chunk originally was given to Amnesty international; open source programmers etc, than it was mined by pimply teenagers with custom built rigs in their basement dwellings.

My summary so far: Freicoin has just about the inverse economical functions of Bitcoin, both in distribution and for the long term..

The initial idea was to distribute it all through miners for p2p-ness, but many people complained about giving it to miners.
We also considered to distribute it equally among as many people as possible, but there's no easy way to uniquely identify people from any country and getting people to sign for their share before launch.
Then the "good causes" idea came out and we thought it could be very useful to distribute it to many people fast (even people or organizations that wouldn't have get involved with the currency otherwise) and it could also help to further legitimize freicoin.
Let's see how this turns out, but I don't think we've made a mistake.

this is on par with what a miner would make mining btc... your not offering a premium?

Neither Jtimon nor any other Freicoin contributor are going to be profiting personally from Foundation funds, everyone is maintaining full separation of their personal accounts (created through mining on our often pathetic personal rigs) and Foundation funds.  You can also use the Block-chain explorer to see that Foundation funds have not been moved yet.

I'm in favor of allocating a portion of Foundation funds towards a faucet in the future, but we will need to make sure it's done properly.  First the Foundation needs a get a documented procedure for how it distributes funds agreed upon.  If you want to have some input on how that's decided you can contribute at http://www.freicoin.org/post819.html#p819 ware we are discussing that along with some charitable proposals.

Holly $hit! 7.5 Million?!?!?!?!

Makes the amount I've been mining look rather small  in comparison... :(

Neither jtimon, Impaler, galambo, or any of the other core contributors have access to the Foundation wallet. It's currently in cold storage in safe deposit box only I have access to. The Foundation is currently an existential risk for Freicoin: how well we keep to our promises about those funds will determine the future of FRC.

Because of the gravity of the situation, we're keeping very strictly to the promises that we made. The Foundation outputs will only be spent through grants, and no funds will be disbursed until a process is in place for public solicitation of proposals and comments on proposals, and a disinterested review board setup to evaluate and select proposals for funding according to published criteria and a transparent process.

I would have liked to have helped fill the faucet funds, and given support as needed to the explorer, mining pools, and exchanges currently being worked on. But in the absence of a Foundation decision making process, I would have done so unilaterally. And that's a slippery slope none of us want to go down.

The 320 Foundation addresses are a matter of public record (see GetInitialDistributionBudget() in main.cpp). You can lookup their history at any time on the block explorer. I promise you this: those addresses will not be touched until grants are awarded by a fully functioning Foundation. theymos can mark me as a scammer if I renege on that.

80 Gigahash/s busted, congrats!  :o

https://i.imgur.com/Qce3t.png

As a sidenote to the basic interest rate and its tendency, the Austrian explanation is

The interest rate (yes basic, as opposed to loan insurance, loan cost and profit/loss) is a result of the consumers time preference, or impatience. In and economy where everything is fixed and known, including the value scales of the consumers, the interest would still be positive. The demand for holding money, however, would be zero.

Peoples demand for money is due to the uncertainty of the future, but also if you think you have a comfortable level of consumption it is logical to save more.

Then when you have more than enough money to cover the insecurity, you would invest in capital goods either directly, via a firm, via a fund, or via a savings account.

Luckily for us who live from hand to mouth, the savers supply capital which results in productivity increase for every wage earner.

I feel the freicoin website spells that out pretty well. Do you see that as a problem, or just different than bitcoin?

Stopped reading here:

« In fact, the unfair economic advantages of simply being wealthy are diminished with Freicoin. In the current system of money, including the U.S. Dollar, Euro, and other national currencies, money is and always has been used to store value–money seen from the point of view of the holders, the wealthy. Freicoin emphasizes instead the view to that of the producer, the proletariat, the 99%: money as a means of buying the goods and services necessary to sustain life, and the capital required to create improved living conditions. »

It's clearly a currency designed for communists or communist-friendly people.  Not sure they even try to hide it.   They should call it "redcoin".

Well, communists have the right to exist so I guess it would be a good thing if they had their own money.  But as far as I'm concerned, I don't want any part of this.

Sure, but in a way we should be happy about this thing.  Because Freicoin is the answer to most of the ranting we've been hearing ever since the beginning of bitcoin.  Instead of trying to convince them on how wrong they are, we can just tell them:  "well you can just use freicoin, then".

As a bitcoin user I still have to use fiat currencies everyday, anyway.  Between USD/EUR/Whatever and Freicoin, I'd rather use freicoin.

You may see that as a problem but there's nothing I can do to convince you otherwise.

But in Bitcoin, the mining subsidy is called that for a reason. Bitcoin is a very "political" coin, as well, if you consider the behavior of Freicoin to be political. These are all design decisions meant to encourage or discourage specific behavior. We'd like to encourage behavior that most people outside of this community would consider to be more fair.

I just read this sentence again:

« In fact, the unfair economic advantages of simply being wealthy are diminished with Freicoin »

That's so awesome.  Isn't that a great pleonasm?  I mean, doesn't "being wealthy" consist, by definition, of having an economic advantage?   And what  exactly is unfair with this?

Exactly. This is the most adult rejection of the Freicoin I have read yet and I'm perfectly okay with it.

The audience for freicoin and the audience for bitcoin are completely different. We serve different markets which shares very little in common.

Economics exists to solve a resource allocation problem. Because someone has an extraordinary amount of currency, does that necessarily mean they should have an insurmountable advantage over people who have better ideas of how to use some resources? Of course not. Thats a pretty perverted consequence of the "fiat" system, and the system that Bitcoin promotes. We didn't want this in our currency, so we tried to design it out. That is the entire point of the demurrage.

This is the first commentary I've heard arguing for very high demurrage, 50% is far higher then even the failed Occupy currency (a non-cryptographic currency totally unrelated to Freicoin).  We consider that level of demurrage to be little more then confiscation and to be worse then the 0% demurrage of bitcoin or standard currency.  Demurrage is not like sugar on corn-flakes, more is not always better.  Like anything in economics their is a socially optimum rate that will result in the most good&services being transacted.  The liquidity premium has never been so high as to justify that level of demurrage, it would just destroy capitol formation and enrich producers at the expense of savers.

This principle of optimum rates and non-one-exploiting-anyone is why Gesell and Freicoin can not be called 'Communist' in any stretch of the imagination (Socialist perhapse, but that's a distinction over the head of most people today).  Gesell embraced private ownership of property, deriving profit from property & prices set by markets.  These were all factors that made Communists of the day despise Gesell and label him a "Capitalist Stooge".  At the same time Gesell denounced the earning of interest which is the basis of Capitalism (don't confuse Capitalism with the 'Free Markets' which are completely different), thus he was called a Communist by the Capitalists of his day.  Both sides suppressed this 3rd Way and today Gesell is tragically unknown.

The truth is that Gesell was a Free-marketer anti-Capitalist anti-Communist, and we at Freicoin follow the same ideology.

You seem pretty jaded here by past failures in the Bitcoin economy. Running off with all the Freicoin to buy private armies and high security houses? We're trying to be above the board, not be the next pirateat40. Everything we do will be disclosed and corroborate with what is observed in the blockchain. Maybe you will believe it later when the grants process actually starts.

If you don't want cryptocurrency to remain the realm of "gold-bug nerds" then you should at least recognize that something like the Freicoin will eventually have to happen.

Ok. Now you're just trying to be funny, or mean.  Sorry you don't like the Freicoin.

It is actually "richcoin" masquerading as "redcoin". The irony of Freicoin is that demurrage in a manner similar to inflation actually favors the rich over the poor. The theory that the rate of interest for a very low risk loan will essentially offset the demurrage rate is in fact correct if we assume the currency itself does not have deflation or inflation. The problem is that, as in the case of inflation, this form of low risk wealth preservation is only available to the rich. Why because the typical transaction costs make lending not cost effective for the poor. With Bitcoin on the other hand the poor can preserve their meager wealth by simply doing nothing and consequently not incurring any transaction costs.

So if you if you are a billionaire in CAD, USD or EUR terms sure Freicoin is the currency for you since you will be able to lend it out with minimal risk to offset the demurrage and preserve your wealth. On the other hand the remaining 99% are way better off with Bitcoin where wealth preservation does not require the payment of fees to the 1%.

By the way the poor are far more likely to using CAD, USD or EUR cash than the rich. If fact I would not be surprised if many members of the occupy movement actually have more cash than many billionaires.

And who would you then lend it to? Whom other than the ordinary working guy who is today paying half of his net income in various forms of interest? And now gets his loans from the very same former USD billionaire for 0%.

Yes, this is naturally when living from hand to mouth. And then a yearly FRC demurrage of 5% would not even be noticed.

Well, yes it does.

Economics solves the resource allocation problem by giving a price to resources.  So people who have more money have bigger a weight in the resource allocation process, because they are capable of paying a higher price.  Rich people weight more in the market, and that makes sense.  Rich people are supposed to be people who have shown in the past that they are more capable of producing wealth or of evaluating the real value of things.  They are more efficient economic agents than poor people.  So it's totally logic that they have more influence in the price mechanism.

The profit made by the former USD billionaire is the spread between his cost say 0-1% and the retail rate which can be as high as 30% or more. However this spread has nothing to do with whether the underlying currency is inflationary or deflationary or has demurrage or not. The key is that by doing nothing namely not participating in the first place the "ordinary working guy" can avoid the transfer of wealth to the rich person since a lot of the borrowing  by the "ordinary working guy" is to finance discretionary consumptive spending. The key difference here between Bitcoin and Freicoin is that Bitcoin encourages inaction on the part of "ordinary working guy" thereby preserving his wealth, while Freicoin encourages action on the part of the "ordinary working guy" that results in a transfer of wealth to the top 1%

The point that the yearly FRC demurrage of 5% would not even be noticed is in fact very true. What is critical here is that this kind of thing is precisely how the top 1% engineers the transfer of wealth from the remaining 99%. The top 1% literally nickels and dimes the remaining 99% in order to accumulate wealth.

When one takes the time to actually figure out how the top 1% accumulates wealth at the expense of the remaining 99% it becomes very clear why Bitcoin is a far better deal for the "ordinary working guy" than Freicoin.

I just don't understand the need for the 80%.  Why not just focus on the demurrage aspect?   Seems the 80% is what is scaring off more adopters.

If any number were to be used, I believe 10% is more reasonable.  The solution to reduce the excess amount that has already been taken is easy (atleast in my mind).  Simply "lose" the remaining outstanding coins. 

Do it. I would love to see this exact same coin without the 80%.

I can help with coding, hosting and hashpower. All initial coins mined would go into a faucet.

I think we should call it, BushCoin.

I wonder if a Freicoin fork is the sort of thing that the Freicoin Foundation would donate to?

No, I've mined nothing and I bought only 12000 frc for now.


Yes, sorry for giving away my own time in ways you don't like. I guess I just have a big mouth.
Some people call that lot of talking analysis and design. But now I'm focusing on economic education, since most of the people that are calling me lazy won't bother to read a short book, they seem to prefer my posts.


I haven't wrote that part, but I don't see where you think is being "communist" defending the producers? Maybe you're just alergic to the word proletariat? How's suppressing unfair privileges goes against the free market?


Please, read my previous answer here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=133020.msg1422106#msg1422106

Also, this chapter contains the core economic reasoning under the claim "the basic interest and capital yields represent economic rents", which I think is the underlaying concept you disagree more with:
http://www.community-exchange.org/docs/Gesell/en/neo/part5/4.htm

Of course it would be better if you read the whole book (or the 3 parts on interest), but I think that's a good start if you want to discuss Gesell.


No, it's not agnostic: it gives it to miners. When creating money, you have to give it to someone. You just think that giving it to people with mining equipment so that can later made huge profits by selling after the price have risen is more fair. That's YOUR OPINION. I used to have the same opinion, but it's still an opinion.


Your own opinion could influence too, since we want people to comment on the proposals and participate in general.


Please, this is ridiculous.


Please, stop calling demurrage inflation, they're different things. Demurrage is not monetary inflation nor price inflation.
Many people claim monetary inflation is equivalent to demurrage and so timecoin/expocoin would be equivalent to freicoin, but they don't undesrtand that the effect on interest rates is pretty different. If you're one of them, I suggest you search the web for "inflation premium component of interest" or something like that. Or just ask here, but please stop saying something false as it was an obvious tautology.
Simply put...

What would be the risk-free interest on expocoin ?
I would say something close 10%, in any case, surely over 5%

What would be the risk-free interest on freicoin ?

I would say something close to 0%, surely under 5%.

I'd vote for the coin! :-) ObamaCoin! :-) Love it.

I suppose we want the cost of keeping money (demurrage) as well as the cost of making money exchanges as low as possible, like we do with all production. It is called improvement, and is the reason we all live in relative abundance.

It's not just the word "proletariat", although it is indeed a very good hint:  generally whoever pronounce this word is either a communist, or a capitalist mocking communists.

First:  "unfair economic advantage of simply being wealthy".  Why is this "unfair"?   Being wealthy is not a privilege: it's the result of an open competition.  In the past (and still nowadays in some countries), some people could not practice some professions or own certain things, whatever they do.  You had to be born in a certain way.   That was what one might call privileges.  But it is not the case anymore in most countries.

Second:  your idea of money is just wrong.  People do not just work to survive.  Most of them, and especially people who work A LOT (like chinese people working to build the stuff we use all around the world), work in order to save money SO THAT THEY DON'T HAVE TO WORK ANYMORE IN THE FUTURE.   Sorry for using high caps but I really wanted to stress this.

Storing value is a perfectly normal and economically sane use case for money.   Storing money is really a mean of buying and exchanging stuff, it's just being done with a much longer time scale.

Third:  nowadays most people don't work anyway.   At least because of the high unemployment rate.   So talking about the 99% of "producing" people is just weird.



There are way too many economic assumption I don't agree with in this reasoning.  I just can't debate it.  I disagree with pretty much every single sentence.

This is not exactly true. Many people don't have access to the necessary equipment or just lack the technical capabilities to mine.


Ok. Then you would have preferred that everything went to miners. That we had only made one experiment instead of two at the same time.
My bet (after a couple of years advocating for bitcoin and explaining it to very different people) is that more people will prefer our solution, some may even be skeptic about that 20% and require an explanation. But as you say, we'll see.


Ok, sorry, I wasn't getting your point.
Yes, this is complicated. We will try to define some rules first. The more objective and clear we can, so that the "veto" doesn't seem arbitrary.


Good to have mathematicians around. So tell me, if they're equivalent what will it be more like? 10% or 0% interest rates?
What's your prediction for both equivalent schemes?


Well, Silvio Gesell was neither of those. He just defined that word as: "Proletariat: workmen deprived of their own means of production."


He means unfair in the same sense cartels and government subsidies are unfair. In the "economic rent" sense. We believe gold-like monetary systems give an economic rent to both money lenders and "real capital" owners.


That's perfectly possible with free-money. There's many ways to SAVE besides hoarding. It's not even the more common when there's capital yields. Only when capital yields are below the basic interest (or when money issuers manipulate interest rates), money runs to the mattress. The most common way to save is to invest/lend.


If having both functions on the same tool causes great waste of resources (unemployment, cycles, destruction of capital...), we need to separate each function on a different tool.


I don't think that's accurate. I would say that most of the people of the world sell their labor. But anyway I think you just don't like the style how that part is written, because you just don't sympathize with the people that may like it.


Let me try to summarize it on separate statements. All assuming a free market but for an enforced gold monetary monopoly.

1) nominal interest = real interest + inflation premium = basic interest + risk premium + inflation premium

2) Capital yields naturally tend downward through competition, just like other profits. While they're positive, there's unsatisfied demand for producing goods (real capital) and more could be invested with no loss.

3) Capital yields and the Basic interest/liquidity premium/time preference tend to be equal

4) The basic interest is always positive (obviously we disagree on why) and therefore capital yields can never be zero.

What does he mean by "deprived"?  And "their own means of production"?  Were these means of production their property in the first place? Have they been stolen?  If so, those workmen should ask for justice.  Theft is a crime even in anarcap-land.



Let me ask you.  Is it unfair that an unemployed workmen receiving his weekly unemployment subsidie from government?  Isn't that also a rent?   Why would such a rent be acceptable when the person who benefits it has done nothing to benefit it except gathering in flocks and use political threats and physical bullying in order to get it from force?

Yeah, having and using sound money is a good economic move and it does indeed provide an economic advantage other people using shitty money.   Yes, being smart pays.  I don't understand why you think this is unfair.


You didn't quite get my point.  To me saving and exchanging are really the same process.  They just happen on different time scale.  So there really is only one function, it just that it is very elastic as far as time is concerned.


I don't understand why you keep talking about interest rates and capital yield when bitcoin is not about that at all.  Bitcoin is jjust a currency.  It does not say anything about credit and investments.

It's not like they are forced to work, either.   Last time I checked, workmen in factories are not tied to their workplace with iron chains on feet or something.  Oh, and they also happen to receive something that they are supposed to have agreed to receive in exchange of their work.  It's called "SALARY".

A few major misconceptions I see folks arguing about:

80% of INITIAL distribution will be decided by the FreiCoin Foundation according to an open grant request process. If you have an idea for distributing FreiCoin in a way that will enhance adoption you will have a chance to submit your proposal and get the 100k FRC you need to start an FRC based rewards card or whatever your idea is (FYI, I have some ideas, but no programming skills worth talking about if someone is looking for help with the non-coding aspects.)

After 3 "coin-years" the Foundation is no longer funded by new coin generation, we are already over 3 months into this period given the accelerated block times. Once that 80% is distributed the foundation will have to operate on donations and volenteerism, using the 80% funds for the developers benefit is not part of the plan, it's about INITIAL coin DISTRIBUTION)

Freicoin is modeled after the works of Silvio Gesell who was seen as a Communist by Capitalists, and the other way around. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Gesell) This IS a controversial idea to base a currency on, but it is not one that has ever been possible to test until the advent of cryptocurrency. Please be very careful with your knee-jerk reactions, the age of some of the writings may cause confusion given that the communism of the day was a very different sort and his writings have a lot of colloquial references to the time that are not easy to unravel. The theory behind Freicoin centers around a <1930 understanding of the world, infinite inflation was not considered a good thing, we didn't have pure fiat in the US, and communists were bombing and shooting to try to bring down the established order, even in the US.

Please remember that the word to use when talking about economic advantage is "insurmountable" not "unfair." Someone born with $1Bn today has an insurmountable advantage over a person born into poverty today, and it is likely (under most theories, but not all) that their grandchildren will be in a similar situation given the current (and growing) class divide. If you have not seen this first hand, think of it as a caste system that is unintended and unacknowledged.

The makers of Freicoin have not yet advocated replacement of all (or any) fiat currency with Freicoin, and I anticipate that this will be the case for some time. The reality is that there WILL be multiple currencies, some fiat, bitcoin, and maybe a few (or a ton) of other cryptocurrencies. Freicoin will need to coexist with other currencies and will not have an isolated existence. Given the low cost of converting to bitcoin or another crypto, the barrier between being able to afford multiple currency types will continue to drop, giving similar financial tools to the whole world, not just the wealthy.

Saving wealth for retirement is neither encouraged or discouraged by Freicoin in a multi-currency environment, there is no reason to assume that everyone who earns a wage in FRC (or sells goods, etc.) will only be paid a living wage in FRC. If they have more than they need for their daily needs then it can be loaned out as FRC (pay me back what I loaned you in 1 year, much easier for peer-to-peer lending), or converted into fiat or another cryptocurrency for value storage. The demurrage is not so steep that you need to convert your daily living expenses, except for spending reasons, but holding FRC instead of BTC is a foolish plan right now, and likely will be in the future as well.

In spite of their being called "the 99%" those in the movement make up FAR less than 99% of the planet, and even less than 99% of the unemployed. Globally is it NOT true that "most" folks are NOT working for a living. The vast majority of the global adult population is engaged in productive work for themselves, their families, their communities and their employment. It may not all be on-the-grid and exposed to the global banking system, but even the poorest of communities have internal trade in goods and services.

Demurrage may be similar to inflation at the math level, but it is very different at the physiological and social level as well as the lack of a political aspect like fiat has. Instead of having money in your pocket that buys less and less over time for the same amount, I have money in my pocket that is perishable and prices that are (in theory) stable. I also know how and when my money is declining in value, so I don;t have to worry about the government changing it. Inflation gives an illusion of personal control over money while removing actual control. Demurrage gives personal insecurity over future value of money and drives a personal decision point much earlier in the decision process. Put more simply "I can SEE demurrage happen, inflation sneaks up on you."

Please note, I'm NOT convinced that Freicoin will work in the long run, or that this economic theory is 100% correct, but honestly I don't know that it matters. All that will matter is adoption and user perception in the long run, miners should be minor ;)

How did this develop into a discussion of economic fairness?

Freicoin is about a new feature of a currency. The developers have the opinion that is should be field tested now - so they have started it. There's nothing new about this coin from a technological point of view - innovation points are limited to coin distribution and the demurrage. Due to the lack of a proper monetary support system for the implementation of the required infrastructure an 80% tax on mining revenues for the first few years is acceptable.

It is debatable whether the properties of the currency is what determines economic fairness. I wouldn't know. Any real experiments done? E.g. an ESS analysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy)?

Maybe because of the extensive (edit:  my bad, just one actually.  But still) use of the adjective "unfair" in the freicoin webpage?

I'll reword that sentence. The correct meaning we were striving for is “partially unfair,” but maybe “insurmountable” conveys it better. A communist says the money-holder has no claim to the return on his capital: that is not our belief. It's only the basic interest that we claim is usurious/unjust.

If the basic interest truly offered no unfair advantage, than around the world wasteful heirs would be squandering their inheritance, and entrepreneurs rising from rags to riches in a single lifetime. Yet that experience is rare except in places like Silicon Valley, where capital returns far exceed basic interest rates. In most of the world what is happening is social stratification and the entrenchment of an even more monied multi-generation elite. What we're proposing is monetary reform that would make the entrepreneur-friendly Silicon Valley experience much more normal.

No, I think he means that since less factories are built than what would be profitable without basic interest, they're being forced to compete for artificially scarce means of production. But, sorry, I can't be sure what he meant exactly.


Well, yes, it is kind of a rent, but not exactly. In my country, Spain, I'm forced to pay an all-in-one health and unemployment insurance to a public company called "Social Security".
So I won't feel like I'm stealing anything when I receive unemployment subsidies if I ever do.
Of course, this goes against the free market and private companies could make this more efficiently. That's not what we're proposing here and we don't have force to use.


Actually most people pay far more interested priced in the products they consume through their lives than they get from their savings. Even most entrepreneurs and smart guys.
By accepting free money, you're making more investments profitable and you're getting lower prices for yourself. That's why I believe free-money will be competitive against capital-money on a free market.


I disagree with your point. Saving and trading are different things. The financial market is not "just another market", it greatly influences all the other ones. Because it is very important for investment and real capital accumulation (which I think you'll agree is the root of prosperity).


Apparently now you're saying that the structure of money doesn't have any influence on investments. This is not what I'm used to hear from austrians but, sorry, I don't think we can debate demurrage without talking about interest and yields. I have tried...

How is basic interest rate related to demurrage rate in Gesell's theory?

Assuming there is no competing currencies, what's the basic interest rate (a rough estimate would be okay) for:

1% annual demurrage rate
5% annual demurrage rate
10% annual demurrage rate
90% annual demurrage rate

Can anyone answer that? Then it would be easier for us to grasp the claim here.

The basic interest rate / liquidity premium is a natural feature of money unrelated to the artificially-imposed demurrage rate. Basic interest does not go up or down if demurrage parameters are adjusted. Gesell argued that demurrage should be equal to the basic interest rate, which at his time and now hovered around 5% (but like the undeveloped value of land, it's not something easy to measure). We chose 4.89% because the math was better (2**-20 per 10min block) and it stayed within the error bars of ~5%.

so hey guys....


has there EVER been another alt-coin that was so freaking controversial before?

This just seems to be pretty rediculous how much garbage and hate is being thrown around.

If you dont like how its ran.. than dont buy it or mine it.. ITS THAT SIMPLE.

I'm of a slightly different opinion on the stability of the liquidity premium, I think it fluctuates with the business cycle.  When times are good and most types of assets are rising in value and loanable funds are in abundance the premium goes down because money as a hedge is less useful.  In bad economic times when most real assets are falling or in danger of falling and the markets are gripped by 'flight to safety' the liquidity premium rises.  The higher premium drives down monetary velocity and compounds the economic downturn.  Gesell provides 5% as the 'historical average' but dose not claim that liquidity premium is invariant.

We have had considerable debates on this on the Freicoin forums and while I believe that adjustable rate of demurrage would be ideal in a theoretical sense, it was clear to everyone that such as system was too high a mountain to climb both technologically and in public acceptance so Gesell's fixed rates were used.

We're on a bit of a tangent here, but actually Gesell advocated variable interest rates set by a state mechanism (pricing of demurraged stamps affixed to paper bills). Our concern was that there's no decentralized mechanism for adjusting rates that is not subject to influence/attack. However compared to other indicators basic interest is incredibly stable.

Really, 5% demurrage would have the same basic interest rate as 0% demurrage according to your understanding of the theory? Hmmm that's what I thought too, so finally we have something to agree upon  ;)

aaaand its gone

I´ll give you 500 1000 FRC if you can have it ready in 4 weeks time. The Freicoin Foundation should support this (-yes, seriously); I recommend all early FRC adopters to support it. But the following changes has to be included, to make it even less of a copy-cat coin:

- The addresses will have to start with rather "b","f" or something: anything other than "1" (more stylish also)
- The demurrage has to start way higher than 5%, lets say 65% which is then reduced to 5% in 3 years (as a part of the initial distribution)
- The name bushcoin or obamaCoin is not acceptable, we need a serious, un-political sounding name. I can accept subCoin (for subSTRATA Coin).

nah friecoin is just a taxed coin.. everyone mining wants to call it a big thing so they can find suckers to buy it off them before they get taxed.

how about instead of promoting yet another alt coin to the 150k crypto community. you try promoting the existent coins which are lasting the test of time (litecoin and bitcoin) to the mainstream merchants.

One of the reasons is related to our mascot, the arctic tern.

The world most people are looking for and the world of the tern are nearly the same. A soaring bird, like the tern, is only seconds away from a collision with the ground. The bird must respect and obey the natural laws or suffer the worst consequences.  Yet, its able to use its brain to stay aloft for hours. In contrast, man's laws are regularly abused by corruption, intimidation, and celebrity. Punishment has become increasingly avoidable, especially in finance. Most people agree this is a net negative for humanity.

What maaku and jtimon have done is come up with a method for making the system of finance behave more naturally. This is very much in the interest of "fairness." Everything decays; so should our money.

Freicoin is a lot like flying through the air. You must either spend energy and flap your wings, or be smart and find rising air to soar if you want to stay up. To those who argue that 5% demurrage may be the wrong value -- gravity on the surface of the earth is a constant -- does that make flight and crashing impossible?

<unsubscribe> I can't take any more of this philosophical nonsense. I want my currency to be as effective a store of value as possiblePERIOD

I don't want or need it to attempt to shelter the poor, feed the hungry, punish tyrants, etc...

And this is a very reasonable and commendable objective. You are however in a tiny minority of a tiny minority (those who are prudent enough to  think of saving-> subgroup those who have a grasp of cryptography and economics)

Most people are used to- and still want cheap an crazy credit money. And if they are surfing the web and can see the obvious benefit in decentralized money... FREICON FREICOIN (had to kep the misspelling after edit  :D)!

Personally I think it's a new idea, and therefore it's awesome!

Isn't that what we're all about here?  ;D

Anyone, feel free to toss me some FRC :) I'm excited

Another daily hashrate chart:

https://i.imgur.com/5bv4N.png

https://github.com/freicoin/freicoin/issues/17

I thought that same thing at first, but it seems it would be worse.


There's several discussions on the freicoin forums about this, but I'll post here again the chapter where Gesell justifies the 5% value:

http://www.community-exchange.org/docs/Gesell/en/neo/part5/8.htm

Sorry, didn't see this.


Demurrage is supposed to suppress the basic interest.


It would be 4%.


0%


0% but...
With this high rates, you're doing more than suppressing the basic interest. You would be pushing rates below zero.
What would happen? Of course, we don't know, but let me speculate...
We're assuming stable price. So you would be pushing for lower than zero REAL interest rates. I don't think any rational lender would lend at negative real rates. He would prefer to invest himself or to purchase some commodity suitable for hoarding (gold, wine?). So in this case, your hurting the financial market too (as the basic interest does).

With basic interest, the borrower won't take the money if he doesn't expect yields over or equivalent to the basic interest.
With these demurrage rates...borrowers will still offer zero rates if they can achieve zero yields on their investments, but maybe lenders would be willing to take more risks.
I don't know, it's hard to tell what would happen with this high rates, but if the history-based measure of the basic interest is correct, putting more demurrage will intuitively lead to something that's not good. And, as said, my intuition is that less investments would be made as savers prefer to buy goods to hoard over lending/investing OR the economy as a whole would make "more risky investments than it should"


Not sure if this answer will satisfy you, but I hope you can get a clearer idea of Gesell's free-money theory of interest.

Almost at 100 Gigahashes/s already  :)

https://i.imgur.com/DweYw.png

Were also past 10 million coins issues, though naturally demurrage has decreased this slightly by now.  Due to the exponentially increasing hash rate and faster then target block times the accumulated demurrage on the earliest coins issued should exceed 1% already.

A new system of accounting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping_system) was popularized in response to new risks and crisis which appeared in the 15 Century, an era dominated by the Venetian trade empire.

As we are faced by new risks and crisis our goal is to promote the use of cryptocurrency. We want to do this in appropriate places to help the global economy overcome all obstacles.

I think Freicoin is the best vehicle to do that.

How about you?

No. It seems like an oxymoron. From the Freico.in website:

"Freicoin's parameters are carefully chosen to eliminate the basic interest component of investments, called the liquidity premium by economists. Usurious non-zero basic interest distorts the free market, incentivises poisonous greed, excess, and short-term thinking, and perpetuates a vicious cycle of boom/bust recessions."

Besides the obtuse nature of the explanation, several obvious points pop out at me.

1) boom/bust recessions - is this not the natural order of things? Are there ever any true eternally lasting equilibrium's? Forest fires reset the forest just as Ice Age's reset the planet. I'm not aware of any natural process that is fixed for all time. Why should the economy?

2) Money serves greed, does it not? If there was no greed, we wouldn't need money as we would all just share everything equally- no? So if you create a system of money that has eliminated the incentives toward greed- you have essentially eliminated the need for collecting money itself.

3) "Usurious non-zero basic interest distorts the free market" - I would argue that this is a primary functioning component of the free market.

Obviously natural disasters and physical socks are going to effect economic activity, but virtually all economists agree their is something called "The business cycle" which is characterized by cyclical expansion and contraction of the economy and that this cycle is being generated internally not being imposed from the outside.  Their is huge disagreement between economic schools as to what that cause is, Gesell blames the economic distortions of basic interest.  


No, Greed is no more the point of money then Gluttony is the point of food (Did you learn your economics from Gordan Gecko?)  The purpose of an economy is to allow consumers and producers to conduct exchange and achieve maximum utility by doing so as efficiently as possible, we believe Demurrage helps to serve that purpose.  Demurrage may make greed harder to execute by eliminating an avenue through which greed is commonly executed (usury), but because greed is a moral defect in the individual no law or social structure can eliminate it entirely.


A free market is process for finding a price.  Free-markets simply mean that the rates are set by an open process of bidding, rather then being set by some arbitrary authority figure.  But Gesell has clearly demonstrated that the nature of the money used in a free-market will inevitably determine the rate of interest (essentially the rent value of money) that is arrives at, in modern terminology we would say its a Nash Equilibrium, decide the RULES (nature of money) of a free market and you decide the outcome even when you don't control anything else.  

Now when anyone say something is 'distorting' a market we are implicitly saying their is a natural undistorted state/price that a market would or should be achieving, Gesell takes that undistorted state to be one in which the medium of exchange (money) is on equal footing with the broad marketplace of physical assets.  Thus to have an undistorted market the money must be destructible like the rest of the physical world.

Boom...

https://i.imgur.com/0n2UM.png

This graphs are cool. It would be nice to see one comparing various chain coins...

Here you go  ;)

https://i.imgur.com/0JMAJ.png

Thank you!
I wonder what those huge peaks on PPcoin are...

Most likely the points when.... First people with serious hashing power discovered PPC and got it setup... Second when Bitparking added a pool and an exchange.... 3rd when the BTC block reward halved for BTC... just my guesses so don't hold me to it!!

You're most likely right about the third one, that value is from November 29th, right when the BTC block reward was halved.

OK i just had a thought...

So everyone jumped on the FRC wagon and is mining their little hearts out to get these coins as early adopters while the difficulty low...

Now the difficulty has jumped again to 9772.0

Everyone getting less coins for their hashrate at mining....

I heard someone saying that they are mining with their little GFX card (~20MHash) just to keep the coins in their wallet....

This all well and good.... but what about electircity costs??

And when the difficulty gets so high that only fractions of FRC make it to each miner.... would these people who are early adopters be able to mine the coins to keep their supply?? i think not... agreed they only loose 5% of their coins... but all this means is that the people with massive mining rigs will ALWAYS have all the coins, buy some off them.... pay say in BTC..... wait a few years.... and they will mostly have worked their way back to the original miner... (not only does this screw over the smaller miner, but also devalues BTC, right?)

Also what if one of these alt coins was just setup by some big Bank as an attack on BTC in a way to aquire BTC wealth without much effort (cept the programming) and launched their own Pump and Dump scheme to just trade for BTC.... also don't forget that all these alt coin mining rigs that are not pointing at BTC will leave the BTC network more open to a 51% attack..... realistically yes there are a few people with massive hash rates so would require a serious investment to build up the needed hashrate, but with ASIC's round the corner it not too much of a wild statement....

Just be careful with ur coins, and read read read all u can to find out more if you are serious about cryptocurrencies, learn from lessons others had to learn in the past at a cost... and never play with money u can't afford to write off 100% as a loss. 

anyways just my thoughts feel free to chip in where i may have missed something...

No, Greed is no more the point of money then Gluttony is the point of food (Did you learn your economics from Gordan Gecko?)  The purpose of an economy is to allow consumers and producers to conduct exchange and achieve maximum utility by doing so as efficiently as possible, we believe Demurrage helps to serve that purpose.  Demurrage may make greed harder to execute by eliminating an avenue through which greed is commonly executed (usury), but because greed is a moral defect in the individual no law or social structure can eliminate it entirely.

[/quote]

I disagree. Most mammals I am familiar with personally consume to the point of gluttony (myself included). Bears don't eat till they feel pleasantly satiated, they eat as much as they possibly can. Greed and gluttony are products of our pseudo awareness of an uncertain future. We hoard money/food because it's abundant today and we are unsure of the future. Anyone who thinks they "have all they need" and are "satisfied" are simply outsourcing the job of worrying about the future to someone else (Often Society). I don't go to the super-market and take every can of beans because I am making an assumption that the super market will be there tomorrow and I can get more tomorrow. Likewise I save (hoard) money because I know what I don't spend today, I will need to spend tomorrow. And thus most people are reasonable.

In the face of a Zombie apocalypse however- things would be different. I don't know if the supermarket will be here tomorrow, so I will take every last can of beans I can possible handle. Even if it's more then I require. If we live in a truly free market with no government support or intervention I will also work tirelessly to accumulate as much money as possible because, well, who knows what might happen.

So yes, Greed is the point of money just as Gluttony is the point of Food. If you weren't physically limited by the size of your stomach and the physical limits of your body you would gorge yourself forever. If you had to physically hold your money you might limit yourself to how much you try to hold because it's a physical object and thus has physical limits. However when it's just a matter of Zeros (like bitcoin!) you're goal is to hoard as many as possible because there is no limit to how many you have.

FRC I understand is trying to stem this behavior, but I'm not convinced you're doing it the right way. People will invest and thus circulate money when they feel like the risk of lending it out (investing it) balances potential gain in rewards. It's a more sophisticated system of hoarding. Demurrage is like food with expiration dates: People will still hoard. FRC doesn't go 'bad' fast enough to give people a sense of urgency with it.

If Demurrage actually IS a good idea, it would have been smarter to start later on- not at the beginning. Now all you have done is create an incentive for pump and dumpers. Why? Because the FRC supermarket probably 'aint gonna' be open tomorrow, and this food gonna spoil in the heat.
 

@ FuzzyBear
Thank you for your explanations on ppcoin hashrates, they make sense to me.

Now your last comment.

Sure, when more efficient miners (including taxes on electricity) jump in, others stop ming at a profit. Profits tend to zero anyway, so the mining costs tend to equal the reward for any currency. Yes, the small miner eventually gets screwed.

Now, eventually (probably long before the competition for hashing power represents any kind of thread to Bitcoin) Freicoin will be merged mined, ending that competition for resources forever. There's no reason not to do it: is more efficient and better for everyone.

After that, all Bitcoin miners should mine Freicoin too, since the marginal costs of validating Freicoin transactions will be probably lower than the reward. You were paying the expensive costs (hashing) anyway, mining only bitcoin or also freicoin.
Well, I don't know the current btc/nmc hashing ratio. It should be 1:1 but human stupidity can always defy any logical prediction.

For merged mined currencies, the total costs of mining tend to equal the value of the total merged reward.

They compete with each other for users and value, but that's not exclusive to chain currencies. For example, a barter club makes the usd, bitcoin and freicoin less valuable since it competes with them as another medium of exchange.
Should bitcoiners sabotage freicoin so that bitcoin remains more valuable?
For anyone who would answer yes to this...please, answer this too:
Should the US prohibit barter clubs, LETS, Ripple, Bitcoin, Freicoin, gold, miles and linden dollars to postpone the inevitable collapse of the usd?

Exactly, but you've just misspelled a word.


We're all for savings, just not in a way that suppresses other people's ability to exchange and work (to prosper). Not in a way that obstructs competition.
Sorry if I'm repetitive, but costless hoarding (the source of time preference/basic interest) is a barrier to competition as positive capital yields (a form of profit) show. The more competition, the less profit. Until costs equal prices.


Since we believe that a currency with demurrage can be competitive, it should be competitive having demurrage from the beginning. I believe I'll make profits from buying the early coins even after paying the demurrage fees, why complicate things with time ranges and different demurrage rates?
This same thing you're saying has been proposed on our forum, on the initial proposals (sorry, quite messy) section. I'll let you know if I find it.

perhaps....


What is wrong with costless hoarding? I'm not convinced there is any problem with it. Some people will hoard and some will invest, it all depends on the person and their incentives. If there is money to be made through investing- people will invest. If not they won't. People won't hoard if they dont' have some better alternative. Currently hoarding is the status-quo among cryptocoins because there just isn't very much of value to do with the coins themselves.

FRC is obviously a very idealistic experiment, but it's difficult to see how it addresses a real world need. If Bitcoin had demurrage, do you think it would be farther along then it already is? The problem FRC seems to be addressing seems to be a theoretical problem "hoarding", which is not a 'real' problem. Hoarding in CryptoCurrency land isn't (in my opinion) because it's free to hoard/save coins, it's because there is nothing reliable/worthwhile to spend it on. As we are without any government that would enforce our Bitcoin contracts with Violence, we are left with securing investments between people who don't know each other and who identify each other.

My proof for this? Most people transacting anything over a small amount of BTC insist to use escrow for transactions (or work in small increments to build trust), the popularity of SatoshiDice and other "provably fair" games (really high transaction volume), and the exchanges which give the sense of limited risk by allowing users to convert BTC to liquid fiat quickly in the event of panic.

Other transactions: Loans/lending with a set interest rate, investment into companies, ponzi schemes: while collapsing triumphantly- don't actually consume much of the overal total transaction volume.

I'm tempted to think FRC is solving the wrong problem. Think again of some natural disaster, like Katrina for example. For some amount of time, Cash is less valuable then real possessions like food, guns or security. It's possible in some situations of natural disasters that cash is worthless (King Richard III: "A Horse! A Horse! My Kingdom for a horse!") however if the government is expected to return at some point in time, it would be worthwhile durring an emergency to take advantage of the relative 'cheapness' of cash to accumulate (hoard) cash. Not because it's free to hold, but because there isn't anything worth purchasing with it (because it has such little value versus other things). However hoarders are acutely aware that in the future it will have a greater purchase power, and thus hold onto it and try to accumulate as much as possible.

See what I'm saying? People aren't hoarding Coins because they are free to hoard, they are hoarding because there isn't anything worth spending them on right now. Which in my opinion is the case with Crypto. There are some things you can buy with the coin, but compared to what people think the value should be, there isn't much you're willing to spend a large amount of crypto on.



Since we believe that a currency with demurrage can be competitive, it should be competitive having demurrage from the beginning. I believe I'll make profits from buying the early coins even after paying the demurrage fees, why complicate things with time ranges and different demurrage rates?
This same thing you're saying has been proposed on our forum, on the initial proposals (sorry, quite messy) section. I'll let you know if I find it.
[/quote]

Because costless hoarding is impossible with REAL assets, everything in our world decays, entropy is inevitable.  When you accumulate a surplus of goods to have as a reserve for future consumption that is perfectly natural and good, but their will be an inevitable cost in decay before the reserve is consumed.

Now if we know for sure that costless hoarding is impossible with real physical assets, yet money which is entirely a social construct of man appears to allow that which the laws of physics forbid.  How can that be reconciled?  The laws of physics ALWAYS trump social constructs, their is no costless hoarding even with money, money is simply causing a cost-shifting from the hoarder to the rest of society (which we call usury) which is why we can't ALL hoard at no cost, someone must always lose.

Your last point about "hoarding because their is nothing to do with the coins" is the classic supply-side economic error, the belief that is the fault of a 'supply' for not enticing money to move in the face of it's desire to remain stationary.  It's argued that an increase in supply and a lowering of prices will entice money to move, but if the prescription is for continuing declines in price then how ever tempting it may be to purchase on the first drop in prices the expected future infinity of price declines constitute an even strong incentive to keep hoarding. 

The reality is their is nothing to do with the coins because they are being hoarded, remove the hoarding incentive and the uses will spring up.

That's the central point where we disagree. I claim that because of the basic interest, there's profit to be made through capital competition which is not made so that capital yields can stay above liquidity premium. As you've said before, liquid cash is like an insurance against uncertainty. By the way, you're enjoying this insurance for free, so here's an externality that someone has to pay for. I'll leave who for later. The point now is that won't accept any positive return on your investment. You rationally want a return that is greater to the value of this insurance. That's where the barrier for competition appears. You could make an investment that yields 0.1% and it would still be profitable, but you're just better off keeping the money instead. This barrier to investment creates an artificial scarcity of real capital (it can be education, knowledge or code, just saying real as opposed to money-capital, which is only a symbol of value). This scarcity protects capitalist's profits from competition, another externality. Who pays for all this?

1) Obviously, consumers pay higher prices since the capital profits never disappear through competition.

2) The artificially scarce supply of capital contracts the demand for labor, giving workers lower wages and unemployment.

3) The more hidden and catastrophic cost for the whole of society is that cyclically, when the labor of workers and the audacity of entrepreneurs and investors has lowered capital yields below the liquidity premium, money stops flowing on a positive feedback loop commonly named by its symptom: deflation.

Not part of the previous externalities, but also an indirect effect...Of course, the State tries to fix 2 through counter-productive actions such as minimum wage laws or hiring more public employments. To blindly try to fix 3, Keynes and central banks appear and vainly try to reestablish velocity by driving us into the hyper-inflationary oblivion (at first is only inflationary, but you know, these things accelerate). So instead of destroying enough real capital by cyclically wasting huge amounts of labor and other resources and opportunities so that the yields get back to the minimums required by the liquidity premium, paper currencies without demurrage allow us to cyclically destroy our currencies (even more resources wasted in the process than with gold's deflation) and go back to a national gold standard. This time is different though, since now we're all on paper at the same time.
Sorry for this long summary on how gold can be dangerous for freedom.


I get your point, and maybe it was better that "first there was bitcoin" after all. But this is something that we the coin users (well, with the help of our great pool of hackers and entrepreneurs in the community) have to change. We need more merchants accepting them and more users. My hope is that demurrage will help users ask the question to merchants more often "Do you accept FRC? What a pity, I had some of them here that wanted to spend, but, you know what? I'm going to spend them elsewhere."


I see "crypto-contracts" (such as the probably fair games that you mention) as a sometimes superior (and others, maybe useless) alternative to legal contracts, but not necessarily as mutually exclusive. I fail to see how a signed legal contract between two private parties is less enforceable when it contains the word "bitcoin". Manually signed contracts can also make digital signatures legally valid. Some countries even provide digital signature systems to their citizens which are legally valid by default (for example, Spain). Maybe, as you say, I'm too idealist, but I see clearly how the future of monies lies on the internet.

Those are the times when it's more profitable to mine PPC and sell them to earn BTC than it is to mine BTC directly. Chain hoppers join in.

The hashrate calculator on abe is probably built on a constant difficulty assumption. PPcoin changes all the time so I'd imagine the hashrate for it, and any of the altchains that don't use Bitcoin's proof of work system, are wildly inaccurate estimates. Its probably just noise.

I think another chart would be handy.... hashrate seams to have dropped

"Because costless hoarding is impossible with REAL assets"
But is our current financial system really "REAL" assets anyway? When the financial crisis hit, hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth were 'destroyed' but did they ever really exist? It's free to hoard Zeros.

"money which is entirely a social construct of man appears to allow that which the laws of physics forbid.  How can that be reconciled?  The laws of physics ALWAYS trump social constructs"

LOVE man. I disprove you with LOVE. Social Construct. Trumps Physics. Free to Hoard. The more you divide it, the more of it you have. All you need is love.  ;D (But seriously, I'm being serious.)

"the classic supply-side economic error, the belief that is the fault of a 'supply' for not enticing money to move in the face of it's desire to remain stationary"

Money doesn't have a desire to remain stationary. It's not like the money in my wallet wants to jUmP OuT! I have to have something to spend it on. If I'm all alone in the middle of the ocean and there is no one and nothing that accepts money for anything, I don't just take what cash I have and toss it to the seagulls. I wait until some point in the future when I get somewhere (or when someone gets to me) that DOES take my money and then I make exchanges. Crypto-currency is a money on an island without any goods for sale.

The real error I think is in forgetting that as this is sort of a 'virtual' currency that is being bootstrapped the conditions are a bit more novel  then traditional money. None of us really know each other, nor can reach each other. So it's very hard to find goods and services that are both  in demand, and can be exchanged over either great distances or mediums. If this were an "in person" or REAL currency and all of us were in close proximity then we wouldn't have this dearth of economic opportunities. If there were nothing to sell people would at the very least turn to services or prostitution.

Not surprisingly this is what actually happens: Monkeys when taught the basics of money almost immediately turn to prostitution.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05FREAK.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

But this only works, once again, in person. In virtual world we are struggling to find places to spend our money, but we don't waste it just because we have nothing better to do with it. So classic error, I think not.

More blocks need to be solved before we will have real data on this. It's still greater than 40GH/s, guaranteed, not counting pools I don't know about and solo miners.

What's the 80% thing?

I'm thinking of it as a tax.  My understanding is that the 80% is placed into a "foundation" in which a group (which has not been established yet, but will likely be made up of the founders of FRC), will decide how and when to spend it.  So far it hasn't been touched, but could be at any time. 

I wish it didn't exist, or if it did, was at a much more reasonable level of 10% or less. 

Someone will probably eventually fork the coin without it.  There have been several people comment that they were working on it, but whether they actually are or not, who knows. 

Ok, just forked it. Working on removing it and distributing it democratically to miners.

If you do I expect that none of your blocks will be accepted by the FreiCoin network. Have a look in main.cpp for 'GetInitialDistributionBudget'. This shows the addresses that receive the Foundation percentage.

I have pledged 1000 FRC for this purpose (if you want it...). But please consider another creation rate than bitcoin, like this one suggested by Adrian-X:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=118317.msg1274548#msg1274548

Check out this awesome Freicoin fork:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134629.0
https://github.com/gladoscc/freicoin

All of your blocks WILL be accepted by the current FreiCoin network. This simply removes the check to see if there is the 80% tax, and will accept all (otherwise perfectly valid) blocks. Migrate to this fork, tell all your friends to do it, get pools to do it. Why?

Because this will soon be changed so that the coins normally given to the Foundation forcefully will be given to the miner instead! First of all we will need people running this fork. So make it :)

I don't think that "compatible fork" will work. Even if it does, you're getting a different distribution than was designed, which, by the way, was already different from bitcoin's (better IMO): http://www.freicoin.org/freicoin-generation-graph-t41.html
I haven't bothered to calculate what distribution you would get though, but I think you will take lots of years to get final fixed supply.

I don't think we need more profit for miners, I would rather give it to the free software foundation (for example) even if they "sell them into existence". But if you really want this, I would start a new fork (without trying compatibility) from scratch.

Block reward will not be changed. The coin creation will not be changed. Only the distribution will. Instead of putting 80% to the developers (you could call the 1%), 100% is given to the miners.

Vote with your hashpower. It's how cryptocoins are decentralized and open.

How many times must we explain that this foundation fund is for the distribution to people who do not and can not mine, not the property of developers.  If you distrust us that is one thing but stop repeating these accusation that we these funds have 'gone to developers'.  Mining over the last few years has become so capitol intensive and centralized that it is simply too undemocratic a process to distribute a coin base upon when the goal of any legitimate currency is broad circulation amongst the general public, not the enrichment of the first adopters.  Mining needs to become a sustainable business and this is why we have provided for an ongoing revenue stream that will support mining in perpetuity.

Mining may not be the best way. Proof of stake might not. But this is NOT decentralized. It is centralized. There is a "federal reserve" for FreiCoin, and that was developed by the FreiCoin developers.

You cannot claim that this is a coin "for the 99%" when you have 80% of coins given to a select group of people. You can call it a foundation, corporation, whatever, but it is being given to a group of people in an undemocratic manner.

Vote with your hashpower - if you feel that 80% of what coins should be yours, instead is given to a bunch of hard coded addresses, use the default client.

But if you don't think that's what should happen, use a fork of this open source project that is a fork of bitcoin.

@TradeFortress, please keep that discussion to your own fork thread. This thread is for Freicoin.

but the fork from TradeFortress is maybe the future of Freicoin...

Because leaving all the original developers and others behind will really help this fork thrive, oh, wait...

If you want to try I0Coin again, feel free, but I doubt you will get very far with an idealistic currency without idealists.

I'm not investing in (just) FRC, I'm investing in maaku, and the concept of the foundation as well. Without these added value items, I'm not that interested in the currency. If someone proves that they are willing to take up the baton and run it forward with the same kind of vigor I might change my mind, but right now I don't see the point except to troll and try to kill the original project.

It's like buying a patent to a product, or the company that invented (or at least produced the relevant innovations around) the product. One is far more likely to succeed than the other.

The last estimate from ABE came in at 62 GH/s.

For anyone keeping track of this.

Proposed Freicoin Notations


Standard Notation:
Use the symbol ⌠ to represent Freicoin in everyday transactions. The symbol is a truncated 'long s'. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s) It is a simple symbol to write by hand, has low ambiguity with other symbols in the alphabet, and can be used to replace the decimal mark.

You can access this symbol by holding Alt and typing 244 on your numeric pad on Windows.

Alt-244. Go ahead and try it.

Examples:

6⌠ = "six freicoin"

6.001⌠ or 6⌠001 = "six and one thousanth freicoin"


Scientific Notation:
For large or small values we suggest scientific notation. For this purpose we use the German character 'Eszett,' or 'ß'. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F) The eszett is a ligature of ⌠+s, which we intend to represent "freicoin, scientific."

You can access this symbol by holding Alt and typing 225 on your numeric pad on Windows.

The symbol uses following formula: xßy = x * 10 ^ y

Alt-225. Go ahead and try it.

Examples:

6.001ß6 = 6001000⌠

6.001ß-5 = 0⌠00006001 or 0.00006001⌠




I'm not so sure about this idea. It may be controversial.

I'm not a fan.

I would rather just

355.6 frc
or
355.6(with an F like the bitcoin  ฿)

can this chart be redone now..  would be interesting to see

You should notice that the difficulty rose after the peak, which lead to the decrease in hashrate, which in turn lead to much slower block times. The decrease therefore looks much more significant and abrupt than it's actually been. I'd guess that we're still somewhere around 45-50 GH/s right now.

https://i.imgur.com/A2Ihp.png

I decided to play with the way we were presenting the hash rate and discovered that over real time (vs blocktime) we've actually grown pretty linearly. Looks like a pretty healthy graph.

I've also overlaid the difficulty so you can see the effect of the recent increase.

https://i.imgur.com/PgN2H.png

I'll keep using it and see if it catches on.

How about  24.9356╒ ╛  

or 24.9356╒

Well this idea actually sucks, because I don't have numpad since i use a laptop.
And I'm not going to search those Deutsch things in my the Unicode Keys Map.

Alt+4 closes the window for me (I have to press Fn+4 to get F4 on my keyboard so I found that convenient), so I can't type Alt+244 on any program. I'll try with one of the other windows manager I'm trying out, but honestly the idea isn't very appealing to me.

It's also not consistently the right letter. it shows up as a lowercase "o" with a tent when I type ALT-244 in the address bar of chrome on windows, and an empty block in the Run... Dialog. I can do a ⌠ here, but not consistently in every application  use.

FYI, that also looks like one of 3 sticks needed for a fasces (add 1 straight, 1 curved the other way, and a horizontal line or two for the rope and you have a fascism symbol), which might not be the best link.

If Europe is using the Euro now, can we contemplate stealing the "Fr" notation?

You mean FRC were french francs ?
I thought about that too. I used FCN for some time but I stopped when everybody was using FRC.

Wow looking at this I see a lot of premining...  Looks like up to block 8000 was done in the first 2 day before it was publicly released.  We are not even up to block 15000 2 weeks later now.  Someone got rich....

PS

How can you tell from that chart there was a premine?

 for a currency in the works for almost a year, that would be a disaster...

"I r has chart interpreting skills... not."
Maybe this will clear your mind.

https://i.imgur.com/YNVxf.png

https://i.imgur.com/PgN2H.png
At around block 8000 our network g/hash hit 10 g/hash. According to the other graph above that happen in 2 days... Scary to say the least.

That does not mean there was a premine.  If I had known about the release, I would have thrown a few gig in myself, we would have been at 20g in less then days!

Please do not say premine unless you have proof. what are you trying to do?

2days = 8000blocks but after 14 days we are only up to block 14500.

What happen in those first 2 days we haven't done in the following 12 days yet.

You do the math...

Do we have a block explorer yet to see when and how many blocks were mined?  That would be the proof.

Holy crap that's about 2 million coins after the 80% to the foundation.


PS

He was counting time backward and made a couple small errors is my bet, there was no "premine" before release, only a beta period that had it's blockchain reset.

Here's my science inspired thought for the day, it might help some folks get it:

Blockchain Relativity:
Just as there is Relativity in the motion of objects in space, there is a relation between the average length of time needed to find a block (L), actual network hashing power (H), and current difficulty (D). (L0 is the desired or original average lenght of time, ^ is exponent, the equation is modeled after Lorenz Contraction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_contraction if it looks weird that is why)

L = L0/(H/(D*2^32/600))

This means that if block solving time (on average) is unknown, difficulty is 2, and the network hashrate is 28Mhs your effective time L is going to be 10/(28M/(2*2^32/600)=~5.1 minutes.

I like thinking about this like relativity, because neither clock is wrong for it's own purpose, but they are running at different rates.


FYI, PPC is at 15M coins and has a similar fast ramp you can look at. It's different denominator in the bottom fraction (D^4) and since PoS started it got WAY more complex, but the general result was the same.

My logic was when did the network hit 10 g/hash.  Its simple math.  At day 2 and block 8000 we hit 10 g/hash....

But a simple block explore would tell us and I cant seem to find one that works.

PS

Lay that out for me a bit more please, I'm not sure it works as consistently as I would like. Are you factoring in the 4x difficulty movement cap that was our limit until the most recent change?

Did you know about http://www.cryptocoinexplorer.com:4750 (http://www.cryptocoinexplorer.com:4750)? It seems to be down right now, but it's been up for a while (I even helped maaku accidentally break it with the first FRC transaction!)

Take a look at the 2 charts above.  One is time vs hashs and the other is block vs hashs.  On each of the charts look where 10 g/hash lands. Its on day 2 and block 8000.  Someone did 8000 blocks in the first 2 days.

PS

The bitcoin difficulty algorithm is a tough subject to understand and I won't fault you for misunderstanding. What you're seeing is a consequence of the design of Bitcoin. Its not anything nefarious. Sorry.

and just think, with your 500Mh you could have had mucho blocks during those first 2 days... NO PREMINE

How is it difficult to understand on the second day 8000 blocks were mined.  Are you saying it took longer? I'd like to see that data.  I'm purely going off the charts provided here, which maybe wrong.  Is there a way to view when blocks where made on freicoin?  I'd like to see when block 1 and 8000 were made.  Then its easy math.

PS

500? I had a great time with a 4750. 30Mh/s baby!

For the first 6048 blocks the difficulty was at most 16. Even with only my 5870 doing 375MH/s and 5.2 shares per minute on average, I would have found a block every third minute on average. I don't see the problem here? In the beginning the difficulty adjustment just can't keep up with the rise in hashing power, so if there was sufficient hashing power you could theoretically find those 8k blocks in less than an hour.

It took about 2 days for 8000 blocks, but thats just how the difficulty adjustment in Bitcoin is designed. We would have gotten to 8000 even faster if the network had more hashing power, believe it or not.

at 16 with 375 mh/s that is a block every 3mins

PS

And that's exactly what I was trying to say, sorry for being fuzzy.

Yep, and they were clipping by every 15-30 seconds at a few points.

Here is a more specific version of the link I gave earlier: http://www.cryptocoinexplorer.com:4750/chain/Freicoin?hi=19&count=20 (http://www.cryptocoinexplorer.com:4750/chain/Freicoin?hi=19&count=20)

PS, it is perfectly valid for a block to appear to have a time before it's parent, the order of the blocks is what matters, the apparent UTC time on the client behind the mining does not. Look at blocks 6032 to 6047 for example.

ok ok  STOP.  I dont want to think about how many frc i could have had if I had been following the release!

HOLY CRAP 2000 blocks in the first 4 hours 21 mins. 

On an average from block 1 to 2000 someone was making 1915 coins/min.  And that is after the 80% taken out.

PS

But you DO!

That way you know to be ready for the next launch ;)

I'm just lucky that moron "differently-abled thinker" I was debating on resurrecting destroyed bitcoins was pointed at FRC as an example of what he wanted to do. (it didn't help him)

I didn't realize the import of the launch though and waited 8 hours to start mining (block 6961), now THERE is a regret.


Change that from "someone" to "all miners" unless you have traced it back to a single address. You would need to determine the number of miners to get the average.

I will change that to "all miners".....But all miners at block 2000 made up a hash rate under 1000 Mh/s.  Looks like one person to me.

Also we got to block 8000 in 1 day 20 hrs and 59mins.  I was close at 2 days.  So the fact still remains that over 50% of all the freicoins found were found in under 2 days.  How is that not a premine?  Why start the difficulty at 1 if it wasn't.

PS

It is a 100M coin limit with FRC, not 21M. They have only produced a bit over 10% so far.

It's not a premine because it was announced in advance when the genesis block would be released. Premining refers to the practice of mining a number of coins before the general public, not at the same time.

I just pointed out I was participating with 30Mh/s, look at the P2Pool payout address lists and you can get some idea for the first couple of days since the p2pool was one of the first things started. http://www.cryptocoinexplorer.com:4750/block/000000001c76a14764609061c1a9610932b39587fdaea43e51c5ce99c2de26f8 (http://www.cryptocoinexplorer.com:4750/block/000000001c76a14764609061c1a9610932b39587fdaea43e51c5ce99c2de26f8) has multiple miners for sure, and I've not looked for anything earlier than that.

Well no initial difficulty didn't need to be set at 1.  Given that per processor hashrate has grown by a factor of 500x since Bitcoin was launched (unoptimized non-OpenCL CPU code vs highly optimized OpenCL GPU miners) it is kinda insane one would choose to launch with a difficulty of 1.

Of course a difficulty of 1 means that rather than the first 8,000 blocks taking 3 months like Bitcoin it took less than 48 hours and those who participated in those early 48 hours when almost nobody knew the coin existed were able to mine at 30x faster than the targeted rate and those who mined in the first 4 hours mined at over 70x the targeted rate.

Bitcoin does the same thing it is a safety mechanism to prevent for a griefing attack.  It is much less likely now but imagine back when CPU mining was common.  A massive botnet or supercomputer could mine a difficulty interval so fast it would cause the difficulty to shoot up 100x.  Then they could simply stop and Bitcoin would die a death of starvation with the average block time being 16 hours and the time till next difficulty reset something like 4 years.

HOWEVER.  Satoshi did some benchmarking and chose a starting difficulty that would require roughly a dozen computers.  Bitcoin was less popular than that and as a result difficult remained 1 for months before it gained critical mass to move difficulty up.   FRC either through ignorance or malice chose to keep a difficulty of 1 despite the average node now being able to mine 500x faster.  It would have been like Satoshi picking a difficulty of 0.002 and as a result mining 20% of the coins himself in the first week.

this!

Why the hell does a diff start at 1? when most miners have 1000 times the hashrate anyone had when bitcoin launched.

It's not about greifing. Its a consequence of control theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller). The gain of the controller must be limited or the system may overshoot or become instable.

Nobody likes my idea to have a scientific notation built into the way we write the coin?  :'( I thought it was a great idea. Especially for talking about microeconomics (big numbers) and for microtransactions (small numbers)






Maybe we can use the symbol for a dutch guilder?  5ƒ  = five freicoin

I like the ⌠ because its simpler.

This is the traditional fasces. I don't see how it resembles it?

https://i.imgur.com/UR3Jq.jpg

Anyways, the fasces isn't evil. It's a roman symbol to represent "strength through unity." Its a heraldic charge used by many small towns in Europe.

You probably already know this, but there are two fasces prominently flanking the rostrum of the United States House of Representatives, where the Speaker of the House sits.

I also like the ⌠ for historical/symbolic reasons. Maybe if you knew the reason you would understand more of what I am thinking here.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_symbol

Hmm, I must have an odd one in my head, or maybe I'm confusing it with some art-deco wheat I saw or something.

I think part of the point remains though, how does a peer to peer distributed currency that does not promote or require unity in any real way get to "Strength in Unity?


This reasoning I like, but it's pretty geeky ;)

Go ahead, make it official.

BTW: Swastikas aren't evil either.

Hmm.. I think you may be thinking of the Fleur-de-lis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleur-de-lis)?

https://i.imgur.com/bg2R3.png

Could be, but the image I have in my head is something between the two. It's 4-5x taller than wide, 3-5 staves or stalks ending with the top 10% of them curving out up to 45 degrees, tied together with two parallel cords. It does not really matter what it is though, since it's not a fasces and your symbol does not remind me of one now that I've seen a picture of one in this century.

ALT-159 is ƒ, an alternative choice, but I do like ⌠ pretty well too.

1) PPC is preannounced 1 week before release on bitcointalk, no we didn't just announce it on our own website  ;)

2) PPC block chain started at difficulty 256 and 800 blocks later it was already at difficulty 1000. So no we didn't allow massive amount of low difficulty blocks by design. Our continuous difficulty adjustment works well to further limit the number of initial low difficulty blocks.

Yes early adopters are still rewarded with more ppc but that's over weeks and months plus 1 week preannouncement on bitcointalk so it is much more fair for the mining society interested in altcoins.

In hindsight 256 would indeed have been a better starting difficulty, unfortunately no one give us that piece of advice during the year long period the project was being discussed and presented, we had to constantly defend the very concept of Demurrage from a torrent of hostility.

It would be a good idea if the Bitcoin software itself had the base difficulty raised in it so people don't make this mistake in the future.

They can't, because doing so would make all blocks after the block where the new difficulty comes into effect invalid.

I don't understand. Are you trying to claim that PPCoin had a more fair initial distribution? I disagree with that statement. If you would like to dissect it we can do it in a new thread. Specifically, you chose the block reward as the inverse of the difficulty. If you think Freicoin is "unfair" to miners, why does PPCoin pay miners less to do more work?

Yes - a starting difficulty of 1.0 was a major fail. I looked at it and thought, WTF!
However, given the 66% tax, the majority of the initial mining reward goes to the recipients of the foundation money - so the "damage" or "unfair advantage" is contained to 33% of the first few 1000 blocks. Also, one has to acknowledge the fact that an easier mining difficulty will generate cheaper coins. Thus those initial FRC are likely to go into the market for a cheaper than average market price. It's unfair, because the initial miners are likely to make a good profit - however they will likely "kick-start" the market at a lower price point, thus a significant larger fraction of the profit will be available for speculators.

I find another question more relevant: How will the foundation money be denominated? FRC or BTC? And how does the grant proposal scheme work? A centralized grant scheme is against the very nature of cryptocurrencies.

A possible solution out of the funding dilemma would be to integrate the community into the decision making process, e.g. by letting various projects collect funding from the community. E.g. if a developer offers a certain implementation or service for a certain amount of FRC, then he would need to collect 20% from the community and 80% would come from the foundation after the fact. Even better, the 20% would have to be generated from block rewards, which give miners "voting" power in selecting proposals.... (since the decision process must be hard/costly to manipulate)

I'm sure folks would have bent out of shape if you had given out 9999 PPC per block to the first few miners, which is a bit different than the (more) consistent block reward for FRC or BTC. Even the ~2500 rewards you started at were pretty large, so some folks might have the same argument about unfairness. There was also the fact that it took 2 days between 0 and 1 with that high difficulty. Don't get too high on a pedestal there King, your refusal to provide detailed background information and detailed calculations and modeling was pretty bad at the beginning, and caused me to limit my level of involvement with your project.

Personally I don't blame this team for leaving this board for most of their functions, they have been abused every time they have tried to get feedback. You may have noticed that BTCFPGA and BFL have done the same thing, there IS a pattern here, but it is not "being unfair to miners."

Much better short answer:


+1 on the kickstarting effect, and remember that a lot of those first coins have changed hands already. I've seen at least 200 k move personally.

Not sure that I agree it was a major fail, I think it's minor in the long run. It sure got coins out there and buzz going. Now if someone starts at 1 difficulty with ASIC's in the wild, that will be a major fail. Trying to do 2k-10k blocks per second at difficulty 1 and stay in turbo-block-mode for 16k-20k blocks would be one hell of a ride. Or not paying out right, or payout on the wrong formula, or maxing out at the wrong number of coins (cough, litecoin.) This worked as expected, even if it was a bit fast, nothing broke significantly.

Mhhm, the community bounty completed with funds from the foundation idea is interesting. I don't like the "only miners can collaborate with the bounties" part, but it's interesting.

About the mining difficulty...I didn't thought about that neither. I even thought we may use galambo's improved difficulty filter (but, honestly, I don't really understand how it works).

And no, there was no pre-mining and it can be demonstrated with genesis block. I'm not sure what we ended up putting for that, maybe several things. maaku generated it so he must know. I was happy putting my little sentence there.

I'm curious. How is the 80% tax any different than a pre-mine? In the end, the "foundation" get a butt-load of coins.

Maybe... this way they will always get more, more, MOAR COINS!

Some basic English vocabulary:

The pre- prefix means "before"

http://www.5minuteenglish.com/may14.htm

examples:
preschool: education previous to school
pre-mining: mining BEFORE launch

Taxes are something that only coercive entities can collect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax

as long as by always you mean the first 3 years...

That can't be the case because initial difficulty is irrelevant to BTC now, difficulty is just a running value in the chain, 1 was just the difficulty at the start and that value of 1 is still in the code that maaku forked from, anyone else who forks and starts a coin has to correct this manually while it is of no significance to changing it in the exiting BTC github code.  Clients running BTC do not even need to updated in any way.

Is it that hard to understand? Why is bitcoin paying 25btc (which is 25btc less than before) for more work from miners? Of course it's a way to make future inflation approach 0. Well it's the same for ppcoin but I don't like the way step functions are interfering with the market. freicoin also does that but with a different curve (from 250 coin to 0 in 3 years).


Yes the subsidy drop in ppcoin  is faster in the first few months, and I did get plenty of ppl complaining about it. I would say I got a good amount of 'abuse' myself as well but no I am not going to hide from this board because of that. Not to mention the freicoin team and fans never intended to avoid this board they just chose to show up a few days too late, maybe as a way to 'punish' the hostility of this board?  ;)

Initial difficulty is set in the genesis block.  Changing it for the Bitcoin chain would cause an immediate hard fork as all subsequent blocks would be invalid.   

developer:  ooops, sorry guys, didn't mean to make your millions worthless!

Please exercise some reading comprehension, I know you can't change the difficulty in old block and I'm not talking about changing anything in the Bitcoin CHAIN or any existing chain, just the development software packages initial difficulty which gets put into the genesis block, that's a change which will effect only newly created chains and allow them to start at reasonable speeds.

Just to be clear so I know what you're talking about, and to remove 'reading comprehension' error, can you please post a patch with the change you are suggesting?

Yea I probably should, but it would take someone who actually manages the BTC hub to accept the patch, and it needs to be continually updated too.

Their point is that a new node downloading the chain from the start would reject the first valid blocks because of difficulty. I guess they're right, although I'm not sure how this would interact with checkpoints...

What ports this use for solo mining on ? is it same as client using 8639?

SOLO MINING INSTRUCTIONS

1) Download freicoin (http://freico.in) and cgminer (http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/cgminer)
2) Run freicoin with these flags freicoin-qt.exe -rpcuser=USERNAME -rpcpassword=PASSWORD
3) Run cgminer with these flags cgminer.exe -o http://127.0.0.1:8332 -u USERNAME -p PASSWORD

Done as instructed however its is not connecting and theirs no connections to it i get 1 or 2 connections with ports forwarded and still keeps on dropping

I for one always put everything in /userxxx/roaming/xxxxx/freicoin.conf

server=1

server=1
rpcuser=DaCrazy1
rpcpassword=1234
rpcallowip=127.0.0.1
rpcport=8332

does not connect up when running as server loads up but does not connect to anyone

it it were me, i would change the rpcallowip

rpcallowip=192.168.*.*   or such

Tried that too and still not working. All am getting is unable to connect to pool 0 all other coins mine perfectly fine. And to add to that it si not downloading block info or anything too. just sits their doing nothing

Well, then that is the issue.  You cannot mine solo if you dont have the entire chain.  reinstall?

You may be having problems due to the disparity between difficulty and the current network hash rate.

Blocks are sometimes taking the entire network hours to solve and as a result the client believes it is not synced.

Keep the daemon-client running until the next block is solved and it will sync.

If you shutdown the client-daemon and the latest block it can get from the network is hours old when starting it again, it will again need to wait until current block is solved to sync up.

So essentially there isn't enough hashing power on the network to make things suitably quick?

My client is reporting 15677 blocks complete, and the last was generated 13 hours ago. Normally it takes but a few seconds to sync up.

Hoping the freicoin network is intact.

Edit - Decided to push some hashing power to the network for the evening. Lets hope someone gets the next block.

Ok re installed everything cleaned up old data seems its now connecting but still losing active connections. 1 min it had 8 then 3 then none and does not connect up.

Anyone got a full list of ports this uses to forward in router ?

I have 8332 and 8639 forwarded is their any others it uses or just them ?

The network is still fine. For one, it's the exact same as bitcoin.

We haven't monkeyed with the proven parameters that make Bitcoin work, not even the targeted inter-block time.

As you can see at cryptocoinexplorer.com, the current block is 15677. http://cryptocoinexplorer.com:4750/chain/Freicoin

Dont forward the RPC port (8332)

There is no need for people on the outside to connect to the remote RPC port.

Have you been able to get solo-mining work yet? If your mining software shows any hashes at all it is working.

I have lifted the connection limit on the cryptocoinexplorer.com Freicoin daemon, in order to help with providing nodes.

put:

addnode=96.126.122.8

In your freicoin.conf file.

This will have your client-daemon daemon always try to connect to the daemon at cryptocoinexplorer.com (96.126.122.8 ) as one of its connected nodes.

It looks like we are about ~451 blocks away from the next difficulty adjustment (Please post the correct amount if this is wrong).

At normal rate (Target -  1 block every 10 minutes) this would take about 3 days.

Although too late now, perhaps a secondary condition for changing the difficulty based on a low average of blocks over a few days might avoid the issue in the future for any cryptocurrency. This is just a quick suggestion and I have not flushed out all the security concerns. This would probably require a hard fork.

I am in the middle of a complete rework of my personal network (Including the mining rigs). I will turn my miners (about 3.5 G/Hs) to the Freicoin network as soon as everything is done.

That would be great. We only saw 7 blocks solved in the last 24 hours. At this rate it is going to take 64 days till the difficulty adjusts. Then I guess we can expect a rush again.

Dreamwatcher: Waste of energy, try another alt.

Well the good thing for people that hold Freicoin is this effectively greatly reduces the time value of demurrage. In a way it makes Freicoin worth more because you're losing less.

I have managed to get it to connect up to a total of 23 connections and it wont download blocks or synk and download and this has been left open for over 5 hours and not downloading any data.

just a highlight

I understand difficulty can only increase a maximum of 4x at each adjustment period.  Is there a limit on how far difficulty can decrease per adjustment period? 

Same as maximum increase. Difficulty can go down to 1/4x at most.

Thanks Galambo. I will be sure to check out the cryptocoinexplorer to make sure my client it up to the latest block. (it is now btw)

There is no need for ad hoc rules like that. I have already presented a solution with ppcoin's continuous difficulty adjustment algorithm. Using a shorter adjustment interval like LTC works to some extent as well. Only TRC's 2-hour adjustment is probably too short and opens up to difficulty manipulation by the miners.

+1. I always wondered why bitcoin has constant difficulty intervals anyway.

The running average implemented in ppcoin is most logical solution for difficulty adjustment and showed that it works well to accommodate rapid changes in hashrate.

Ah yes I stand corrected it's 30-block adjustment interval equivalent to 1-hour. Last I checked I haven't seen any manipulation attempts yet, these large variations right now is probably just due to small sampling size of 30 blocks. When I get some free time I might consider demonstrating the problem with such short adjustment interval, I believe if miners collusion occurs the difficulty can be dramatically reduced persistently, if terracoin did not properly fix the time-travel vulnerability (which looks like they did not but do correct me if I am wrong on this).

As for progress of ppcoin's protocol upgrade you are welcome to check my weekly update thread.

I think this is appropriate. The demurrage is less when there is less mining activity. I have always wanted a currency which increases in value when economic activity is slow and decreases in value when economic activity is overheated. Hopefully it creates a self-regulating system to manage booms and busts.

Since when is there economic activity? Even dramatic activity has been less than stellar lately.

http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/4118/e1eed6c92ed1580ca2555bd.png (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/515/e1eed6c92ed1580ca2555bd.png/)

Latest Difficulty vs. Nett Hash / Second.


Uploaded with ImageShack.us (http://imageshack.us)

is there a new projection when the diff will drop?

2 weeks I heard in an IRC chat post... Not certain.

http://pastebin.com/h1Am5bKw

It could take anywhere between two weeks to four months. Yesterday there were only three blocks found, which means it would take almost 130 days until the difficult drops.

3 more blocks in the last  8 hours!

How many more to go? 300?

Remaining blocks until diff. change = (8 * 2016) - current blockount
So now it would be 16128 - 15795 = 333

ballpark 325

we solved 23 in 24 hours

how is the not dying going on?

anyone knows:

- how many blocks to retarget?
- time to retarget aproximation ?
- next difficulty aproximation ?

the graph clearly shows its dieing/dead.

Read the thread... info is posted just above.

Oh wow, Freicoin didn't learn anything from Namecoin's famous experience that led all (except Freicoin it seems, any others?) altcoins to adapt their difficulty adjustment systems? Sheesh.

-MarkM-

four months... well.. that means that its officially dead.

Coz in the mean time more and more miners will lose their interest (and their patience)
Plus, it was a fail coin from the beginning of its time (the reasons are all in this thread)

Maybe the fix is how namecoin did it: merged mining?

As it is people have to divert hashes away from the entire family of merged mining coins to mine this thing; add the merged mining patches to it and all those folk can just add it to their mix.

-MarkM-

i"ve seen the data, just thought maybe someone calculated some estimates, not just wild gueses.

i think it's killed by it's own outdated difficulty retergeting system.

future is dead or zombie [megred] 

What you are calling "zombie" might well just be "sleeper"... Basically allow some years for the initial distribution of coins to take place before worrying about them having value. Coins that aquire value too fast tend to not get distributed to a whole lot of people as it very fast becomes hard to get them. The coins that all the big miners think are dead are actually ones that normal folk can easily pick up instead of being crowded out by the already-rich but greedy big miners.

-MarkM-

There are only two virtual currencies: Bitcoin and Failcoin.

16128 - 15883   (2013-02-13 08:21:33) = 245 left...

5 to 8 blocks a day...
so 30 to 40 days till next difficulty drop.
It would go back to 4096 or even less to 2048? Not clear on that and / or the mechanisms involved for the drop in difficulty.

Considering ASIC's are looming on the horizon there is potential for any alt-coin considering that the difficulty of Bitcoin itself will rise by a factor of 10 or more in the coming months some estimates have the difficulty for BTC to be as high as 70 million from 3 million currently by as early as June or July. What would you do with your out matched GPU if BTC also drops in value making BTC unprofitable? Don't think that FRC is a failure or dead considering the backing of the foundation will also provide FRC for grants soon. FRC has just as much potential regardless of the current drop in nethash vs difficulty.

6.536166213 Nett GH/s Difficulty:64        (Sun, 23 Dec 2012 17:19:22 GMT) @ Block 7920
6.536155284 Nett GH/s Difficulty:9772    (Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:39:10 GMT) @ Block 15840

Maybe the sky is falling comments are a bit harsh considering were are still at 6.5 GH/s even with a difficulty of 9772? This adjustment seems reasonable and probably warranted and should allow the FRC to rebound at a more steady rate over the coming months rather than yoyo back and forth as it has. Maybe having less is not such a bad thing for the currency?

The difficulty can change at most by a factor of four. Which could make the next difficulty 2443. When it changes I will be mining FRC again.

we could use some help getting it down...  maybe start mining it now?

Wish I had a rig worthy of mining... I'd put some time on FRC. Then again with BTC at $27 can you really expect anyone to put anything into FRC at this time?

Getting closer and closer to difficulty drop... can't be soon enough for me.

hello. I want all the FRC. feed me.

Good news for the freicoin network. Current rate is about 15 blocks/day, which puts the ETA for difficulty drop to 2500 to about 12 days.

What's the status of the foundation? Are there any campaigns planned yet?

I think there is a call for grant proposals right now... linked here http://www.freicoin.org/how-to-present-grant-proposals-t146.html and the foundation submitted it's paper work I do believe to get registered?


And that is a great news... if we can keep pace 12 days is worth the wait. 11,834,609.99488551 FRC mined... nice.

I don't come by here very often, so I missed all the hullabaloo. Mark's pretty much dead-on. We are attempting to create a viable international currency based on new/revived economic principles. That takes a lot of time.

Most people seem to be waiting for the foundation to issue its first grants, which we've said will happen as soon as we get a grant proposal submission site up. (You can follow updates to that on our forums and #freicoin IRC channel, and we can use volunteers of all types to help get it going.) Because of that I actually think it could be a good thing that we've had this boom-bust mining cycle, due mostly to the stellar rise of bitcoin profitability and lack of a high-volume FRC exchange. Getting more of the initial distribution out before there is anyone using the currency would not help in the long term.

If you guys can get your foundation up and running properly again before mining on the coin heats up you can kind of have a "restart" and hopefully get a somewhat better reception this time verses that nasty "scamcoin" that was thrown around.

Best of luck to you guys.

Freicoin is sort of heated up already - its mining profitability is greater than mining straight Bitcoin (when converted into Bitcoin itself).  See http://www.coinchoose.com (http://www.coinchoose.com)

yeah, but where can i trade them, vircurex and btc-e arent trading them

You can trade them here - http://exchange.zapto.org/exchange/2/6 (http://exchange.zapto.org/exchange/2/6)

You can also trade them at Cryptonit, as well.

Zapto is Cryptonit, but Crytonit is the new link and SSL certificate...

I have 12.5k FRC and am looking for 2.25 BTC for the lot.

At the present BTC value of ~100 USD, that comes out to 1.8 cents which sounds fair to me.  But with these wild BTC prices so unstable it might be better us start stating prices in USD and converting to what ever BTC is at the time.

What is pretty much impossible, since most cryptos are BTC based. (Their rates keep the same even with the crash)

That more likely indicates how illiquid these markets are.

Price still seems 'sticky' at 1.8 cents.  At current LTC price of $2.40 and LTC/BTC exchange rate of 0.0075.  The LTC/BTC rate has appreciated a bit over the last few days though with some spikes that sent it briefly up too 0.0165.

(Edit) Oh, nvm, down to 0.0045 while I was posting, well lets see what happens.

Not sure if it matters, but my site (http://www.coinchoose.com (http://www.coinchoose.com)) has the current price for Freicoin after converting it to BTC (thru LTC).  Right now I have it at 0.000150583.  I need to add transactional costs (since it is using two exchanges), but it is available there automatically (and updates as the exchanges update).

I think, a leas now, the price of any crypto-currency inherently linked to the price of the most important crypto-currency: Bitcoin. Of course this may change in the future, but if Bitcoin loss half its value in the eyes of the market, it makes sense that Freicoin loses half of its value as well. Next to this, at the moment for almost every transaction the agreed upon price is inherently fiat based after which it is converted to the price in the crypto-currency used. I like that, at least for alternative cryptocurrencies, this is done the other way around. Hopefully in time more things will follow.

For anyone interested, I have come to an agreement with someone for the price I asked (I pro-rated it to account for the 77 FRC lost due to demurrage).

how much USD is a FRC?
and a TRC? If may i ask you of course!

So since the cryptonit exchange is down, there is nowhere to exchange freicoins.

That said, I have approx 13389 freicoins. I want Bitcoin or some other coin I can readily trade on BTC-E or Vircurex into BTC.

Our forums and IRC channel are for the time being the best place to go to exchange FRCs, the forums have subsection specifically for exchange
http://www.freicoin.org/exchange-f24.html

http://www.freicoin.org/post2336.html#p2336

In an effort to help the community. I will track the trades people post on the thread there so we can have at least a manually exchange ticker available. As data comes in I will manually update it.

FEATHERCOIN! FTC

there : https://vircurex.com/welcome/index?alt=frc&base=btc&locale=en
and
here : https://bter.com/trade/frc_btc

http://www.freicoin.org/list-of-exchanges-supporting-freicoin-t225.html <-- Exchange List
http://www.freicoin.org/mining-pools-list-for-frc-t251.html <-- Pool List
http://1.cr.rs/ <-- Block Explorer
http://www.freicoin.org/market-f21.html <-- FRC Marketplace

FRC topped out at nearly 2 TH/s today... wow! http://www.freicoin.org/massive-hasrate-over-at-coin-on-tron-516-gh-t311.html#p3069

Interesting

why my balance FRC on my wallet gets smalle??

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_currency
http://freico.in/

yup, you should have spent them. On BlackJack and hookers.  :D

You got it wrong. Is interest and not demurrage what's against investing in the long run.
Interest creates the so called "time preference".

Here's this same thing said with some poetry:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9URm-y_ASQ

Freicoin diff now at 148K, profitability drops to 30%. Expect miners abandon ship enmass.

When is the new diff adjustment going to be implemented?

Was thinking the same thing...  Well, unless the exchange rate increase to compensate, we'll see the same thing that occurred a few months ago, with FRC chain stalled for weeks.  But back then, there were pretty much no exchanges (apart zapto/cryptonit which the double-authentication requirement pushed away a lot of people).  Now you have vircurex and bter.com that trade them easily.

So, maybe within a week or two, the exchange rate will increase.  For sure, they are now undervalued.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=202250.0