Although only a proposal at this point, Decrits addresses many of your concerns.

By using an account ledger in lieu of a transaction ledger, transactions have a maximum size of half to one-third that of the smallest bitcoin transaction size, but many will be a quarter or less the size of a typical bitcoin transaction.
By separating coin creation from network security, no energy (other than tx verification) need be wasted in protecting the network. Additionally, only a small portion of new coins are minted by miners, the rest are given freely to people who save and transact. This is part of the solution to making an inflationary currency possible.
Due to the account ledger instead of transaction ledger, individual coins can't be tracked, only accounts. While this doesn't immediately add anonymity, it makes coin mixers significantly simpler.

See sig for the link.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3008.0 an enlightening thread on this topic

Besides unbalanced oil & vinegar, NTRU exists today and has an open source implementation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTRU
There are also one-time Lamport signatures + merkle trees that allow for more than one sig use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_signature

Both of these have serious downsides compared to ECDSA though, namely a lot more data is required for public keys and signatures. But they are quantum computer resistant.

It is in reference to the violation of the 1st amendment that is HR347.

You have to look at and understand all aspects of a currency before deciding on what you think will happen. Investment has always been the tool that takes underutilized wealth and puts it to use. Whether or not it is put to good use may strongly depend on how the currency functions. Investors in a demurrage currency will look for long-term, renewable investing rather than short-term, resource dwindling gains. When gains are likely to be realized, investors will have to be very conscious about what to do with those gains and must realize that overproduction is only going to lead to a larger loss due to demurrage if more investment cannot be quickly found. So rather than promoting overproduction (and therefore overconsumption), investors are forced to stop and think about the diminishing returns that comes with a currency that has demurrage, or they will quickly find themselves penniless.

But yes, no one is going to use a currency with demurrage when there are alternatives, imo.

Even if this were true (it is a hasty generalization), the expected outcome on encouraging a high time preference is that either: 1) investment dwindles and there are very few "goal-oriented jobs" and people without money suffer (though this may be somewhat specific to bitcoin and the lack for need of a banking system); or 2) consumption rates will eventually equalize and it will just be older people that consume more now that money will have no meaning sooner rather than later.

If the value of money stayed relatively stable with some inherent risk of loss due to investment (a problem "avoided" by things like the FDIC), investing/saving/consuming could potentially equalize much quicker to something of a steady state. Overproduction/over-investment would be much riskier without governments/banks being able to print money.

Many of the problems attributed to fiat currencies that bitcoin supposedly solves are really just problems of government mismanagement, and not something that bitcoin inherently solves. Over-investment leads to over-production/consumption, but this is encouraged by inflating currency and government controls. Do you really think that a deflating currency is going to support a steady state, or will it support under-investment and under-production? Why utilize money to produce when the act of doing so will likely devalue it (more in circulation) and there is risk, when merely holding the currency provides a near-guaranteed return? Investors are going to have quite the pickle.

This is just time preference semantics though. Spend now or spend later, what difference does it really make? jtimon et al make some pretty decent arguments for their demurrage currency where holding currency is actually actively discouraged by the demurrage fee, and thus potentially reducing wasteful activities by investors trying to turn a quick profit now rather than thinking about the long-term. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=89843.0

Unfortunately, there is little incentive for anyone to actually use a currency with demurrage when there are other, non-demurraging currencies available. And in fact I don't think a demurrage currency can ever be successful unless it exists in a vacuum, e.g. by government mandate. Anyone looking for the quick profit now will just take bitcoins or something else and refuse freicoins.

If something's too good to be true, it must be true.

I don't follow the ASIC stuff much as I don't mine, but from what I've heard here and there the price of ASICs should drop significantly once competition begins and they begin mass production. Like, really significantly. Chip fabrication costs hinge heavily on the amount that can successfully be produced, so if demand is high enough and the manufacturing process efficient, the price should drop like a rock, just like every other ASIC. And we can only really guess what the real eco-footprint of these devices will be, it can't be hinged upon just how much electricity they use. No matter what, it's still wasteful. The solution to the security of the network needs to be something other than "throw more money at it", or you might start seeing some ironic parallels to typical government policy.

This is not accurate. See my sig for one example. Another are the proof of stake ideas from Meni and Cunicula. I also proposed a bitcoin-like blockchain that used bitcoin days destroyed or a similar metric to decide which chain is stronger rather than purely hashing power. This could allow for a safe reduction in difficulty without opening the network to attack.

But if bitcoins for example, sell for $1,000 a piece and there are 10 or 20 bitcoins in tx fees each block, there will be competition to see how much people are willing to spend to eek out a profit on mining. Likely it is going to be 90% of the value of the bitcoins or more. So it's either electricity or the purchase of additional FPGAs or ASICs and the effort of repaying those investments. If there are $20k worth of bitcoins each block, competition is not going to allow people who have $10k invested to reap a 100% ROI. If ASICs are ubiquitous, you can expect the ASIC energy output to come close to that of GPUs, there will just have to be a lot more of them mining. If ASICs are not ubiquitous, GPU miners will still have an opportunity to profit above their electricity costs. GPU miners in cheap electric economies may mine long after ASICs are ubiquitous.

Quelle surprise, someone with nothing to lose and everything to gain by rabidly defending bitcoin, with a dash of sycophancy thrown in.

Not all A is bad, implies some A must be neutral or good
Therefore, A should never happen

A, if misallocated, leads to drops in productivity
Therefore, instead of fixing A's misallocation, A should never happen

Oh man, you better call up every economist in the history of time and tell them how you have solved economics.

No, you have made assumptions about what causes what with rudimentary logic and claims of your infallibility coupled with fallacious arguments.

You, as you have throughout your arguments. "I know you are but what am I" doesn't work as an argument past fourth grade. Quote anything I've said in this thread where I've used a legitimate strawman and I will send you 100 BTC.

Whoops, there you go again.

how were you able to associate satoshi with another forum ID unless the forum ID is a real name, of which there are only a few

I know you are but what am I?

Because the quick expansion of the money supply and the start of the industrial revolution happened around the same time. Paper money worked because of the scarcity of gold, not in spite of it.

That's great and all, but FRB is still not fiat, and one does not necessarily have anything to do with the other, so I don't know why you bring this up again.

Make up your mind, please.

Right, and the easiest way to lubricate the greatest and most productive fraction of people is to have enough money to go around. What happens when there isn't enough money to go around can easily be seen by the credit crisis that led to the great depression. Prior to monetary expansion, society worked because most people lived in a feudal or other pre-industrial society. Lots of gold to go around, even in the form of paper, allowed for much easier economic expansion and international trade and various other benefits.

Heyo, another strawman alert. I have never said nor believed that money creates wealth. The easy flow of money, however, can very easily bring out the most productivity in the greatest number of people.

Heyo, another strawman alert, and a lack of historical understanding alert. The Romans created fiat-like money very early on and also price fixed and this worked well for hundreds of years before the collapse of the currency. It only failed because of improper control of the money supply. Kind of like the situation we find ourselves in with central banks.

Really? Last time I checked, almost every single country in the world except for about 3 or 4 use a central bank-controlled currency. And in each of those countries, there is no currency competition so banks are free to fuck up however they please and there is little that the population can do about it except suffer.

Because we over-produce due to the fact that we are enslaved by government/central bank debt. I already said this but you choose to ignore what doesn't suit you. I'm not going to argue about the slowing of the velocity of money due to credit crises because that is a different subject and one that I haven't touched, but you are using as some kind of false-logic argument.

I argued that an expansion of money allows for an expansion of productivity (to a point), something also argued by neoclassical economists. There are other factors at play in a credit crisis and a contraction of productivity, namely money supply manipulation by central banks or the super wealthy and so on. There is more to money than just "fiat" or "not fiat".

I don't know why you're asking this or what this has to do with the argument I've made. If I claim that A causes B, that does not mean that I claim that not A causes not B or some other such crap.

Woohoo, an "agree with me or I deem you a troll" ultimatum. Very mature.

How am I supposed to take you seriously when you use Hitler as an example? There is certainly a correlation with the expansion of the money supply and the rise of the middle class and the industrial age. It is not definitive causation, no, but it is a significant correlation and can't be simply swept aside. And why does fiat need to be thrown into the mix? There was no fiat, this is gold-backed currency we're talking about here.


Good for you. It doesn't really make sense that productivity increased then the money supply magically increased as an effect, but believe what you want.


No, it doesn't. New money is not created because there is new productivity. It creates more demand for money, sure, and banks took advantage by using FRB. If they hadn't, all sorts of new production would have likely been halted due to lack of investment.


But that's not what I said, so why make this argument.


Wait, so you're saying the greatest empire in human history didn't work well? Damn, you need a history lesson son. Yes it eventually broke down because of the dilution of the currency by individual cities and such, but the empire lasted for a very long, and very prosperous time using a fiat-like system. So did the British empire with tally sticks. Of course, abuse a good thing and it's going to bite you in the ass. The tally sticks were only issued by the king so they were never abused in the way the Romans did, but the Bank of England put the kibosh on them.


Again you are putting words in my mouth. Abels claimed that "100 years ago" businesses and people saved up before they did something, which, as a rule, is patently untrue. We have been functioning in a debt-based production society that is similar to today for hundreds of years. And it's not like I didn't give a good reason why it isn't working now:

"The over-production/consumption that exists today is most likely due to the fact that our governments are in serious debt and the citizens are forced to repay this ridiculous, fictitious debt in the form of taxes or cut social services or what have you. So even though we are so productive, we have to continue to work ourselves literally to death so that the wealthy can eek out more profits."

I am 110% against central banking, but central banking is not FRB, they are two different concepts.

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

"From these two premises, the neoclassical model makes three important predictions. First, increasing capital relative to labor creates economic growth, since people can be more productive given more capital."

Now there's no guarantee that this is correct, but this is economics where nobody really knows anything for sure. What we do know for sure is that your opinion is just an opinion, and so is mine. To compare my opinion to bringing about the rise of Hitler is ridiculous and only makes you look desperate to win an argument on the internet.

Really, why not? There just happened to be a huge expansion of productivity that just happened to coincide with FRB?


So the industrial age was just a side effect? It had nothing to do with easily available credit? If you want to believe that, that's fine. Here's some government sponsored debt to go with it.

"The last hundred years" is not at all accurate. With the advent of FRB, financing exploded. This was 300 years ago. And there is certainly evidence to suggest that this is what truly brought about a middle and/or merchant class of people. Now, all this really means is that there was not enough money to bring about productivity in people who had production to offer. It is unfortunate that the some gains of this productivity are siphoned off to the wealthy, but it is the system that brought about some serious economic prosperity. The abuse of it, of course, has brought some very negative side effects though. In particular, there is likely groups of super wealthy that manipulate governments into controlling other governments into getting into debt and putting their people into debt and so on and so forth. Healthy, unmanipulated FRB is probably a good thing, but this is not what exists today.

The over-production/consumption that exists today is most likely due to the fact that our governments are in serious debt and the citizens are forced to repay this ridiculous, fictitious debt in the form of taxes or cut social services or what have you. So even though we are so productive, we have to continue to work ourselves literally to death so that the wealthy can eek out more profits.

A currency where investment is very risky due to the nature of the currency is never going to be significant. Especially one that is so ridiculously lopsided as bitcoin.

Or he who wants to build an empire can loan the money, earn lots of interest, then cause deflationary swings by withholding money from the market (credit crisis) and benefit in the same, sadistic way that banks do now by profiting handsomely off of the bankruptcy of others.

Anyone who says 51% "can't do much" is delusional or anti-FUDing. Anyone with 51% can refuse to add blocks from other miners which will cause other miners to drop out and give them even more than 51%. They can either create an effective monopoly to control the price of transactions or they can decide to drop transactions for whatever reason (and perhaps all of them, making the network useless). And of course they can double spend at will, though anyone doing this is probably a lot more interested in breaking bitcoin than making a few bucks.

lol @ "banks haven't attacked paypal"

I was trying to oh-so-gently lead you back to "because there is a strictly limited supply", a flaw I consider fatal.

Then why mention it in the whitepaper? It only serves to confuse.

I thought difficulty determines mint per block? Or what does mint per block mean?

I'm sure I don't completely understand it, but again, why is this better than just using coin age consumed? What advantages does it offer? Perhaps there would be less energy consumption than just using coin age consumed, but I don't think that that is a given. And people who wish to participate in stake holding must not spend or transfer their coins. Hard to say how it would work out.

Your idea sounds like it's in its infancy stages, so it is hard to comment on the feasibility of anything. But feel free to see the link in my sig for a proposal I spent a lot of time on that would significantly diverge from bitcoin.