Right now we are all early adopters. Some were luckier than others but if you have a whole Bitcoin you're pretty damn lucky.

On the other hand even if you don't have a whole Bitcoin, even if you're very late it may still be better than whatever your national currency was.  What if you were late to buy gold and now the gold bubble is as high as it can get and you never got in early? It happens. What if you missed the dot com bubble? Even if you missed the Bitcoin train there are Litecoins and PPCoins. So at this point, the technology is so new that I don't think anyone involved in the Bitcoin community right now should consider themselves unlucky.

I also don't think people should get into Bitcoin to get rich quick. If you don't truly understand what Bitcoin can do for the world beyond make you rich then you're not a true supporter of Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies.

Exactly. Tokens are like tickets. You want to get on the train or bus? You buy a token. You want to gamble? Buy some chips. It's not going to gain in value over the years and it's not designed for you to keep your money in it for long periods of time. It's not designed for you to actually spend it either, it's for a specific purpose within a narrow focus of a community.

Devcoin is like that. It only exists as a support structure for Bitcoin until Bitcoin has infrastructure to pay people in Bitcoins and then Devcoin is done. No one is going to choose to get paid in Devcoins over Bitcoins just because theres an octillion Devcoins. And the moment someone comes along and forks Devcoin and adds the ability for the tokens/coupons to expire is the moment Devcoin becomes second best. Nothing is wrong with infinite inflation if the inflation is nice and slow, and if there is an expiration date. Devcoins seem to have no expiration date and are generated so fast that I cannot see how it will work up against a fork which has expiration built in.


Devcoin isn't a coin, it's a token/coupon. Coupons expire when the sale is over. That is how it works. If you're 100% against the destruction of "coins" that statement is too vague. I'm assuming you're against the destruction of Devcoins? I'm for it. I think Devcoins should deteriorate and self destruct over a period of time. This will encourage Devcoins to be used for what they are designed to be used for, which isn't a commodity. Commodities don't have infinite amounts of inflation if they are supposed to be a store of value. So why pretend like Devcoin is gold or silver? It's not a precious metal, it's not a commodity. The only purpose of having Devcoins is to trade them for Bitcoins as soon as possible. If Devcoins self destruct then it encourages people to trade them in as soon as possible which is better in my opinion if you're going to generate an unlimited amount and generate at such a high rate. The last thing we would want is to have millions of people with trillions of Devcoins hoarding them so the price can swing way up and then dumping them all at once so the price can dip down to less than 1/1000th of a cent. This kind of volatility is bad for something like Devcoin where people are expecting to earn a reasonable amount of money for labor and stability is everything.

If a case can be made for why Devcoin can have an infinite supply of tokens, that never self destruct, (even paper currency deteriorates and even coupons expire), then please make the case. If we look at nature the way nature balances life forms with fast metabolisms and generation rates is that they don't live as long. Basically nature keeps the balance by saying if you generate billions a month, you only live for 6 months anyway. If it wasn't like this then we'd be overwhelmed by insects that will live forever and reproduce in the trillion trillion trillions. I think you can see why it does not scale.

I agree with this 100%.

I'm not against inflation, it's the rate of inflation that matters. If you inflate at 1% like PPcoin it's fine because it's still going to be scarce and it's inflating at a rate that is so small that it doesn't change that. Gold inflates too but is scarce. You can have a small amount of inflation, 1% or less. But to have infinitely large amounts like Devcoin simply does not work well for a commodity or a currency.

If the dollar is such a great currency why don't you have a lot of dollars? After all, a lot of dollars are printed up and there are way more of them than Bitcoins so why are you buying Bitcoins with your precious dollars?

For a community token you can have one token per person because the token itself is supposed to be worthless. For negotiable instruments or paper money you can have 1 dollar per person, but once again in my humble opinion it's better to keep the rate of inflation so low that demand always vastly outnumbers supply. Nintendo used to do this with game console launches, they would deliberately not produce enough of them around the Christmas season and people would have to stand in line to get them. Apple does this too, they deliberately keep supplies low to boost the demand. I'm saying there should never be 1:1 coin per person on earth because then each person will have to have thousands or millions of coins to distinguish themselves from others as "rich". No economy is going to work when everyone has an equal stash because that isn't capitalism, so some people have to be rich.

In Bitcoin the early adopters will be rich. Early adopters include some of us. In fiat currencies whoever is more politically connected to the central banks and those who already have money are more likely to have money. Bitcoin with it's early adopter premine is still much more fair than the political distribution system we have. At least with Bitcoin anyone could have been an early adopter with some luck and even if you weren't an early adopter you can still through hard work make yourself very rich as is happening with people who start successful startups.

Bitcoin isn't a community token, it isn't merge mined, it's a cryptocurrency which is a commodity more like gold. It has intrinsic value based on it's scarcity and the difficulty and expense of obtaining it. Devcoin is just a community token no different than if we created coupons and called them shares and gave them out so people can exchange those coupons for Bitcoins. The coupons would be coupons not Bitcoins. The value would be in the Bitcoins themselves which function as the gold standard to back the coupons. In the case of Devcoins the value is in the Bitcoins that people can trade Devcoins for. Devcoins themselves are merely community tokens and are not scarce because they don't have to be worth anything to be used to prove you did a job any more than a time card has to be worth anything more than to prove you showed up on time. Devcoins are functioning like time cards for Bitcoins. Devcoins can help establish who did what job and its a lot easier to reward in Devcoins but I see no intrinsic technological innovation or value in Devcoins to make it last nor is it scarce enough to have any psychologically instrinsic value to a smart investor. Negotiable instruments or fiat currency had value in that it was lighter and easier to carry than gold but I don't see what niche or role Devcoin has that could not be done by PPcoin or Litecoin If you'd like to go buy millions of Devcoins go and for now it will be an okay investment but the moment Devcoin is globalized and the majority of writers are in third world countries the value will crash or something has to change, I do not see how it's a sustainable model mathematically.

Devcoin is not designed to be scarce. It will never become like gold because it doesn't have the same design. Anyone can get Devcoins for cheap and while there might be occasional volatility it's always going to be cheap because it will never be scarce. Devcoin isn't really a coin. Let me give an example, lets say I took decks of cards with arbitrary random numbers on them and I called them "shares" and passed them out to anyone who did X amount of work and who typed Y amount of words. Let's say the cards are made by a card company that for sake of argument mined the cards into existence using technology from a completely different company that makes very rare limited edition baseball cards but agreed to let them use the facility to make the arbitrary cards and then gave us unlimited amounts to pass out. The point here is that with Devcoin the worker is acting as the miner mining by earning shares. The more workers who write, the less profitable it becomes to write, the less workers will want to write. This is a flaw in the design of Devcoins because while it was designed to produce efficiency it neglects the fact that in a global economy there will be people willing to write nearly for free so once critical mass is reached there will be hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of third world writers who will write for $5 a share, so what of those expecting $50 or $500 a share? It simple does not scale. The number of Devcoins being generated are just arbitrary numbers, it's only the worth of the shares that matter to the writer just as miners care about how profitable mining is and not so much about securing the blockchain.

Bitcoin is a global commodity currency. You can use it as a store of value or as a currency to purchase large items but not so much for micropayments. Litecoin is better at micropayments, hence it's a bit less scarce and has faster transaction times. PPcoin is better as a store of value than Bitcoin because of Proof of Stake and the differences in managing difficulty. Devcoins are tokens which represent a value in Bitcoin but which have no intrinsic value of their own. Bitcoin has an intrinsic value of it's own because people will buy or even invest in Bitcoin. I don't see many people thinking Devcoin is a good long term investment. Anyone who actually attempts to work out the math quickly finds out that with unlimited supply but limited demand, you're not going to see much of a price rise. Limited supply but unlimited demand like with gold or perhaps Bitcoin is a very different story.

To test this out, if you ask people here if they have enough Bitcoins most will say no.
Try asking people here if they have enough Devcoins and see what they say.

Everyone should do a bit of both. Save and spend.

Devcoin is not a currency. Devcoins are tokens so that is a problem with them calling it a coin when it's a token.


Devcoins don't have any real value other than to be used as some token to represent the labor. Honestly we could work for Bitcoins instead but Bitcoin isn't focusing on that right now so there is Devcoin. Devcoin is not something to invest into as a commodity and it's not a currency that you should save or spend. It's a transitory or transient token which the moment you get must be traded in for the actual payment in the form of Bitcoin. Devcoin will never make it as a currency and will always be a token system because that is what the creators call it and the fact that you can have an infinite amount of worthless tokens in the same way you can have an infinite amount of time cards. It's the shares and the generation process that matters and from what I can see that process seems to function independently to the amount of coins that exist in total.

I think the solution to this problem would probably be to set the tokens to self destruct after X amount of time. Devcoins can be created infinitely but old coins which aren't traded in for Bitcoin should expire and we should probably treat it like coupons. I did X amount of work, wrote Y amount of words, I get a coupon worth Z amount of shares, and there has to be some volatility to the process but since there is no 21 billion cap and it's infinite the math would indicate that at some point no one will buy Devcoins for any investment or speculation, and it probably does not make sense to do so now, which is why the price is so low. But it does make sense to work for Devcoins and provided that the amount you get is modulated and adjusted, the fact that infinitely many get produced wont matter.

What I mean to say is, if there is 21 billion that exist then the jobs will be paying tens to hundreds of millions of Devcoins. All that changes is the decimal places and the amount per share. Honestly I don't know why they made this decision of infinite inflation, because from a marketing perspective it's keeping many people away from Devcoin who need to be using it. It kept me away from buying it, but I don't mind earning some provided that I can trade them in nearly instantaneously. Basically the only purpose behind them is to let people work and feel like they earned a billion coins or something, but the truth is people work for dollar amounts not coins and the amount of coins will be based on what people are willing to accept. No one is going to accept anything which isn't a fair amount in a free market, at least right now. When the market becomes more global that is when Devcoins will become worthless to many people because the price of the labor once again will be the minimum that anyone in the world will work for.

Devcoin is fine for now but I suspect at some point there will be competitors.

The payment route has to be much more streamlined. Maybe some developers can work on streamlining it into a sophisticated E-lance site where individuals can work under a pseudonym but at the same time have all the accounting and tax stuff handled in the background, also of course escrow and the ability to use digital signatures so a person can verify they produced whatever work they produced, perhaps the ability to do independent contracting paid in Devcoins and eventually salaries and not just bounties. Bounties can only take you so far, people will want smart contracts and a sense of stability.


The only problem with Devcoin is it's difficult to determine exactly how the market determines how much a job is worth. How much is 1000 words supposed to be worth? How exactly do we control how much anything is worth when there are infinite amounts of Devcoins? We all know every word is worth something but how much seems to be difficult to determine and Devcoin hasn't solved it. $70-500 is a very large range, so perhaps a rating system can be built in at some point so that really talented writers can get bonus shares in proportion to their rating. This rating system would have to rely on digital signatures and could not be done anonymously though so it would have to be traced to real people and that is hard.

How much is this in USD per share? How much is 1000 words worth in Devcoin economics today and into the future?

Of course you are correct but is Devcoin the answer?  Many people have mentioned that there are infinitely many Devcoins and that is the main problem with the idea. Perhaps a fork should be made and it should be renamed Workercoin instead because Devcoin sounds too nerdy. At the end of the day we all need a way to earn coins and Bitcoins don't seem to provide many avenues to work for coins just yet which is part of the problem with Bitcoins. If more people could actually work for them more people would use them and it wouldn't be so easy to manipulate the price.

Devcoin does not seem to be the answer though. While you may need billions of coins if its merge mined with Bitcoin, to have an infinite amount of coins seems unnecessary. One thing should be clear, Devcoins are not a traditional currency they are a token currency. You can create infinite tokens, tokens are only used to determine who did what work so if it's 1 token per share or a trillion tokens per share it does not really make any difference. For the barter exchange of time for labor any token will work. Devcoin just in particular isn't working because we aren't all writers and programmers so how do musicians, artists, mathematicians, and those who offer products and services get paid?

When the market is expanded so more than just writers and programmers can get paid, but podcasters, models, and anyone who offers any digital content can get paid, that is when Devcoin will work. Devtome isn't really a good enough site either, there has to be many sites like Devtome for it to work and different sites have to fill different niches.

If Bitcoins turn out not to be profitable is the pool willing to consider mining other SHA256 based coins? Do we get to choose where our hashing power is directed?

And that is not going to happen. But even if its $50,000 a Bitcoin that is damn sweet. And that could happen in 2016.

Bitcoins will not be worth 7 figures. $70,000 is the most Bitcoin will be worth in the next 20 years. But even if that is the case, any of us will be better off owning a few of them.

The markets are looking gangsta right now.

Already asked a similar question, but I would never call it an "Army".

Now we know why Google funded Ripple.

I recommend Coinbase also for tax purposes. When the time comes to report your taxes they make it really easy to do that.

It's bad for Bitcoin. Remember what E-Gold did? Kept people from Bitcoin.

Go on Cryptostocks.com and list there. There is another group offering FGPA shares. You should do the same and try and pull an ASICMiner type deal.

Sell shares of your company and you might have a shot or get on Kickstarter.

LuckyC? What? Did you borrow my name on purpose?