Money should strive to be neutral. The purchasing power of money should stay the same. The net gain on society when the value of gold or bitcoin goes up is zero. As gold rises in value, some people will inevitably sell. It is most likely going to crash again unless world currencies start dropping like flies. When it crashes is not predictable, so that is what fuels the speculation. Money should not be a speculative vehicle. If its value rises, those who have more of it transfer wealth from those who have less. If its value drops from supply inflation as with fiat, the wealthy still transfer wealth because they are the ones at the top of the currency food chain. This is what is causing the class disparity and OWS and all that jazz. Again, even if bitcoin were reasonably distributed, just like what happened with gold-backed currency, the wealthy become wealthier and you enter a recession because the middle and lower class can no longer afford to pay for things the rich provide.

The purchasing power of money should stay the same in a perfect currency. Austrians believe this, Keynesians believe this. Bitcoin doesn't even make an attempt to do this. It attempts to encourage people to gain wealth for nothing productive. This is why we are in a recession, playing with the value of money. Those at the top with the power end up happier, those in the other 80% are oppressed.

You are falling for the same shit that you are stuck in with fiat, except that you think you can become the 20% or the 5% or the 1%. And by you I mean anyone who thinks bitcoin has a solid foundation for monetary policy. Because if you don't accept the fact that to gain value with bitcoin others are losing value then you are deluded. Wealth is not created by a currency or how scarce that currency is. A currency is just a means for moving wealth around. And both bitcoin and fiat have measures to move wealth involuntarily up the chain to those who already have wealth. It takes it away from those with less.

I am not going to link wiki garbage or anything else to prove this point. It should be self-evident.

A currency that the people actually control, not some computer-driven distribution that is arbitrarily limited, will probably engender more faith than any government currency ever could. It cannot be manipulated by those with wealth, it cannot be manipulated by those without. It is driven by the will of the people as a whole. Should this not be what we strive for? Never before in history was something like this possible, and bitcoin absolutely blew it. Maybe it was a lack of vision, maybe it was just plain old greed, the same shit that got us looking to alternatives. An alternative that makes YOU the 1% is no alternative for the other 99%.

That's great and all, but it is mostly irrelevant to the discussion. I am talking about the average cost to produce and over time. Of course you can nit pick specific instances in time or in place, but all you are doing is nit picking and obfuscating the heart of the argument.


Yeah, and the gold bubbles are not so much different from bitcoin either. And the problem with bitcoin is that it compressed 5,000 years of the history of gold into 3 years. All of the easy to find gold got mined in the first year, then it got exponentially more difficult. It never had a chance to be actually used as a currency before the enormous amount of easy gold was put into the hands of a small number of people. Throw history out the window, fuck it let's do it all over again. Humans are gluttons for punishment, after all. Tell me what to do, wealthy overlord, for I am your slave.

Gold has done it throughout history, for example. This is why it has been a good starting point for currency. There is nothing particularly special about gold except that it is a small portion of the material on Earth and it is pretty. Pretty doesn't put food in my mouth or a roof over my head.


This is starting to get frustrating. I explain to you that gold has never gone below its cost to produce, yet you worry that something similar will drop to 0. And this worry is based on faith, apparently, which is the basis for all currency (almost all of which, nowadays, has a near zero cost to produce). So there is apparently something inherently unfaithful about ENC, but not about everything else used as currency.

Then you find it unconvincing that gold has, in recent history, cost around $320/oz to produce, that it has never fallen anywhere close to that price, and that when gold was selling for $2900/oz that this wasn't a speculative bubble? I'm not making up the $320/oz number. That is what it costs to produce gold. The reason why gold doesn't back currencies anymore is because it caused a deflationary spiral when economies started growing faster than the gold supply. Now money is backed by zilch. Bitcoin as a currency works in the same, silly way as gold during deflation and results in speculative bubbles.

I propose a happy medium where the commodity is always very difficult to produce, but as much of it can be produced as necessary. In what way do you think people will lose faith once it is adopted as a currency? People haven't lost faith in a useless element on the periodic table. People have kind of lost faith in currency backed by the will of the government. This currency would be backed by the will of the people. It is only produced if people WANT it, which means there must be some faith. The cost to produce is just a base line, the same as $320/oz for gold. It is proof that EFFORT went in to getting this thing called an encoin (bitcoin has no such proof as early coins were mined for thousandths of a cent). Faith is faith and I can't make any guarantees about that, but I can guarantee that speculative bubbles won't exist because you are guaranteed to lose value. Every time.

Because demand could never get too far out of line with supply. The main issue you have with my idea--that it isn't scarce. Which isn't true, it's just that gold and bitcoins will be more scarce.

I gave you the example of "what if everybody could mine gold at $320/oz?" You countered with "what if people lose faith?" If gold is $600 an ounce and I can produce it slowly at $320/oz, you can bet your bottom dollar I'm going to be spending a lot of time mining gold and so will a lot of other people. So if gold gets to $600, it won't stay there long, and everybody knows it won't stay there long because they can make more themselves. If gold is $300 an ounce, no one in their right mind would bother mining it. Gold lost 60% of its value because the speculative bubble burst. If gold never got so far above its cost to produce, it would not have happened.

ENC will not ever get so far above its cost to produce because everyone can produce it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gold_price_in_USD.png

If you look at this chart, since around 1973 gold's price has never dipped below $380ish (inflation adjusted). I don't know what the cost to produce gold has been throughout that time, but you can probably infer that it has been level at around $320/oz (inflation adjusted) since then. (Yes it was cheaper before 1973 as most of the "easy gold" was now probably mined.)

So look at that crazy graph and tell me there is no parallel to bitcoin. Now do you think the graph would look so crazy if everyone could make gold, but it still always cost $320/oz to do so?

Lol I'm not being catty, I'm just pointing out that you are not making an argument against my idea, but against all currency. I can't solve everything, ya know.


Gold lost 60% of its value because most of its value was, surprise surprise, based on demand. Just like bitcoin. Just like gold's value is now. Now is a fairly terrible time to buy gold unless you think that faith in fiat currency will continue to drop and continue to drive demand to gold. Speculation. Gold didn't drop below its cost to produce. Its cost to produce is a huge portion of the value of gold when it isn't inflated by speculation.

Now imagine a commodity that is relatively unlimited (electricity) but is extremely difficult to pack into a currency (processing cycles + time), but anyone can do it. The people control the direction of the currency.

Uhh I hate to break it to you, but every currency is based on faith that someone else wants it in lieu of a real good. Fiat, gold, bitcoin. This is not an argument against making a currency that works similarly to gold, it is an argument against currency period. If the price fluctuates between $300 and $340, it is still within a reasonable range that merchants do not have to worry about daily swings or what have you, and thus can always charge a consistent price, just like they do with fiat (though obviously it eventually increases as the supply is almost always outgrowing economic activity). If the price is on the low end, people are encouraged not to sell unless they've lost faith in the currency. Low price does not equal low faith, just high supply.


Actually, the main reason is time. The supply of gold can only increase by about 2% per year unless many more people devote time and effort into mining gold. Bringing up new mining operations costs a lot of money, takes a lot of time, and will have to wait many years before seeing a ROI. Allowing easily accessible ways to mine ENC means that the demand will never (maybe) get too far ahead of supply. And if it does, holders are encouraged to sell because the price will get back to parity (cost to produce + return on investment) much quicker than with gold.

But then your distribution of the pie is always going to shrink when the supply is fixed and others are spending thousands on mining rigs to out-compete each other. By them spending money it costs you money. No matter what you lose.

I was always first concerned with whether or not I could get away from the block chain because that was necessary to separate the security of the network from the creation of currency. If I couldn't achieve one, there was no way I could achieve the other. That is why the majority of the proposal is based around explaining it while the scarcity aspect is only a small portion.


The simple correlation is to gold. It still isn't the same, but it is closer than bitcoin's correlation. Gold costs about $320/oz to mine, this price does not change easily. Imagine now where gold is like $1500/oz because of high demand due to currency volatility that you could turn on your computer to mine gold. It still costs you $320/oz to mine, but it is accessible to everyone. Eventually the price for gold will come down to $320/oz. If gold is selling for less than $320/oz, anyone who tries to mine will do so at a loss. In bitcoin, people do not have the power to bring the price down because the supply is fixed and measured. So even if bitcoins were reasonably distributed, eventually an 80/20 type scenario will emerge where the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small number of people. I'm not saying this is bad, it is just reality. Now that small percentage that controls 80% of the supply controls the price of the currency. This is bad. You need an unfixed supply to counter this. Unfixed does not mean unscarce.

It is electricity + processing cycles + time. I don't know how things will eventually work out, but the second two factors may be worth a larger percentage of the value to people than the first. The price is far from fixed, it is rather an oscillation that would hopefully never go too far one way or the other. I'm still working on more ideas to keep the oscillations smaller and to be able to account for unexpected future variables such as the CPU->GPU thing that bitcoin suffered, as well as large changes in the price of electricity.


It isn't possible? If there was a commodity that worked very efficiently as a currency and was always difficult to acquire but not limited, would that not create a stable value to the currency? And the fact that no government can dilute the supply when they feel like it? The bitcoin supply is most definitely not stable or we would not have seen a deflationary spiral in the first few years of its existence. And deflationary spirals are wont to happen again and again as the prisoner's dilemma takes hold--this doesn't require a bad distribution or early adopters--so what the end result will likely be is that merchants will have to stop taking BTC as payment and switch back to a traditional currency during spirals. Currency fail. Surprise, surprise but if there aren't businesses popping up all over the place to keep the volatility away from merchants by just converting it to something else. Gogo payment processor, fail currency.

hardware is free?

I am merely asking questions to get to the heart of the matter of your argument. I didn't assume you believed any of those things, that's why there was a question mark at the end of each sentence. Sometimes it takes going to the extreme side of things to get someone else to flesh out what they're saying.


And I stand by my position that the currency has (should have) nothing to do with this. You are promoting what you think is best for the society and the world through manipulating how the wealth of this world is exchanged. That is folly. People will just do it in a different way. If that involves a different currency to facilitate this process, then so be it. You aren't going to be able to stop them.


What I disagree with is that this can somehow be managed by currency.


Focus on changing the way people think, not how they store their wealth. A much tougher task that does not allow for some band-aid like deflation.

Too many arguments I see for deflation are based on "THIS IS WUT DA GUBMENT DOES." I think everyone on this board agrees that how currency is managed by governments is far from ideal. It allows for too much unproductive exchanging of wealth. Rather, transferring of wealth. This is why I'm so against Bitcoin. It is doing the same thing. This is why, at a voluntary cost of my own time which is important to me, I have spent many hours coming up with a system that makes the supply of money less vulnerable to manipulations. In a fixed supply of money, those with more money can "group think" or "prisoner's dilemma" themselves into transferring wealth to them from everyone else in an absolutely unproductive way. It doesn't matter if there are early adopters or not. And it is the same result as typical fiat currency; someone benefits for nothing.

Let's fix that first, then perhaps we can see what society can do when trying to manipulate money no longer can cloud our judgments.

110% agreed. But you don't need deflation to fix this, you need stability. Deflation WILL lead to hoarding if there is no counterpoint that says "if you hoard, I'm going to inflate the supply." Thus the idea for the cryptocurrency linked in my sig.

Then what is the reasoning behind your logic? You think innovation is bad because it creates a system where some people are wealthier than others? Do you disagree that living longer, healthier lives with less fear is a good thing? Do you disagree that understanding how the universe works is a good thing? Do you disagree that some people are more intelligent or more driven to accomplish things than others, and should be rewarded for it? Should we simply stop growing as a species because it's not fair to everyone?

(sorry this is kind of a mix of questions directed at you and electric, but the questions are about stifling economic growth which you both seem to agree on)

Ok, fine...


Any company would have a harder time getting a loan. Ethical or not. That is no basis for speculating that ethical investments would rise. By what logic will the self-serving measure of holding money to increase its value suddenly be thwarted by that measure? That people will be more generous just because? That is about all your argument amounts to. Money should strive to be neutral. Silly effects like price deflation is at worst likely only to encourage greed, at best be no different from inflation. Deflation is not going to make people more ethical.


Where is the draconian control? How is shipping unproductive? Do you think that trade with different nations or far away places is unproductive? As far as bureaucracy, do you think we should live in anarchy? I don't believe bureaucracy is very efficient, but it certainly is not less than 1% efficient. It does accomplish something. While military productivity is certainly debatable, world peace isn't going to magically arrive with the diverse cultures that exist on this planet. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with it, but it is very likely that someone is going to always try to control someone else, so you might want to have somebody out there to prevent that from happening. And you've glossed over someone who flips burgers for a living. Is that unproductive? Should we go back to farm life and be self-sustainable? What exactly do you want from the world?

Ah that makes sense.

That's all well and good, but this is possible without deflation. And it is less of a risk. Yet very few if any people do it. So what makes you think the bigger risk of doing it with deflation will suddenly spur this type of activity?

To what draconian control are you referring? On the supply of money? Saying that 99% of productivity is wasted has to be wrong. If you say that in regards to the financial system it might be accurate, but in just about everything else it is certainly not. You have to be a little careful before declaring that the war between classes is for naught. Trying to improve society in the name of making money is not necessarily a bad thing, you know. It drives innovation. However, there are many cases you can make where greed becomes the main factor and society actually hurts because of it. But these are more on a case-by-case basis (hello big pharma). Blanket statements such as all productivity is bad is just wrong.

Who in their right mind would ever loan at negative interest?

Loan money, lose coins. Hoard money, keep coins. Where is the incentive?

Cryptography-supported voting mechanisms have already been proposed with solutions to all of the problems, even being forced to reveal your vote (so that you could never prove who you voted for to someone who paid you to vote for them). And *gasp* a block chain isn't necessary.

http://ethesis.nitrkl.ac.in/1683/1/Thesis_evoting.pdf for an example

By arguing with the choir, those in the chapel can hear it and make their own decisions, rather than only seeing one-sided group-think.


Herein lies the problem--I'm not claiming to be infallible. I need people to come in and give opinions and ideas. As of yet, Red is the only one who has provided any kind of counterpoint. By dumbing it down further, the only responses I am likely to get are "this is cool when's 1.0?" or "this is lame, bitcoin is better." Neither is helpful in the least. If you are worried about how it tries to achieve stable value, the only two sections you have to read are those on moore's and koomey's laws. They do need to be discussed with a fine-toothed comb, but I can only do so much discussing with myself. I'm not sure what "authority" you expect to back up this claim, but you have a serious chicken-and-egg problem if you wont risk your time unless there are a lot of people behind it.

I am working on making it easier to digest, that's why I have switched to a wiki rather than a proposal. I'll probably be doing a few youtube videos or powerpoint slides soon to help aid the digestion further. But it all takes time. And until this latest proposal, I was very unsure about a lot of the properties of the system. Now I know at least that everything I write about is possible (from a technical standpoint), and I believe the system behind it is sound. But it still needs tweaking and discussion, and other viewpoints can and have already enlightened my understanding of ways to do it better.


Yes, but this thinking comes from the fact that there has been only one successful cryptocurrency. The status quo is never the only way to achieve something; thinking that way is a great barrier to progress.