Assuming you're only willing to use open-source coins (like most of us), any must-have features will eventually make their way into the Bitcoin main branch.
If only it was that easy. Do you think that the pos tha ppcoin uses can be introduced into bitcoin? Both because of concensus and also from a technical point of view. I'm assuming "must-have features" implies a consensus. Merging PoS into Bitcoin would be technically possible with a hard fork, especially since it's more of an economic concept than a specific implementation. I don't mean to dismiss these as "easy", but with millions of BTC riding on it and plenty of time, it doesn't have to be easy. |
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I think you've pretty much nailed it with those two categories. Part of the reason you see so many claims of technological superiority over Bitcoin is these claims pump up the price, helping a developer who is more in it to get rich quick.
Assuming you're only willing to use open-source coins (like most of us), any must-have features will eventually make their way into the Bitcoin main branch. I think Zerocoin is a good example; it's a very innovative idea, but it seems most Bitcoin users would rather watch it tested on an alt coin before merging new cryptography into the main project.
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Who says that this has to stop at a level of political leaders? Carlton Banks does, that's who! Create an assasination prevention market. Nearly everyone provides so much of a benefit to society that it would never be cost-effective to kill them. And if psycho ex-boyfriends with $100K become a widespread problem, I think your loved ones would buy insurance against it. Besides, this allegedly already happened when Dread Pirate Roberts ordered a hit. The government simply staged a fake video and used it against him. |
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Why are people so afraid to try a demo? its just MT4 and a simple EA sponsored by the oldest bitcoin miner. Like we said, because it requires trusting an anonymous person's closed source. We wouldn't even trust Satoshi like this. If I was you guys i would be trolling less and paying closer attention to the details. Finally, you say something true. |
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Let me help connect a few dots.
I am a millionaire, before bitcoin existed.
I happen to also be a wealthy bitcoin holder. Why and how? I started mining bitcoin April 2009. Do the math.
I am here sharing this secret with this community only because I think you are intelligent enough to understand the system in the first place. Apparently that is not the case.
2 years after the first post and still searching.
Its not a martingale.
I am not giving away anything. This is a private invitation to join a very select club.
Maria.
This is classic. Why would someone who opts into an anti-establishment trust-free banking system want to trust you just because you're rich? You didn't even know how to sign a message when we first asked for proof that you owned a copy of an old key, and we can't verify that you're a USD millionare without your dox |
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Sorry to keep repeating myself every year, but I don't think we can just gloss over the definition of HUMANLIVES as a "detail". The lowest number in this huge bell curve is always going to vary wildly.
For example, what if we used RICHESTMAN as our currency, to encourage more jealousy? Carlos Slim would be taking us all for a wild ride!
If you want stability, don't pick an extreme. Maybe the cost to extend the average person's life by one year?
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I'd say, use other payment methods as well, but give a discount or benefits to those that pay with bitcoins. That would probably promote bitcoin the best.
Who is going to subsidies that discount? After all, if you can buy an car for a discount with bitcoins, who's going to cover that spread? I believe others answered that already. It mostly depends on the business model, it doesn't have to be an expense for you necessarily, as bitcoin has really low fees and quick transactions. I'm not sure how BTC has low fees and quick transactions, at least on the buyer side. I could pay with a debit card and get charged nothing extra and the transaction is instant. On the seller's side, I'm guessing you get charged somehow? But exchanging BTC to fiat and then withdrawing must have some fees. IIRC the seller will typically pay ~3% fees for credit/debit, which is usually more than BTC/USD exchange fees. This fee is invisibly added to prices, that's why some things appear cheaper when priced in BTC. The transaction isn't really complete until the buyer runs out of time to issue a chargeback, which can be up to 120 days. http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/07/31/credit-card-chargeback-merchant-disputes/If you're a merchant, Bitcoin trades the risk of chargeback (which averages a loss) for exchange rate volatility (which averages a gain). |
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Freicoin has 80% seigniorage towards a central foundation. It makes for an interesting demurrage test case, but any city should be using a coin that's 100% peer to peer. That means equal rules for all participants, not an unelected cabal spending most of the coins on their own pet charities.
I thought this was Devcoin. Does Freicoin also have this? Yes. They don't advertise this feature very prominently, but they're going to spend 80% of the initial supply on charity. All other participants are allowed to compete over the remaining 20% as mining subsidy. They added this right before the official launch, but so far they haven't decided which charities will receive it. So... should the economy of Detroit depend on the security of a single cold wallet, or the authority of an unelected private foundation?  |
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Normally I would say it's not a good idea to alienate customers based on their currency preference, that it would be awesome to just add Bitcoin as an extra so people can pay anonymously, but the problem is governments are going to get so desperate soon I predict it will soon be impossible to do business in conventional currencies if you are at all associated with Bitcoin because of the ridiculous laws they're going to introduce. I think anyone trying to set up a Bitcoin business needs to have a look at the history of wealth transfer and capital flight to have a proper understanding of what they're getting into when it comes to using Bitcoin.
Pretty soon it's going to be a question of them or us the more governments realise that they can't control Bitcoin at all.
True, but so long as the OP is allowed to set prices in each currency independently, he should take advantage of it. Once they start mandating that BTC prices must equal fiat_exchange+fees (or some other weird rule), then he'll have to choose. |
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A bigger question is how you limit the population when you remove limits on the population. Personally, I'm not in favor of artificially enforced limits on the population (against the non-aggression principle and I think people are generally an asset) but I also don't leave uneaten food and scraps pile up in my kitchen (if you see what I'm saying).
I think the limiting mechanism will depend a lot on the causes. Right now in my country there are several reasons to reproduce - you get paid for it if you're already poor, it's a status symbol if you're rich, and it might just be an accident. * Privately-funded soup kitchens wouldn't create financial incentives like welfare-per-child does. * Rich people reproducing isn't a huge problem because they can support these children. * Accidental pregnancy can be reduced with easier contraception and abortion. For example, bitcoin drug markets could sell emergency contraception and abortion pills even within oppressive countries. However, here in the USA we don't really have an overpopulation problem; if you don't count immigration the population is shrinking. It's reasonable to assume that developing countries will eventually reach this point too, and population growth will slow to the rate of economic growth (or less). |
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If a grocery store used its security guards to physically remove someone from their store for attempting to eat an apple that he had no money to pay for, and that person subsequently died of starvation than his living heirs would be entitled to restitution for something very similar to murder if not murder explicitly. that's just my opinion of course but if society in general shared my opinion than it would be enshrined in common-law.
Would it be possible to keep one's savings in a brain wallet, while walking around eating free food every day? absolutely. fortunately there is a rather simple and elegant solution to this problem. the soup kitchens could provide nutritionally well balanced and healthy food that tastes like shit. think of the white gruel that the crew of the nebakanezer eats every day for breakfast lunch and dinner in the matrix reloaded.  this way people have a social safety net that they can use to get back on their feet if they fall on hard times through not fault of their own while still having good incentive to actually work to rebuild their lives. Could I load up my gruel with Denatonium and preservatives so my grocery store would save a lot of money? I'll assume that I can't add Chantix to help them quit smoking. |
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If a grocery store used its security guards to physically remove someone from their store for attempting to eat an apple that he had no money to pay for, and that person subsequently died of starvation than his living heirs would be entitled to restitution for something very similar to murder if not murder explicitly. that's just my opinion of course but if society in general shared my opinion than it would be enshrined in common-law.
Would it be possible to keep one's savings in a brain wallet, while walking around eating free food every day? |
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Only those that are already well established (Litecoin, Namecoin) or offer true innovation have a chance to survive.
I don't see any innovation in Bestcoin. If it's a premine than it is a deadborn for sure.
+1 BitBar is already "rare", which is pointless anyways since the units are arbitrary. Premine/seigniorage means either "pump & dump" at worst or "thinks he's smarter than a market" at best. Let me explain the idea behind BestCoin. 1. It's a long term project (atleast for me), and I can assure you it's not a pump & dump scheme, and I'm not smarter than a market (no one is). If the market participants are rational, then they'll pledge towards these bounties voluntarily. We're already seeing this with Bitcoin; people are starting exchanges for profit because there is no risk of spent-premine "inflation", and they're donating to bounties because it makes their remaining Bitcoins worth more than their total would have been without donating. Assurance contracts work, they're simple, and they allocate resources based on a crowdsourced assessment of importance. Premines and seigniorage carry with them the risk of sudden inflation. This scares off speculators, which reduces liquidity, which makes the price more volatile, which scares everyone else away. Look at the cryptocoins with the highest market caps right now - no premines, and still plenty of exchanges/pools/innovations. Every coin that did something really interesting but had a premine was subsequently replaced - Ixcoin by I0coin, Tenebrix by Fairbrix, etc. Litecoin didn't even really break any new ground other than a fair launch, level playing field, and good communication. 2. The "rare" part is true, because in several years, there will be less BestCoin compared to Bitbar, franko...., and it will only became harder and harder to get one.
Why stop at 1,000,000? Why not just make 1 Bestcoin, or 0.001 Bestcoins? |
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Only those that are already well established (Litecoin, Namecoin) or offer true innovation have a chance to survive.
I don't see any innovation in Bestcoin. If it's a premine than it is a deadborn for sure.
+1 BitBar is already "rare", which is pointless anyways since the units are arbitrary. Premine/seigniorage means either "pump & dump" at worst or "thinks he's smarter than a market" at best. |
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“Provably fair” was never a design requirement.
Peer-to-peer was, and unless you have equal rules for all participants it is not peer-to-peer. So yes, provably fair was never in the initial plans... it's just the only way to restore that plan. No aspect of the protocol is centralized. None. Zero. Zilch. This whole initial distribution thing happens outside of the freicoin/bitcoin protocol. So the protocol doesn't require 80% of new coins go to a specific address under your control? I was under the impression (incredibly sorry if mistaken!) that miners who tried to opt out of the seigniorage would be rejected by other nodes. If the 80% seigniorage is completely optional and can be configured client-side, my whole argument is invalid.  |
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“Provably fair” was never a design requirement.
Peer-to-peer was, and unless you have equal rules for all participants it is not peer-to-peer. So yes, provably fair was never in the initial plans... it's just the only way to restore that plan. You're asking us to either trust you or independently verify that these recieving addresses belong to registered charities. That's a non-trivial cost that doesn't exist with "wasted" heat.
Everybody will be able to see the transactions in the public chain, 100% transparency in this reward. The only way we could cheat is by lying on what address belongs to what organization. We could say: -See? we're giving the money to this address, which belongs to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But if it didn't belonged to that organization, that organization would have something to say. If we cheat with this system it will be easy to catch us, that's the whole point. If we cheat, it's never too late to go back to the only-mining hardfork. Since we're not assuming trust, this requires that every participant goes online and researches every receiving address. Do you think this wasted effort is less than the effort wasted by mining? What about charities which close their websites someday after they've recieved funds, are new users expected to check those? Unless you're requiring trust, every user from now until the end of Freicoin will need to spend energy and time performing verification - it's like meatspace mining. Miners who value these charities will mine at a "loss" and then you have wasted heat again.
No miners should always mine at a profit or stop their equipment. Freicoin miners have mined at a profit most of the time, they periodically mine at a higher profit that bitcoin miners. I don't think I was being clear here. If mined coins allow for matching funds, then any miner who would otherwise donate to charity has a greater incentive to earn them. So if I gain $1 of utility from donating 1 FRC to the EFF, I would rationally mine all the way to $2/FRC. So I pay $2 to mine 1 FRC @ $1/FRC, but get $2 worth of utility. At best, this means the same amount of energy spent. How hasn't Bitcoin solved seigniorage? Seigniorage is the difference
between the value of money and the cost to produce and distribute it.
Since scarce money needs no backing you could maximize seigniorage and minimize money production costs. ... Right now the value of each Bitcoin block is worth roughly 100% of the
cost to produce and distribute it. The value of each Freicoin block is roughly 500% of the cost to produce and distribute it.
That's the whole point. The ratio cost to produce/value of Freicoin is 20% that of Bitcoin's. Freicoins are produced more efficiently and the gains derived from this increased efficiency is what must be distributed by the foundation. The most important thing is that the value comes from the demand and not from miners. That demand is explicitly approving the issuance mechanisms in both cases Bitcoin and Freicoin. There's also demand for other issuance schemes like xrp, where the marginal cost of production is zero and 100% of the supply starts in the hands of a private company. I think the comparison to XRP is fair. I can understand your argument that seigniorage can potentially be efficient, but I'd like to see how efficiently these coins are actually distributed when the time comes. My guess is that more time and effort will be spent, and most charities will just convert to BTC and then to local fiat. Believe it or not, there's people that prefer Freicoin's issuance
experiments over btc destruction and xrp privilege, and that's why it
has demand and a market price.
No offense, but I heard the exact same thing from RealSolid of SolidCoin. There is demand for every single alt coin here. |
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2) I can't think of any way to poll "the community" fairly, in a way that includes everyone, and you certainly didn't think of a way to do so before adopting this centralization aspect in the first place. How do you know who is and isn't a sock puppet? Do you expect people to trust you, or to audit your entire distribution process? There's only one provably fair way to distribute this hoard - to destroy it.
The first mechanism will be transparent donations in Freicoin and Bitcoin to registered non-profits. The Foundation will issue some freicoins to match those donations in proportion to what they have received. This can be transparent, clean and productive. More than mining in all these three aspects. People will vote with their pockets. It's not "perfectly fair" (whatever that means) but it's fair enough for most of us. I'm not sure what "perfectly" fair is either, but a provably fair system would be one in which all participants can prove that the 80% coins were handled according to strict rules without having to trust anyone. You're asking us to either trust you or independently verify that these recieving addresses belong to registered charities. That's a non-trivial cost that doesn't exist with "wasted" heat. And this of course assumes that users are OK with a government having veto power over acceptable charities - those of us who would donate to Wikileaks or Defense Distributed might be disappointed. I think you'll find that every new rule you make is "fair enough" when you only ask people who have not yet left the project; it's an echo chamber. The only thing that differentiates this system from pure 100% subsidy is you are requiring us to spend a minimum on state-approved charities instead of productive for-profit activity, and you are retaining the right to say when this hoard is released into the money supply (much like a central bank). Miners who value these charities will mine at a "loss" and then you have wasted heat again. Any time someone criticises this money grab, you put the burden on them to solve the problem you created.
No, I tell them to propose new issuance mechanisms and discuss the current proposals. Seigniorage is a problem we haven't created (it's much older than us) and Bitcoin hasn't solved by destroying real resources in a sterile attempt to mimic gold. But this technology gives the opportunity to use it for the commons and positive things instead of financing states and wars like other times, or just produce more heat like Bitcoin. How hasn't Bitcoin solved seigniorage? Seigniorage is the difference between the value of money and the cost to produce and distribute it. Right now the value of each Bitcoin block is worth roughly 100% of the cost to produce and distribute it. The value of each Freicoin block is roughly 500% of the cost to produce and distribute it. |
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More interesting to think that this coin, with nearly 80% of its production being held by one person could be considered a coin for the masses--but then it came to me. Gesell thought one should earn according to his ability. FRC's "foundation" is doing just that. While opining about the need for social change, the foundation is quietly amassing huge wealth under the notion that "they" are best to decide how it's used and spent. Strange...that sounds just like the current rash of premine and scam-coins only its ongoing and since its "to further the movement," the sheeple don't bother to dig any deeper.
No, the notion is to avoid a huge waste of energy by issuing that money through mining. The foundation doesn't wants to decide how to spend the money directly, that's why the community is proposing several alternatives to distribute the coins without wasting energy and without "central decisions" by the foundation. Ideas like curecoin (cure cancer instead of mindless hashing for issuance) or increasing voluntary donations in a crowdfunding platform. The point of the proposals is to take responsibility out of the foundation and back to the community and individual decisions. Please, post your own alternative to mining if you have any idea. I've been thinking more about this problem: 1) I'm not certain that the amount of energy spent is directly proportional to mining revenue, because Freicoin is merge-mineable with Bitcoin. If Freicoin hash power is much less elastic (relative to Freicoin mining revenue) than it is with Bitcoin, then you're making Freicoin more vulnerable to swings in Bitcoin price (which are arguably caused by deflation). This is because the decision to mine or not mine SHA256 depends more on what the merge-mined Bitcoins are worth than the price of Freicoin. 2) I can't think of any way to poll "the community" fairly, in a way that includes everyone, and you certainly didn't think of a way to do so before adopting this centralization aspect in the first place. How do you know who is and isn't a sock puppet? Do you expect people to trust you, or to audit your entire distribution process? There's only one provably fair way to distribute this hoard - to destroy it. Any time someone criticises this money grab, you put the burden on them to solve the problem you created. |
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Freicoin has 80% seigniorage towards a central foundation. It makes for an interesting demurrage test case, but any city should be using a coin that's 100% peer to peer. That means equal rules for all participants, not an unelected cabal spending most of the coins on their own pet charities.
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