The problem is that the client won't check that the block hash is correct, nor will it check the merkle tree. As such, you could modify a block and any client who uses your blockchain download will just assume that it's correct. That's why you should only download the blockchain files from the P2P network, where it is verified, or a HIGHLY trusted developer (which is the case for the bluematt.me site).

Kind of a stupid question, but if the GPU uses 150W, is all of it dissipated as heat?

Which isn't really the goal of the project. From the website:

"Many similar ventures failed because they expected billions to materialize out of thin air. Our ideas for seastead financing are far more realistic. The basic idea is to proceed in self-financing, incremental steps."

No trap I'm talking about people who don't know what a cryptocurrency is, do not believe the world is run by a secret cabal of bankers, don't think ponzi schemes are a valid line of work, don't ...

There are a lot of weird posts here. That's ok, I like almost-unmoderated personally. A lot of people don't.

So, your sales pitch is that you will run a forum we can safely point regular people to?

That would be a welcome change indeed.

I thought the blockchain was downloaded from peers in the network and not from a central server...

+1


No, the price inflation is primarily a symptom of the monetary inflation created by the fed to prevent deflation and a credit crunch.
But they cannot keep on printing more and more and wait for all this debt to disappear. If they don't allow deflation to come in, hyperinflation will end with this unsustainalbe situation.
If the inflation index you're looking at doesn't include energy and food then is clearly a wrong index. GDP growth statistics are highly manipulated too. I recomend you a video series called the crash course. It explains in a comprehensive fashion how CPI and GDP are calculated. Also peak oil and other important subjects.

Keep in mind that your assumption of 4% constant growth means exponential growth.

Make it 5 BTC and I'le spam the shit out of you.

Well I can understand why just straight out appealing to people's self-interest might seem to be a winning tactic around here.. but call me crazy.. it also comes across as just another tacky-crappy marketing ploy for something I don't know if I care about.

Why not appeal to people's interest in the overall expansion/success of the bitcoin community and explain how bitcoinforums.net fits into that..  and then offer the financial reward/prize thing as a sweetener on top of that?   At the moment it's all largely-illusory sweetener but no dessert.

What is bitcoinforum.net for? What problem is it solving? Is it just competition for bitcointalk.org?  
Is this intended to split the community somehow? Along what lines? Is that good anyway?

why do we need another forum, when we have the "official" forums here? Besides, you are spamming these forums with ads for your own forums, but you are requesting people to not post spam in your forums.  WTH dude?

None of these suggestions has a workable method of ensuring honest reporting. Instead, they use democratic reporting. This might end up being honest, but there is no incentive for honest reporting in the system. Given how much nonsense is talked in the forum, would you really want the masses to decide how much money is generated?

I would put more trust in a dictatorship or oligarchy as these governance systems provide better incentives for truthfulness. The dictator loses big if he fucks up his coin. In a democratic system, the losses are divided among many decision makers so no one has a significant stake in making good decisions. I think we should vest all power in a few oligarchs, but tie their hands using hard coded rules. If we must use a democracy, then we should use even stricter rules. I really don't think a democracy is a good way to go. One oligarchic option is vesting all voting power in the 10 largest account balances. These guys are the 10 oligarchs. If someone else wants to be an oligarch, they can purchase the necessary coin.  

I'm not in favor of using bitcoin to back the currency.

Here is what I propose instead.

1) every send is taxed at a 0.1% rate (the tax is rounded up) + (an extra tax fee for sends with low confirmations) + (a user-specified voluntary tax to motivate inclusion in a block)

2) mining occurs through the mixed coin - hashing system I described above where you escrow coins in the blockchain whenever you find a block (and thus need coins to mine)

3) miners receive 50% of the send tax revenue. An additional 50% of the tax revenue and coin generation equal to 50% of the tax revenue is put in an escrow account.

4) What happens to the escrowed money depends on monthly voting rounds. There are two possible voting outcomes (these are hard-coded):
                      a) money generation via lottery -> all tax revenue is sent via a random dividend to some lucky address.
                                                                      Probability of being selection in the random draw is proportional to coin account size (one coin = one draw.
                                                                     the lottery occurs once per block
                      b) money destruction -> all tax revenue is disposed of (for example sent to a nonexistent address)  

5) Voting rounds last for one month worth of blocks. Votes are cast whenever a block is mined. However, only one vote is counted every month. The counted vote is the one that included the largest number of escrowed coins (not coin-confirmations) in a block mined over the past month. This single vote decides whether the next month follows outcome 4a or outcome 4b.

To the extent that currency use grew over time, money generated via the lottery would enrich all holders of the currency in proportion to their initial holdings (early adopters are rewarded). To the extent that the currency failed, the volume of currency available would contract with every block sent until none remained. If this occurred slowly enough, the price could remain stable during the contraction.

Rich voters decide between currency creation and currency destruction. If they are risk-neutral, they will be indifferent between destroying currency and generating it. I think they would try to manage the currency price in a sensible way to help it succeed and thus maximize returns on their investment. I believe that they would try to keep USD or EUR exchange rates stable, but it is up to them. Also, there is a market for control. If anyone decides that they can manage creation/destruction more successfully, they can seize control of voting through a massive investment in the coin.

By steady deflation I meant "always in a deflationary state", not something like "steady 3% annual deflation, forever" as that's not something that could happen. My argument was that it is virtually impossible to asses if an investment will pay off in an "always deflationary state" and that in most cases it will be superior to just keep the money and do nothing than make the investment and risk ending up worse off.


- Yeah, by "this" I meant keep price stability.

- You were the one who suggested to look into historical data in order to extrapolate and get a more accurate number. I did just that but it seems you didn't like the numbers. There's no denying that the world keeps moving faster and faster, specially since the industrial revolution, and you haven't provided any evidence of the supposed wall we are about to hit, so I don't see how 9% is insane at all. Maybe some further reading on the subject could convince you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change

Remember that GDP is just the market value of all goods and services produced in a given amount of time. It would be possible for physical goods to account for 1% of GDP while information and services account for 99%.


Now that I think about it, with this scheme you would be increasing the money supply by way more than 4% for many years. Assuming there are 52560 blocks in a year and you want 4% annual inflation, then the block reward has to be 0.000075% of the money supply. 500k/block means you would first need a supply of 667,000,000,000 before you start increasing the reward, and you wont be anywhere near that amount when you reach the 500k/block rate.

Even more confused now, how can demurrage achieve this if it has no control over the demand for money? As I see it, demurrage just encourages an increase in money velocity, which has the same effect on inflation as an increase in money supply.


But is there any evidence to suggest that we are reaching a peak in resources? Even if we were to reach a peak in some physical resources during the next decades or centuries, I don't think it would hit GDP growth too hard as information keeps grabbing an increasingly bigger share of GDP, and information can be almost infinite.

How about a compromise? Let's say I grab all the historical data I can find and extrapolate it to the year 2200 or whatever. I tell you then that we should expect an average annual world GDP growth of 9% by that time, so we start with your 4% supply growth and very slowly increase it over 10 million blocks or so until we reach the 9% which would be a hard limit. How does that sound?


Ok I can go with that, but it should be like a year at most or we risk irrelevancy.

Even more confused now, how can demurrage achieve this if it has no control over the demand for money? As I see it, demurrage just encourages an increase in money velocity, which has the same effect on inflation as an increase in money supply.


But is there any evidence to suggest that we are reaching a peak in resources? Even if we were to reach a peak in some physical resources during the next decades or centuries, I don't think it would hit GDP growth too hard as information keeps grabbing an increasingly bigger share of GDP, and information can be almost infinite.

How about a compromise? Let's say I grab all the historical data I can find and extrapolate it to the year 2200 or whatever. I tell you then that we should expect an average annual world GDP growth of 9% by that time, so we start with your 4% supply growth and very slowly increase it over 10 million blocks or so until we reach the 9% which would be a hard limit. How does that sound?


Ok I can go with that, but it should be like a year at most or we risk irrelevancy.

I don't like this reasoning very much. But I am all for free market. Where does this leave me? Is there another way?

Like a college education, what if the prices are kept artificially high by government subsidies and protection such as patents? Should augmentations be subsidized for the poor in this case or should we eliminate these government benefits for the corporations?