Yes but with merged mining there could be a slow chain alongside all the individual planet's chains, to which all the hashing of all the planets can contribute by all merging it alongside their local chain(s).

Martian BotCoins (MBC) were actually running as a chain some time back but due to lack of sufficient hashing power to secure them they have retreated for the time being to an Open Transactions server, pending sufficient transaction volume for transaction fees to be able to attract enough miners to make the blockchain format secure enough to seem reasonable again. Maybe by that time there will be settlements on Mars so that that eventual move back to blockchain format can happen on Mars.

-MarkM-

The time to buy up neglected coin types is before they start rising in price, not after. I would wonder instead of why people are buying i0coins why are they not buying just as many ixcoins, since if only at mmpool miners are receiving both "free" on the side even if they have no particular interest in them.

-MarkM-

Keep buying the price up and eventually the volume will increase...

...Its just these pathetically low prices keeping people from throwing away their precious coins so early in the game.

-MarkM-

Actually I read recently that even despite his fee, the added types of coins add enough to more than make up for the fees.

However I set up my own merged mining using p2pool to gain all the benefits of mmpool plus more chains mmpool doesn't include. I get much much more variance of course on the merged chains but get to support p2pool and chains that almost everyone else has been neglecting.

I guess maybe there might be a market for a mining operation such as mine, which is why I am looking at the potential "competition" to check that others are not heading the same way.

-MarkM-

So only Bitcoin and namecoin eh? Okay, just wondered as several other merge-capable chains aren't getting a lot of mining thus are at very low values that likely will go up significantly whenever enough miners do get around to adding them to their mix.

-MarkM-

Which blockchains are you mining? Presumably Bitcoins but which others merged alongside?

-MarkM-

No one in that thread was reachable. They don't actually run retroshare at all, or if they do ever fire it up they presumably notice as I do that there is no one online to connect to thus they shut it down again as useless.

I even got a private message recently on these forums from someone claiming they will run it almost all the time, so I fired it up, saw that still there is no one to connect to, added them and waited and saw that they too were not online so unable to be connected to, and shut it down again.

I had 28 or more people from the thread PLUS another over 20 people I friended from being able to see the connections of the 28 in the thread, yet all of those second-step connections also were offline.

Meanwhile I have always found connections no problem when I fire up i2p or Tor or Freenet. So compared to any of those three I basically do not find retroshare worth bothering with. The whole point of a network is connections. Without connections there is no network.

Even if the person who resorted to PM to get me to add him or her does turn out to be online they next several times I fire up retroshare, that won't convince me to bother with it. When I see the majority of the people in the thread and/or the majority of the people I reached through them online every time I fire it up I might reconsider whether it is worthwhile.

-MarkM-

My guess is that freicoin would need to be pushed rather than pulled. Notably absent from the nice book with all the nice stories from different types of people about why they like it how good it is for them etc is a detailed examination of the circumstances of its printing. Some magical money-management office supposedly watches some kind of price indicators or something and prints as much or as little as is needed to stabilise prices, but no examination is there of how much their buddies benefit from being the first people to get their hands on the newly printed money type of effects which seem to be one of the main complaints about the "print more money" method of making money constantly drop in value.

If people actually want money, rather than merely wanting the match-up-with-trading-partners function money in its capacity as a medium of exchange provides, they presumably would choose bitcoin. So it seems to me likely it is up to those who are giving out the money to push freicoin, so that bitcoin is just another thing one can choose to spend it on. Given bitcoin, I am not sure how to motivate people to spend it on freicoin, but presumably who-ever is printing it, which usually seems to be assumed to be the government or community services offices, is going to prefer to spend it than to spend bitcoins.

Since the current implementation seems to plan to have the miners print the stuff, maybe some of them will buy hardware instead of buying bitcoins?

Normally the printer of a currency is the initial main backer of it; the government that prints it for example also offers to accept it in lieu of taxes.

So maybe we need mass production of dirt cheap ASICs one can buy with freicoin in lieu of a government that does the mining and accepts the coins as taxes? The ASIC factory runs lots and lots and lots of ASICs itself and sells them dirt cheap in limited quantities per family or something to try to make sure individuals or families hold, between them all, at least 51% of the total hashing power?

The whole business of the decay of the value of money forcing people to spend it seems to pre-suppose that someone does stick them with that kind of money in the first place. Thus that it is pushed rather than pulled: people don't go looking to buy some, they get stuck with it when they try to sell other things, presumably because it becomes easier to find someone willing to pay you in this stuff than it is to find someone who is willing to pay you in gold or silver (or, nowadays, presumably bitcoins or maybe even some kind of fiat whose inflation rate is less than the freicoin's demurrage rate).

Merged mining seems to make most of the altcoins that can be merged-mined almost free. It seems believable that people would prefer to pay you in coins they get pretty much free alongside the bitcoins their mines are primarily intended/used for than to give you bitcoins. I had in fact imagined that simply by occassional adding of yet more new blockchains to the merged mining mix the values of the merged altcoins would tend naturally to fall since more chains can be added any time supply of altcoins falls low enough for them to start growing in value. Freicoin would just be an altcoin specifically designed to go down in value even faster than most altcoins...

-MarkM-

A physical freicoin could instead of periodically applied stamps like old paper implementations of demurrage currency sometimes used instead have a display on it and a clock in it, so that it constantly counts down the number of freicoins it is worth moment by moment, graphically showing its constant decay.

Internally though, it has private key of a fixed number of epochal coins. It is the constant demurrage of that constant number of epochal coins that causes the change in the given-moment number of at-that-moment freicoins.

This might even be better for urging people to spend quickly than the stamps systems were, since instead of "it is friday, remember tonight they go down in value" people will see moment by moment the constant eating away of the value.

-MarkM-

We cannot know the actual new block; that could change at any time, depending on the discovery of alternate branches, resulting in re-orgs.

That is why I am suggesting the blockchain use constants; on the blockchain, 10 still says 10 no matter what block it ends up in. The demurrage is coded into the display/interpretation of what the value 10 actually means at different times.

Basically I am suggesting the numbers in the blockchain record how many "at the time of the epoch" d-coins are involved, not how many "at some other moment in time" d-coins are involved.

We could use the unix epoch even, recording in the blockchain how many January 1st 1970 d-coins are involved. The number of as of that block coins that amounts to can be computed for display by comparing that block's datestamp to the epoch, and the amount as of today can be computed for display by comparing the number recorded in the blockchain to the current unix time.

The number of epochal coins need never change, all that needs to change is how many coins that would have amounted to, does amount to, or will amount to at any given moment.

The chain thus need not care how long it takes a transfer of 10 epochal coins to get recorded in the chain; that number does not change. ten epochal coins arriving today or ten epochal coins arriving next year are still ten epochal coins.

What changes is how many actual d-coins that many epochal coins amount to at each moment in time. That goes down. But the blockchain need not care about that. If you want the number of actual as of that time d-coins minted each block to stay the same, increase the number of epochal (blockchain-recorded; blockchain-notation) coins minted in that block to compensate for the demurrage (the conversion rate at that time between blockchain-notation aka epochal coins and at-a-given-moment-in-time d-coins).

To the users, this will look the same, but to the blockchain, it eliminates all the problems of re-orgs causing changes in numbers recorded in the chain. I still send you X number of this-moment d-coins which by the time you receive them will have demurred to less d-coins, but the blockchain is entirely unecumbered by all that, as it need only exist in the display and input conversions/functions.

-MarkM-

Ok so how many coins per block are to be created and will that number ever change if so how much and on what schedule?

Also, in line with someone else's question, I too am interested in how exactly the demurring is to happen.

I still think it might be easier to always relate quantity to time, so that one can write constants in the blockchain and compute the actual number those constants represent at any arbitrary moment in time by reference to the calendar. That way the blockchain never has to care that the X binary number transferred from one account to another happens to represent 10 dcoins one year, 9.5 dcoins the next year and so on.

When for example we write contracts saying "will pay 10 dcoins on 3 years time" the binary representation of the number will reflect the fact that the underlying binary number today read/displayed as 10 would not read as 10 in 3 years time. The contract would thus, if expressed in the constants the blockchain uses, show a value that will only be equal to 10 in three years time; at the current time that same presentation would actually be displayed as more than 10.

This will in fact serve to constantly emphasise to anyone who actually looks into the internal workings of the system the fact that future money is worth more than current money. (9.5 a year from now is the same as 10 now, in the internal representation.)

-MarkM-

So maybe the translation is simply "we don't yet have a module that uses bitcoin as the primary in-world currency, so until we do bitcoin is a bad idea".

-MarkM-

I tried to get marketcetera working as it seemed to possibly be able to run a stock-exchange but I had problems with it on Fedora so put it on back burner a while pending some kind of fox or workaround for Fedora. Maybe on other platforms it works fine though.

(At first glance you might think "but its just the trader's end and assumes exchanges already exist", however they also seemed to include a module you can set up something of your own to trade on, if only to test your strategies against your own sample market, and it was that part that was of interest as possibly useable to at least get started on running the actual market end of things.)

-MarkM-

Thank goodness I got rid of all mine when they dropped through the $2 flloor...

...Oh wait, I didn't. My bad.

-MarkM-

Wow, really interesting read, though I have the impression I have read much of it before or read some other stuff maybe that says much of the same.

I am guessing that he is not of the/an "Austrian" persuasion? If not (as seems to me a reasonable guess), can anyone point me to the most apropos, direct, pithy, and relevant "Austrian" counterargument (or "debunking", maybe, they might say imply or imagine)?


You want something like 4% to 5% of the market cap per annum to go to securing the network?!?!?! Sheesh, consider merged mining or something, please! Such a percent seems a ridiculously expensive proposition.

EDIT: Bear in mind too that if you do in fact stimulate greater "velocity" that likely also means more transaction fees? Or is the plan to have no fees just the demurrage?

Please do make it merged-mineable, if you must give 4% to 5% to miners each year, it might really help small miners who scrounge up the cash for a Jalapeno coffe-warmer to cover their coffee-warming costs once everyone and their dog has at least a few Jalapenos and maybe a larger unit or few in the family (footwarmers and such, y'know...)

-MarkM-

Driving up the price in early days might not have always seemed a good idea though. As long as people thought coins were worthless, there was less mining competition. If people saw the coins actually being bought in quantity instead of merely mined in quantity, they might have realised duh these things might actually be worth something. So maybe at least early on it might be more in miners interest not to buy simple because buying might cause more people to get into mining.

Kind of seems like the longer you can chug along initially at low difficulty by not encouraging competition, the better?

I know for example that the people who have thrown some CPU power at GRouPcoin mining from time to time are quite happy that it has continued so long to slip under the radar, keeping its difficulty so low even CPUs can mine it effectively.

-MarkM-

Any of the coins could easily have begun as a scam, and we maybe cannot even tell whether or not they did, but those that are still struggling along? I think most of those are not scams at all, they could maybe be the victims of a scam struggling along despite the initial scam to build something real and useful out of what someone once upon a time began as a scam.

Maybe we all did get scammed by the very first few adopters of each coin type. So what? We now have many types, most of which can all be mined at once using merged mining. That gives us options, it gives us flexibility, it gives us some nice cheap off the mainstream alternatives we can quietly chug along with until the big boys and girls finally get their acts together and realise there isn't really much reason *not* to snap up most of the remaining coins of each type just because they can do it so easily and at so little cost.

We actually have so many blockchains running now that if there really is some important innovation to be tried we maybe should be considering retrofitting it onto one of the existign chains that seems to have almost, or completely, run out of partisans. A few chains are down to so few nodes that you are lucky if you can find even one or two connections with them. It would be great to revive one of those with whatever the next big innovation is proposed to be, like maybe demurrage or whatever. A good chunk of the "how to go about distributing the coins initially" is already done with such chains, plenty of people out there wishing there were some use for the things...

-MarkM-

Thanks for the search term, some interesting material there.

-MarkM-

Okay, so how is freicoin better for a successful business than dollars, or bitcoins? What profit do they extract from whom by using it? Does it give them more leverage over their employees so that forcing employees to accept rotting/decaying/evapourating money? It is expected they will get more goods from suppliers per man-hour their labourers put in selling stuff for them or building stuff out of what the suppliers supply?

Or is the plan to turn into an investment firm, offering to help the suckers they foist this rotting currency upon a potential escape from the rot if only those suckers will simply invest into the business? Maybe thus turning a nice profit by suckign everyone into putting back into your busienss all the crap-coins you foist off upon them as wages or as change or even as "payment" for supplies?

Even tobacco/cigarettes/liquor/pantyhose type goods that have become currencies in various circumstances seem to be actually somewhat storable, even back in ancient times when grain was a currency that was only after granaries had been invented, wasn't it? So how the heck does anyone get suckered into actually accepting this guaranteed-to-rot currency? You keep dropping its price lower and lower and lower until someone finds a sucker who will accept it real soon thus decides to buy just as much of it as that sucker will accept? Then that sucker is stuck with the problem of finding a greater sucker?

Since the whole thing seems to depend on suckers, why not just build it directly on top of bitcoin? I have already pointed out in another thread (in the Development section) that the blockchain need not adjust its values at all, the adjustment can happen in the display and input routines only, allowing the blockchain to represent with constants the values that the display and input routines will, by access to a clock, render in accordance with the time at whcih the input or display happens, it becomes un-necessary to use a separate blockchain at all. You can simply use such display functions in a demurrage-coin client that uses the bitcoin blockchain for actual transactions but demurs the demurrage-coin quantity it displays for any given bitcoin quantity in accordance with the seconds since the epoch or whatever: the time at which display or input happens.

That way everyone can hum along fine all using the same blockchain but those who prefer to think of their balances decreasing can use the demurred display of their balance and those who prefer to just use constants to represent those same bits in the blockchain can do so.

Since the whole point is simply psychological, to psychologically trick people into thinking they should spend their money as soon as possible, this should suffice nicely since in any event it is hopefully only those who volunteer to be the suckers subjected to the experiment that need to see their balances as constantly decreasing. This should also ensure that your demurrage-coin will work fine and be wideley used, since anyone who prefers not to pay attention to the decreasing numbers representation of their balances can just stick to the normal family of clients and see things they way they always have, which they will in any case strive to do. Without this approach they will have to do it by not using your currency at all, At least this way they can still in good conscience use the stuff, leaving the psychological benefits of spending as soon as possible to others.

-MarkM-

I don't see how this is an improvement over simply using Freemail, or even something over i2p or Tor.

What exactly is it you are trying to accomplish with it? To make bitcoins selling email services to peers? Anonymous mail? Or what?

-MarkM-