If I expect falling value doesn't that mean I have to inflate my prices?

For example if I buy 16 years supply of pencils, or erasers, or gold, or land, or whatever... any wholesale good I plan to sell at retail over a period of time to make a living as a retailer... surely I have to keep on increasing the price I require for what is left of my supply as the money I have aquired from what I have sold so far keeps vanishing from my purse, otherwise I will not have enough in my purse by the time I have sold all but my profit portion of the bulk buy quantity.

Is it supposed to be good that we help eliminate retail by forcing wholesale purchases to become impractical for retailers, forcing them to buy one at a time themselves instead of buying a number at a time, or some such thing?

If the objective is inflation, why bother decaying the currency, just jack the prices instead...

-MarkM-

If ALL the money is decreasing ALL the time, then ALL you should need is for ALL displays of actual AMOUNTS of the money to include a time-factor, so that the SAME value in the blockchain will display as a DIFFERENT amount every nanosecond or millisencond or second or minute or hour or day or whatever.

Thus the demurrage would exist purely cosmetically in the clients, needing no representation in the blockchain whatsoever.

Done this way, the number of new coins minted per block would ALSO be perceived as being less over time UNLESS the actual number minted in the actual blockchain anticipates this and compensates for it so that on average if the blocks take the average amount of time they are supposed to then the average number of DISPLAY-COINS (as distinct from the actual number the blockchain records) comes out to whatever number it is that you are aiming for it to come out as.

Basically "the unwashed masses" need not ever concern themselves with the mysterious fact that the numbers in the blockchain do not change yet the number of DISPLAY-COINS, which is the actual number used in real life, being the actual number taking into account that moment in time's demurrage of the entire all coins ever to be minted including those not minted yet, changes constantly.

Basically even block explorers would display the display-amount based on the moment the block is explored, only highly technical machine-code-types needing to know the obscure fact that the blockchain uses constants to express amounts that in reality are changing moment by moment.

-MarkM-

In that case it might be useful to turn on the testnet flag, and observe that if you run as a test net you don't care about that assert, which could lead to wondering what purpose that assert actually serves if in fact is is not even worthy of being tested (that is, the test net functions fine without it, so if it is not worth testing maybe it is not even worth worrying about at all... just run with the testnet flag on like multicoin does...)

-MarkM-

Until you know which block a transaction gets into, you cannot know how much to subtract from it, and even if you do think you know, a re-org could happen later, changing which block it goes into.

Maybe it would be simpler to create a currency that you keep lowering the buy-back price of, that is, keep lowering the number of bitcoins you are willing to buy it back for, so that it effectively keeps going down in value over time.

-MarkM-

The attack done on Coiledcoin almost certainly violated laws, and it didn't actually last long, for a long time since then coiledcoin seems to have been operating normally, with the attacker simply doing normal merged mining using his pool's users' hashing power without the users seeming to care.

SO sure the attacker is still racking up coins, but others are still able to use the coins. The chap just happens to have a lot of suckers willing to freely give him hashes to do as he pleases with.

-MarkM-

See if you can get an Open Transactions client running. #opentransactions channel on freenode IRC can help with that. If you can, then all the assets on my Open Transactions server will become available to you since it treats Litecoin no differently than any other asset, you can use any asset to buy any other asset, basically. So there is no special favoured asset in which everything else is priced.

-MarkM-

Since Litecoin is not, afterall, GPU-proof, it seems Litecoin already fills the proposed niche.

-MarkM-

Liquidoin had fixed difficulty, which caused ever-increasing orphan rates as more hashing power was used. So basically it didn't adapt, it jsut got more and more and more errors (orphaned blocks) the more people mined it. Thus it was pretty much broken-by-design.

GRouPcoin and DeVCoin both have no limit to the total number of coins, they keep mining coins forever. So for anyone looking for an inflatacoin either or both should work fine.

-MarkM-

I actually tried to install flash on Fedora15, did in fact install it, but the browser rejected it, seems Fedora thinks it is a security problem or something. So even after installing it the browser does not actually use it.

-MarkM-

Litecoin: LX6AkBGjQPypwWs2edbLAnQWG9etjCQVYv

Namecoin: N6NH1pxBhgcK5cQKFGvcd8EFJALsJ1oEMP

-MarkM-

70,000 BTC overhead cost to raise 30,000 BTC for community projects seems like massive overhead costs. Surely there must be more efficient methods of raising coin for community projects.

-MarkM-

That would be client end. The API can be built for PHP but I am not sure where people are currently at with it.

-MarkM-

Wow, a lot to wade though.

First impression: If the point is to run away with everyone's money, why bother having security that might actually make it harder for stupid people to hand over their money? Better to make it user-friendly, the moeny is gone anyway, whether some third party hacker gets it first or not.

-MarkM-

My Open Transactions server is agnostic about assets, you can use any asset to buy any other asset. So anything you can offer bitcoins for there, you can as easily offer litecoins.

-MarkM-

EDIT 2: TL;DR By "dirt cheap", do we mean "cheaper than foisting it off upon the bitcoin blockchain"?


Okay, lets consider something that might be massive overkill of amount of resources being committed and overall certainty of the integrity of the data.

At least maybe try to figure out just how totally over the top the costs would be.

Remember that thing called a blockchain. whereby distributed peers maiintain an ongoing mutual confidence in the validity of past transactions some among them purported to have occurred?

There are algorithms too whereby checking each member of a (spy, etc?) network's reports about each other member, actual path to path inferences as to which path a "weak link" is on. Reliability matrices across many possible paths, making intferences both about which path was or  might have been taken and which nodes are how likely to be the sources of any unreliability that is measured/reported.

The content of the blocks of the chain could be assertions that each peer on the entire network received from each other one a correct merkle value taking into consideration which peers claimed to have recieved which such values from each other peers and what the actual total combined merkle of all bits ever submitted to the network the consensus agrees to be correct based upon the order in which the consensus agrees those bits were submitted (or more likely, committed; as like with bitcoins we'd not count a block of bits to have been submitted uintil the consenses agrees not only with whether it has been submitted but in what order, relative to others).

This could all even maybe serve as some research toward just how much a huge blockchain really does cost a network overall compared to how usefull to the network nodes that fail to store the entire blockchain actually are.

The chain could be pruned of blocks that have already been returned to their original sender undamaged after having been retained the stipulated period of time, and if original-uploaders ("content providers"? "financiers", maybe, as presumably they should bear the entire cost of this project between them?) are not anonymous if they fail to publish cryptographic proof of their agreement that they, the orignal uploader of bts blah blah blach, did in fact receive back intact said bits from nodes this that these those et al and sundry, etc etc etc then some black mark could be held against them too for trying to cheat participants of their deserved repution owed to them for their part in actually performing as contracted to.

This could be massive massive cost, but cxnsider how much people pay for the bits of the bitcoin blockchain, which is precisely a record of what quantities of bits, representing what quantity of bits worth of value, which parties exchanged in a consensually agreed approximate order in time...

-MarkM-

EDIT:  Also, what the heck, why not tie it all to bitcoins from the start, by trying to store the blockchain itself on just such "dirt cheap storage"...

...Or is that precisely what exactly bitcoin IS doing, in effect, and by doing so, is revealing to us the actual cost of storing (such?) data in such a way?

EDIT3: By bidding using various altcoins, might bidders thusly express the certainty level they are budding upon, like "I want to store this as securely as if I had coded it into the ___coin blockchain in some way" for each coin designated by the ___ ? (Taking into consideration the propensity of the developers of the ___coin blockchains to attempt to prune any data from it that they consider no longer necessary to retain after some span of time verus cost of blockchain size.)

I suspect that compliance discovery is far more of a challenge than price discovery.

I will probably have to take symform up on their offer if as their online chat support said they will have Linux compatibility in a few months, even though they are not open source.

The idea of throttling the connection to them seems not too bad an attack since if one does not actually provide fast speed then one can simply be paid in slow speed access to one's own data. By paying the storage nodes "in kind", service.com can measure what "kind" they actually are and reciprocate with the same "kind".

Maybe bitcoins could be awarded for "performance above and beyond the norm" or somesuch though folk not planning to strive to be among the very best maybe wouldn't bother trying in such a setup.

It was mentioned in the Tahoe-LAFS thread that only the three fastest nodes would be asked for blocks of a file set at 3-copies redundancy. Just as mining got more and more concentrated into the hands of those building the most powerful rig-farms maybe pretty much everyone whose offered space isn't directly on major internet backbones simply would end up never being asked for a copy thus being largely irrelevant backwaters.

-MarkM-

For now I think the pick and choose offers type of market makes more sense than an automatic-matching market.

The forum's longevity made me think aha, maybe the folk running this thing might not be too awful a choice to pick if one of the offers on the market / on the table was one of theirs.

As to this SgtSpike chap, hey, lemme go see if he has a .sig, I honestly don't remember, having not even been motivated to look and see yet. Hey he lists a website! I wonder if that has been there ever since I or he arrived at this forum and I simply never noticed? Interesting. Maybe that is a sample of some storage he manages. I wonder if he hosts it from on-site or at an off-site-hosting provider...

As to whether you would get paid, why would anyone even consider paying you in the first place? Oops, I haven't noticed whether you have a sig either yet alone inspected it. Why would I? How much space are you offering at what price? Personally I am not looking to buy, I have onsite storage that, to others, is offsite so am more interested in swapping than buying.

-MarkM-

EDIT: I am moving more and more toward regarding "storage" and "hosting" as very different services. "Hosting providers" are basically selling publication, not storage. Maybe it is kind of like the difference between a warehouse that stores your books and a bookshop that displays/sells them to the public...

We have been trying it, and see what has happened so far: no concrete offers of bitcoins or fiat to any of those who have space available so far, resulting in continuing water-cooler and/or back-room-engineer chatter about various proposed engineering or marketing tweaks that might or might not result in more or better offers of actual money sooner/faster.

In other words: we already have at least one terrabyte on offer, we already have lowered its price to $1/month per 100 gigabytes, and we still have no concrete offers from anyone to buy a month at that price even stipulating it is on a terrabyte disk dedicatable to the purpose that can become dedicated to the purpose if/when in fact anyone actually decides that purpose suits his or her purpose and presents coin to follow through on it.

So here we sit chattering about various ways the offer can be manipulated, dressed up, elaborated as to precisely what protocols could be deployed for accessing it if a customer has a preference as to what protocol they would prefer to use to access it and so on and so on and so on.

We could firm it up further maybe by getting more details about other swathes of disk, in case the problem preventing firm bids from coming in happens to be not wanting their data to be hosted on a Windows machine, or doubt as to your technical and systems-administration competence to accommodate a request that FTP be the means of access or for NFS mount to be possible or some such technical concern.

Presumably some among us can provide RetroShare based access if some customers would prefer that?

For blocks, chunks, spans, files, collections etc small enough to be threaded through a needle/bottleneck the size of a gmail account, likely some could provide access-via-email if that would be more attractive. Lets maybe just ask each customer how exactly they want to deliver their data to a storage-facility and how exactly they would like to recover it from a storage-facility, and see if we are able to comply with the customer's requirements? How many gigs do the prospects-so-far want to store and by what protocol do they want to deliver it and retrieve it?

If all their preferred methods are vapourware, then basically they are saying they do not actually want to store any data at this time, they prefer to wait until some hypothetical Year of Condensation rolls around. If so, fine, when the coin materialises to seed the vapour sufficiently to cause condensation we can take this up again, meanwhile I see a vapour trail over in a Tahoe-LAFS thread, nice chatting with y'all.

-MarkM-

EDIT: Hey, anyone else noticing this forum is still here after all this time? Heck even when it got shot down over that bitcoin.org that didn't lose the data, did it? Or did it? How much damage, if any? (Lost posts? Lost user-accounts?) Its nice having this free storage to store my posts.

TL;DR lets demonstrate and/or provide everyone's free 1 to 5 gigs for [life?!?] first like the professionals do, then see if that is enough proof of capability to attract paying customers.

It should eventually start to look attractive, but only once it has been running long enough to see how many copies one should actually have it keep in order to have a reasonable certainty the data will survive X span of time and so on.

Many among "the competition" give one to five gigabytes for life to all comers, without embarrasing their offer with bandwidth limits let alone dangerous-sounding nickel and dime buildup of charges as bandwidth k'ching k'ching k'ching hits your purse every time the data is actually viewed/delivered.

If we start by setting up a stable, useful "free" network based on sharing, people will be able to simultaneously audition as prospective storage nodes and observe for themselves how many copies of a file need to be out there to make that file's survival likely, then once we have real statistics on how many copies it takes people will have some figures from which to start computing how much someone would have to pay for one surviving copy in order to start with enough copies that there will actually be at least one surviving copy.

If prospective storage-providers are not confident enough that they stand ready to store files reliably for months or years to actually do so long enough to build up the confidence of prospective customers, how likely are they to actually do it once they have money in hand and some other short term scheme to try for a few days that seems to them to make it worthwhile to wipe all customer data to make space for the new scheme, whether it be a cute new automatic-pornsite-builder or yet another spam-the-search-engines-site generator or gosh knows what else that might look like a quicker buck than waiting for a storage customer's next periodic payment of storage fees?

Heck maybe they'll decide they can crack captchas if they fill that space with every captcha image all currently popular captcha generators generate, I am talking about bottom-feeders but a huge fraction of them are likely to go try to scam someone else somewhere else rather than wait out a several month assessment period and by the time such a span of time passed they would very likely have moved on to some other seemingly game-able project or crowd that might offer an easier, faster buck.

Meanwhile, I see the Bounty for adding Accounting to Tahoe-LAFS (preferably or requiredly bitcoin accounting) thread has been revived...

-MarkM-

Except for one person who wanted to be counted in on both sides of the fence, I had the impression all the interest was in getting money for their space, not in paying others for use of others' space.

-MarkM-