This is the value that Bitcoin provides to all the other non-reversible currencies: it is the curtain behind which the whole can of worms that is the fiat system is hidden behind.

Only the people who are stuck with fiat, and the people who are willing to take the risk of accepting fiat, need worry about it. It is the users of fiat who don't seem to realise how untrustworthy their currency is, the irreversible currency users are well aware that fiat should be avoided unless some huge markup, presumably about what money-laundering usually goes for probably, is offered by those who wish to divest/launder themselves of fiat.

Really the overheads associated with accepting fiat currency are so ridiculously high that it should not surprise anyone that money-launderers thieves crooks etc are the folk most likely to be able to afford such overhead.

Put simply, fiat currency is so fraught with problems that it is worth far less than irreversible currency.

A DollarCoin thus needs to cost far far more than a dollar IF it is paid for using reversible fiat currency.

Maybe a Reversible Assets asset could be set up in which all reversible assets get put, then people who have irreversible assets can place offers so the market can discover how much people really think such reversible assets are worth. Bear in mind that the largest inputs of reversible assets to such a pool/fund will probably have the highest likelihood of being scams. So presumably it should come back again to the number of units in it that are more than six months old divided by the total number of units as the average value per unit. Interestingly that should result in an asset/fund that goes DOWN in value when units are put into it!

-MarkM-

EDIT: Hey that actually makes sense, as putting more paper printed by the fed into it is simply inflation just like it already is in the outside world when such paper is printed in the first place.

Matthew seems to have cut directly to the simple straightforward solution, if there was a wallet "account" per user. Just send back to each user what is in their wallet-account. It doesn't matter how many withdrawals, or when, they did to reach the current amount they have left, what matters is getting back to them what they do have left.

-MarkM-

As far as I can tell no LiTeCoin users even tried the game I recently set up, so I think maybe they are just not the right kind of people, games do not seem to interest them in the slightest.

Mind you it is my intent with all these games not to force people who play the game markets to have to actually play the games in which the items on the markets are actually used, so maybe its no big deal that LiTeCoin users have no interest in games. Maybe it will suffice that they can buy and sell game items commodities stocks bonds shares and currencies without ever having to enter any of the actual games whose items commodities etc are being traded on the market. Afterall the main advantage blockchain based assets have over assets that exist only on the game's own servers is this very fact that people don't have to enter the game to use them. They can trade them among themselves without ever having played the game, and they can do so purely on the basis of "technical analysis" even without knowing or caring anything about the assets other than how they perform on the markets.

Since the currencies are totally independent of any one game, it is really up to the players which such currencies they choose to use. The games simply provide venues in which trading of game items and game accounts are not against the Terms Of Service, so that players can trade freely without concern that the game management will confiscate their game assets if they do engage in such trade.

So far more players in the various games have been trading IXCoins than LiTeCoins, simply because IXCoin has a character, "Ix", who is actively seeking to establish trade using that currency. So far no player/character has emerged as a champion of LiTeCoin so IXCoin is pretty much the default cryptocurrency the players think of trading in as they know there is a trader who is will buy them and will sell things for them. WIth LiTeCoin there is so far no-one that comes to mind as the go-to character for buying stuff from with them nor for selling them to. I suppose that could be charaterised as an opportunity, but it does not seem to be an opportunity that LiTeCoin advocates are interested in pursuing.

-MarkM-

It also maybe doesn't make a whole lot of sense to try to peg the value of a real actual transfer of value to a pretend, play-acting, maybe it might turn out to be real but we won't know for six months unit of purported value.

I once thought maybe the simplest approach would be to make a PPUSD-fund of which the actual number of USDs that actually lasted the full six months without getting reversed would be kept track of, so that one could figure out the average actual value of each PPUSD currently in the fund and either value them at that average each or only value those that are over six months old.

I thought maybe it could work with things like game subscriptions. Have games people subscribe to at, say 10 PPUSD per month, and in the seventh month and thereafter they start to receive some blockchain based currency coins in addition to whatever the usual perks people who have not been in a full six months might get. (An allowance of game-gold for their character? An edifying newsletter all about the wonderful world that will open up to them in six months time... five months time, wait for it... three months... etc...)

-MarkM-

I thought the 80% / 20% proposal was in this thread or the other, certainly I read it in this span of being awake. But I cannot find it.

Thanks for the link, I will go check that out.

Things I saw while looking for the 80% / 20% thing though made me realise there probably are a bunch of complications that will pop up in actually trying to code though. Not in the code itself initially but in all kinds of sneaky problems that need to be thought out.

One thing I liked about the proposal though was it scaled so that pooling together basically ended up increasing the stake you'd need, so you might as well solo mine with a tiny stake or maybe even no stak in coin form (hashes count) instead of ganging up with others to pile up a stake between the lot of you. It seemed that might actually even potentially be able to be tuned to address the LiTeCoin people's concern that the little guy keeps losing the ability to make a few pennies at home over and above electricity costs.

-MarkM-

Oh thats just more dysfunctional thinking again. Social peer to peer values shipping out free ASIC modules to everyone's tent will cause a field day for the botnet people.

-MarkM-

No problem, it is CRCoin not RCCoin I am thinking of first off anyway, since the 0.8 & 0.2 proposal seems concrete enough and simple enough, gosh knows how complicated whatever you want to "collect signatures" for will turn out to be. I was thinking of going really simple, the address the reward is to go to either contains enough stake or it doesn't, no licensed miner / licensed mining, just put the reward where the stake is if there is enough stake already there or invalidate the block.  Maybe make sure at least stake plus reward is still there 120 blocks later or don't mature the reward.

-MarkM-

Aha, of course! Sneaky of them to have CSIS handle the "revelation" of their ASIC capability for them through that Vancouver front-corporation, eh? Only 25 available, eh? Oh yeah, sure... to the public...

-MarkM-

Actually there has already been a rush to implement pretty much "anything", ha ha.

I want to push merged mining further, it seems to me I could mine at least a few more chains than I am currently mining, so given a choice between this or just a bunch of boring old identical clones this concept might be worth trying.

We have a bunch of pennystock-like chains already, lets see if a penny-CRCoin can beat out the other penny-chains.

If it can emerge a clear leader "in its class" then that should lend at least a couple of pennyweights to the theory, yes?

I don't expect you to write code, I don't expect Cunicula to write code. It was a very very pleasant surprise to me that Unthinkingbit does write code, in fact a whole lot more of DeVCoin's code than I wrote. (Heh "than I hacked a little" is more like it, I didn't really "write" anything, I just hacked away some at what was already written, enough to get it to at least look like it runs.)

So don't worry about coding. We can bribe codemonkeys with DeVCoins, or just make up the code, it doesn't sound real hard. And it sounds like an interesting idea.

-MarkM-

P.S. Hey maybe we should also accelerate the decay of the block-rewards in it so we can get to the juicy bits sooner?

Ha ha, good luck with that without proof of concept.

So, back to proof of concept... I do not want to detract from bitcoin with altchains, so we can maybe make sure it is clear from the outset that if it takes off too darn well Bitcoin itself is free to set some block number at which it adopts a similar system.

But to drive Bitcoin to do so, we really should demonstrate that failing to do so could indeed prove a competitive threat to Bitcoin's value rather than being a harmless companion-coin or hanger-on or, indeed, merely yet another of the many currencies used by various civilisations of the Galactic Milieu.

I am losing track, are you both in favour of making such a change to Bitcoin on purely theoretical grounds, or is at least one of you at least a little more empirically oriented than that?

-MarkM-

Thanks! So then maybe we call it CMRcoin or MRCcoin? (Cunicula/Meni Rosenfeld or vice versa; I know normally it'd be just one initial for each of you but I have this bias for three-letter currency-symbols...)

-MarkM-

EDIT: Oh wait, duh, CRCoin or RCCoin (Cunicula-Rosenfeld Coin or Rosenfeld-Cunicula Coin).

Hmm I guess SolidCoin's take-away from your proposals was proof of stake.

Somehow I don't think he quite got it right, though.

This 0.8 / 0.2 you propose doesn't sound particularly difficult to code, but if yet another altcoin is to be launched to implement the concept the coin or chain should have a name...

-MarkM- (I hesitate to suggest CUNcoin, though maybe it is kind of an easy one to arrive at...)

Didn't you know? Satoshi cut his teeth in dentistry before taking up economics and finance.

He doesn't often pull teeth, but when he does he defangs entire financial systems.

-MarkM-

Not fully utilising the full merged-mining capacity seems like a tragedy too, maybe it is not technically exactly a tragedy of the commons per se, but all that open potential being dog-in-the-manger fenced away from the commoners instead of being expansive and accomodating as many chains as it can seems not unlike some steps in how commons got fenced off.

We're lucky we even still have rights of way along rivers and beaches in some juridictions let alone any actual commons.

Its my power, mine to waste, I profit by denying it to others... Familiar tune.

-MarkM-

Proportional to the total ever minted doesn't sound right either; proportional to number actively circulating sounds more apropos maybe. Maybe plus dark pools, but maybe activity can help guess which are lost and which are merely dark pools that have not made any moves in the last few generations or years or centuries or whatever.

-MarkM-

EDIT: Remember, I am pointing at aux chains, increased reward can arise by increased number of high difficulty chains. Whereas you seem to be imagining your proposed chain is the be all and end all, hogging all the hashing power to itself, refusing to share the bountiful potential of merged mining...

Bitcoiners sound much like all the prervious entrenched monopolists sometimes. Oh gosh we cannot allow hashing power to be spread out, we have to let it go to waste to maintain our monopoly...

I thought breaking monetary monopolies was supposed to be a good thing, that bitcoin is here to help accomplish...

https://github.com/knotwork/old-devcoind/blob/master/src/main.cpp Lines 649 through 658:

You presumably are pointing at static const int64 MAX_MONEY = 21000000000 * COIN;

However the code at no point ever adds up all the transactions of all the blocks. MAX_MONEY is merely the largest single amount it allows in individual calculations such as total of inputs of a transaction or total of outputs of a transaction or something like that.

-MarkM-

Merged-mined chains are out-of-band to some extent, though admittedly not totally out of band. The fact that merged mining is not totally unrelated to and independent of bitcoin (at least not yet, though RUCoin seems to have tried to separate I suspect it was simply being too lazy to put the full merged mining code in that led them there not a policy of trying to be the primary chain deliberately) might be a good thing.

We are projecting into some nebulous future, but a future in which bitcoins matter, so there are many possibilities. It seems a waste of hashing power NOT to merged-mine as many chains as you can come up with some clever plan for. Make your own blockchain currency kits could be marketed, encouraging youths everywhere to set one up for their local Junior Chamber of Commerce and use it in school to teach economics and mathematics and psychology and gosh knows what else while also being able to use it instead of "gold star on your report card" and so on - motivational stuff.

Miners could also start refusing to accept transactions of less than a bitNicKeL into the main blockchain, insisting that such puny amounts instead use the bitNicKels blockchain. There would be leverage here if hitherto bitNicKeLs had not had enough hashing securing them to be able to withstand a 51% attack by the miners who hitherto had not seen fit to add bitNicKeLs into their merged chains mix. Anticipation of each huge pool adding it to their mix might even cause the fiat value of bitNicKeLs to rise, but if bitNicKeLs might possibly be see-able as being a twenty per bitcoin kind of coin instead of being merely a coin valued about the same as an actually made of nickel old time nickel of the fiat world, then heck, do the math, if a bitcoin is twenty bitNicKeLs and bitNicKeLs are going up in value, shouldn't bitcoins also be going up in value? If a bunch of large heavily-invested corporations such as major pools and major exchanges indicate they certainly do not plan to buy any bitNicKeLs for any more than 1/20 of a bitcoin each, well, who are you going to believe? The naysayers who are determined to prove the megacorps cannot "fix" or "peg" the price of bitNicKeLs by pushing their price up above that "cap"?

Etc... Its a Drama. Tune in next BTC block-reward-drop for the next exciting episode...

-MarkM-

EDIT: oops, I forgot to even mention things like hey we are megapools lets incorporate and each have a blockchain for our shares so people can trade them too...

EDIT 2: GRouPcoin and DeVCoin both have fixed block-rewards. Any others?

I don't know, maybe I mis-understood the whole gas-station thing.

If I picked up a bunch of inventory back when my bitcoins were worth USD $30 each, I ought to be able to undercut other dealers of that type of inventory right now by quite a bit.

On the other hand if I bought inventory now while my bitcoins fetch far less than that, I wouldn't want to be stuck with such expensive inventory when inventory prices go back down (aka bitcoins go back up). Thus, I'd be (and in fact I am) wary of buying inventory right now.

(I include inventories of USD, CAD, and similar pieces of paper or cheap metal in that too of course.)

-MarkM-

I can understand the desire to sell inventory for far far more than you paid for it, gas (petrol) stations used to love doing that for example.

But isn't it considered to be more "reasonable" to average the vost of your inventory as you buy it, so when you get it cheap, the price you charge for it after your retail (or whatever) markup is lower, passing on the savings to the customers?

And similarly, if you buy a batch that costs more, the average cost went up, and that too ends up being passed on to customers?

If that actually is a reasonable practice, then you should not need to know what bitcoins are selling for on some market somewhere when you sell some of your inventory, all you need to know is how many bitcoins that inventory cost you and your retail markup.

Obviously whoever is stuck with those two famous pizzas in their inventory might find fault with such an approach, but luckily in that particular case they problem ate that "loss" already...

-MarkM-

Great, where is your list of products and services you offer? Maybe once people see what you already have covered they'll be inspired to fill in the gaps...

-MarkM-