@death.

your pointless remarks about strippers and my lack of coherence are adding nothing to this conversation which i started with a good intention to see where cryptographic currencies may go next. please may i request you take your learned but limited opinion elsewhere as its not particularly valued here.

Its a simple and obvious historical fact that those who create currency or control mining commodities end up with huge concentrations of wealth. My interest is the evolution of this technology, not the next gold rush, nor to get caught up in the hype. 

I think maybe you are blinkered by the technology and don't really have a grasp of the language your trusted currency is written in nor what it is capable of.

However, thank you for your time and opinions.

"BTW Bitcoin is democratic". 

ok... i'm still following...

"Miners vote on tx by hashing power".



and, um, what is the majority of the global population doing while this is going on? fighting austerity measures.

i do agree "miners don't get rich". that's an absurd thought. mining companies do.

flying car? http://rt.com/news/hover-bike-star-wars-255/ (ok, its a bike)

so now can we get on designing a genuine democratic currency to facilitate real and valuable exchanges and motivate the masses, and not end up as (just) another pyramid of wealth of early adopters (this is the bitcoin model isn't it? free of any kind ethics and morality as it is?).

it's clear we have the technology to create "something as valuable as gold" in a digital form. only maybe - at this stage - there is no will within the first generation "gold rush" to share it.

ps: scrum and agile are more efficient and democratic than any political, social or financial structure I have encountered to date. Our politicians and treasurers could do well to learn some lessons (if they could get their heads round it).

@matthew: use LETS networks to create bitcoin descendents.

this has less to do with pleasing a human heart than solving a growing problem of technological unemployment. is it not the case that human exchanges could be used to collectively "tick the network clock" so that the heartless machines can work only in proportion to the quantity of real exchanges occurring in real life?

there is a golden opportunity here to assign a new level of value to toward community exchange beyond local ledgers: the creation of real, tangible, single-spendable wealth.

as I am posting here a discussion perhaps you have something more to offer other than meaningless "+100" comments? Whats this? Follow the leader/hero?

@saintflow: Thanks for your perspectives. IMO our words are certainly not arbitrary and they have enormous influence over our collective imagination. Real life extends way beyond technology and GPU power, and I hope one day for a currency to reflect this reality.

@frizz23, @foxpup: Please can you limit this thread to discussion of 2nd generation cryptocurrencies. Thank you.

no its not a local exchange trading system. it derives its value from the same source. please read my post before replying. thanks.

@DeathAndTaxes

Thanks for your reply. You are right that I am not proposing any substance whatsoever. More specifically - I do not have any bare metal implementation for this. That's why I'm in these forums.

I would like to clarify a few things further if I may.

Firstly, it appears I have grossly misunderstood mining. I thought it was something like this I picked up from a forum a couple of years back "...you run a program which does a bunch of calculations, and once it's done enough calculations you get bitcoins. You can then sell your bitcoins if you want".

The currency you are describing, and what I see bitcoin to be, is a currency with properties but no (human) values. Its creation is completely detached from human affairs. I appreciate and understand the properties of bitcoin, but I cant see it has any instrinsic value. Its not really that different to valueless fiat currencies in this respect. Bitcoin seems to be an in-humanistic currency created from inhumane processes.

Extract from an intro on mining coins. "The first thing you need is an ATI/AMD graphics card. With current difficulty it is near impossible to generate Bitcoins with a CPU or an Nvidia GPU. CPUs and Nvidia GPUs simply don’t hash well. The best you can expect from them is around 20Mhash per second and that will get you about a bitcent per day if you’re lucky. On top of that, you will max out power usage. So using either of those 2 options will cost you a lot more then what you make unless you have free electricity".

The world's population doesn't know what a GPU is, let along how to "mine" from one. I proposing a cryptocurrency created from "people cycles" not GPU cycles. Surely thats simple enugh to understand. There are 7 billion of us on the planet right now... Sure GPUs will probably be employed if there is enough collective effort in the network, but the point is that EVERYONE CREATES THEIR CURRENCY: not through trade, but through participation.

I said: "I propose a cryptocurrency that is farmed by community "currency collectives" where currency is harvested from the activities in networks of mutual currency exchanges."

In answer to your question: how?... keep the system exactly as it is (it appears to work and create something that resembles money), but correlate activity to the total output of a network of community based activity. In other words enable community exchange to become the "fuel" of the system and the creator of wealth. If community activity ceases, so does new currency. Need more currency in the system? Share more.

As someone here has rightly stated this idea is in its infancy. What I am proposing is as much a movement as a currency. Of course its early days for crypto-currencies. They wont look anything like they do today 10 years from now. That's the nature of technological evolution and innovation. The internet didn't stop evolving at the terminal command line.

Sorry if this is still not making sense. Nor did the radio.

Regards,

Laurence

Hello I am a C/C++/C#/PHP software engineer. I've been following the evolution of bitcoin since its initial release, and I would like to open a discussion of ethics and propose a possible stepwise evolution in its development.

For the sake of this discussion I am going categorise bitcoin as a first generation cryptocurrency. I realise there are other "bitcoins" cryptocurrencies emerging, all are mined in a similar fashion, and all claim to be better than bitcoin, etc. etc. for some unique property or feature, but they are all essentially created in the same way - in an inhuman environment "mined" by machines solving complex mathematical problems. I think this will alienate a lot of people seeking a more humanistic alternative to our present fiat system who dont necessarily understand just what gives a currency its properties. As far as I understand, Bitcoin's value is based almost entirely on its digital properties, and the ethical arguments of mining and power consumption will continue as long as mining continues.

IMO mining is a bad analogy because it is essentially a destructive process. I would like to make a draft proposal for the second generation cryptocurrencies. This is a proposal not a definition. Here goes...

Rather than mining currency with the present "fastest machine wins" philosophy, and its potential for capital monopolies I propose a cryptocurrency that is farmed by community "currency collectives" where currency is harvested from the activities in networks of mutual currency exchanges. The general idea is to replace GPU/CPU/machine cycles with metrics derived from human collaboration and cooperation recorded through a network of mutual currency systems. In simple terms: the circulation of local currencies becomes the engine for solving hash algorithms, which offer the same anti-inflationary. Would it be possible to plug these nodes in to the existing network so that communities who do not have their own GPU warehouse could participate through community activity. Such an approach could combine all the benefits of mutual currencies and cryptocurrencies and seems (to me) to be the next logical step toward the evolution of a genuine, universal alternative to fiat currency or precious metals as a store of wealth.

I believe this proposition is a more humanistic and inclusive system that would not only promote cryptocurrencies in much wider circles than at present (a lot of people simply don't "get it" based on its properties as a currency), but will also rekindle interest and enthusiam in the vast networks of mutual credit systems that exist today. Communities could start "farming" digital commodities with all of the properties, algorithms, and properties of bitcoin, but with the shift of VALUE moved over to CREATING the coin.

I propose the following working title for further discussions: Trustcoin. Communities creating their own trust, encapsulated in a digital unit of currency.

I look forwards to hearing your views and opinions

Laurence