I promised to stop conquering the FreiCoin thread and I wouldn't consider myself a FreiCoin hater in the sense of hating demurrage money with a good cause and so the discussion went on via PM:

High vs. low vs. negative interest rates
The argument was that Freicoin allows low interest rates. Calculating the interest rate relative to buying power shows though, that the demurrage has no influence to the real interest rate and even negative interest rates on Freicoin might be acceptable but result in high interest rates relative to the buying power.
Yes, negative interest rates make sense if it saves me from loosing even more. I consider 5% demurrage cosmetics as it is vastly dominated by volatility, so please don't take 90% as a feature-request but just for sake of argument to get an idea what's happening:
If Freicoin had 90% demurrage, I would happily use a hosted wallet guaranteeing to only loose 10% aka giving me 9x the Freicoin I would have if I kept them in my laptop's wallet.
100 Freicoin in my wallet. Next year they would be 10 Freicoin.
100 Freicoin with some third party giving me -10% interest rate. Next year they would be 90 Freicoin.

Yes, with a demurrage, for anything other than a wallet, negative interest seams unacceptable assuming I can buy gold and Bitcoin with Freicoin without paying a markup but I guess getting people to sell Bitcoins for Freicoins will cost a markup that makes slightly negative interest rates very likely. Said wallet provider might do the gold and Bitcoin shifting in the background for you.

Demurrage coins being destroyed would not be demurrage
Problem is that the market cap of the Freicoin economy doesn't care if you have 5% demurrage or 90% demurrage as long as you don't give these coins to somebody. The miners for example. Giving them to the miners guarantees that in any year, 5% of the market cap is spent on mining. If you don't give the demurrage to somebody, you loose a point of reference. Imagine 90% daily demurrage. Sounds dramatic, huh? It isn't if you don't do something with these coins. If you just destroy them, users would just have to shift the decimal point once per day and they wouldn't loose any buying power as their respective share of the market cap would stay the same. By spending the demurrage on transaction security, market value moves.

The Wörgl was coupled to the existing fiat currency so destroying it proportionally, actually meant something to the users. With a bitcoin based currency that is not coupled to a backing something, you have to redistribute in order to achieve something like demurrage.

Mining is a necessity and not a good cause
Redistributing towards mining and having some 80% of the initial stocks for some good causes is Freicoins design.
Guess what, I would consider it far far more worthy considering using it, if it was 10% demurrage going towards good causes with proof of stake mining. So the Freicoin government would have a permanent tool to keep the demurrage meaningful without taking 80% upfront.

Freicoin Government
I have a problem with this entity that will decide on what to do with the coins. My medium of exchange should not be subject to political modifications no matter if I can take a vote, too or not.

How a demurrage could maybe some day work
The only way to redistribute a demurrage that I would deem fair would be to give it to every person in the world regardless if the person has a receiving address or not. Everybody should be able to claim his wallet with 1000 Freicoin² already in it (initial distribution) and 1000 Freicoin² would be the equilibrium from the redistribution. People with more than 1000 Freicoin² would loose them over time and people with less would regain asymptotically to that value. Mining could be done by proof of stake and without block reward for miners. Those with a larger stake in the currency have a natural incentive to secure transactions and proof of stake is not computationally expensive. Additionally the demurrage would constantly take power from those with huge stakes, so the 51% attack can not be prepared over a long time.

World government as a prerequisite?
If there already was world government with a digitally signing ID chip implanted into every person on earth I would definitely prefer this kind of Freicoin². Luckily we are not yet there so all that I can make up that gets anywhere near a demurrage crypto currency is doomed to implement compromises that I'm not willing to take. Please proof me wrong.

Oh, well, sort of. I just don't quite agree with it. I would prefer to see a rather short term goal at which point you, Rassah and all the BTC100 can call it a win and focus on other projects. I consider BTC100 slightly inefficient for all the money spent. I mean I also spent 1BTC towards BUND Berlin but BUND Berlin as the 5th(?) organization to receive $1300? I mean with that amount of money you could do a lot more good for BTC and I would be sad seeing the same amount of money goingt to BUND Munich, BUND Hannover, BUND Köln, etc. We should focus on more valuable multipliers. In this class off NPOs there is literally millions of organizations in the world.

Shouldn't there be a target to get Bitcoin 100 to an end? I mean the way it is handled now, you end up holding more and more coins that are not free to be given to the next charity. Wouldn't it make sense to target for bigger than those before charities with some promise to call B100 a success once the red cross/whatever accepts bitcoin and leave it to that returning the remaining funds?

Too fast I would say. I could only read half the sentences.

I'm sure you all know this video about the importance of the first follower. If I go to my local store and tell them to jump on the bitcoin band wagon, I'm essentially asking them to be the lone nut without a leader or better first followers to show them.
Make them visible and you will get more. There is no competition. The market is far from being saturated and you know that once bitcoin takes off, nobody will want you as a middle man neither. Not for converting bitcoins to funny money at least.

Sorry. I could not resist

Maybe use the reply times of users and publicly show the average or median reply time.


There is always the plausible deniability when you got "hacked" and the daughter that got cancer kind of urgency. Sorry but bitcoin is designed to have you get away with any scam. When I feel like you are earning 100€/day I wouldn't feel save if there were 300.000€ laying around on your servers. If you earn 1000€ per day with 100.000€ on your server, I would feel very confident that you would not risk loosing that business through neither a fake nor a real hack.

As far as I remember the escrow works without fees, so where does it cost a scammer to fake transactions?

To be honest I don't totally trust lb to not loose my bitcoins so I traded more than 150BTC with people I met there without using the escrow. I now have a list of people that I can contact for future trades without even touching lb. I know I might damage lb or my own profile on lb by not acting as planned but loosing 100BTC is not an option. I only do in person trades and it always works like that:
We meet, we chat, we go to a cafe, we show cash, we send the bitcoins and after the first or second confirmation pass the cash. If the business gets more hectic some day and chatting 20minutes with some stranger about bitcoin becomes annoying, and lb is in business much longer, I guess your escrow (or any other well known green address) will help streamline the process.

lb for me is a listing of potential scammers that I have to be very very careful with when doing a trade. The escrow as the only thing that adds value to the actual transaction is of no value to me. Any green address would do as I do in person trades and these work by sending the bitcoins first anyway.
If you want to add value to using lb, you could take deposits. Merchants could be listed also by the deposit they put into lb. This deposit would get a 2 weeks delay when withdrawing it, so a merchant scamming others would risk his deposit in case these others can proof to you that they were scammed. Sadly this requires trusting you to not run with the money but multisig can help. The funds will be released as soon as both your and my sig confirm the return of the funds. If you refuse to sign (usually for 2 weeks but on dispute this can be extended indefinitely), these bitcoins essentially get destroyed. I would favor this over you holding the bitcoins putting you into the position of holding many many bitcoins to potentially "loose" although this way the victim can not be paid with such funds.

cool. you are right. this way should work much better and easier to implement.

Even trades and ratings are free to fake.

Getting more and more in touch with libertarian ideas I'm a bit scared as I don't see solutions for some things that I think you definitely need a state for.
Yesterday I saw a video of a libertarian who brought the example of selling his 4 years daughter into sex slavery to save her from starvation and of selling himself into slavery to pay a surgery for his daughter. If that is what libertarians dream of then I'm scared of bitcoin being the tool to force it upon the world. Yet I have some hope for the good in mankind so it will not come that far.

Hi,

just in case you are out of ideas of how to improve coinDL:

you have apps as a special category. I hesitate selling my app via CoinDL as then everybody could pirate it and claim he bought it there. Is there a way to maybe zip it with a registration key that you send to a callback url that I provide?

The idea is the following:
You generate a unique, human-readable, non-guessable key.
You ask the authors for a script url that you notify upon purchase with ?key=blablub&paid=0.01BTC.
I store the key in a db for later use when I suspect high piracy rates.
You have a script that packs the actual apk file with a text file explaining not to throw away the key as it might or might not be needed to proof that you actually bought the app.

The paid-field could be used for pay what you want with some "if you pay above average, you get a wallpaper" features or other nice gimmics on my side.

With any luck, bitcoin reaches mainstream before we run out of oil (aka before the majority of cars runs on other fuels).

Or to put in perspective, if the average deal size far exceeds the market cap of BTC, even the most courageous oil dealers wouldn't touch BTC with a 100 feet pole. If you settle a 1million dollar deal, you move the market by 100%. How on earth would you settle an 1 billion dollar deal?

We are still at a point where nobody expecting daily turnover of more than $100k would feel comfortable using BTC. Exchanges are an exception as they are 100% independent of the volatility. In fact volatility brings them business.

This is the reason why we have to go from low turnover to higher turnover gradually.

Huh? It's going mainstream since almost 4 years and will continue to do so for a long while before any serious news outlet will ask "Is BTC mainstream?".

Hi

bin mal eben wieder aus Chile zurück. Geht was im Januar? Wär schön, da ich im Februar wieder in Chile bin.

Herzmeister hast Du meine Anfrage auf localbitcoins erhalten?

vg

Leo

So now that it's in beta (after being in beta some weeks ago?) I tried it out to charge an Entel phone which did not work in 22h after paying and receiving the payment confirmation. Any comments from you maybe here after you were silent on facebook?

The browser implementations look safe when you switch off your wifi but be aware that it could still use poor randomness or hard-coded keys to snatch your bitcoin. Being offline does not protect you. You need to get code review done by experts. With your life savings I guess you can't be paranoid enough. Maybe use the 5 most plausible approaches and split up your savings

what is an RES plugin? (yes, I duckducked it a bit but didn't find it).

The video doesn't convince me at all. Ok, the french accent (WTF is a mongos account??) is fixed but the checkout page with the "pay with mtGox or with bitcoin" is over-complicating things. MtGox should rather honor all kind of green addresses with 0-conf and treat Mongos' payments as "green" no matter what sending address was used.

Is it a competitor for BitPay? I don't think so as the merchant will not get rid of the Bitcoin related hassle. BitPay promises the merchant does not need to know a thing about Bitcoin in order to use their service. Offering the same most likely is more a marketing/political decision than a technical issue for Mongos though.

Bruno: I donated towards the address in your sig. Transaction ID in my other post.