What exactly is the proposal? I see none.

"Distributed evenly" lacks any reasonable definition how to do so, and mining in its current form will vanish with the reward cuts. A second cryptographic scheme appears pointless, and the one used can be replaced on all active nodes within any expected construction time of a quantum computer. If the current methods are broken, it is likely that larger systems, especially online banking, will fail, so this forum appears a strange place to bring this up.

With that explained, this thread is pointless. Please close/delete. Also, stop bumping it.

But that's the point! Who cares? I'll just buy at Google Liechtenstein, or Google Taiwan or wherever they think tax regulations are neat! They only have to care when they move the money into a problematic country, and that can probably be done in some kind of simplified batch operation.

But if an application seller accepts BTC, only the earnings by Google will have to care about taxes at all, the rest can be done in any country on the planet! Just send on the BTC to the company who made the application and let them care about taxes!

And the greatest part: the market will work for anybody, everywhere!

What kind of political opinion do you expect from a mob? I doubt it's even able to form any consensus beyond the slogans they shout.

I've seen this often enough. Government does hated action X. People demonstrate against X. Everyone's on the street, students can skip lessons, leftists can call for communism, and somewhere along a group offers free hugs. Still, the group appears homogeneous and united from the outside -- as long as it fights against X.

When the government gets annoyed by the demonstrators, it removes X. Then, everybody goes home or returns to endless debates, splitting into tiny sub-groups or dancing for some lobby. The outcome is that of democracy. It was before, and it is afterwards. With luck, they manage to get rid of some of the corruption, but mostly the mob hardly even figures out they ever had a corruption problem.

It hardly ever is, that's why I'm more of a Libertarian than a Liberal.

However, what you accused "Liberals" of doesn't even sound Liberal. Maybe you refer to a certain party, such as Japan's LDP, which is Liberal only in name?

Arbitrary redistribution of money is what I know as "left" politics, with communism being the extreme branch of it. More state power, a large set of rules on who gets money or support, those are the properties of such politics. Together with "right" politics, which have society set cultural norms, one gets a 2D map of political orientation, with anarchism being the origin and the Nazis quite far away from it. I'd find myself at ~10% "left" and almost zero "right". (Yes, it's not very intuitive to have left orthogonal to right, but I didn't name those political orientations! *shrugs*)

Anyways, it's common to call the direction away from those "left" or "right" politics Liberal. That's why quite some people might be confused at that post from earlier.

A similar issue: beggar threads. HEY GUYS CAN YOU GIVE ME SOME MONEY???

Engineers within Google may be helpful, but will they finish the job? It might be worth thinking about more ways to get Bitcoin onto Google's radar.

This would seriously increase the success chance of Bitcoin. The Android market is large! Even if just a fraction of it were to be paid in BTC, the situation would be incomparably better than it is now.

Does anyone want to try an estimate of a market size and reach comparison Android Market vs Bitcoin economy? This is huge, possibly it would be the final breakthrough to reach "critical mass".

The topic says it. Where I live, the market payment is just annoying. Just give me a simple Bitcoin target address, I pay, I get the application. That is how simple it should be.

Now, Google doesn't have much to loose trying this, and certainly a few Bitcoin geeks would like this and use the market more. But how can we make the guys at Google understand that? Blah blah new payment systems blah, a Google employee even worked on the Java bitcoin implementation, but the business guys there successfully ignore Bitcoin.

It's totally the same target audience as Android. Yay open-source hack-together sell first finish later, and it worked great with Android. I'm sure this would be win-win for both Google and the Bitcoin community. So, should we make a petition? Is there some site where Google asks people what kind of features they would like? If enough people nag them, they might look into it and notice they should've jumped on this boat a long time ago.

I consider myself a Liberal (or Libertarian, depending on context), and I have no idea what you are talking about. The Principle of Liberty does not concern giving free money to anyone. People can do that if they want to, but that's their choice, not a collective liberal idea.

I don't know what definition you use, but over here, liberals oppose arbitrary wealth redistribution by the state unless it is considered fair and necessary.

I have the same problem.

All the big countries involve different kinds of insanity, but there is none that got rid of all of them.

I'm currently in Germany, but it appears the country has decided to "embrace" the future in turtle mode. I've thought about many others, but each has some problems. Currently, I consider:

Liechtenstein
Japan
USA
Canada
Switzerland

But that's because I can speak German and am learning Japanese -- someone limited to English might find some choices less suitable.

Liechtenstein is epic, but SO SMALL. No matter how great the setup, it's totally endangered by anything big making a move. Japan has the most awesome feeling to live at, but also has a huge debt and people who love rules, no matter how silly. And so on. There's just no obvious choice.

Don't forget early adopters, they would gain a lot if Bitcoin reaches critical mass.

Yea, a Bitcoin lobby would be awesome. If some large company is able to use its potential (*cough* ANDROID MARKET PAYMENT SYSTEM ), Bitcoin might reach a good market size in no time.

This result is surprising. I thought users are mainly from the USA, isn't that country full of fanatic Christians?

I see sum over Atheists and Agnostics being 23, but Christians being 4. That's... actually a refreshing read. Not that I dislike Christianity more than any other nonsense. Still, that's quite a result.

BTW, I fail to see a major difference between most Atheists and Agnostics. I opted for Agnostic since I can't prove there is no God that stays hidden from me or outside this universe's scope... but I guess most Atheists would agree on that, so distinguishing between Agnostics like me and Atheists feels like some academic game.

Mathematical answer: you contribute, albeit very little.

Reasonable answer: don't bother. Neither do you have a substantial gain, nor the Bitcoin network. If you like the idea and want to support it, buy some bitcoins and spend them, or offer services for Bitcoins and spend your earnings. That will really make a difference.

This reminds me of "Machines have little meaning on the planet, humans could shut them down any time!!!1one"

Good luck trying. It's done, we are hybrids and this change can never be reverted. Whoever tries is at a massive disadvantage and will be conquered, bought, or otherwise removed from the map.

What will the government do once it lost most of its information-related assets? Hitler reloaded, this time against a full-digital enemy? Hah, hardly scary. Look at northern Africa, what even a juvenile network infrastructure does to its enemies. Shut it down and face the hatred of all those using it.

People could join the Unabomber and try to blow up all the scientists. Pff.

You imply there is a problem. Why? Men have a tendency to hype new things early, this has happened thousands of times already. And guess what, it usually was not a problem.

Look an the different smartphones, they all got hyped by men first, but it's balancing out now. Same with practically any tech/computer/geek thing. Nothing special at all. If Bitcoin reaches critical mass, the situation will change quickly.

It might be useful to keep this thread on topic, namely creighto's proposal of demurrage and its advantages and disadvantages.


If you want a longer discussion about this, see http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=6284.0

But be ready for a long discussion with a handful of twists in it. Long story short, this is not as easy as most people like to think. The system isn't proven broken, but it looks like difficulty will fall unless for block size limits etc. Especially, the system is not proven stable. The topic is more of academic interest though, since I don't know whether we will need a lot of miners later on... I think it is best if we keep that discussion separate from the suggestion in this thread here.



@Topic:

Apart from the technical benefits, I think that a demurrage system might have a few more general advantages that mainly stem from the ability to tell stale coins from lost coins. Also, the higher incentive to spend is often named as an argument for inflation, and it's not entirely false. But I think demurrage should be really low, far below inflation, and not apply to people who spend their BTC in time -- or else a good portion of the current user base, those hating inflation, might be gone in the blink of an eye. So, the main argument against demurrage is psychology. People don't like their BTC disappearing, they might shy away from a cost even if it's reasonably low. It's another part of the protocol the users need to understand.

I believe demurrage has an advantage over the current situation technically, but I don't know whether it's better than the current system. Yes, it's nice to keep mining up, gather up lost coins, allow getting rid of old parts of the block chain. But Simplicity on the user side is a feat of its own, and stale coins don't do anything until they stop being stale coins. Mostly, I just dislike the idea of the total amount of BTC shrinking without re-mining of lost coins, but maybe that's just my personal opinion on aesthetics confusing my mind.

Most likely, the question will not be of importance, since it might be too hard to change the protocol now -- then we'll have to cope with current rules one way or the other.

Oh, what... I'm the second Libertarian voting? And we have an anarchist majority so far.

That's kind of unexpected!

This method of projection might face a problematic truth:

A trend is a trend until it stops.

Just saying, external factors dominate Bitcoin at the moment. An analysis that will return some exponential uptrend... you don't need a load of numerics to retrieve that.

I'd like this demurrage on very stale coins, as in lost coins. If you don't move coins for 8 years, they start disappearing slowly.

It is totally reasonable for BTC holders to refresh once in 8 years. This gives a small fee to miners, and with what I learned about nodes not accepting blocks that split the block chain too far back... with little change to the protocol, we might not need many miners to keep things going.

I find the idea of having exactly 21M coins much nicer than the risk of "suddenly, surprise market crash caused by ancient million bitcoin deposit". Also, you can pretty much rely on coins getting lost somewhere, so this will always secure a minimum amount of mining.

Nice part: nobody complains, since everybody can prevent demurrage by just doing a single transfer to himself every 8 years. The client could remind people, too.

Mining will just cease to be important after 2012.

We don't really need a lot of miners. We only need the network to agree on a valid block chain, and the deeper I look into this problem, the more it looks like it can be solved with very few miners.

I just hope that spending by rich BTC holders will commence in a smooth fashion at increasing market size, so the pre-2011 coins don't disturb the economy because of being controlled by too few people. Let's just hope that the early adopters use their coins wisely, or give them away slowly.

Mining... get over it. Over a quarter of it is done, and the rest will be distributed over a huge network. Now, we are getting an increasingly good configuration, with the mined coins spread over many people.

I strongly prefer the golden color. I know this is a temporary psychological effect, but Bitcoin is here to replace gold. The golden logos catch on.

Also, emphasizing the coin form not only fits the word perfectly, but again causes a positive association with money.

When you target geeks, choice of colors won't make much of a difference. But for the sake of targeting a wider audience, this new logo is less suitable than the ones that were used before.