Once we have an easy way to buy and store Bitcoins the demand will so far outweigh the supply that the price will go from $1000 to $10,000 within a matter of weeks.


No, I was Goxxed. I thought people learned their lesson in April 2013 and I was wrong.

I still stand by my statement that once we have an easy way to buy and store Bitcoins the demand will bring the price to $10,000 in a matter of weeks.

Whether or not we develop an easy way to buy and store Bitcoins prior to May is anyone's guess. If I'm wrong you can throw the pie at my face. If I'm right you can tip me. It's even not April yet and a lot can change very quickly.

As long as inflation is low then investors will love it. As long as your inflation is justified then we know your reasons for including it are sane and rational.

If there is enough flexibility in the protocol so that it can adapt to new technological ideas or changes in the global economy then it will work out fine.

Ultimately this all depends on how attractive you want to make the coin to investors and whether you want it to function better as a store of value or as a transaction currency. I would argue that the store of value mechanism is more important because if you have a good store of value people can easily create their own personal currencies on top of that.

The coins could in essence double as shares and those shares could be used as collateral to create new coins which are backed by the shares. To have a good transaction currency in my opinion you want to avoid both inflation and deflation so that the price is stable. Most people aren't going to want to store their life savings in a transaction currency though so if you want investment and long term users you need to create a good store of value.
I'm interested in seeing both of these solutions in action. If there is a way that we can agree upon to quantify the level of decentralization of the network we can use that as a metric to try and measure the success of things. What I do know is that Bitcoin isn't decentralized and if they stick with sha-256 there is no hope it will ever be.

The solution I would like to see and that I've been promoting is to have the hashing algorithm randomized so that no one group of people can optimize for it. If it changes at random intervals to a random hashing algorithm then you can't prepare in advance with a sha-256 asic farm or a scrypt mining farm. You simply will not know what the next hashing algorithm will be, how many days it will be in effect, and you would have to prepare for all the possible algorithms and have to purchase all machines or just pay really close attention to track it.

The other idea is the lottery effect where there is an occasional jackpot. The basic idea is if you put enough uncertainty into mining then no one can plan ahead and it becomes less about how much money you have to spend on chips or how many chips you have and more about how much you're paying attention and whether or not you're waiting for the opportunity to use whatever you do have when an algorithm and scheme favorable to your specifications kick in.

I understand this sort of randomized hashing would be a nightmare to code so it's only theoretical. I think the original whitepaper you had was to be something like that, so it's possible at least in theory.

I think there are ways around inflation but it's still experimental. I think you could simply just destroy the fees and the shares in the network would appreciate as the coins get destroyed. Of course miners would not have incentives at this time but once the mining network is fully built out I don't think miners will need that kind of incentive anymore. If you think of coins destroyed as a dividend, and then make everyone on the network a miner, why wouldn't that work?

The amount of hashing power available in 20-30 years if it's decentralized could be so ubiquitous and so cheap that you won't need to give any incentive directly to miners in the form of new fresh coins. You could destroy the coins at a 1-5% rate and disperse the incentive *which under the currently centralized Bitcoin network would go to a centralized cartel of miners as new coins* instead onto every participant in the network equally. As coins get destroyed with every transaction the fees would give a deflationary dividend to all who hold coins in the network. As a result of this dividend that would be continuously dispersed, their coins would become more scarce and thus more valuable so that the hashing power gets cheaper for them as their buying power increases.

And because technology is inherently deflationary, there is a synergy there. I admit this is theoretical so I only present it as an idea to consider rather than as a solution.
My argument is that because technology is deflationary (Moore's law), the currency backed by that technology should be deflationary. It's technological determinism. The focus in my opinion should not be on people and the pursuit of money, but on making technology more accessible and cheaper so that the cost of living decreases with deflation. If the rich are getting richer in numbers in some ledger but for everyone else the cost of living is going down then everyone wins. The rich feel richer and can invest in even more sophisticated technology, and poverty eventually ceases to exist because you can theoretically rely on automation, 3d printing, and decentralization.

Again this is highly theoretical, speculative, and philosophical so there is room for debate here. I just think human labor over time is being phased out in favor of automation and that technology will determine if poverty exists not monetary policy.

I think it's the opposite. If buying power goes down over time you could end up with the opposite effect. I think if inflation is low enough you could be right in the short term, but over the long term I think Moore's law is deflationary and when that kicks in the hashing power will just become cheaper at a faster and faster rate. The only way to find out is to watch what happens with 1% inflation and always leave in the capability of putting things into deflationary mode at a later date.
I agree right now it is too centralized. I think we will be able to decentralize it eventually using a DAC though. So I'm actually very hopeful on this front.


Very interesting. I think theoretically once we have infrastructure to have DACs and other tools available it wont be so hard to let the network itself or the artificial intelligence itself pay the human beings to do certain tasks on a list are are voted on. In that atmosphere it becomes possible to make Proof of Work beneficial and decentralized if human beings are used to verify the work or some process which uses human labor by paying human beings a bounty or fee is put in place.

I hope whatever Proof of Work you do decide to use is modular enough that you could switch it out for something better or improve upon it at a later time. As long as you have the flexibility to future proof it then it will be great.

Some additional information
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/how-technology-is-driving-deflation-everywhere-aOgVQHcASBqwtc9uFa1AGA.html

The only argument I can make for having a higher supply is for psychological effect. Like with Dogecoin because there are so many everyone who has them feels rich. People look at Bitcoin and they think Oh My God it's too expensive!

So you want enough of a supply so people even in third world countries can afford to have a chance. Long term it does make sense only if you think people wouldn't buy coins in fractions. I do think people could be convinced to buy coins in fractions though so I favor selling the coins in the Satoshi denomination.

Another thing which could be done. We have Netcoin as the largest unit but if there were fewer and not many people have them then you would use the largest unit for large transfers between businesses and for daily transactions people would use the smaller proportions.

Now this is important to note, depending on the blockchain technology and whether or not you can handle a lot of transactions should decide whether you go with a smaller or larger cap or even no cap.

If there is no cap then you still must limit inflation, as that is what is bad. If the cap is low or high it does not matter if inflation is 50%. If inflation is low, and the cap is low of course that is better. If inflation is zero and the cap is low like Mastercoin, Counterparty, of course that is best of all but then it's not much of a currency for transaction purposes and more of a stock.

What psychology do we want? To attract investors the cap and low inflation rate is good. To make people spend money having a higher cap is better because people are more likely to tip in a currency where they feel like a billionaire. The profit investors would make is the same no matter what the cap is, just so long as the inflation rate is low.

Fear of accusations shouldn't determine what we do though. In my opinion if there is inflation it must be for some specific purpose other than to avoid bad publicity.

If the argument you're making is that less people would want to use it as a currency if it's deflationary, this is a valid argument. I think different people will be attracted to deflationary currencies and that deflationary currencies may actually have many positive benefits.

One positive benefit that I postulate is a reduction in crime. A lot of crime is out of desperation or out of competition. Violence over turf happens among drug dealers often because in inflationary currencies the idea of saving doesn't make sense. You're punished for saving in an inflationary currency and I postulate that this encourages the thug capitalist mentality where short term profits rule.

If you want to promote long term thinking, long term investment, saving, and reduce violent crime I believe one way of approaching the problem is to offer a deflationary currency to allow people to think not just about day to day profit but the next year, the next decade, and not to spend all their money down so fast.

I use the street criminal as the individual in this metaphor because in American society the street criminal is the purest capitalist. Inflationary currencies encourage crime because why would anyone want to make and spend money slowly, or save money, when they can spend it as soon as they earn it and never save a penny? As a result of not saving this keeps the street criminal as an individual in a state of always being on a tread mill, or always struggling to stay afloat, and as a result it promotes a kind of ruthless competitiveness.

Let's take it out of the street level, how about it's stock investors? If you have a stock which dilutes over time then it requires that people keep buying it. The faster the rate of dilution the more people will have to find money to keep investing to maintain their position. This is like trying to keep up with the Joneses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses and in my opinion is a problem which would not exist if people were encouraged to think about long term investments.

Protoshares has it's problems because it over relies on prediction markets. The developer seems to believe that prediction markets will solve all of societies ills. But a lot of changes have been made to the design since the time when Cunicula called it a ponzi scheme. I don't think it's a ponzi scheme at this time, but if people wanted to make a case for it being a ponzi scheme or pyramid scheme the truth is you could make the same case against Bitcoin.

1. Bitcoin itself is not decentralized. It's actually controlled by a mining cartel. This mining cartel controls the hashing power of the network. For this mining cartel because they make the chips we use to mine with, if Bitcoin were to inflate forever they would not mind because they are closer to the generation of new coins and stand to benefit from inflation. It is this same attitude in my opinion which leads people to believe inflation for the dollar is helpful, it helps only the people who are close to the creation of new dollars because the initial distribution goes to those people.

As a result of the centralization of both Bitcoin and the fiat currencies as well we could say they are both pyramid schemes which benefit (certain people) most the people who control the production capability behind the currency generation of the network. At this point Bitshares is looking like it will be more decentralized than Bitcoin just as Bitcoin is more decentralized than the USD, because they switched away from mining and moved into a transaction based proof of stake which allows for them to both minimize inflation while increasing decentralization. I will say this has not been proven in practice so it's entirely theoretical, we have to wait and see.

2. We have to in my opinion measure or quantify the level of decentralization and as a principle agree that greater levels of decentralization is better. This should apply to Bitshares, Bitcoin, Netcoin, we want to have some way that generation of new coins or shares is decentralized. Netcoin is in a position where it can easily be more decentralized than Bitcoin provided that it's hard enough to mine, but if it cannot resist centralization around it's mining then whatever that inflation rate is, whether it be 1% or 4%, it will ultimately be a tax on anyone who saves in Netcoin. So if that 1% tax or 4% tax to miners goes to securing the network or paying miners I would say that sort of inflation has a purpose but if mining becomes centralized then that 1% to 4% tax goes to the same few people who basically will use their influence to maintain high inflation rates forever because they now have a coin faucet which pays them at the expense of everyone else in the network.

3. I believe deflation has more social benefits than inflation. I haven't seen anyone make a case for the social benefits of inflation. Inflation is always promoted as if it's some kind of necessary evil. It's usually spun up by economists that if the currency does not inflate then people will hoard (save) too much money and the economy will grind to a halt. This hoarding in my opinion only happens if a currency is too centralized. If it's decentralized in the initial distribution then since no one is going to become a trillionaire there is no massive wealth disparity argument. Instead you could end up with lots of millionaires who saved for years, but the social impact of that isn't the same as the social impact of a few people becoming trillionaires. So it seems to me that over centralization is what makes inflation or deflation bad. If anyone can mine and earn a reasonable amount of coins or shares then there is no real complaint with deflation.

4. Proof of Work seems to be the main problem behind all of this. We need a better Proof of Work which rewards work which is actually valuable to society, or we will have to move away from Proof of Work in the current form. I don't think Bitshares has completely solved it with going to Proof of Stake and I don't think Proof of Work as it is now is very good either. Proof of Work right now generates an effort with minimal to no social utility, all of that computing power essentially goes to waste, we have to make Proof of Work both economically and socially useful. We have to also make sure it's as decentralized as possible and by decentralized I mean resistant on the social network level as well so that it resists the formation of mining or other kinds of cartels to try to control the hashing power.

Some of my ideas on how we might be able to do it, the idea of the mining lottery is a good metaphor and perhaps is a direction if we keep mining. This would make mining a bit less predictable for the miner in a good way because it would decentralize the power dynamics in such a way that any random person could hit the jackpot while mining. It would also create some disassociation between hashing power and the reward by adding an element of uncertainty.

It should also be that we can create some disassociation between how much money a person spends and how much power the person gets. Money alone should not be the deciding factor in Proof of X. I think in the case of Bitshares money is the deciding factor but that is because they are treating it as a decentralized autonomous corporation so it has to be focused around profit. I think you can easily create a DAC which focuses on profit but do the crowd funding donation in such a way that money isn't the only way to mine or send value. For example perhaps you can donate computing power, money, or anything to the network to earn credits/shares.

I don't have the solution I'm just presenting some directions to explore and trying to encourage a high level debate on strategy.

If you want to make the coin attractive to investors the most important factor isn't the total number of coins. The total number of coins can be infinite or have a low cap depending on the psychological impact you want to have. Peercoin for example has an infinite total number but inflation is limited at the rate of Moore's law. The ASICs being used will eventually give Peercoin among the lowest inflation rates there is and so it's actually a better investment than Litecoin.

The area where there is no room for negotiation is the inflation rate. The inflation rate should be kept nice and low and taper off after the first year so that while you don't have to put a cap on the total amount of coins (or if you have a cap it does not have to be something you reach in the next 100 years).

For example if the cap is 50 million but the inflation rate is 500,000 coins a year it's going to take over 100 years to reach 50 million. I think the only reason coins have to inflate is to attract new people to the idea. Bitcoin had to inflate at a high rate early on because no one knew what Bitcoins were and they had to be given away to get people to use them.

Now if you have a high inflation rate all it causes is pump and dumps. It's not like altcoins need marketing anymore because everyone knows about cryptocurrency now.

40,960,000 coins issued through stake tickets is a lot. My opinion is let the demand determine the supply. But it can reach a return on investment if the inflation rate from mining is kept low. These are just my opinions and everyone is free to have their own.

There is Bitshares http://invictus.io/bitsharesx.php which has a fixed supply and will give a 5% dividend. There are also a bunch of alt coins and assets which pay dividends and also have fixed supply.

Just watch the securities thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=78.0 and you'll see all kinds of opportunities.

If you can hold for as long as you can. A few years is more profitable than a few months. More companies than ever accept Bitcoin so just spend it.

I would love for it to go back to $100. I would go broke buying Bitcoins and then wait a few weeks later for it to go back to $800.

Just for the record, my entire life savings (which isn't a lot) is invested in crypto assets. It's a risky business but cashing out rewards companies like Paypal and Apple who want to tell us how to spend our money. The central banks want to micromanage the "free" market to the point of telling us how to spend our money via advertising and not allowing us to have free speech to donate or spend how we want or to even download what we want (whether it be mp3s or a Bitcoin wallet).

If we keep giving corporations like this power they will start trying to control how we think and every aspect of our lives.

Bitcoin represents your freedom. All the people saying cash out are Bitcoin newbies who don't understand what Bitcoin represents yet. We have all been there.

The best advice is don't cash out unless it is the last resort. If you truly believe Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are better when Bitcoin is volatile and crashing you can park your wealth into another cryptocurrency which does not inflate.

But why would you want to move out of a currency internationally controlled by the people which has intrinsic value to put it into a national/poltiical currency guaranteed to inflate?

Learn how to use arbitrage and how to park your value from one form to another. Find an altcoin which has a fixed supply, with little or no inflation, and which can even pay dividends and park your value there.

When you'll receive daily, weekly, yearly dividends, your monetary value is safe from this crashing nonsense. For the newbies I suggest you spend the next few months conducting your research into the alternative currencies rather than cash out to fiat.

If you cash out to fiat you're sacrificing freedom for the illusion of security. If you can pay your bills and keep your freedom intact then don't cash out because this is just the beginning of the wave and less than 1% of the United States (and even less of the world) has purchased a Bitcoin. If you're worried about losing money then cash out when a coin is worth $100,000+ and only cash out enough to last about a year.

If my post sounds delusional with $100,000 a Bitcoin check back later this year to early 2015.

The best way to make money is to ignore the price until the next bubble. If you bought at the peak of this bubble you can't think about selling until the next bubble.

How does it feel if you sell your only Bitcoin and a month later it's $10,000 and you can never afford a Bitcoin again?

Think.

Okay.

1.) Ask them to make the case for why we need Proof of Work and the inflationary model of crypto-equity distribution?

In my opinion if the inflation is unjustifiable then it's unjust because it robs future generations and early investors of value for no apparent value in return. For Bitcoin it was necessary because inflation is how Bitcoin is marketed. Miners are important in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Now that we have plenty of miners and plenty of more profitable coins to mine like Dogecoin and others we don't actually need Ethereum to be Proof of Work.

But let's say they decide to go with Proof of Work? Shouldn't they aim to have the lowest level of inflation possible when Ethers cost so damn much? 1000 Ethers per Bitcoin? That is maybe $1 an Ether we are talking about? Inflation should be extremely low and in fact it should as close to 0% as possible.


They give no reason for why we need the extreme levels of inflation. Ethercoin? No it's not a coin. It's a protocol and Vitalik knows this. As a protocol which we have to build stuff on top of it, it will never have much value as a coin because it's primary mode is not that of a currency.


In fact I would argue that Ether is supposed to be a unit of measurement in the mold of a perpetual coin. A perpetual coin should not inflate or deflate, it's supposed to be static. If they aren't going to use it as a perpetual coin but instead use it as a currency, then I would argue that the primary mode should be deflation.

We could achieve the deflationary mode simply by requiring that the Ethers spent are destroyed.

2.) If Proof of Work is necessary for securing the blockchain, why aren't they going with a deflationary model which requires Ethers to be destroyed when spent to offset the justified inflation if it must be mined by Proof of Work?

No one has to lose but they are setting up investors to lose. Inflation might have to exist to secure the network but a case hasn't been made that Proof of Work is the only way they could secure the network or that inflation rates would have to be so ridiculously high to give incentive to miners. 2+2!=6.

Consider this to be constructive criticism. I offer some ideas which can actually help the product.

I wouldn't care where people worked before hand. It's the fact that Ethereum seems to be designed to screw investors. It almost seems like it's designed wrong on purpose.

I'm willing to say it's possible that it's just a philosophical disagreement. A lot of very smart people can disagree on these matters. I'm willing to watch how Ethereum does but I'm not going to be investing in an IPO where it's 1000 Ethers a Bitcoin. That is so over priced that it's almost ridiculous. 50% premine is even more ridiculous.

Say what you want about the IPO but as an investor it's just too much risk. On top of that the design is extremely ambitious but also presents security risks as well being that it is turing complete. Using virtual machines and sandboxes may help but it's also going to make it much more expensive and difficult to develop than most people here realize.

I like the technology, so from that perspective I think its pretty cool. But from the perspective of an investor I think it's not worth the risk to me when you have Bitshares, Mastercoin and others which aren't going to inflate for eternity (for no apparent reason).

If you're going to dilute our shares don't ask for 50% premine. Don't design it in such a way so that it is as unattractive to early investors as possible. We aren't stupid.

If you can give XCP its better to give XCP. If XCP is to stand on its own why are we even discussing giving donations in BTC? Developers should also be willing to accept and even prefer their own currency. Think of it as being paid in stock.

And as a good signal the developers have announced they'll accept XCP.

The problem with it is developers want to get rich off the expense of suckers willing to pay the insanely high price of 1 BTC for 1000 ether. And it's premined? To top it all off it's an infinitely inflationary stock (which means it dilutes forever), and it's mined. I don't see why it has to be mined. Mastercoin and Bitshares aren't going to be mined so why do we need mining at all?

I won't be investing in Ethereum early on and I had intended to when I read the technical specifications. The technical specifications are impressive but whoever is behind the economics of this is doing it all wrong.

You want to return the best ROI for the early investors/adopters. If you're going to punish them then why would anyone have faith in your stock, your product, or your future decisions? Ether is a stock and it's a perpetually diluting stock which means you have to keep buying more and more if you want to maintain the same position.

If you're an investor you should put your money in Bitshares, Mastercoin, Counterparty, but if you want to support the technology you should donate to Ethereum.

In order to save human beings in Africa you have to give them Bitcoin wallets and Internet access. It's certainly possible to do it by crowd funding an Internet cafe, giving Bitcoin wallets, or providing Bitcoin wallets via MPESA.

No one is saying that CounterParty in it's current state will be able to do this. But what I am saying is that when buying power is strong you actually have more power to crowd fund / invest in people who live in places like Africa. When buying power is strong the people who work in the USA can use Bitcoin for remittances back to Africa.

If you dilute Bitcoins by infinite inflation then you reduce the buying power which means the person who has less than 1 Bitcoin (that is actually going to be the majority of the people on planet earth) will have significantly less buying power and most importantly their percentage of shares in the total supply will constantly be shrinking which favors big rich people who can keep buying. Deflation helps the little guy who is willing to save whatever small portion they can afford so that you don't have to keep buying to maintain the same position.

And out of 21 million Bitcoins every person on the planet can have around 0.03. That isn't even 1 Bitcoin. Only around 5 million of the 7 billion people on planet earth will ever get to own a Bitcoin.

Having said all that, no one is saying that 1600 out of 12,300,000 is going to make more of a difference than the millions that will be mined before the block reward halving.

You're missing the point. It's increasing the value of everyones coin by a fraction of 1% but when you generate new altcoins you're actually increasing the total supply of cryptocoins which is actually inflation. If you create 10000 Bitcoin clones and release them then you're affecting the buying power of Bitcoin because people will have to either sell Bitcoins to buy these coins or they'll not buy Bitcoins at all to buy Dogecoins for example. How exactly is that better? It's inflation for inflation sake because Dogecoin could have been mined by Proof of Burn which would mean we wouldn't need any of this.

You don't agree with Proof of Burn but you think mining is okay? You think it's a good thing that there are 100,000 different altcoins all which have to be mined and all which inflate into infinity? If we used Proof of Burn and just minted the coins similar to how CounterParty is doing it then all those altcoins wouldn't have to negatively impact the price of Bitcoin or artificially inflate through mining.

So the real problem is Proof of Work mining. The real problem is inflation. Proof of Burn avoids Proof of Work and inflation and does it without requiring we trust a central party. It solves two problems in a very efficient way.


I actually proposed a bounty system to the developers. If they built the system I proposed then we can say that CounterParty will have funding but as of right now it's not built so we cannot discuss it until it's built.

I actually believed Ethereum would be successful until I learned that they are going the mining route and will have infinite inflation. There is no cap on the amount of ethers.

Knowing this, I don't believe Ethereum can work. If you can secure the network without mining and without inflation that is  technologically better. You can have no cap and still make it work but the inflation rate has to be extremely low. Peercoin for example has no cap but the inflation rate is lower than Litecoin so it's eventually going to work out in Peercoin's favor.

Ethereum from what I understand of it has no cap and has an insanely high inflation rate for no apparent reason. They need to either make the inflation rate extremely low by design (Peercoin has a good algorithm to limit inflation and they should look at that), or they should go with a strict cap and mint every coin over a period of time either by Proof of Burn or by a crowd funding address like with angelshares or exodus. The way it's looking right now Ethereum has a lot of changes to make.


It's not a coin, it's a platform. I'll use it if it's useful. I proposed an idea to help the development team in private. If they go with that then the spec is laid out for them as to how to do a decentralized autonomous bounty distribution.
You've done nothing to discredit the logic of Proof of Burn. Proof of Burn does everything we want it to do and is a proven success. 1600 Bitcoins have been burned.

In my opinion Proof of work mining is what is wasteful. You're telling me that having people buy CPUs and GPUs to calculate worthless numbers is somehow more useful than burning Bitcoins? Proof of X is just about some kind of sacrifice or cost. Burning Bitcoins is a cost, burning CPU cycles is a cost, burning GPU cycles is a cost, you could even give people chess puzzles to solve and that would be a cost.


If you want to give to charity why not just give your dollars to charity? Dollars don't have volatility and are currently still a better store of value. It's true that Bitcoins price is going up quicker but that is because it's in the exponential growth phase.

Inflation is what makes something a poor store of value. Mastercoin currently is an excellent store of value. If it becomes useful it will be the best store of value (far better than Bitcoin) because your shares in the Mastercoin protocol will never be diluted.

The same can be said about CounterParty. If you buy XCP through Proof of Burn rather than mining then you know after the IPO that you'll never have to worry about your shares being diluted. People do not want their shares to be diluted through inflation.

If you bought a stock issued by a company and toward the end of the IPO some guy posts on a forum that not enough stock was issued, that there wasn't enough time and that we need to issue more stock at the last minute, all the people who purchased the stock expecting it to be a good store of value and not to inflate are going to feel scammed if at the last minute developers change their mind and decide to dilute everyone's shares.

Why is it wrong to do this? Because the only measurement which matters is the percentage of shares out of the entire supply that you own. If the supply keeps growing then your percentage keeps shrinking which means you have to keep spending more and more to keep from losing your position. At that point it starts to look like a pyramid scheme or something.

That is why you want to have a fixed supply with minimal inflation or a fixed supply with no inflation. There is no reason to have inflation post-IPO. And I don't see a better way of doing it than Proof of Burn, your idea clearly wasn't better because it asks for increased centralization, trust, and inflation, all the stuff we don't want.

What is also interesting is people are suddenly willing to trust completely anonymous developers and want to encourage other people to send all their Bitcoins to them?

If you want to crowd fund it properly then get any developers to do it. Set some bounties up and crowd fund it that way. Why send all your money to a centralized donation address and hope they do the right thing when you can just set bounties for the features you want and reward the developers for doing it?

That shifts the burden of trust onto you and off of the developers. Will you pay the bounty? If the right foundations are involved or the right non-anonymous individuals then we can organize a proper bounty with accountability.


They definitely need to raise funds, no doubt about that. But the crowd funding process should be entirely separate from mining. One good thing about Mastercoin is it has 0% inflation. All Mastercoins that will ever exist already exist and that is important if you're trying to use Mastercoin as a store of value or unit of measurement.

XCP is supposed to be a unit of measurement from which other assets are generated. If XCP is constantly inflating then there will be no reason for anyone to want to hold it long term when they can sell it for Mastercoins which aren't inflating or for Bitshares.

So inflation is really bad for this purpose and the developers should have figured out how to fund their bounties before they launched. A certain amount of coins could be set aside for development but they didn't do that.

The ideal way to do it would have been if they did it exactly like Mastercoin and mint the reward XCP as part of the Proof of Burn process. That way no one would lose and there could be no inflation. Offering the possibility of inflation makes no sense for what XCP seems to be used for because inflation really does dilute the shares.

Absolutely not. What of all the people who burned their BTC?

Also now you're centralizing development around one BTC address controlled by anonymous developers. So now we have to trust them?

I think you're missing the point.

Proof of Burn is how the coins are "mined" without causing any inflation. If they were just going to do an exodus address then it's just a clone of Mastercoin only without us actually knowing who they are.

Proof of Burn is a way to simulate mining and is not just a way to make the developers rich. If you give to the developers and they get rich they could run off with the coins and also giving them 1000 coins would never make much sense since they are anonymous.

Someone who has a lot of coins can donate and not feel like they are sacrificing much while someone with a little bit of coins wont be able to donate at all. Proof of Burn allows someone with a little bit of coins to donate and not lose.

We get it. You don't understand Proof of Burn. The fact that you are measuring in dollars proves that you don't know what you're talking about.

Dollars weren't actually wasted. Do you think the price of Bitcoin is based exclusively on the cost of mining it? In that case if we go to Proof of Stake then we'd save so much dollars which could be given to charity. So why aren't you against mining? Mining generates the actual waste.

Proof of Burn is a way to mine without environmental damage caused by using GPUs, without the centralization caused by ASICs, and it's fair. Anyone can give up some Bitcoins and mine by Proof of Burn. If you don't give up any Bitcoins then the coins you have are worth more.

At this point in time 1500-1600 BTC have been burned. If you change the terms now then you're screwing over the people who burned their BTC in order to get XCP.

That is why you cannot change the terms. It's set in stone just like Bitcoin has it's block reward halving set in stone. If you don't like that then go count dollars.