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November 17, 2011, 06:03:29 AM |
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I am deliberately not entering this post on 'alternate cryptocurrencies' because the intent is very much to support the 'real' Bitcoin (and the various alternate cryptocurrencies mostly smell of scams to me.) I consider the solution set I propose to both reduce the needless burdon on Bitcoin (which may or may not gracefully scale to it's theorized potential), and provide a much more flexible and suitable end user experiance.
In a nutshell, I propose a variety of different 'designer' currencies with various combinations of the good ideas tuned to a particular goal. Generally a part of the 'base value' of these currencies will be BTC pledged as backing. This 'backing' could lend immediate legitimacy to a new currency, and provide holders a BTC a way to leverage their 'investment' to a good cause.
One of the problems I see are that there are plenty of instances where a property is specifically and legitimately desirable for some situations and a specifically not desirable for others. Some examples:
- infaltionary, deflationary, or stablized. - anonymity -> pseudo-anonmity -> transparency. - cycle rate (10-min/block, etc.) - charge-back capable or not. - cpu capable generation.
For illustrative purposes, I will elaborate on an idea for dealing with chargebacks. This is one of the things that is of interest to me because it limits greatly how much I as a potential consumer am willing to use Bitcoin as a currency.
A transaction could have a 'clawback' flag. The potential to claw-back could decrease over time, and doing so could serve some useful benefit for the currency. For instance, clawing back a transaction could entail doing a certain amount of useful work in securing the system. If a user choose to use a specific account (abaondoning pseudo-anonymity), a counterparty could choose to either transact or not transact with another based on their history of performing claw-backs.
One more illustrative example. This has to do with 'redeaming' a given designer currency for it's BTC backing.
The rules of the designer currency might be such that the currency can be redeamed for it's BTC backing under some condition like that the redeamer must mine an equal amount of new BTC currency as well. This would both strengthen the 'real' Bitcoin system (which would be of value to those holding the backing currency) and would limit the rate at which people could cash out (thus insulating the base funders from flash collapse type scenarios.)
Anyway, the goal of this note is just to introduce this idea (which I suspect is not entirely novel.) I will be quite honest in saying that I hope it takes off in part because I now hold a decent amount of BTC and it could be of benefit to me personally. I do believe, however, that an even bigger goal of mine is to see crypto-currencies generally work well for all people, and I think that a structure such as I've described could play a part in this.
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