I don't care about being an early adopter. I see a problem with the system for the people who asked me to look into developing a local currency. This is going to arise out of the barter project, not mining.
Well, then
"Mine the shit out of that village." Is that your bitcoin rapist threat? Are you 12?
Does anybody in the audience really fault me for exploring limiting *who* can mine in our town with morons like that on the loose?
To repeat: nobody in this town owes the power company any favors. Nobody in this town owes ATI any favors. Nobody in this town owes newegg/provantage/tigerdirect/etc any favors.
But anybody in this town could just use their kid's computer to potentially gain a lot of local money or screw with the whole system, if it is a bitcoin fork with money generation per new block.
If you start limiting mining, you start harming your local economy + you still risk mining pool attacks (if only a hashrate of 5 MH/s is "allowed", let 60 miners run on one GPU and create a pool). Bitcoin is designed to be as open as possible to anyone who wants to mine, limiting this can have severe issues!
Again, there is also no real way to make sure only town people are mining (and if mining only has very small rewards it doesn't even matter!). IP adresses won't work, as you can go online with mobile phos too (and they usually are even NATed). Selling mining certificates (however you implement that into bitcoin...) makes mining non-anonymous again and harms your network security (and still certificate holders can form pools to attack the system).
Furthermore, nobody in this town needs to share their local currency with luminary organizations like the [$ethnic_group] mafia or [$country] intelligence services.
Maybe I will do this straight bitcoin rules on a new chain under a different name. I don't know yet. I'm exploring the implications of changing certain points. That's the point of this thread.
With straight BTC rules you favor early adopters and high hashrate miners far more than people who trade with that "money" initially.
This is intentionally with BTC to make sure the network kicks off with a secure hash rate until enough money is in the system to really start an economy (which is currently happening as mining gets harder and harder + ppl start to sell stuff for BTC instead.)
BTC itself has a huge inflation initially (the first 1000 BTC become only 50% of all BTC after just 20 blocks!) which might also scare people away.
Right now you can easily get a fairly secure hashrate via GPU mining and what you wnat to have is I think a quickly working money system, not a bootstrapping economy, right?
In the end, if you want to have something VERY similar to BTC, use BTC - and if you want to have something that just uses a blockchain, make sure that you do NOT have to limit participating miners in any way artificially.
