Starting a new block chain

[xf2_org]

Can someone please split off other-chain discussion into another thread?  Thanks.

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[Dusty]

I'm not very confident that liberals will buy the "people's money" angle. Eventually they'll figure out that welfare would become hard to provide if bitcoin took over.

I am willing to argue that better welfare will be provided if Bitcoin took over. People naturally love to give and will have more to give if they have more money in their pockets.

Not only that, but sound money (and low taxations and regulations) bring goods and services to being always better and cheaper.
That, in turn, makes a better welfare, not because of "redistribution" or charity, but because almost everybody can afford them.

@unp:
So who decides when to restart the official chain?
Just having this power in the hand of someone defeats the very purpose of having a decentralised currency with no central authority.
If someone could decide to restart the official chain then for example he could dump all his btcs of the old chain and rebuy them on the new chain, and this reminds me very much of central banking...

Of course you are free to start your very own chain, and then hope other people will jump in and give value to it.

I think you should read Mises Regression Theorem to understand better the argument and nonsense you are proposing.

[Timo Y]

Like anything that exhibits strong network effects, a blockchain is a natural monopoly of sorts.  Free market forces will always push towards the ONE big blockchain.  

There is a strong incentive for new users to choose the social networking site that already has most users, to edit the wiki that already has the most content, and so on.  This discussion about rebooting the blockchain reminds me of Wikipedia in the earlier days, when several Wikipedia clones popped up, all of which failed or remained extreme niche of course.

IMO network effects in Bitcoin are even stronger than in Facebook or Wikipedia.  I think that is it inevitable that new chains will appear, but the older and longer the main chain becomes, the harder it will be for them to stand a fighting chance.  Right now, I think that only Gavin has a chance of succeeding with this and soon not even he will.

The only exceptions are chains which fulfill a very different need than the main chain, such as Namecoin.


@unk:

None of us can pretend to know if we are in a bubble or whether it will pop.  There is no objective way of measuring this reliably. This is really nothing more than a hunch of yours (and other users).  There was bubble talk after the first price spike in July 2010 and people were complaining that 0.06 USD/BTC was grossly overvalued  .  That bubble, if it ever was a bubble, never popped of course because the goods and services offered for BTC on the internet eventually caught up with the speculators' expectations.  

Is it really worth doing something as drastic as a chain reboot, based on a hunch? It wouldn't even solve the supposed problem, because the new chain would be just as prone to speculation as the old one.

I don't think speculation is such a bad thing anyhow. The market has already decided that Bitcoin is useful as an investment vehicle on top of being useful as a way to transmit money. The market isn't going to change its mind soon, and even if Bitcoin became primarily an investment vehicle, that doesn't mean the economy won't be sustainable.

[ribuck]

i really do think someone should set it up. if nobody does, i'll volunteer to spearhead it, but i won't have time until about a month from now

Too much talk already. Gavin's obviously not going to start a new block chain, so go for it! We can wait a month to see your new coins. Just call it something different from Bitcoin so that you're not deceiving people, ok?

[JohnDoe]

Too much talk already. Gavin's obviously not going to start a new block chain, so go for it! We can wait a month to see your new coins. Just call it something different from Bitcoin so that you're not deceiving people, ok?

I propose we call it KeynesCoin. But instead of 50 KYC forever like unk proposed, reward should be a function of difficulty so that it "grows with the economy" and there's no deflation right? Start with something like 10 KYC per block and add 10 more for every 10,000 difficulty, so if the difficulty is 244,000 the reward should be 230 KYC.

[marcus_of_augustus]

Too much talk already. Gavin's obviously not going to start a new block chain, so go for it! We can wait a month to see your new coins. Just call it something different from Bitcoin so that you're not deceiving people, ok?

I propose we call it KeynesCoin. But instead of 50 KYC forever like unk proposed, reward should be a function of difficulty so that it "grows with the economy" and there's no deflation right? Start with something like 10 KYC per block and add 10 more for every 10,000 difficulty, so if the difficulty is 244,000 the reward should be 230 KYC.

Bit off topic but i think this is a worthwhile idea as a PR demonstration that nobody wants crappy KeynesCoin that inflate to infinity .... and beyond ... we could use it as a testnet also and reset it every time it gets outrageously inflated ... maybe on Jan 03 every 10 years as reminder to what crap money looks like.

[evoorhees]

as a suggestion against short-term self-interest (and against the interests of enough other early adopters that it won't be popular), i am convinced that the absolute best thing for the bitcoin technology at this moment would be for gavin to release a version of the client that restarts the block chain.

a controlled popping of the speculative bubble now would be better for the technology's perception than the uncontrolled one that is more likely, and it would help put to rest (or at least delay) the 'get rich quick' mentality that mike rightly criticises.

Yikes, bad idea. An artificial "popping" of a bubble is just as bad as an artificial inflating of one. Let the market work, my goodness! The extent to which Bitcoin can simply be "reset" is the extent to which it will fail. I can't think of a worse thing for Bitcoin than to start "socially engineering" it to adjust its distribution "more equitably."

Laissez-faire. Let things be. Let markets and prices deal with markets and prices =)

[Gavin Andresen]

I split this topic from the Public Relations thread.  Apologies for any mistakes I made selecting which posts to split.

For the record:  I think a main block chain reset is a terrible idea.

[goatpig]

I split this topic from the Public Relations thread.  Apologies for any mistakes I made selecting which posts to split.

For the record:  I think a main block chain reset is a terrible idea.

You had to start it with a comment about you looking like spock didn't you o.o"