A fair and strong Bitcoin fork design exploration, "Faircoin"

[markm]

I do not recall even seeing any links to any proposals, I would have gone and taken a look I expect had I noticed one but I don't even notice any links in any of your posts to this thread so have no idea where your proposal's documentation might be found.

Engines to drive civilisations are of course always of interest to the Freeciv ("'Cause civilisation should be free!") scale aspects of the Galactic Milieu and thus also ultimately to all the smaller scales too once assimilated into the Milieu.

-MarkM-

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[ElectricMucus]

I made a proposal on the topic of the thread, not a complete concept which if I had wouldn't even bother with this forum.

We all have our motivation, I respect yours, but if you link to some of your stuff please provide context to relate it to the discussion.
Srsly, I'm lost how are your online games related the economic aspect of cryptocurrencies?

[markm]

YOu seriously don't see any connection between vrtual currencies and virtual worlds?

World of Warcraft god, EVE Online currency, Lindens, Litecoins, Bitcoins, BotCoins, etc etc are all virtual currencies and many of them situate much of their economies within virtual worlds.

All that is without even getting into the legal aspects, wherein games seem to be a lot safe places in which to situate stock exchanges than plonking then right inside the jurisdiction of the Earth authorities like GLBSE did.

Stock exchange and currency exchanges working with virtual world currencies are primage targets for any kind of integration with bitcoins and any other cryptocoins.

Another economic aspect is that spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on money-transmitter licenses stock broker licenses and so on might not make sense for any coin of which you are not doing millions of dollars of volume, so cranking up the volume in virtual worlds makes a lot of sense for getting security issues solved and software fully tested before even considering using the software for real world exchanges and stock exchanges and such.

Plus if it is useless even for games it is totally useless. Whereas if is is useful as a game currency it might, like other game currencies before it, become valuable in the real world too.

There is also the matter of backing. Game currencies have an entire world, or many worlds, of products ready to buy with them right off the bat, whereas currencies no games will accept likely also few or no sellers of anything else will accept either so they just end up as pump and dump schemes, trying to scam people into selling fiat for them.

-MarkM-

[ElectricMucus]

I'd say online games are a good use for cryptocurrencies yes. But so are drugs, socks and webhosting. (I'd leave out socks because they are closest to the thing I'd like to deal with)

Where my interest lies is have a system which is very well suited for these things:
land, food and shelter
production-, communication- and transportation-infrastructure
weapons, energy and computers

I don't care about the rest.

[markm]

All those things are what we try to simulate.

Maybe the word "simulation" might make the concept more understandable to you than the word "game".

You kind of sound a bit like a Private who refuses to take part in "field exercise" / "field training" on the grounds that there is no point "playing wargames".

Real world forces actually do "play games" as much as they can afford to, so that they can know whether their tools, equipment and people are ready for "the real thing".

Millions of dollars have already been lost due to people insisting on "going live" before their systems and people have been proven in "simulation".

It is not easy to get lots of people to spend hours and hours each doing testing; making a "game" out of it lets them at least get some kind of satisfaction/reward out of it.

-MarkM-

[ElectricMucus]

You make an interesting proposal, but it would require for the currency be an inherent part of the simulation.
A separate block chain if you will, a bit like bitcoins testnet but requiring simulated infrastructure to run.

[Richy_T]

All those things are what we try to simulate.

Maybe the word "simulation" might make the concept more understandable to you than the word "game".

You kind of sound a bit like a Private who refuses to take part in "field exercise" / "field training" on the grounds that there is no point "playing wargames".

Real world forces actually do "play games" as much as they can afford to, so that they can know whether their tools, equipment and people are ready for "the real thing".

Millions of dollars have already been lost due to people insisting on "going live" before their systems and people have been proven in "simulation".

It is not easy to get lots of people to spend hours and hours each doing testing; making a "game" out of it lets them at least get some kind of satisfaction/reward out of it.

-MarkM-

The issue I see with this is how the rate of generation of the currency would be controlled. With Bitcoin it's in the protocol. How would you prevent gaming the system or the game's owner from generating large amounts of currency whenever they wanted in your scenario?

[Bitcoin Oz]

Maybe make the "maturity" rate on coins based on difficulty. When the diff is low it takes a lot longer for the coins to mature and when the diff is higher it takes a shorter time.

Then late adopters get rewarded by being able to use their coins earlier than early adopters.

[ElectricMucus]

Maybe make the "maturity" rate on coins based on difficulty. When the diff is low it takes a lot longer for the coins to mature and when the diff is higher it takes a shorter time.

Then late adopters get rewarded by being able to use their coins earlier than early adopters.

Nice idea, makes even sense from a security aspect!

[markm]

It would be interesting and useful to get some actual quotes / commitments from miners on how much exactly they would charge to merged mine how many chains (or a chain that will be their X-many'th chain, if they charge less per additional chain).

That way a realistic budget can be worked out and actually "backed" coins such as USDcoin and so on could be deployed, knowing how much the backers to whom the initial and total number of coins ever to be issued were issued need to budget for paying miners to secure their chain.

About game companies messing with the number of their coins, minting more on demand, have you not read anything about bitcoin? They have as much ability to do that as Gavin has to do it with bitcoin, maybe slightly easier is less users out there already using it.

What keeps Gavin from doubling the number of bitcoins minted, for example?

-MarkM-

[cunicula]

To be true, I think coins dependant on miners are doomed. The whole idea of system functioning only if someone mines, and only if legit
miners have 51% hashpower is just terribly wrong.

Agree with this 100%.

Long-term stable coin is possible only if it's not dependant on profit-oriented people.

But what the hell you are talking about here?

[Vladimir]

This thread is so petty!

[cunicula]

Long-term stable coin is possible only if it's not dependant on profit-oriented people.

But what the hell you are talking about here?

Value each person can withdraw from the system must be very close or equal to value that same person put into system, at all times.

Why ever put value in the system at all then?

[Richy_T]

Long-term stable coin is possible only if it's not dependant on profit-oriented people.

But what the hell you are talking about here?

Value each person can withdraw from the system must be very close or equal to value that same person put into system, at all times.

Why ever put value in the system at all then?

Exactly. The whole success of currency is that it's a representation of value. The labor theory of value just doesn't work. The point of mining isn't to put the value of the labor into the coin.

[crazy_rabbit]

This thread is so petty!

+1

[EskimoBob]

You guys really need to get over that stupid "this is a new currency" idea.
No sane merchant out here, in the real world, wants another currency to deal with. What they want, is fast and secure and a lot cheaper way to transfer "value" from point A to B. They do not need additional risks like volatility, complicated "coin"-to-fiat conversions and so on.
You go and tell someone: "this new cool internet currency" and they usually walk away. Go an tell merchant, you have a fast, secure and X times cheaper way to transfer funds... you have their attention. Mention new currency, and the door will hit you in the ass on your way out.

No matter, how shiny and fair and what not your new coin is, if it has no real life use, it will be dead sooner or later (after few pump and dumps and Trendon-like tricks)
Yes, there are huge wallets stuffed with BTC. Lot's of greedy scumbags have stolen coins from each other and so on. Lot's of scams and what not. But this all will be history, if those coins (BTC, LTC etc) do not become useful in the real life and find larger audience. Most people do not give a flying f** about mining. They do not get a hard-on when GPU fans are screaming in the corner, making them less than a EUR per day.

Real world promotions are the key for any coins success. 20+ nerds having a circle jerk session about BTC is not really a event RW cares about. What about LTC? Yes, LTC is better for a merchants in many ways but if it gets no real life use... it will be dead too.
Do not get me wrong, I really like the idea of BTC, LTC, PPC... and so on but it's time take a step back and understand this: Yapping about technology is not going to cut it. Technology is only a tool. Tool for solving a real life problem. If you do not understand the RL problem, you can not develop a tool for it.

[ElectricMucus]

This thread is so petty!

Oh I do remember you shitting yourself calling merged mining and any kind of alternate cryptocurrency a "siege". Now this forum is live an well with plenty support from within Bitcoin.
Now who's petty?

Do not get me wrong, I really like the idea of BTC, LTC, PPC... and so on but it's time take a step back and understand this: Yapping about technology is not going to cut it. Technology is only a tool. Tool for solving a real life problem. If you do not understand the RL problem, you can not develop a tool for it.

At first to understand a problem you have to work on solving it. You can do that either by manual work or by better tools.
One can not work without the other but tools can get arbitrarily complex and useful and work arbitrarily tedious. So everybody will choose the approach which works best, and since almost the entire community here consists of nerds we mainly focus on tools. There is nothing wrong with that as long as we get to work at some point.

[Vandroiy]

Independent of the exact implementation, there is no need for a fair initial distribution. It's unimportant. An early adopter can smash his coins into the market exactly once. Then, that's it, and they can be traded hundreds of thousands of times later.

But rewarding early adopters served an important purpose, namely kickstarting adoption and incentive for the developers (although they might have really hit the mark in their own getting rich method. ).

The current distribution is as good as any to start off with. For all I care, Satoshi could've just sold me the coins directly. In the long run, it's all irrelevant. I'm jealous about early adopters' quick riches too. Still, that time is over now, and as a community, we have no real reason to go back. So let's think ahead and focus on the power of international markets we could unlock; there's more than just a one-time use mountain of digital gold to get there.

[ElectricMucus]

No the current distribution is not as good as any, it's bad in a sense that is does not go after the distribution of gold mining. That follows/followed a bell curve, which is what I did suggest.
If you apply the current distribution to gold it would be if early miners did grab head-sized nuggets out of the earth with pick axes and later giant mining apparatuses only being able to drag up microscopic specs of gold out of the depths.

[FreeMoney]

What keeps Gavin from doubling the number of bitcoins minted, for example?

-MarkM-

Are you serious? How about the fact that he can't alter code running on my computers?