FreiCoin (FRC) discussion (was FreiCoin (FRC) for TRC, PPC, LTC or BTC)

[jtimon]

We're all for savings, just not in a way that suppresses other people's ability to exchange and work (to prosper). Not in a way that obstructs competition.
Sorry if I'm repetitive, but costless hoarding (the source of time preference/basic interest) is a barrier to competition as positive capital yields (a form of profit) show. The more competition, the less profit. Until costs equal prices.

What is wrong with costless hoarding? I'm not convinced there is any problem with it. Some people will hoard and some will invest, it all depends on the person and their incentives. If there is money to be made through investing, people will invest. If not they won't.

That's the central point where we disagree. I claim that because of the basic interest, there's profit to be made through capital competition which is not made so that capital yields can stay above liquidity premium. As you've said before, liquid cash is like an insurance against uncertainty. By the way, you're enjoying this insurance for free, so here's an externality that someone has to pay for. I'll leave who for later. The point now is that won't accept any positive return on your investment. You rationally want a return that is greater to the value of this insurance. That's where the barrier for competition appears. You could make an investment that yields 0.1% and it would still be profitable, but you're just better off keeping the money instead. This barrier to investment creates an artificial scarcity of real capital (it can be education, knowledge or code, just saying real as opposed to money-capital, which is only a symbol of value). This scarcity protects capitalist's profits from competition, another externality. Who pays for all this?

1) Obviously, consumers pay higher prices since the capital profits never disappear through competition.

2) The artificially scarce supply of capital contracts the demand for labor, giving workers lower wages and unemployment.

3) The more hidden and catastrophic cost for the whole of society is that cyclically, when the labor of workers and the audacity of entrepreneurs and investors has lowered capital yields below the liquidity premium, money stops flowing on a positive feedback loop commonly named by its symptom: deflation.

Not part of the previous externalities, but also an indirect effect...Of course, the State tries to fix 2 through counter-productive actions such as minimum wage laws or hiring more public employments. To blindly try to fix 3, Keynes and central banks appear and vainly try to reestablish velocity by driving us into the hyper-inflationary oblivion (at first is only inflationary, but you know, these things accelerate). So instead of destroying enough real capital by cyclically wasting huge amounts of labor and other resources and opportunities so that the yields get back to the minimums required by the liquidity premium, paper currencies without demurrage allow us to cyclically destroy our currencies (even more resources wasted in the process than with gold's deflation) and go back to a national gold standard. This time is different though, since now we're all on paper at the same time.
Sorry for this long summary on how gold can be dangerous for freedom.

People won't hoard if they dont' have some better alternative. Currently hoarding is the status-quo among cryptocoins because there just isn't very much of value to do with the coins themselves.

FRC is obviously a very idealistic experiment, but it's difficult to see how it addresses a real world need. If Bitcoin had demurrage, do you think it would be farther along then it already is? The problem FRC seems to be addressing seems to be a theoretical problem "hoarding", which is not a 'real' problem. Hoarding in CryptoCurrency land isn't (in my opinion) because it's free to hoard/save coins, it's because there is nothing reliable/worthwhile to spend it on.

I get your point, and maybe it was better that "first there was bitcoin" after all. But this is something that we the coin users (well, with the help of our great pool of hackers and entrepreneurs in the community) have to change. We need more merchants accepting them and more users. My hope is that demurrage will help users ask the question to merchants more often "Do you accept FRC? What a pity, I had some of them here that wanted to spend, but, you know what? I'm going to spend them elsewhere."

As we are without any government that would enforce our Bitcoin contracts with Violence, we are left with securing investments between people who don't know each other and who identify each other.

I see "crypto-contracts" (such as the probably fair games that you mention) as a sometimes superior (and others, maybe useless) alternative to legal contracts, but not necessarily as mutually exclusive. I fail to see how a signed legal contract between two private parties is less enforceable when it contains the word "bitcoin". Manually signed contracts can also make digital signatures legally valid. Some countries even provide digital signature systems to their citizens which are legally valid by default (for example, Spain). Maybe, as you say, I'm too idealist, but I see clearly how the future of monies lies on the internet.

[1713545383]

1713545383

[doublec]

I wonder what those huge peaks on PPcoin are...

Those are the times when it's more profitable to mine PPC and sell them to earn BTC than it is to mine BTC directly. Chain hoppers join in.

[galambo]

Thank you!
I wonder what those huge peaks on PPcoin are...

The hashrate calculator on abe is probably built on a constant difficulty assumption. PPcoin changes all the time so I'd imagine the hashrate for it, and any of the altchains that don't use Bitcoin's proof of work system, are wildly inaccurate estimates. Its probably just noise.

[jjiimm_64]

Boom...

I think another chart would be handy.... hashrate seams to have dropped

[crazy_rabbit]

What is wrong with costless hoarding? I'm not convinced there is any problem with it. Some people will hoard and some will invest, it all depends on the person and their incentives. If there is money to be made through investing- people will invest. If not they won't. People won't hoard if they dont' have some better alternative. Currently hoarding is the status-quo among cryptocoins because there just isn't very much of value to do with the coins themselves.

Because costless hoarding is impossible with REAL assets, everything in our world decays, entropy is inevitable.  When you accumulate a surplus of goods to have as a reserve for future consumption that is perfectly natural and good, but their will be an inevitable cost in decay before the reserve is consumed.

Now if we know for sure that costless hoarding is impossible with real physical assets, yet money which is entirely a social construct of man appears to allow that which the laws of physics forbid.  How can that be reconciled?  The laws of physics ALWAYS trump social constructs, their is no costless hoarding even with money, money is simply causing a cost-shifting from the hoarder to the rest of society (which we call usury) which is why we can't ALL hoard at no cost, someone must always lose.

Your last point about "hoarding because their is nothing to do with the coins" is the classic supply-side economic error, the belief that is the fault of a 'supply' for not enticing money to move in the face of it's desire to remain stationary.  It's argued that an increase in supply and a lowering of prices will entice money to move, but if the prescription is for continuing declines in price then how ever tempting it may be to purchase on the first drop in prices the expected future infinity of price declines constitute an even strong incentive to keep hoarding.  

The reality is their is nothing to do with the coins because they are being hoarded, remove the hoarding incentive and the uses will spring up.

"Because costless hoarding is impossible with REAL assets"
But is our current financial system really "REAL" assets anyway? When the financial crisis hit, hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth were 'destroyed' but did they ever really exist? It's free to hoard Zeros.

"money which is entirely a social construct of man appears to allow that which the laws of physics forbid.  How can that be reconciled?  The laws of physics ALWAYS trump social constructs"

LOVE man. I disprove you with LOVE. Social Construct. Trumps Physics. Free to Hoard. The more you divide it, the more of it you have. All you need is love.  (But seriously, I'm being serious.)

"the classic supply-side economic error, the belief that is the fault of a 'supply' for not enticing money to move in the face of it's desire to remain stationary"

Money doesn't have a desire to remain stationary. It's not like the money in my wallet wants to jUmP OuT! I have to have something to spend it on. If I'm all alone in the middle of the ocean and there is no one and nothing that accepts money for anything, I don't just take what cash I have and toss it to the seagulls. I wait until some point in the future when I get somewhere (or when someone gets to me) that DOES take my money and then I make exchanges. Crypto-currency is a money on an island without any goods for sale.

The real error I think is in forgetting that as this is sort of a 'virtual' currency that is being bootstrapped the conditions are a bit more novel  then traditional money. None of us really know each other, nor can reach each other. So it's very hard to find goods and services that are both  in demand, and can be exchanged over either great distances or mediums. If this were an "in person" or REAL currency and all of us were in close proximity then we wouldn't have this dearth of economic opportunities. If there were nothing to sell people would at the very least turn to services or prostitution.

Not surprisingly this is what actually happens: Monkeys when taught the basics of money almost immediately turn to prostitution.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05FREAK.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

But this only works, once again, in person. In virtual world we are struggling to find places to spend our money, but we don't waste it just because we have nothing better to do with it. So classic error, I think not.

[galambo]

Boom...

I think another chart would be handy.... hashrate seams to have dropped

More blocks need to be solved before we will have real data on this. It's still greater than 40GH/s, guaranteed, not counting pools I don't know about and solo miners.

[🏰 TradeFortress 🏰]

What's the 80% thing?

[Nolo]

What's the 80% thing?

I'm thinking of it as a tax.  My understanding is that the 80% is placed into a "foundation" in which a group (which has not been established yet, but will likely be made up of the founders of FRC), will decide how and when to spend it.  So far it hasn't been touched, but could be at any time. 

I wish it didn't exist, or if it did, was at a much more reasonable level of 10% or less. 

Someone will probably eventually fork the coin without it.  There have been several people comment that they were working on it, but whether they actually are or not, who knows. 

[🏰 TradeFortress 🏰]

Ok, just forked it. Working on removing it and distributing it democratically to miners.

[doublec]

Where is the 80% tax? I'm not too familiar with the sourcecode but that's absolutely ridiculous and I want to remove it.

If you do I expect that none of your blocks will be accepted by the FreiCoin network. Have a look in main.cpp for 'GetInitialDistributionBudget'. This shows the addresses that receive the Foundation percentage.

[Ignore@YourPeril]

Ok, just forked it. Working on removing it and distributing it democratically to miners.

I have pledged 1000 FRC for this purpose (if you want it...). But please consider another creation rate than bitcoin, like this one suggested by Adrian-X:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=118317.msg1274548#msg1274548

[🏰 TradeFortress 🏰]

Where is the 80% tax? I'm not too familiar with the sourcecode but that's absolutely ridiculous and I want to remove it.

If you do I expect that none of your blocks will be accepted by the FreiCoin network. Have a look in main.cpp for 'GetInitialDistributionBudget'. This shows the addresses that receive the Foundation percentage.

Check out this awesome Freicoin fork:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=134629.0
https://github.com/gladoscc/freicoin

All of your blocks WILL be accepted by the current FreiCoin network. This simply removes the check to see if there is the 80% tax, and will accept all (otherwise perfectly valid) blocks. Migrate to this fork, tell all your friends to do it, get pools to do it. Why?

Because this will soon be changed so that the coins normally given to the Foundation forcefully will be given to the miner instead! First of all we will need people running this fork. So make it

[jtimon]

I don't think that "compatible fork" will work. Even if it does, you're getting a different distribution than was designed, which, by the way, was already different from bitcoin's (better IMO): http://www.freicoin.org/freicoin-generation-graph-t41.html
I haven't bothered to calculate what distribution you would get though, but I think you will take lots of years to get final fixed supply.

I don't think we need more profit for miners, I would rather give it to the free software foundation (for example) even if they "sell them into existence". But if you really want this, I would start a new fork (without trying compatibility) from scratch.

[🏰 TradeFortress 🏰]

I don't think that "compatible fork" will work. Even if it does, you're getting a different distribution than was designed, which, by the way, was already different from bitcoin's (better IMO): http://www.freicoin.org/freicoin-generation-graph-t41.html
I haven't bothered to calculate what distribution you would get though, but I think you will take lots of years to get final fixed supply.

I don't think we need more profit for miners, I would rather give it to the free software foundation (for example) even if they "sell them into existence". But if you really want this, I would start a new fork (without trying compatibility) from scratch.

Block reward will not be changed. The coin creation will not be changed. Only the distribution will. Instead of putting 80% to the developers (you could call the 1%), 100% is given to the miners.

Vote with your hashpower. It's how cryptocoins are decentralized and open.

[Impaler]

How many times must we explain that this foundation fund is for the distribution to people who do not and can not mine, not the property of developers.  If you distrust us that is one thing but stop repeating these accusation that we these funds have 'gone to developers'.  Mining over the last few years has become so capitol intensive and centralized that it is simply too undemocratic a process to distribute a coin base upon when the goal of any legitimate currency is broad circulation amongst the general public, not the enrichment of the first adopters.  Mining needs to become a sustainable business and this is why we have provided for an ongoing revenue stream that will support mining in perpetuity.

[🏰 TradeFortress 🏰]

How many times must we explain that this foundation fund is for the distribution to people who do not and can not mine, not the property of developers.  If you distrust us that is one thing but stop repeating these accusation that we these funds have 'gone to developers'.  Mining over the last few years has become so capitol intensive and centralized that it is simply too undemocratic a process to distribute a coin base upon when the goal of any legitimate currency is broad circulation amongst the general public, not the enrichment of the first adopters.  Mining needs to become a sustainable business and this is why we have provided for an ongoing revenue stream that will support mining in perpetuity.

Mining may not be the best way. Proof of stake might not. But this is NOT decentralized. It is centralized. There is a "federal reserve" for FreiCoin, and that was developed by the FreiCoin developers.

You cannot claim that this is a coin "for the 99%" when you have 80% of coins given to a select group of people. You can call it a foundation, corporation, whatever, but it is being given to a group of people in an undemocratic manner.

Vote with your hashpower - if you feel that 80% of what coins should be yours, instead is given to a bunch of hard coded addresses, use the default client.

But if you don't think that's what should happen, use a fork of this open source project that is a fork of bitcoin.

[maaku]

@TradeFortress, please keep that discussion to your own fork thread. This thread is for Freicoin.

[Nyx]

@TradeFortress, please keep that discussion to your own fork thread. This thread is for Freicoin.

but the fork from TradeFortress is maybe the future of Freicoin...

[scrybe]

@TradeFortress, please keep that discussion to your own fork thread. This thread is for Freicoin.

but the fork from TradeFortress is maybe the future of Freicoin...

Because leaving all the original developers and others behind will really help this fork thrive, oh, wait...

If you want to try I0Coin again, feel free, but I doubt you will get very far with an idealistic currency without idealists.

I'm not investing in (just) FRC, I'm investing in maaku, and the concept of the foundation as well. Without these added value items, I'm not that interested in the currency. If someone proves that they are willing to take up the baton and run it forward with the same kind of vigor I might change my mind, but right now I don't see the point except to troll and try to kill the original project.

It's like buying a patent to a product, or the company that invented (or at least produced the relevant innovations around) the product. One is far more likely to succeed than the other.

[galambo]

Boom...

I think another chart would be handy.... hashrate seams to have dropped

More blocks need to be solved before we will have real data on this. It's still greater than 40GH/s, guaranteed, not counting pools I don't know about and solo miners.

The last estimate from ABE came in at 62 GH/s.

For anyone keeping track of this.