PPCoin is the only ALTcoin

[tacotime]

The strict definition in economic terms is in regards to the money supply.

This.

[bootlace]

The strict definition in economic terms is in regards to the money supply.

This is no longer the case, look at Investopedia or Wikipedia or anywhere for that matter for a definition - the way the word is used in modern lexicon has changed.


"The term "inflation" originally referred to increases in the amount of money in circulation, and some economists still use the word in this way. However, most economists today use the term "inflation" to refer to a rise in the price level. An increase in the money supply may be called monetary inflation, to distinguish it from rising prices, which may also for clarity be called 'price inflation'"

Source: http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/Commentary/1997/1015.pdf

[James Bond]

Has anyone tried to create a P2P currency with stable prices yet?

Since the price of a currency is set by supply and demand, like anything else, you'd have to adjust the supply of the currency with changing demand. You could use transaction volume as a proxy for demand (or is it actual demand?). It's easy enough to increase the money supply with that rule: perhaps you could adjust block rewards. I have been wondering how to decrease the money supply, however: if you have an idea, please let me know. Perhaps this model could create a currency that wasn't a factor in economic decisions: people would be indifferent as to whether they held or spent it. It could then just be used for what money is for: transferring value over time and between people.

BTW, I like the name P2PCoin for it.

[James Bond]

I just now read that Freicoin has demurrage (holding) fees, and it occurred to me that you could destroy the coins collected through those fees, reducing the money supply.

[yvv]

I have not checked out Freicoin, I heard something bad like its either premined/dead/51%'ed/scam or something of that sort but probably worth a look considering all the BS flying around on these forums.

No, they are not premined or dead (they are younger then ppcoin by few months), and they are definitely not scam. They are trying to address some economic and social aspects of cryptocurrency, and they are definitely not morons.
 

[bootlace]

Has anyone tried to create a P2P currency with stable prices yet?

Since the price of a currency is set by supply and demand, like anything else, you'd have to adjust the supply of the currency with changing demand. You could use transaction volume as a proxy for demand (or is it actual demand?). It's easy enough to increase the money supply with that rule: perhaps you could adjust block rewards. I have been wondering how to decrease the money supply, however: if you have an idea, please let me know. Perhaps this model could create a currency that wasn't a factor in economic decisions: people would be indifferent as to whether they held or spent it. It could then just be used for what money is for: transferring value over time and between people.

BTW, I like the name P2PCoin for it.

Some good ideas here but don't you think transaction volume can be gamed easily, for example through constant transfer of money from one of your wallets to the other. Higher transfer fees could dissuade people from gaming the system in this way but low transaction fees are one of the best features of this digital currency so I don't like that option too much.

I can offer no better alternative at this moment, so let me ponder this for a bit.

[pyra-proxy]

Has anyone tried to create a P2P currency with stable prices yet?

Since the price of a currency is set by supply and demand, like anything else, you'd have to adjust the supply of the currency with changing demand. You could use transaction volume as a proxy for demand (or is it actual demand?). It's easy enough to increase the money supply with that rule: perhaps you could adjust block rewards. I have been wondering how to decrease the money supply, however: if you have an idea, please let me know. Perhaps this model could create a currency that wasn't a factor in economic decisions: people would be indifferent as to whether they held or spent it. It could then just be used for what money is for: transferring value over time and between people.

BTW, I like the name P2PCoin for it.

Some good ideas here but don't you think transaction volume can be gamed easily, for example through constant transfer of money from one of your wallets to the other. Higher transfer fees could dissuade people from gaming the system in this way but low transaction fees are one of the best features of this digital currency so I don't like that option too much.

I can offer no better alternative at this moment, so let me ponder this for a bit.

You could use average transaction count and average transaction size in a difficulty like equation, when he number of transactions goes down and the typical size of transaction goes up that could be a leading indicator of decreasing currency evaluations, in the reverse you might expect increasing currency evaluations and when only one or the other metric changes perhaps only minor currency evaluations are taking place?....

[Jutarul]

Lmao at people listening to Smoothie. He is a self proclaimed troll

What you PEE PEE fan boys forget:

1. PPC has not proven to have fixed the previously found vulnerabilities exposed by jutarul and have not proven the 'new' POS algorithm to be well tested for exploits.

2. Shady development.

3. Sunny's ineptitude to discuss publicly his design of the NEW POS algorithm.

Dont take something as truth just because you heard it was "energy-efficient" etc.

What is the point of energy efficiency if their is an exploit that still needs to be fixed within the code?

I prefer not to touch this coin until Sunny comes out and addresses my three points above with 100% transparency.

 

Oh and as a TRADER, I know what not to touch/invest in when the writing is on the wall.

1. All the vulnerabilities have been fixed, just like Bitcoins early problems were fixed. Go ahead and exploit one of these vulnerabilities you are talking about?

Right now the easiest exploit is probably to hack one of the nodes doing the checkpointing and steal the private keys for signing the checkpoints. Then pick a target merchant and feed them checkpoints for a faulty chain at a rate faster than the main network. Then trade PPC and move BTC off the exchange. The merchant gets stuck on a wrong chain and will (likely) stay there due to the checkpointing policy. Meanwhile, you introduce a transaction into the main network which moves the PPC you used for the merchant to another address.
Haven't studied that attack vector in detail, but it should work, theoretically. In fact, if Sunny would be one of the bad guys, he could probably exploit that himself and frame others or hide behind TOR. However, given what we've seen of Sunny so far, I doubt he would go so far. Anyway - just making the point that the network is centralized.

[Sunny King]

Right now the easiest exploit is probably to hack one of the nodes doing the checkpointing and steal the private keys for signing the checkpoints. Then pick a target merchant and feed them checkpoints for a faulty chain at a rate faster than the main network. Then trade PPC and move BTC off the exchange. The merchant gets stuck on a wrong chain and will (likely) stay there due to the checkpointing policy. Meanwhile, you introduce a transaction into the main network which moves the PPC you used for the merchant to another address.
Haven't studied that attack vector in detail, but it should work, theoretically. In fact, if Sunny would be one of the bad guys, he could probably exploit that himself and frame others or hide behind TOR. However, given what we've seen of Sunny so far, I doubt he would go so far. Anyway - just making the point that the network is centralized.

This attack has been considered before ppcoin's initial release so the checkpoint has built-in confliction detection. Nodes would not accept conflicting checkpoints and would set a warning message. I think Balthazar last week misoperated the checkpoint master in novacoin so the warning was triggered on novacoin users. So this mechanism is working as designed.

Given the current market acceptance of ppcoin, it's likely the central checkpointing could be phased out to be advisory later this year.

[James Bond]

Has anyone tried to create a P2P currency with stable prices yet? ...

Some good ideas here but don't you think transaction volume can be gamed easily, for example through constant transfer of money from one of your wallets to the other. Higher transfer fees could dissuade people from gaming the system in this way but low transaction fees are one of the best features of this digital currency so I don't like that option too much.

I can offer no better alternative at this moment, so let me ponder this for a bit.

Perhaps, and maybe you'd never know till you tested it in the real world, but I'm skeptical there would be a profit in gaming the system that way. I suppose someone could want to make the currency dip to buy low (or if shorting it, if that were possible). If they did a lot of tiny transactions they'd generate a lot of fees relative to how much they were able to move the currency however. And if they did larger transactions, they'd be lowering the value of the currency they were holding by manipulating the inflation rate.

[James Bond]

Has anyone tried to create a P2P currency with stable prices yet?

Since the price of a currency is set by supply and demand, like anything else, you'd have to adjust the supply of the currency with changing demand. You could use transaction volume as a proxy for demand (or is it actual demand?). It's easy enough to increase the money supply with that rule: perhaps you could adjust block rewards. I have been wondering how to decrease the money supply, however: if you have an idea, please let me know. Perhaps this model could create a currency that wasn't a factor in economic decisions: people would be indifferent as to whether they held or spent it. It could then just be used for what money is for: transferring value over time and between people.

You could use average transaction count and average transaction size in a difficulty like equation, when he number of transactions goes down and the typical size of transaction goes up that could be a leading indicator of decreasing currency evaluations, in the reverse you might expect increasing currency evaluations and when only one or the other metric changes perhaps only minor currency evaluations are taking place?....

Are you suggesting changes in average transaction size as a direct measure of inflation? Interesting idea. I'm assuming coins traded, the standard measure of volume/demand, is best, however, unless I'm persuaded otherwise. We have a recent example of how # of transactions or size might be misleading: transaction #s soared and transaction size must have plummeted (I'm presuming the latter) when Satoshi Dice came online and withing weeks accounted for more transactions than the rest of the bitcoin network combined.

[mr_random]

Right now the easiest exploit is probably to hack one of the nodes doing the checkpointing and steal the private keys for signing the checkpoints. Then pick a target merchant and feed them checkpoints for a faulty chain at a rate faster than the main network. Then trade PPC and move BTC off the exchange. The merchant gets stuck on a wrong chain and will (likely) stay there due to the checkpointing policy. Meanwhile, you introduce a transaction into the main network which moves the PPC you used for the merchant to another address.
Haven't studied that attack vector in detail, but it should work, theoretically. In fact, if Sunny would be one of the bad guys, he could probably exploit that himself and frame others or hide behind TOR. However, given what we've seen of Sunny so far, I doubt he would go so far. Anyway - just making the point that the network is centralized.

This attack has been considered before ppcoin's initial release so the checkpoint has built-in confliction detection. Nodes would not accept conflicting checkpoints and would set a warning message. I think Balthazar last week misoperated the checkpoint master in novacoin so the warning was triggered on novacoin users. So this mechanism is working as designed.

Given the current market acceptance of ppcoin, it's likely the central checkpointing could be phased out to be advisory later this year.

Excellent stuff. 

[No_2]

(Hint: Bitcoin is neither)

Can you explain what you mean by that?

[spartacusrex]

1) Can someone explain if POS does actually solve the Byzantine General Problem - and if so why it needs POW aswell. This I don't get..

2) I'm not sure I like the voting in ppCoin.. I want a Mathematical currency. 1+1=2. Etc.. This should not be up for debate.

3) There's nothing for nothing in this world. The Energy used in maintaining the Bitcoin network, by the Bitcoin Miners, is the price we pay for the Crypto-Currency to WORK.. seems fair enough?

If you ask me THE ONLY viable ALT-COIN will be the first coin whose protocol is ABSOLUTELY specified at launch..

All a crypto-currency should be, is basically a piece of paper describing it well enough, so that we can all right our own implementations..

C may be the Grand-Daddy, but Java is the Internet's language.. I want to write one in JAVA from the ground up.. ! 

[spacegoat]

can someone in a few words explain to me how ppc is invulnerable to 51% atacks?  they are saying over at TRC that they need to implement PPC retargeting to fix ttheir problem.  can somebody expllain in a few words what this means?  and what affect it would have on TRC?  thank you

[spartacusrex]

Also - if PPCoin also uses POW, and having read the specs, it seems like there will be alternate POS and POW blocks, to prevent certain attack vectors, does this not mean that PPCoin will be just as, (1/2), energy hungry as bitcoin ?

[pyra-proxy]

Also - if PPCoin also uses POW, and having read the specs, it seems like there will be alternate POS and POW blocks, to prevent certain attack vectors, does this not mean that PPCoin will be just as, (1/2), energy hungry as bitcoin ?

I don't think it is an alternating schedule, I think ppc can go all PoS or all PoW as they each have their own difficulty and both types of block verification are kind of competitive with each other.... but that could be a misunderstanding on my part.....

[robamichael]

(Hint: Bitcoin is neither)

Can you explain what you mean by that?

The Bitcoin money supply is finite, and will eventually cease its expansion. At this point, the amount of BTC will be static, unchanging.

This makes it neither inflationary nor deflationary (it's money supply does not increase or contract). However, there will inevitably be some loss of coins due to human error/carelessness. This means the currency will ultimately be slightly deflationary.

Assuming Bitcoin reaches its static point (~year 2140), there are few things that could happen.


It demand continues to increase, possibly because people prefer more exposure to BTC vs other assets, or that the number of users grows, and the BTC price will rise. Remember that for each purchase there is a sale. In the case of increasing demand, a holder of Bitcoin must be persuaded by a higher price to be parted with his BTC stock. Otherwise, he/she is happy with his current exposure to BTC (Maybe he is happy with 40% held in BTC currency).

Demand could also wane at some point. Basically the reverse of the above will lead to a depreciating BTC. For example, lower population, BTC competition, and a discovered vulnerability are all possible causes to a decrease in demand. Again, each seller has a buyer, so the price is determined by a preference for exposure to BTC vs other assets.

If Bitcoin is a great success, it will likely go through periods of both appreciation and depreciation. With this type of stability, the value of BTC would be most dependent on public sentiment. How its value is measured is another topic altogether. It may be that you are no longer trading dollars for BTC, but are instead reaching for a pocket full of yuan, Litecoin, or gold.

[Impaler]

JB:  We had extensive discussions about adjustable monetary base in FRC durring the design phase.  As we knew we would have demurrage that would have been the money removal method, and by adjusting our 're-injection' percentage above or below 100% we would effectively grow or shrink supply.  So while the mechanics of doing it were simple the amount was not.

In this thread, Jt and Sepp discuss an adjustable base targets extensively and Jt in my opinion makes some excellent arguments for why the simple first-order statistics from the chain can't be relied on to correctly pick a target supply.
http://www.freicoin.org/adjustable-coin-base-t19-10.html

Also in this thread Jt and several folks discuss if adjustable supply is even necessary after the anticipated stabilizing effects of demurrage are taken into account.  Not everyone was convinced entirely (and Jt was by his own admission playing devils-advocate), it was generally concluded that we should see significant benefits from demurrage even under a static money supply.
http://www.freicoin.org/should-we-fear-deflation-when-there-s-demurrage-t7.html

In this final thread I present my thoughts on creating 'bonds' inside the block-chain and using them initially for the control of demurrage rates, but also money-supply which I conclude must be addressed together.
http://www.freicoin.org/decentralized-auto-adjusting-demurrage-t51.html

[James Bond]

Thanks for those links Impaler. I'll read them when I have a chance. I noted your reply in the other thread as well. I've been struggling with how to define demand for a currency myself since I posted in the other thread.