= Grand Unified Solution to Lost Coins, Hoarding, Deflation, Speculation =

[alexeft]

alexeft:  It is saving without loss that is the problem, if a person saved real goods they would have a carrying-cost to that saved value. 

There is a carrying cost in bitcoin too. It is the mining cost. It has to be paid with most transactions.
Isn't that enough?

[kjj]

This is a common claim that looters like to make to justify their theft.

It turns out to be exactly 180 degrees from truth.  The reality is that savers are doing a service for the market, not the other way around.  By deferring consumption, you are allowing the market to invest the resources that you would have consumed in the construction of new productive assets.  Growing the productive base is a good thing, and should be rewarded.

Saving is not the same as INVESTING, saving is simply withdrawing currency from circulation and dose not result in any increase in future production, in fact all evidence points to a reduction in future production when this is done.  An investment is a form of consumption, capital goods are purchased, buildings constructed etc, this adds to the stock of capitol.  On the other-hand saving simply results in an unconsumed surplus of goods (generally consumer goods) and this reduces the returns of those that produced them causing them to lower production, reduce labor costs and scrap excess capital that can't be productive.  Thus some of the collective stock of capitol is destroyed needlessly, years later this must all be rebuilt to accommodate the new consumption, the wasted capitol if it had been utilized would have lead to an even larger production in the future, this is why boom-and-bust is bad.

Yes, thank you.  What was missing from these forums was yet one more person parroting the stock Keynesian party line.  You even share the perversely keynesian habit of confusing money with wealth in one sentence, and understanding them as distinct things in the next.

I don't point out your obvious Keynesianness as an ad hominem, but rather to simplify the refutation.  The school of economic thought that you follow is not taken as gospel here.  Merely repeating what you've found in your textbooks will not win you many arguments here.

At this time, I only wish to address two things specifically.

When you save, you are deferring consumption.  You are holding the the token representation of wealth, rather than the wealth itself.  The wealth itself is then free to go where the price signals tell it to go, whether to someone else's consumption, or to capital formation depending on the overall market.

Boom and bust is indeed bad, or at least sub-optimal.  However, it is not caused by savings, it is caused by meddling in the price signals.  Keynesians tend to forget that everything they preach involves suppressing or enhancing price signals, making it impossible for the market to provide correct information.

[porcupine87]

Trigonometry and 'Knowledge':  Besides the fact I can't eat trigonometry, it and all other knowledge is useful only when it is in the mind of an educated human being, thus this is whats called human capitol.  Human capitol decays when people die, and they must then be replaced by a laborious process of training new people to be mathematicians.

So you can't eat bitcoins neither. Or gold. Or silver. Or land. There are many good where you don't have decay. Gold and silver are got not because of accident so precious all over the word. Besides other properties like high value-weight-ratio, high fungible, easy to identify, relativ easy divisible etc. gold as the property to be scarce! And because of these properties some goods just qualify to the "the good that everyone accept as part of an transaction = money".

A good that decays do not everybody want. Why? Because of its decay (if there are other good with no decay)!


Like mentioned above there is absolutley no disadvantage with a money which increases in value over time. It is a fact that you can't use bitcoin for something else than spending. You can't eat it, you can't drive with it, you can't wear it. More worth money in your bank account doesn't make you richer. Only if you spend the money, you'll get rich. It is exactly the same as wich stocks. In some day in your life you will sell them, no matter how greatly the value of the stock is rising. Because in some day you are dead.
Otherwise than stocks you don't sell bitcoins, you directly use it as a medium of change.

[Impaler]

There is a carrying cost in bitcoin too. It is the mining cost. It has to be paid with most transactions.
Isn't that enough?

The mining costs clearly get passed onto new people entering BTC, ask yourself, how is the person saving BTC paying for ongoing electrical consumption when their wealth is going UP, that is the opposite of paying for something, that's being paid.

I don't point out your obvious Keynesianness as an ad hominem, but rather to simplify the refutation.  The school of economic thought that you follow is not taken as gospel here.  Merely repeating what you've found in your textbooks will not win you many arguments here.

Pointing out that I am in the minority is not a refutation, it is a simple logical fallacy that is all.  Further more are am well aware that Keynsianism is not gospel here, rather it the rejection of Keynsianism which is the gospel.  Thus I find it necessary to defend people like the OP and point out the errors of the majority position.

Here is a question, why dose the saver get interest for a loan when it is loaned just to another consumer.  The borrower simply performs the consumption of goods that the lender has deferred, their is no overall reduction of consumption, yet the lender still takes interest.


porcupine87:  I never said that all goods decay, please read what I wrote.  I said that non-decaying goods are a small fraction of the basket of goods necessary to live.  And goods necessary to live are always going to be desired regardless of what money is made of.  When a non decaying commodity is made money then it gives money an unfair advantage over the basket of goods.  All money has time-value because it is universally accepted and can act as a wild-card to satisfy unanticipated needs or to take advantage of unanticipated opportunities.  The holder of non decaying money thus received the benefit of liquidity without paying for it, and they can rent out that benefit to earn interest which is how the magic of loss-less savings happens, it's just an inflow of interest to the money holder.

[alexeft]

The holder of non decaying money thus received the benefit of liquidity without paying for it, and they can rent out that benefit to earn interest which is how the magic of loss-less savings happens, it's just an inflow of interest to the money holder.

While in the case of fiat, the flow of interest goes to banks!!! Thus it is experienced as "necessary" decay by fiat money holders!!!

No thanks, I'd rather the interest is distributed among regular people rather than banks and there is no decay.

[BluesBrother]

Brilliant. You basically answered all my concerns.
The problem is scaling it with demand and other things but the premise is great.


Oh yeah like someone mentioned this still leaves the problem with mining. Generally speaking mining always creates the probem of people doing unproductive work getting payed for it because it is the only way to do it. What we have no is digging a stupid hole, filling it an digging it again.

But it's still better than just digging an ever smaller hole and hoarding money as output diminishes.

[Razick]

This is probably the most evil thing I can imagine. But this one simple change would solve every single thing below:

- Solve the problem of lost coins / lost keys
- Prevent hoarding of coins / make it unprofitable in the long run to hoard them
- Encourage people to spend their coins as a currency
- Prevent over-speculation leading to volatility
- Create greater incentives for miners and give miners a reason to mine past 2140
- Eliminate transaction fees completely
- Solve the problem of deflation, while still preventing inflation at the same time (sound impossible? Not with this solution!)

If all those things are solved, mainstream economists would actually take Bitcoin seriously as an economic model, meanwhile the technological protocol and decentralization would be preserved. With this solution, we would still enjoy the benefits of the currency being decentralized, crpytographic, and pseudonymous, while mainstream economists would be more likely to endorse it as a practical currency rather than view it as the commodity / collectible that it currently is.

The grand unified solution is: Have the coins in circulation naturally "decay" over a very long period of time, like a radioactive isotope. Over the course of a year or so, each coin in existence would lose around 0.5%-1% of it's present value. That 1% or so would be re-issued as network fees and greater mining rewards, to the nodes that are actually responsible for sustaining the network. The exact decay rate could be variable based on an algorithm that takes into account the network hash rate and/or transaction volume, or it could be a fixed rate. The decay would have to be calculated at each block, but it should take at least a year to lose the 0.5%-1%.

A simple balance = balance * e^(-bt) where t is the number of seconds elapsed since the last block was created, and b is a very small number (0.00000001-ish) would do the trick.

This would make it so that the value of lost coins asymptotically approaches 0 over a very long period of time, eliminating the need to worry about lost coins causing deflation in the long run. Hoarders will have an incentive to invest rather than hoard. People would spend their currency as a currency rather than speculate and day trade. There would be no need to charge transaction fees since the nodes would be rewarded for moving transactions to blocks this way instead. This will further incentivize spending since users won't be dissuaded by transaction fees.

There would be no inflation, since the number is still capped at 21 million, but all the things that built-in inflation tries to solve in fiat systems, this would solve.

If Bitcoin is going to be adopted by the mainstream, we have to take action to solve every single one of those issues listed above. They are going to be solved anyway, whether it's by us or by them. The world is eventually going to move to a digital currency whether it's ours or theirs, this is beyond question. But if they get to it first and create something that eliminates those issues, it's going to be centralized, not anonymous, not cryptographically secured and will involve banks. If it's going to be us, we have to solve those issues some way soon, and there's not a whole lot of viable solutions for each, let alone singular solutions that fix every one.

Since this is possibly going to upset the "How dare you blaspheme the Sacred Cow by suggesting we change the rules for Bitcoin!" crowd, I humbly add this following. I think we need to let go of this idea that the current rules of Bitcoin are somehow sacred and holy, not to ever be touched because doing so would revile the spirit of the Almighty Satoshi. There is nothing wrong with recognizing a set of flaws in a system and taking action to fix those flaws. They need to be fixed somehow, and the sooner we do it, the easier it will be. If you have a better solution to all of the above, I encourage you to post it.

First of all, that is just another way of putting inflation if you think about it. (It has the same effect). Secondly, didn't some concurrency already do this?

[Razick]

Not a good idea for currency. See Freicoin...demurrage currency ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency) )

Another bad but similar idea: How about a coin that knows who owns it? This way, coins can redistribute themselves from rich people to poor people each week...and currency ownership taxes can be paid automatically every hour!

Haha! That second idea is just hilariously ridiculous.

[ZephramC]

Not a good idea for currency. See Freicoin...demurrage currency ( http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_(currency) )

Another bad but similar idea: How about a coin that knows who owns it? This way, coins can redistribute themselves from rich people to poor people each week...and currency ownership taxes can be paid automatically every hour!

Haha! That second idea is just hilariously ridiculous.

This forum is quite a exception in this. Many people on many other discussion platforms would actually think this is a non-ridiculous good idea...

[bitrick]

Here is a question, why dose the saver get interest for a loan when it is loaned just to another consumer.  The borrower simply performs the consumption of goods that the lender has deferred, their is no overall reduction of consumption, yet the lender still takes interest.

Continuing to take on debt for non-investment consumption is not sustainable and probably not a smart loan to have made in the first place. This is what happens when you have unethical short-term bonus-seeking behavior on the part of bankers with unlimited printed money to play with.

The capital ideally goes towards productive investments. Unfortunately, since the banking system can print money to buy any "investment" (like no-Doc home loans in Detroit) they can find, that leads to loss of investment discipline, malinvestment, and economic contraction as the bad investments are written off. This is exactly what we are going through right now and it is going to get much worse in my opinion. The responses of the Keynesians to their obvious failure is basically, "Well, it's because we aren't making enough bad investments".

I think what you are missing is that savings that would otherwise go to pointless consumption does not bid away the goods and services that productive investments could use. That's a good thing.

[Stampbit]

These "time based" anti-hoarding penalty ideas IE freicoin, just dont work with bitcoin. Anyone can move their money from one address to another and skirt them.

[Impaler]

Stampbit: As we have repeatedly tried to explain to you on our forums, out demurrage code can NOT be subverted by transactions, even moving a coin every single block dose not stop demurrage because it is computer PER BLOCK.  If you want to make economic arguments against demurrage that is one thing, but do not comment on technical designs that you do not understand and appear to have spent no attempt to understand, our code dose what we say it dose.

bitrick:  Obviously loans that are only spent to consume are unsustainable and I never said otherwise.  The question to you is WHY THEY STILL EARN INTEREST when they create nothing?  Further more the whole basis of your argument that 'savings' represent a reduction in consumption and at the same time are 'invested' to create future productivity is trying to have it both ways.  If I literally just remove money from circulation and don't purchase consumer goods no investment is created by this, if anything is causes a decline in investment because demand is now lower and the decrease in circulating money has cancelled any cheapening of the remaining good that might have occurred, so now theirs just over capacity and some portion of existing capitol has to be abandoned.  If I instead Invest money either directly or by loaning it to someone then that investment IS consumption, it's just the purchase of capital goods rather then consumer goods and the total consumption has remained constant and merely changed in composition.

No one can make a rational argument that simply stuffing money under a mattress has a positive effect on the economy or increases future wealth in any way, it is instead a tax on productivity and this has been know for centuries.  Investment CAN be productive and every reasonable person can see how it generates real returns and increased wealth, but mattress stuffers can not claim those benefits as being caused by their actions.  BitCoins economy is pure mattress stuffing without a hint of productive investment (no before you ask buying an ASIC with BTCs is not a productive investment), and the nature of the coin guarantees it always will be hoarded, that is the flaw in deflationary economics.

[MonkeyBear68]

One idea that makes some sense might be to free up the BTC in wallets that are over say 127 years old. We can be certain that those bitcoins are truly lost as their owner would be dead. Those bitcoins could be added to the pool available for mining. Incidentally in 127 years it will be 2140, so it would be perfect timing for those lost BTC to serve as a reward for the future miners.

Anyone that inherits BTC would move it to their own wallet, so that the expiry limit would be reset for those BTC.

[herzmeister]

but mattress stuffers can not claim those benefits as being caused by their actions.  BitCoins economy is pure mattress stuffing without a hint of productive investment

1. what's wrong with taking control of the stored information of the value of my labor?

2. saving is merely a deferred form of investment. Saving up first will be preferred to loaning.

3. there is no value removed from circulation, especially if it's only the bits and bytes of a cryptocoin, and not silver that would actually perhaps be needed for other productive procession. If I die without passing on all my bitcoins, no productive value in society is lost. Bitcoins withheld from circulation merely raise the value of all others, until I spend them. At most this causes higher volatility than necessary. But with sufficient adoption, things will even out.

[alexeft]

I'd say we have another nice economic term for theft. Demurrage!!!!

I'd also say that producing for the sake of production adds nothing but loans and indirect slavery, as is proven these days.

[Impaler]

1. what's wrong with taking control of the stored information of the value of my labor?

What kind of non-sequiter is that?  Your paycheck is the valuation of your labor and uses the units of currency to denominate that value, the question is do you deserve to be given more, equivalent or less value by society then your labor was initially worth at a later date by just stuffing the currency token under a mattress.  You argue that your act of stuffing is somehow increasing societal wide wealth in the future and thus your somehow entitled to that increased wealth (which even your argument was made by someone else's investment and work).

2. saving is merely a deferred form of investment. Saving up first will be preferred to loaning.

Then you admit that investing and not saving is the source of future wealth?  If so then only the investor can make a claim to a have earned a surplus, aka a return on investment.  Even if saving (capital formation) is a prerequisite to investment it is not investing, no risk has been taken yet.  Show me ware BTCs are actually invested in anything productive (no mining or circulating more BTCs dose not count) and I'll admit the possibility that someone might have earned a return.

3. there is no value removed from circulation, especially if it's only the bits and bytes of a cryptocoin, and not silver that would actually perhaps be needed for other productive procession. If I die without passing on all my bitcoins, no productive value in society is lost. Bitcoins withheld from circulation merely raise the value of all others, until I spend them. At most this causes higher volatility than necessary. But with sufficient adoption, things will even out.

Again your trying to have it both ways, if BTC's are meant to be currency then hoarding them is removing currency from circulation, removing currency from circulation causes money to rise in value and goods to drop in price.  This sends price signals through the economy and it is not a signal that encourages anyone to invest, it tells producers they are making TOO MUCH and to make less instead. 

The actual demand removed from the economy is sending the same "Their is too much stuff" signal, but the money reduction is being multiplied by the velocity it previously had, the 1 currency unit would have circulated multiple times buying goods and services and would have supported prices even more, the longer the currency is not circulating the more purchases it is failing to influence.

An investment though IS spent, its just spent on capital goods.  This sends a signal that production of capital goods should continue or even increase.  If the investment improves production and lowers costs then the investor can sell at a lower price while still making a profit and then his lower prices can make other activities profitable.  When deflation occurs from reduction in consumption and money supply their is no business that benefits because they have unsold inventory that loses value on the shelf and can then never cover it's cost of production.  So business reduce production to match the lower demand.

The end result of deflation is always a destruction of capacity and capitol to the point ware goods become so scarce that they stop falling in price and the deflation burns itself out.  The greater the deflation the more physical capitol is wasted or lost.

[herzmeister]

You're still in a way of thinking that assumes a single monopolistic dominant currency.

Bitcoin is not even "deflationary", because it is not an enforced monopoly money. It is just an asset. It follows supply and demand. So you could ask even today, why should I lend someone my dollars, if I can buy bitcoins instead? Simply because bitcoins exist, you would therefore want to charge high interest even on dollar loans. Or would you? No, because, as we see, the value of Bitcoin fluctuates; it is therefore not deflationary. And even in an economy that is dominated by the Bitcoin currency, it will have to compete with other assets that may promise higher return. So the average interest rate in an economy that is not dominated by a central bank would have nothing to do with the mainly used currency. It will rather be the median of any assets out there.

Or to put it in another way: We could abolish the concept of a currency altogether. All we'd have is assets and price indices (baskets of goods etc) that all fluctuate in value against each other. And everyone would be responsible for themselves which assets they would choose to store the information of the value of their labor in.

[Razick]

One idea that makes some sense might be to free up the BTC in wallets that are over say 127 years old. We can be certain that those bitcoins are truly lost as their owner would be dead. Those bitcoins could be added to the pool available for mining. Incidentally in 127 years it will be 2140, so it would be perfect timing for those lost BTC to serve as a reward for the future miners.

Anyone that inherits BTC would move it to their own wallet, so that the expiry limit would be reset for those BTC.

I still don't like the idea because in the end we can't see every effect. What if someone wanted to save Bitcoins in a cold wallet for their great grand kid's retirement?

[alexeft]

One idea that makes some sense might be to free up the BTC in wallets that are over say 127 years old. We can be certain that those bitcoins are truly lost as their owner would be dead. Those bitcoins could be added to the pool available for mining. Incidentally in 127 years it will be 2140, so it would be perfect timing for those lost BTC to serve as a reward for the future miners.

Anyone that inherits BTC would move it to their own wallet, so that the expiry limit would be reset for those BTC.

I still don't like the idea because in the end we can't see every effect. What if someone wanted to save Bitcoins in a cold wallet for their great grand kid's retirement?

Exactly. And who is to say which account is in use and which one is just lost and forgotten?

[ChanceCoats123]

My apologies if this has been mentioned, but if day trading causes the volatility and coins take at least a year to decay, how does that decrease day trading?