Hi, I'm Etlase2. I used to be called etlase, but that account was squelched and posts deleted for vehemently speaking out against bitcoin just prior to the 2011 bubble and collapse.
Being of a programmer's mind, I immediately went to create something better. The first four designs were called Encoin, which attempted to associate coin value to the electricity cost required to produce them. During this time, I read hundreds of papers on cryptography, several books on economics, researched various different economic and monetary theories, and argued with many people.
The latest design is Decrits, which has dropped the idea of a coin having any direct relationship with electricity. The link for the proposal is in my signature, but the design has had many overhauls and fleshings-out since then.
I made a post describing how the minting system would work recently, so I will copy and paste it here. I spent tons of hours designing a system different from bitcoin and that would require several pages to explain, so please assume that the things I take for granted have been proposed, in my notes, how to work.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178140.msg1890016#msg1890016First of all, the energy usage is only one facet. The cost of hardware *does matter*. The human resource cost *does matter*. It doesn't matter what the mhash cost is in real terms is--as long as you can foster competition, people will find ways to do better, and this in turn must raise the difficulty to where the mhash cost is in line with whatever inertiacoin's (potentially original) mhash cost is.
The original way I came up with to foster this competition was to algorithmically change the coin award at certain intervals. During these intervals, miners would be encouraged to lower their output, because if they don't, the difficulty is going to increase. However, more efficient machines would not really be bothered by this and would be able to profit handsomely during this interval. However, for whatever various reasons that could thunk up for this, more efficient machines may not want to or can not oblige, and this could cause a longer-term inflation of the crypto CPI.
I will walk you through what I am currently thinking Decrits will do:
1) It will algorithmically determine the number of coins to be created in the next Mint Block, as I call them.
1a) This number of coins is determined by a percentage of transaction volume over time. (note: for this to matter, transactions must be charged a percentage fee, which in Decrits is 0.01%)
1b) This figure will be difficult and costly to manipulate because it will require significantly increasing the transaction volume of the entire network over a period of a year or more while paying those fees.
2) A Mint Block cannot begin until enough money has been transacted to warrant it.
2a) This will be based on either a (large) percentage, equal to, or a (small) multiplier of the number of coins transacted since the last Mint Block.
3) Once enough money has been transacted, those who wish to create money will have to join a queue to begin the Mint Block.
3a) For the first 25% of the queue, 10% of the individual coin award (the amount each queuer will receive) must be supplied in the currently accepted difficulty with a 10% winning hash and an account number. (note: this can *always* be accomplished in 40-50 bytes because of the account ledger)
3b) For the rest, 5% of the award must be supplied. The most efficient are the most likely to start the next block, but we do not want to unnecessarily raise the difficulty if the majority of people are less efficient, so they get a slight bonus. (This will eventually lead to deflation if we do not account for it, and perhaps because of money supply manipulation.)
3c) Once 75% of the the block's worth has been queued, a minimum amount of time must pass before the queue will close. This figure will be based on some percentage of the the average time it has historically taken to create a Mint Block. (This means that magnitudes more powerful ASICs can not shut others out)
3d) If more than 100% have queued before the minimum amount of time has passed, a random selection of the queued minters will be made to complete the block.
4) Once the block begins, all minters are encouraged to mint at once because:
4a) The coin award is higher the faster you finish. Likely +10% for the top 25%, +5% for the next 25%, -5%, and -10%.
4b) Taking longer than an algorithmically determined amount of time (based on prior blocks) will result in penalties of at least 10% and perhaps more. (e.g. if everybody finished past this time, even the top 25% would still only receive -10% of the promised coin award.)
4c) At some point the block will close, and unminted coins are lost.
5) (Tentative) After the block is over, minters will be randomly assigned to groups (probably of 40) to determine the 10/5/-5/-10 payouts.
5a) This means that there will be groups where ASICs fight ASICs and GPUs fight GPUs (NB: obviously not all of them). This reduces the overall profitability potential of ASICs.
To avoid the p2pool-like data spam, the number of coins mined per queuer must be relatively high. I think the target length for each block will be around 5-10 days. This requires commitment from those minting. It will be annoying. And the fee to join the queue could be completely lost. 50% of those queued will make less than the award.
In addition to all of this, we must eschew mordorcoin and give money away for free. Now we know for damn sure that new money is needed with the difficulties associated with minting. The written decrits proposal proposes giving away 5x of this block of coins to transactions and 5x to existing accounts, both randomly (blocks of accounts will be stored together, and this will be the starting point for awarding free money to them because awarding every account is infeasible in a network of any reasonable size). This area can be nitpicked, but I have come up with some very solid solutions.
In addition to that, because network expansion could easily outpace the time constraints set on Mint Blocks, each successive Mint Block within a defined period will increase the tx/account award further. The second block in a row will award 6x to each. The third will award 7x. This may max out at 10 each, or maybe it could go on continuously (perhaps after 20x the difficulty could start increasing say 3% per block; with so much new money in circulation [especially to transactors], if this causes mild deflation it would likely not have any problems being counteracted). So even in the worst case scenario of everyone instantly switching to ASICs and intentionally not raising the difficulty, designing and producing those ASICs will never be profitable. Plus the inflation has to catch up and raise the average amount of transactions over an extended period, or the ASICs will simply run into a wall where they can not mint for extended periods.
