Price Stability governance in Cryptocurrencies

[m140v]

With the end of the latest ETF drama and the strange fluxes of the Bitcoin price paired with the meteoric rise of coins such as Dash, there is an interesting conversation to be had about price stability and the measures taken with cryptocurrencies when it comes to price stability.

With Bitcoin, the supply is partially regulated with the difficulty curve changing based on the number of miners.  This has a certain effect on pricing but Bitcoin's price is largely based on perception.  With Ethereum, the price took a massive hit with the DAO and the various forks as the Ethereum VM matures.  In this sense, the adoption of Ethereum as a platform seems to be the main determiner of price. 

Now with 2017 as the year of many ICO's I have stumbled on a coin that has a more strict governance measure for price stability.  BOScoin.  With this particular currency, users can Freeze coins for a reward.  This alone pulls supply out of the system while rewarding issuance to users.  Most interestingly, however, is the concept of timed unlocking.  In order to unfreeze a coin, a user must give 2 weeks notice before unfreezing.  This, as the whitepaper suggests, is a mechanism that stabilizes BOScoin.  The applicable snippet from the paper is below:

From the BOScoin Whitepaper (https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@boscoin/the-boscoin-white-paper):

"Coin Freezing is a Proof of Stake concept where if a user locks-in their coins and in
return they will receive interest based on the number of coins frozen and the length of
time the coins are stored. This interest is called the Freezing Reward. Users can
freeze coins in units, which are sets of 10,000 BOS. Frozen coins are used as
collateral in case of attempted forgery of the blockchain. If a node attempts to forge
the blockchain, a portion of the frozen coins are confiscated and sent to the
Commons Budget. Additionally the system requires two weeks prior notice to
unfreeze coins, as a mechanism to promote price stability."

I think this is a really interesting way for BOScoin to maintain price and protect the system from rapid outflows while offering a reward/incentive to users.  I could also see how this may turn off the more libertarian minded Crypto-enthusiasts.  That said, some level of price governance seems to be an inevitable part of cryptos moving forward if their platform managers wish for the space to move out of being a 'commodity' and start being used by everyone for buying coffee. 

So here are some questions for the economist/cryptocurrency specialists here. How can digital only currencies maintain price?  How important is price stability anyway?  And what do you think about more involved stability measures such those put forth by BOScoin?

[AusKipper]

I came up with an altcoin idea here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1805042.0

That had a price stability function by burning coins for a service within the block chain. The less value the coin has the more coins would be burnt on the storage service, thus possibly helping to stabilize the price.

Proof of Storage coin

Points (not coins) are issued by the network based on the following formula:

-1 point = 1gb hosted for 1 month.
-Any downtime (detected by pinging) reduces profit 10x (ie, if your mining machine is down for 1 day, you lose 10 days worth of profit for that uptime month). Ping checks are performed every 15 minutes, you need to fail 2 to be considered "down". Thus you can install an update and restart without "down time".
-100% of your "storage" has to be downloadable by the network within 1 hour, tested by the network randomly 4 times per month (uptime month of 30 days, not calendar). If you fail this test your profits over this period are reduced by double the amount of failed download, eg, you are hosting (mining with) 4gb of space, a random download attempt occurs and only 90% of the 4gb is downloaded, then your profits are reduced by 20% untill the next random download test.
-When you start mining you do not receive profit for the first uptime week of 7 days (this is to stop people that had some downtime simply creating a new miner on a new wallet straight away)
- Miners are also rewarded the transaction fees of the network, spread evenly to the miners based on points earned in the last 24 hours.
- Proof of Monitoring: You will receive unique codes every 2 hours or so. Entering this code into the mining software will increase your points by .1% for 30 days. This effect stacks so if you enter every code correctly for 30 days and then keep doing it you will then be earning +72% coins.
-1 point per customer gb downloaded from miner (so data downloaded but not including the rubbish data to fill empty space or the network speed testing data). This does mean that 2 miners with the same amount of share could end up earning different amounts of the coin just because they happen to have more or less frequently accessed files on their storage, but, oh well, life isn't fair is it .

Coins are issued at a fixed rate per given time period, and distributed based on a simple ratio, ie, if you earned 1.5% of the points on the network you get 1.5% of the coins.

Use of the storage:
The idea of the coin is just the same as an other cryptocurrency, just using proof of storage instead of proof of work or proof of stake, to get some real world use out of the "security". Unlike "Burst" the storage could be used for useful things.

People would "buy" storage using the coin, this would be done via an auction system held every 10 minutes or so. The auction would be priced as 1gb per 30 days storage. Upon winning the auction the purchaser would then have the next 10 minutes or so to indicate how much storage they wish to buy at that price, up to a cap of a certain percentage of the remaining free space (1% or so probably) If a buyer wins an auction the space is available to them from that point in time for 30 days. If the same buyer then wins the next auction and selects the same amount of storage, the contract changes to the same amount of space but for a length of 60 days. This can continue until they have a 6 month contract or another buyer wins.

Storage on the system would be encrypted, and have multiple redundancy. The level of redundancy would be chosen buy the data purchaser.

Any "free" space on the network would be filled by junk, so if someone is hosting 2tb of data, then 2tb will be consumed on their hard drive regardless of space utilization in the network.

Now this is the important (and I think clever) bit:

Fees paid by purchasers of storage are NOT given to the miners, but are BURNED.

This should, theoretically, stabilize the price of the coin. If the value of the coin is low, more coins are spent to buy storage, thus more coins are burned, thus total supply shrinks.
If the value of the coin is high few coins will be spent on purchasing the storage, thus the coins given to the miners will far outweigh the amount burned and the supply will increase.

Increased adoption of the coin should not increase the value of each coin substantially, but will increase the total supply of them.

Blockchain Cleaning (I have no idea if anything below is remotely viable or technically possible)

Unlike Bitcoin where every transaction ever created is stored this would have the following cleanups:

When creating a new wallet, it would cost 1 coin (the first coin put into it would be burned). Any wallets remaining empty for more than 90 days would be forgotten.

If a wallet does not make any transaction in 100 consecutive 30 day periods it is forgotten

Every so often (few months?) the regular chain stops, assesses which coins are in what wallet, reaches a consensus, creates a new genesis block and automatically assigns all those coins back to those wallets, and starts the block chain again with all old data (transactions) removed from the system

[m140v]

I really dig some of the ideas you have here.  The idea of incentives built around uptime are pretty compelling.  I think perhaps some sort of reward along with the punishments would work as a way to create an incentive spread that attracts people to both begin running a node as well as curating it in a way that keeps the system intact.

I recommend heading to https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1759662.0  and talking to some of the devs about your idea.  Although for a dev building your own coin is an awesome challenge it also requires a significant amount of time and effort that you may not have.  That said, there are a bevy of nascent coins that could really help you put together some of your ideas, if not on an architectural level, on the congressional or application level...