Idea for a utopic digital currency

[bootlace]

The Bitcoin experiment is very fascinating and I really commend the creators for such an ingenious idea. However, I think we can all agree it can be improved and is not the final word in digital currencies.

Here is my idea of what a more utopicdigital currency would look like and what differences would exist compared to Bitcoin:

-Turn the "mining" part into something useful: One of the main criticisms of Bitcoin or other altcoins is that it has no intrinsic value. Just 'maintaining' the system is not deemed as having real life value, and clones can be created at will (like Bytecoin recently) which further dilute any scarcity factor the system claims to have. Early adopters having a lot of the initial coins is deemed unfair because, again, just maintaining the system isn't deemed as having enough value to deserve tons of money in exchange. So how to fix this? How about lending computing power to things that actually can have an impact on people's wellbeings and the general economy. For example:

-Aid in the folding@home project which uses computer power in cancer research
-Provide your computer as some kind of server for cloud technologies or hosting service
-Help companies seed files in the future  when P2P technology is used to transfer digital files
-There are tons of real life uses of computers that can be applied to this (perhaps even applying more subjective jobs as found in sites like Fiverr and Amazon's Mechanical Turk).

So the more you lend your computer for real life uses like this, the more money you earn in exchange. All of a sudden people really start 'earning' the digital coin that is being distributed, because it has commercial and humanitarian value. Businesses, individuals, governments, NGOs can tap into this service and pay up in the form of donations to charities relatively equal to 50% of the real life value of such a service (paid in gold in order to remove sovereign currency manipulation from the equation). The other 50% of the value goes in the form of digital credits into the system as 'coins' but is not actually paid out in gold (% ratio can be altered). This has a multitude of benefits 1) businesses get the service for cheaper (50% of market price) and more likely to use it over more 'professional' options 2) no computing power is 'wasted' because businesses have to spend real money and hence this service cant be spammed 3) charities have loads of money, making the world a better place 4) digital coins are handed out to people that have 'intrinsic value' (karma from doing good to the world).

So then the amount of "money" in this digital economy is close to equal to the amount of real life value created aka no bubble. Businesses start accepting this money , because they already use this service to cut costs, and also for PR purposes because which company doesn't want to b eseen supporting such a lofty cause. Slowly but surely, this digital currency would spread around the world until there is more of it.  Eventually this digital currency can be used by the businesses instead of gold to pay for the computing power/services they require and charities in turn use this digital currency to buy whatever it is that they need to help their cause.

The main barrier to such a system is obviously creating a decentralized platform that 1) accepts jobs 2) sets prices 3) distributes jobs to idle computers around the world 4) validates the work done 5) processes and makes payments to random charity and the worker 6) and creates a P2P maintained ledger of all of these transactions and account balances similar to the Bitcoin system now. Ok that does sound like quite a sci-fi platform but 'nothing is impossible' right...I guess it would be pretty easy to set up as a normal 'centralized' website, but decentralization seems essential in our day and age with all the corruption, manipulation, and politics going around.

I realize this is very far fetched and probably full of holes, but if anything close to this implemented, it could really change the world for the better so why not dream and brainstorm to see what we can come up with. One potential worry is how much value can actually be created in the real economy with just computing power - it might take ages for this digital economy to have any sort of significant market cap. But I feel like the world is getting more and more technology dependent so it could be more significant than we think as things like 3D printers, crowdsourcing, open source, robotics, social media, internet of things, 'big data' all become a bigger part of our lives.

PS: The reason why the money goes to charities is because I wouldn't want a centralized company holding the gold in storage somewhere and acting as a "backer" of the digital currency (sounds too much like our crooked financial system) and also because its about damn time the world started moving away from pure greed based capitalism and more into some sort of socialist style system that still encourages productivity, efficiency and labor.

Thoughts?

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[Elwar]

One of the main criticisms of Bitcoin or other altcoins is that it has no intrinsic value.

It does have intrinsic value outside of just a currency.

Coming soon.

[BTCisthefuture]

My idea of a utopic of a digital currency is very simple....... a stable currency. For now Bitcoin is too volatile and varies in value way too much way too quick for me to realistically want to use it as an actual currency.  Right now it's more a commodity than a currency. Hopefully that changes in the future.

[bitsalame]

Wrong 1: Don't complicate unnecessarily things that work, period. Learn the KISS principle.
Wrong 2: The intrinsic value of bitcoins is its trust and freedom.
Wrong 3: The volatility has nothing to do with the mining process.

Descentralized, anonymous, counterfeit proof, impervious to manipulation, global transference and transparency.
Tell me a fiat currency that has these properties.
That's the intrinsic value of the bitcoins.

The intrinsic value is generally misunderstood.
The intrinsic value of a paper money is not the market worth of the piece of paper.
The real value of the paper money is that it allows barter through time and space, and that it is backed by a government that guarantees that it will be accepted as money anywhere it goes.
It is not backed by gold, it is backed at the blind trust towards the government.

Bitcoins on the other hand are backed by its people, democratizing money.
This has very strong implications, ideologically and technically.
And that's why those who are smart enough will end up adopting Bitcoins once they discover what this is really about.

PS: I just hope we have enough smart people. The smart to smartass ratio is what actually worries me.

[Mike Christ]

The only utopia is the voluntary utopia.  All other utopias are undesirable.

However, I would like to see the hashing power burned out on Bitcoin going toward something besides PoW.  It's intentionally inefficient--not a bad thing, but not a good thing, either.

[bitsalame]

I mean, it would be great if the PoW could kill two birds with one stone.
But that would not have an impact in its volatility. If such a system is ever developed, it will be swinging like crazy just like now.
The reason is the small inefficient market. Bitcoins are also in its infancy, with some more time the market will become more efficient.

[fr33d0miz3r]

Good idea. 

[Ls777]

New to bitcoin, but as far as I understand, it's the mining that keeps the currency completely secure from being hacked. How would another currency approach the security problem without becoming centralized?

[bitsalame]

New to bitcoin, but as far as I understand, it's the mining that keeps the currency completely secure from being hacked. How would another currency approach the security problem without becoming centralized?

precisely.

[bootlace]

Wrong 1: Don't complicate unnecessarily things that work, period. Learn the KISS principle.

Hah, you could say this about every single bit of technology that ever received some kind of initial niche adoption and yet if people thought as you did we would stop having any innovation but yet technology keeps on evolving becoming better and better. If you think Bitcoin is the final word on digital currencies, at this young stage in this 'technologiy's' life...I guess you either have a lot of faith in Bitcoin, or not enough faith in human ingenuity.

Wrong 2: The intrinsic value of bitcoins is its trust and freedom.

Sorry, but I don't buy this intrinsic value you propose of Bitcoin, we're suppose to 'trust' a large chunk of the economies money into the hands of a few individuals who we don't even know the identity of??

Wrong 3: The volatility has nothing to do with the mining process.

I guess you're responding to someone else here, but a lack of any intrinsic value, a lack of any solid fundamentals to judge the currencies value, a proneness to clones with limited barriers to entry, a deflationary long term outlook, and its virtual nature that has no physical connection to the real world all mean plenty of volatility. 


I never said fiat has intrinsic value either, that's why people are looking for alternatives. Gold has intrinsic value (a rare metal that has some unbelievable natural properties) and that's why it has been the predominant form of money for much of human history up until the last 40 years. Unfortunately gold sucks as a form of currency as its too cumbersome for our modern times.

I do agree with some of what you're saying, but I think you're a bit too close minded...currencies and money will keep changing and evolving as humans do and as time goes, this is undeniable and thinking we've struck the perfect system on the first real new attempt doesn't seem right.

[hanzac]

Your idea is good only for saving the energy and avoiding the waste. This is nice but is there any other way to maintain strong security without intense computation?

Actually, I think Bitcoin is doing good towards the saving energy (the ASIC miners) and also has strong security.

So there's no need for some other kind of so-called utopic digital currency to serve as the payment system.

The only thing we lack today is building a better trust system to encourage the market trading freedom. If that happens, everyone will happy except these scammers of course.

[herzmeister]

We could try to find something to merge-mine that is also very valuable.

What kind of database would be worthwhile to have in such a distributed way without requiring to trust a central administrator or website? Maybe something like wikipedia?

Kind of like we already have a solution and we're looking for a problem.

[bitsalame]

Something really useful for humanity as a whole would be:

1) Protein folding.
2) Brain mapping.

[kriwest]

Something really useful for humanity as a whole would be:

1) Protein folding.
2) Brain mapping.

This. I would love to be able to combine mining and folding at the same time. The mining part would be like getting paid for folding, so you're actually doing some real useful work. I bet it could act as a carrot for people to join in, leading to more computer power being available to scientists. And the scientists in turn would want the currency to succeed - so they would make sure that it's possible to buy stuff with it, making it valuable.

Folding@home is great - bitcoin is great. Folding + coin = revolution?
I love the idea.

[bitsalame]

Wrong 1: Don't complicate unnecessarily things that work, period. Learn the KISS principle.

Hah, you could say this about every single bit of technology that ever received some kind of initial niche adoption and yet if people thought as you did we would stop having any innovation but yet technology keeps on evolving becoming better and better. If you think Bitcoin is the final word on digital currencies, at this young stage in this 'technologiy's' life...I guess you either have a lot of faith in Bitcoin, or not enough faith in human ingenuity.

Wrong 2: The intrinsic value of bitcoins is its trust and freedom.

Sorry, but I don't buy this intrinsic value you propose of Bitcoin, we're suppose to 'trust' a large chunk of the economies money into the hands of a few individuals who we don't even know the identity of??

Wrong 3: The volatility has nothing to do with the mining process.

I guess you're responding to someone else here, but a lack of any intrinsic value, a lack of any solid fundamentals to judge the currencies value, a proneness to clones with limited barriers to entry, a deflationary long term outlook, and its virtual nature that has no physical connection to the real world all mean plenty of volatility. 


I never said fiat has intrinsic value either, that's why people are looking for alternatives. Gold has intrinsic value (a rare metal that has some unbelievable natural properties) and that's why it has been the predominant form of money for much of human history up until the last 40 years. Unfortunately gold sucks as a form of currency as its too cumbersome for our modern times.

I do agree with some of what you're saying, but I think you're a bit too close minded...currencies and money will keep changing and evolving as humans do and as time goes, this is undeniable and thinking we've struck the perfect system on the first real new attempt doesn't seem right.

The intrinsic value of gold is minimal compared to the extrinsic value that you see reflected in the prices.
Certainly it is not worth at all the prices reflected in the market, the speculative bubble that raises on times of crises are at all not reflective of the intrinsic value of gold.
The price of Gold is based on its scarcity rather than in its utility and it is terribly overpriced on its justified/unjustified demand.

And if you don't understand the word trust when we talk about bitcoins, you certainly don't understand how bitcoins work.
Please read more about its design before making inferences that are irrelevant and not applicable to bitcoins.

[BitByteBite]

There are companies that pay you to use your CPU (cpusage.com) but I agree if you could decentralise the network and reward miners for actual work it just adds to the intrinsic value of a coin. The current work being done on the network feels very wasteful IMO, and would be better spent doing real world problem solving while hashing at the same time. Maybe folding@home projects could integrate a coin based reward system with company donations giving real world value to the coin.
Or maybe there can be a way to have a decentralised body that can distribute the network power and income that it generates? Possibly a voting system built into the mining software that is controlled by the people?

My 2 cents..

[nonameo]

There are companies that pay you to use your CPU (cpusage.com) but I agree if you could decentralise the network and reward miners for actual work it just adds to the intrinsic value of a coin. The current work being done on the network feels very wasteful IMO, and would be better spent doing real world problem solving while hashing at the same time. Maybe folding@home projects could integrate a coin based reward system with company donations giving real world value to the coin.
Or maybe there can be a way to have a decentralised body that can distribute the network power and income that it generates? Possibly a voting system built into the mining software that is controlled by the people?

My 2 cents..

They aren't paying out right now.

http://www.cpusage.com/blog/corp-comm/why-arent-i-accruing-any-points/

[p4xil]

SETI@home + mining.... maybe we finally find some extra terrestrials

[BitByteBite]

  maybe satoshi is an alien, and bitcoin is their currency and they're just waiting until we switch and they come and buy us out