I mentioned a few times that there were 1997 (hashcash) and 1998/1999 (b-money) posts and discussion about how to build digital scarcity and control inflation on the cypherpunks list.
I was just reading some of them, hadnt notice this one last time I looked and it is quite nice (anonymous):
http://marc.info/?l=cypherpunks&m=95279521221935&w=2The quantity of b-money in a mature system is, roughly speaking, constant. (The quantity
may grow, but it will do so slowly, based on the increased demand for b-money.)
(Anon seems to take as a given that b-money would be able to technically solve inflation - the way Wei Dai described it the servers would vote on how much money to create and the cost of creating it per time-interval. Personally I found that prone to human gaming & abuse, eg might people with limited money at stake vote for "lots" and "cheaply" for the two parameters)
So he is referring to the b-money property of supply being increasable by vote amongst servers, but assumes that will remain low and benign. I am not sure this confidence is justifiable - it depends on the motives and interests of the server operators. Maybe he is assuming server operators would be unlikely to agree on > 1% supply side inflation or greater than human population growth %, in a mature deployment.
This one also appears bullish that b-money can be improved:
It's ironic for people to complain that b-money is inferior, in a world in which fiat money is universal. Once the mathematics of b-money are better established and understood, and once the technical issues are clarified and problems solved, this appears to be a very attractive alternative to fiat money. Unlike commodities such as gold, it can be easily exchanged electronically. And unlike fiat money, it is immune to attempts to manipulate the money supply.
http://marc.info/?l=cypherpunks&m=95280154630156&w=2B-money is therefore highly resistant to inflation, and contains mechanisms to automatically adjust the size of the money supply to produce very stable prices over the long term. It would be superior in this regard to virtually any other proposed form of money.
(Again as stated b-money would have allowed on-going supply side inflation according to an average of server voter-for rate at a creation cost based on average vote-for difficulty).
(Found those with search term b-money from
http://marc.info/?l=cypherpunks which finds several threads).
Adam
