BitCoinTokens - an alternative currency approach.

[FredericBastiat]

Why not just pre-mine a fixed 21 billion coins (or some arbitrarly large fiat dollar amount that's eventually harder to manipulate) and then use those coins to do a fiat-to-bitcointoken bailment service until you run out of the bailed token digital coins. We could call them BitCoinTokens (BCT).

It would be exactly like E-gold or GoldMoney (or similar to Paypal, Dwolla or Amazon Payments) but decentralized and initially tied to fiat currencies. It's audited dayly if not hourly (using a blockchain like bitcoin) so that everyone sees that the total number of digital coins in circulation represents only the total in fiat reserve on the exchange.

The exchanges are open source and immediately auditable. You want and need as many exchange participants as possible to effectuate a distributed fiat exchange trust network. All of them vying to put the pre-mined BCT's into circulation but restrained by the market participants (account holders of circulating BCT) to only introduce 1 BCT for every 1 USD fiat vaulted until they exceed the 21 billion coin total.

Everybody purchases or exchanges to BCTs until they're all in circulation and the equivalent fiat value sits in a digital vault doing nothing (except the occasional bailment event). Fees are paid to miners to handle the transaction authentication instead of engaging in mining into existence more coins, as this tends to not track world currencies very nicely (too much volatility for some reason). The BCT in circulation will initially represent exact equivalent USD (or other fiat currency) until the fiat market reserve in the vault total exceeds the total pre-mined amount of BCTs (i.e. USD in reserve/vault >= total pre-mined BCTs).

Once you exceed the reserve amount (it's no longer a 1:1 ratio between BCT and fiat dollar reserves), you let your BCT float against the major currency pairs in the real world. At this point your BCTs will probably rise since most fiat currencies are inflationary (typically not desired) but not as quickly now since it represents a 21 billion dollar fiat market as opposed to a bootstrapped currency. At this point it should be more stable, at least you hope. More BCT critical mass as it were.

The author of the BCT alt-currency can't spend the coins without the permission of the majority of the constituent traders in the network (done mathematically via smart contracts with the "miners" or "transaction handlers"). That way the author can't arbitrarily introduce into general circulation the supply of token coins independent of the users (i.e. not allowed to introduce into circulation more BCT than the equivalent amount of fiat in reserve in the vault). Remember this is primarily and initially a bailment service. Once you exceed the total BCT token quantity you immediately go to a floating scenario. Everybody sees this and can verify this event as the audit of the fiat vault reserve is always made public.

A BCT currency economy is still deflationary by nature (only 21 billion coins total), but less volatile now since the market capitalization in fiat dollars is much larger. The fiat volume built up (vaulted fiat currency) creates a stability and reduction in volatility. It's preferable to cause small ripples in an "ocean" of a 50 billion dollar BCT market, than big waves in a "pond" comprised of 50 million dollars of digital money (where bitcoin's economy is now), where speculators manipulate the price to the chagrin of merchants and other users who want some stability and don't care much for speculators. I'm not biased against speculators BTW, just want to grow the bitcoin economy quicker with less instability issues.

What you need is both a bitcoin network and and open source exchange system that can connect to major banking systems. The exchangers should also be able to easily transact interchangably between bitcoin and BitCoinTokens for ease of use (plug and play). You could use the Open Transaction software developed by FellowTraveler as a good example.

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[cbeast]

What's to stop someone from attacking your ability to audit your block chain and then counterfeiting your BCTs?

[FredericBastiat]

What's to stop someone from attacking your ability to audit your block chain and then counterfeiting your BCTs?

The same question could be asked about the bitcoin network once all 21 million bitcoins are mined. The strength of the network is obviously backed by the processing power of the individual "authenticator" participants. I'm assuming we have a solution to that. Don't we? Isn't that the point of transaction fees? If we don't, my proposal might be what we're looking for.

I'm merely bootstrapping from a different starting point. All of the coins are pre-mined. The decentralized distributed exchanges extract a fee to put digicoin tokens (exactly like bitcoin) into circulation (vaulting/storing the fiat USD) and pay it to the "miners" or "authenticators" who use their bitcoin clients to verify the transaction for you. There would be no currency exchange exposure at this point.

The transaction fee is proportional to the amount of fiat dollars they would spend to pay for their rigs, their electrical costs, and other attendant capital costs. It's a known cost at the outset, not exposed to the BTC/USD exchange rate as it is now, thus less risk to the miners. Mind you, electrical costs are still denominated in fiat currencies. This wouldn't be an issue if you could purchase electricity and hardware in BTC contract prices (interchangably). I fully intend for the "miners" to be incentivized.

Processing power is still used to secure the network as it is now in the bitcoin network. I'm merely presenting a 1:1 BCT-to-fiat conversion until the all of the pre-mined coins are exchanged for fiat (which sits in a vault executing the occasional bailment service).

I'm starting out with a transaction-fee based system first, as opposed to the mining incentive system then fee. It's almost like bitcoin, but from a different starting point.

[cbeast]

The mined Bitcoins payed for the Bitcoin network of many thousands of computers slowly over time. Many bought cards as they could afford them by selling their mined Bitcoin. Where will your network come from? With Bitcoin, non GPU systems verify and distribute the block chain along with the miners. In fact, why would you even need miners? Why not just create a lite client like electrum and then just convince people to run servers? All you need to do then is compete with Bitcoin for users. A good advertising campaign might do the trick. Your idea is probably what banks and big companies may attempt. The problem is that hackers will not likey.

[FredericBastiat]

Instead of a known fixed inflationary growth rate (albeit temporary) like bitcoin, why not let BCT coins be introduced into circulation at exactly the rate at which fiat money is thrown at it? The BCT market capitalization would grow in exact proportion to the fiat stored in the vault.

Once you exceed the BCT coin total however, the price would then float against all the other fiat currencies. Let's let the market decide how fast to fill the vault. But by the time the vault contains $21 billion in BCT value, the market capitalization/monetization would be much bigger and less likely to be exposed to significant price fluctuations.

In this way, market participants (mainly merchants/businesses) can use the BCT without currency exposure concerns, until such time it grows big enough to be let loose on it's own (I know this is an arbitrary amount in an unknown timeframe, but then so is the inflation rate of bitcoin and it's daily trading price).

The incentive initiative here is price stability first (which is what the merchants want) and paying the miners to authenticate the transactions who want a known and recognizable quantifiable steady income, followed by the floating value scenario. It shouldn't be too big a deal to spread this fee around to whomever wants to act as an intermediary.

Let the speculators come afterwards. Liquidity (if that's what the speculators are supposedly providing) is a secondary concern to initial price stability (a presumption, of course). I think price instability is chasing off potential users (both merchants and average users) and inviting arbitraguers and speculators who are specialized in their trade skillset. I prefer serving the average Joe first, and then invite the quants, day-traders, and long-term investors to the game later.

[FredericBastiat]

The mined Bitcoins payed for the Bitcoin network of many thousands of computers slowly over time. Many bought cards as they could afford them by selling their mined Bitcoin. Where will your network come from? With Bitcoin, non GPU systems verify and distribute the block chain along with the miners. In fact, why would you even need miners? Why not just create a lite client like electrum and then just convince people to run servers? All you need to do then is compete with Bitcoin for users. A good advertising campaign might do the trick. Your idea is probably what banks and big companies may attempt. The problem is that hackers will not likey.

What's the difference with starting with all of the coins first and paying to authenticate future transactions immediately? Satoshi pre-mined a bunch of BTC to start with, so how is this any different? It still requires processing power to secure the network, and that requires financial incentives.

That processing would be what secures the network and would be paid to the authenticators. It shouldn't appear much different to hackers than bitcoin is already doing now. You still need a block chain for security purposes but is mining specifically necessary for success? Again, I ask this because at some point there will be no more bitcoin mined. Then what, we all go home and turn off our mining rigs and let the network die an ignominious death?

This proposal isn't meant to be driven by banks and big business it's meant to be decentralized and algorithmically driven by it's participants. I abhor centralization. Come one, come all, I say.

[cunicula]

Instead of a known fixed inflationary growth rate (albeit temporary) like bitcoin, why not let BCT coins be introduced into circulation at exactly the rate at which fiat money is thrown at it? The BCT market capitalization would grow in exact proportion to the fiat stored in the vault.

Once you exceed the BCT coin total however, the price would then float against all the other fiat currencies. Let's let the market decide how fast to fill the vault. But by the time the vault contains $21 billion in BCT value, the market capitalization/monetization would be much bigger and less likely to be exposed to significant price fluctuations.

In this way, market participants (mainly merchants/businesses) can use the BCT without currency exposure concerns, until such time it grows big enough to be let loose on it's own (I know this is an arbitrary amount in an unknown timeframe, but then so is the inflation rate of bitcoin and it's daily trading price).

The incentive initiative here is price stability first (which is what the merchants want) and paying the miners to authenticate the transactions who want a known and recognizable quantifiable steady income, followed by the floating value scenario. It shouldn't be too big a deal to spread this fee around to whomever wants to act as an intermediary.

Let the speculators come afterwards. Liquidity (if that's what the speculators are supposedly providing) is a secondary concern to initial price stability (a presumption, of course). I think price instability is chasing off potential users (both merchants and average users) and inviting arbitraguers and speculators who are specialized in their trade skillset. I prefer serving the average Joe first, and then invite the quants, day-traders, and long-term investors to the game later.

Like many not too clever people before you, you seem to have ignored the problem of downward shocks to demand. Sure you can stem a rise in price by releasing more scrip, but when demand falls you need to take scirp out of circulation to preserve price stability. Two possibilities for scrip removal are 1) confiscation (arbitrarily destory people's scrip) 2) mop up the scrip voluntariy by issuing other currencies in exchange.  1) runs into the problem that no one wants to hold stuff that can be arbitrarily destroyed and that the onset of destruction would induce self-fulfilling panic 2) runs into the problem that you will need to have the resources of a central bank behind you to fund the operation. I have suggested a variant of (1) in which multiple types of scrips are issued with different risk-reward profiles. A no risk version of the scrip could not be arbitrarily destroyed. Other types of scrip would be extremely high risk, would be destoryed in the event of a negative shock to demand, and would be converted to the no risk version of scrip in the event of stable demand growth over a long period (at a high rate of return). The principle is to build some securitization of risk into a blockchain, rather than rely on a potentially untrustworthy and fee charging counterparty to create derivatives (such as bitcoinica). Anyways, these ideas are way over your head and the head of almost everyone else that frequents this forum. Your take-away message should be that I think your idea is foolish.

[FredericBastiat]

Satoshi pre-mined a bunch of BTC to start with, so how is this any different?

This is not true.

Not true, or just not proven? If not, I'll retract that. But I could just as easily say anybody mining right after January 3, 2009 was in the same position as Satoshi would have been had he mined the coins himself.

Some miners mined a lot of bitcoin at extremely low difficulty, but that's mostly irrelevant. This discussion isn't primarily about the purported early-adopter "syndrome" some people complain about.

That isn't what is my concern is about at all. I merely want to introduce and integrate external value (fiat currencies which are well understood and generally accepted as valuable) and exchange them for digital token value at a rate the market will bear at any one point in time. Then float it after it's been capitalized.

I'm trying to seed an alternative currency as quickly as possible with as little side effects that most nacent digital currencies tend to exihibit (if not all of them). The idea being to hope to avoid currency bubbles (and the popping thereof) by creating a large market capitalization first before doing the "initial public offering".

Better to start with something with more critical mass, than go public immediately with a business with smaller gross sales. Probably a bad analogy, but I hope you get the idea.

[FredericBastiat]

Like many not too clever people before you, you seem to have ignored the problem of downward shocks to demand <and bitcoin magically solves this somehow??>. Sure you can stem a rise in price by releasing more scrip, but when demand falls you need to take scirp out of circulation to preserve price stability <I'm not doing that>. Two possibilities for scrip removal are 1) confiscation (arbitrarily destory people's scrip) <nope, not interested, not my intention> 2) mop up the scrip voluntariy by issuing other currencies in exchange <not doing this either>.  1) runs into the problem that no one wants to hold stuff that can be arbitrarily destroyed and that the onset of destruction would induce self-fulfilling panic 2) runs into the problem that you will need to have the resources of a central bank behind you to fund the operation <don't need nor want no stinking central bank>. I have suggested a variant of (1) in which multiple types of scrips are issued with different risk-reward profiles... The principle is to build some securitization of risk into a blockchain, rather than rely on a potentially untrustworthy and fee charging counterparty to create derivatives... Your take-away message should be that I think your idea is foolish <you assumed a lot about what I wrote>...

It's starts as a bailment service (certificate of redemption system) followed by a float scenario when you reach a specific market capitalizaion. You start by exchanging tokens for fiat at a 1:1 par-value basis. You then end up letting it float as a currency pair with the worlds currency offerings. How is this foolish I wonder?

I'm not interested in destroying scrip or arbitrarily introducing more scrip to manipulate prices. That's the same game the State is playing. That's not how this works as there is a known amount of BCT coins that will ever be mined. That is not in the design, and not what I had in mind.

Look up the word bailment.

[cunicula]

Like many not too clever people before you, you seem to have ignored the problem of downward shocks to demand <and bitcoin magically solves this somehow??>. Sure you can stem a rise in price by releasing more scrip, but when demand falls you need to take scirp out of circulation to preserve price stability <I'm not doing that>. Two possibilities for scrip removal are 1) confiscation (arbitrarily destory people's scrip) <nope, not interested, not my intention> 2) mop up the scrip voluntariy by issuing other currencies in exchange <not doing this either>.  1) runs into the problem that no one wants to hold stuff that can be arbitrarily destroyed and that the onset of destruction would induce self-fulfilling panic 2) runs into the problem that you will need to have the resources of a central bank behind you to fund the operation <don't need nor want no stinking central bank>. I have suggested a variant of (1) in which multiple types of scrips are issued with different risk-reward profiles... The principle is to build some securitization of risk into a blockchain, rather than rely on a potentially untrustworthy and fee charging counterparty to create derivatives... Your take-away message should be that I think your idea is foolish <you assumed a lot about what I wrote>...

It's starts as a bailment service (certificate of redemption system) followed by a float scenario when you reach a specific market capitalizaion. You start by exchanging tokens for fiat at a 1:1 par-value basis. You then end up letting it float as a currency pair with the worlds currency offerings. How is this foolish I wonder?

I'm not interested in destroying scrip or arbitrarily introducing more scrip to manipulate prices. That's the same game the State is playing. That's not how this works as there is a known amount of BCT coins that will ever be mined. That is not in the design, and not what I had in mind.

Look up the word bailment.

You seem to have ignored the take away message. I now have a better idea of what you have in mind. Based on my updated information, I have no change in opinion. Your idea is futile and your exposition of it reflects the fact that you are not too smart. Given that you (by your own admission, see the quote) do not plan to do anything to create an asset with more stable prices, what in god's name is the point of your new asset?

[FredericBastiat]

cunicula,

I may be naive, but I certainly didn't intend for my BCT proposal to infer what you wrote would happen. There will never be any arbitrary scrip creation and/or destruction, nor will there ever be any willy-nilly spending into circulation "scrip" as you put it, unless there is an exact 1:1 backing of fiat sitting in the vault (which would be completely auditable at any time, anyway).

No central bank participation or collusion, or anything the likes. If you exchange one fiat unit of money, you get exactly one BCT which you can then trade to anyone else sans exchange intervention. No more, no less. It's after the float where things would change, but that's completely out of my hands either way. Bitcoin already operates exactly in this way.

All of the BCT is pre-mined. There will be no more nor less "scrip" available to the system ever. It is a known quantity just as much as there is exactly 21 million bitcoin that will ever be mined.

My alternative digital coin proposal more likely resembles bitcoin than anything else. It's just bootstrapped a bit differently.

[Costia]

What you need is both a bitcoin network and and open source exchange system that can connect to major banking systems. The exchangers should also be able to easily transact interchangably between bitcoin and BitCoinTokens for ease of use (plug and play).

you are basically asking banks to give up on a major part of their income (transaction fees). If the will not lose any income it means that the transaction fee on the coin will be at least equal to the regular rate.
Another problem is that this coin is supposed to replace them in the future- what incentive to they have to do that?

[FredericBastiat]

You seem to have ignored the take away message. I now have a better idea of what you have in mind. Based on my updated information, I have no change in opinion. Your idea is futile and your exposition of it reflects the fact that you are not too smart. Given that you (by your own admission, see the quote) do not plan to do anything to create an asset with more stable prices, what in god's name is the point of your new asset?

If you have a large starting capitalization value (billions of fiat dollars), any one of the participants who have seeded the system with their fiat will likely not effect the price in any particular direction when they withdraw or deposit (on the average). This is why you start out as a bailment provider prior to the float.

It's a one-to-one scenario. You give me a unit of fiat, I give you exactly one BCT token representing that fiat unit (for redemption purposes). Let the vault grow it's fiat reserves. When you hit the fiat reserve quota, you trigger the float (an IPO as an analogy) at which point your "shares" or BCT "scrip" is now floating freely.

Think of the BCT economy as an ocean versus a puddle of water. Your attempt at effectuating change in the ocean with all your individual effort will likely not raise or lower the water level to any significant degree. Now stand in the puddle. See the difference?

I can't erase all of the volatility effects, just mitigate them in the beginning. Nobody can create a perfectly stable price. The market does this, and only then briefly. I'm merely bootstrapping the digital currency in a different way than bitcoin hopefully reducing some of the side effects along the way.

[FredericBastiat]

you are basically asking banks to give up on a major part of their income (transaction fees). If the will not lose any income it means that the transaction fee on the coin will be at least equal to the regular rate.
Another problem is that this coin is supposed to replace them in the future- what incentive to they have to do that?

So how is it possible that we have the Dwolla, PayPal, VISA, MasterCard and debit card companies of the world? Are they not all competing for the same banking transaction fees?

And besides, how is bitcoin avoiding any of the supposed transaction-fee-hoarding the banks are monopolizing on right now? Creating and securing bitcoins still costs real money and resources. Any way you slice and dice it, bitcoin has a quantifiable carry cost, or transaction cost. And any conversion to fiat currency will induce a fee which inherently diminishes the real value of your bitcoins (at least for fiat conversion purposes).

Otherwise you can never exchange to fiat. It's unavoidable at the moment. I fully expect the banks to fight us all the way. Nothing you can do about that. Just hope you don't wake them up to the realization their slowly being replaced.

[Costia]

I think that with banks working with visa,paypal etc.. they get additional benefits like attracting new customers or mitigating  risk on loans/credit. They probably have signed contracts among themselves to make sure its profitable.
There wont be anyone to sign a contract with when dealing with a distributed crypto currency. I dont think that convicing the banks to trade with bitcoin/whatevercoin will be easy...

[cbeast]

Go ahead and write your code and tell us about it in the alternate cryptocurrencies section. Maybe FB or Google will try this as well. Good luck to all.

[FredericBastiat]

Go ahead and write your code and tell us about it in the alternate cryptocurrencies section. Maybe FB or Google will try this as well. Good luck to all.

The Stratum overlay client/server protocol solution would actually come close. It approximates what I'm looking for by creating a federated trust network capability via truth verification in M of N server query requests. This would result in the release of BCT coins or other fiat-equivalent digital assets. It operates in similar fashion to Open Transactions (OT).

It's described here:

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2613/how-secure-are-various-models-of-bitcoin-clients/2615#2615

and here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55842.0

[phelix]

ever thought about doing this with namecoin? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=66868

[finway]

How to distribute these coins ?

What about the early adoption unfairness?

Without new coins, who will mine it , before it grows through 1000k txes per day ?

[phelix]

How to distribute these coins ?

What about the early adoption unfairness?

Without new coins, who will mine it , before it grows through 1000k txes per day ?

I meant not namecoins itself but use of names as bonds. You can sell/transfer names after registration.

You can be as fair or unfair as you want to be or can handle.

Namecoin is merge mined - it is currently at 40% of bitcoin difficulty so only deepbit could 51% it.