Is crytocurrency hyperinflationary?

[barbarousrelic]

I wish someone would start a new blockchain just to test this. We'll see if anyone uses it.

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[ploum]

They could be more successful if they were easier to use, easier to obtain.

That's, IMHO, one of the weakest point of Bitcoin. It's really hard to use.

People usually want to send money to someone/some organization and:

- Trust it's the good person
- Be identified as the sender
- Add a message (like "Happy Birthday from your grandma")


Bitcoin does not provide that and, IMHO, it will be a critical step to make bitcoin acceptance easier.

Could we do it on top of bitcoin. Yes, I believe. But it means designing a *protocol* on top of bitcoin. The transport could be XMPP or HTTP, I've wrote some ideas about it there: http://ploum.net/post/building-your-web-identity

[BitterTea]

Do U.S. dollars or gold provide a way to trust the receiver is who they say they are, identify yourself as the sender, or add an arbitrary message?

I would say no to all of the above, in which case, why does Bitcoin the currency need to have those features?

[BitLex]

Unless you had no alternative, or ACTUALLY WANTED SOMETHING.  Gee, I'll just live in a cardboard box hoarding my bitcoins since tomorrow they might be worth more.  I guess I won't eat today anything more than cat food and out of a dumpster since I have to eat something, but the I'll save the rest for the magical day that I actually want to spend my bitcoins.

My point exactly on actually wanting something.

But let's say you have bitcoins or dollars. Bitcoins are strong and dollars are weak. Why buy your food with bitcoins? Much better to dump your dollars, until you run out.

Ok, let's say you have bitcoins OR dollars,
how would you decide to keep bitcoins and better dump dollars then?

you could also keep your dollars and better NOT get that new computer today, you will get that same computer much cheaper next year,
but that's not what you do, because you want/need that computer now and not in a year.

point is, you can only hoard money, if you don't need to spend it.

I wish someone would start a new blockchain just to test this. We'll see if anyone uses it.

there are some alternative blockchains already for different purposes,
some used as game-currencies (i heard of MartianBotCoins, whatever that is), some as domain-currencies (namecoin), some as test-currencies,
feel free to create anotherone. 

[ploum]

Do U.S. dollars or gold provide a way to trust the receiver is who they say they are, identify yourself as the sender, or add an arbitrary message?

I would say no to all of the above, in which case, why does Bitcoin the currency need to have those features?

For most of the people, it will not really matter. The definition of money is pure rhetoric. But the whole point of bitcoin is to be used mostly online. Is there system that already exist to pay online? Yes: credit card, paypal, wire transfers. Are those system easy to use? More or less, at least there are quite easy for the sender. Do they guarantee who is the receiver, do they allow you to send messages with your payment? Yes. Wire transfer allows you to do that, paypal allows you to do that.


In the online world, a money doesn't exist without a nice "transfer system" on top of it. The dollars or the euro doesn't have such system so some private companies built their own and are now competing against each other.

Bitcoin, as a money, have a basic built-in system. That's really nice but if you want the people to use bitcoin instead of dollar+paypal or euro+IBAN, you have to provide at least the same level of features.

History shown with Linux/XMPP/Firefox that people are not sensible to new features (as astonishing as they could be) as long as they don't have the same features they had in the old system.