Using MEMES to explain bitcoin's appeal, its problems, and my proposed solution

[dacoinminster]

I hereby create a user currency 'MonaCoins' with the following properties ...

- Target value - The assessed value of the Mona Lisa, adjusted for inflation  (currently about $750 Million USD)
- 'Only' 1000 of these coins will ever exist... I already own a few hundred.. so get in fast!


Of course, this *fabulous* offer is not without risk, because if the Mona Lisa is ever destroyed - MonaCoins will be worthless.
Don't worry though.. as the holder of several hundred  billion dollars worth of monacoins, you can rest assured that I will be spending a small fortune on a private army to guard the real thing.


Coming soon.. my next coin: 'BattlestarGalacticaCoin' -  tied to the theoretical cost of constructing a fully functional Battlestar Class Military spaceship (yes - with FTL drive!) - as assessed by a team of the best scientists,futurists and sci-fi geeks!



If you see no problem with driving the price of a few thousand competing mysterious internet entity's "OilCoin" or "GoldCoin" offerings to their target price despite them not even being in the oil or gold industry - you should have no qualms at all with my innovative Art-Backed and Future-Technology-Backed coins.
What could possibly go wrong!? These are sure to hit face-value faster than the 2011 bitcoin took to hit $100! Up Up Up baby!

I'd just like to point out that you actually COULD release monacoins as a user currency, and you COULD drive their value to $750 million each. The only problem is that there wouldn't be much demand for them, so the protocol would never release more than a tiny fraction of one coin. I'm afraid you would not be able to hold hundreds of them unless you did something different than what I described in my paper.

[julz]

I hereby create a user currency 'MonaCoins' with the following properties ...

- Target value - The assessed value of the Mona Lisa, adjusted for inflation  (currently about $750 Million USD)
- 'Only' 1000 of these coins will ever exist... I already own a few hundred.. so get in fast!


Of course, this *fabulous* offer is not without risk, because if the Mona Lisa is ever destroyed - MonaCoins will be worthless.
Don't worry though.. as the holder of several hundred  billion dollars worth of monacoins, you can rest assured that I will be spending a small fortune on a private army to guard the real thing.


Coming soon.. my next coin: 'BattlestarGalacticaCoin' -  tied to the theoretical cost of constructing a fully functional Battlestar Class Military spaceship (yes - with FTL drive!) - as assessed by a team of the best scientists,futurists and sci-fi geeks!



If you see no problem with driving the price of a few thousand competing mysterious internet entity's "OilCoin" or "GoldCoin" offerings to their target price despite them not even being in the oil or gold industry - you should have no qualms at all with my innovative Art-Backed and Future-Technology-Backed coins.
What could possibly go wrong!? These are sure to hit face-value faster than the 2011 bitcoin took to hit $100! Up Up Up baby!

I'd just like to point out that you actually COULD release monacoins as a user currency, and you COULD drive their value to $750 million each. The only problem is that there wouldn't be much demand for them, so the protocol would never release more than a tiny fraction of one coin. I'm afraid you would not be able to hold hundreds of them unless you did something different than what I described in my paper.

No no.. it's a user defined ticker right?   I'm up front about about that.. it's defined as a curve to start at 0.0000001 of a % of actual value and ramp up in a strictly defined manner over time to the ultimate target of 100% of the Mona Lisa's value.

All of my family and friends completely random investors/art appreciators are cool with this.. and as the current ticker target price is still 'only' around 1% of the ultimate value - What a bargain! you too can get in now for massive upside!

Seriously though - what is to stop someone using a ticker curve that favours early adopters? Only the 'intelligence' of the marketplace seeing through that play?  Ha!

[dacoinminster]

No no.. it's a user defined ticker right?   I'm up front about about that.. it's defined as a curve to start at 0.0000001 of a % of actual value and ramp up in a strictly defined manner over time to the ultimate target of 100% of the Mona Lisa's value.

All of my family and friends completely random investors/art appreciators are cool with this.. and as the current ticker target price is still 'only' around 1% of the ultimate value - What a bargain! you too can get in now for massive upside!

Seriously though - what is to stop someone using a ticker curve that favours early adopters? Only the 'intelligence' of the marketplace seeing through that play?  Ha!

You are absolutely right on that front. Since I'm letting users create their own currencies, people would be able to define a currency that simply targets a 10%/year increase vs the dollar. If lots of people grabbed that, someone else might make one that targets a 50%/year increase. Obviously those schemes will eventually collapse (and the logic for handling the collapse is described in the paper). It will be interesting to see what people come up with.

[ZodiacDragon84]

>le

Stopped reading right there.

agreed

[dacoinminster]

>le

Stopped reading right there.

agreed

I asked myself: what is the lowest form of communication on the internet? I need something that could connect with people, no matter how low their intelligence. I figure I'm covering the highest band of intelligence with the whitepaper, and the lowest level of intelligence with the memes. Some smart people like memes, and some dumb people will try to read the paper, so I'm figuring I've got a pretty broad cross-section.

If the unintelligent conventions of the meme world annoy you, you are probably not in the low intelligence category

[ZodiacDragon84]

you took that surprisingly well. I sir, commend you.

[Boussac]

Have you tried to get paypal to reverse a person to person payment ?

If your account gets hacked, they absolutely will.

Sorry, but you answered a question I did not ask.
My question was, have YOU tried ?
Obviously, you haven't. If you did, how would paypal know which side to take ?

When a consumer disputes a charge form a business, it's their policy to side with the consumer and let the business eat the cost of the fraud. The business in turn will factor in the cost of the fraud so everybody is paying for it at the end of the day.

In a p2p payment, it's just too easy to pretend your account was hacked so the same policy cannot be applied.

[dacoinminster]

Sorry, but you answered a question I did not ask.
My question was, have YOU tried ?
Obviously, you haven't. If you did, how would paypal know which side to take ?

When a consumer disputes a charge form a business, it's their policy to side with the consumer and let the business eat the cost of the fraud. The business in turn will factor in the cost of the fraud so everybody is paying for it at the end of the day.

In a p2p payment, it's just too easy to pretend your account was hacked so the same policy cannot be applied.

You've hit the nail on the head.

I'm figuring that a lot of people would like to put some restrictions on their savings account so that if some hacker DOES get access to it, it's not game over right then.

You wouldn't be able to spend money straight out of your savings account to a merchant. You would have to transfer it to your checking account, and you would have to wait until the waiting period was over before you could spend it. This is a feature that could be added to bitcoin if a lot of people wanted it, so it isn't the central thrust of the paper.

The main thing I want is to allow the creation of new currencies with new rules, no programming required, all running on top of the bitcoin protocol. I'm convinced that the ability to create coins that track the value of a ticker is going to be a really big deal.