[ANN] Freicoin: demurrage crypto-currency from the Occupy movement (crowdfund)

[maaku]

Install mpfr.

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[Impaler]

If a freiconomy can remove interest on mortgages, then this surely will avail much of the financial sorrows of the common Occupyer. Political labeling of wether to call the theory left or right is not relevant when you narrow it down to that.

doesn't matter, leftish idealists and Marxists would call it "verkürzte Kapitalismuskritik", that would translate to something like (dangerously) reduced critique of capitalism.

Gesell is considered anti-marxist in that he rejects Marxist labor-theory of value, and argues that Marx has made massive error in ignoring the nature of money and interest.  Now history has in my opinion clearly disproved labor-theory of value and abrogating free markets reduce productivity too much, and capitalism has been shown to have some serious flaws which Gesells theory explains very well.

[herzmeister]

Marx didn't endorse the labor theory of value either. That's a common misinterpretation. Or misunderstanding. Simply googling or wiki-ing will do.  

Though if you want true socialism or communism, i.e. public and democratic control of production, you'd measure effort in a way that might resemble this theory. It doesn't mean it's wrong historically, it's just a different economic concept that, according to the Marxian utopists, never really was tried in practice (maybe the Spanish Anarchism came close).

And he did criticize "interest" all the time. He called it "Mehrwert" (surplus value). (He didn't differentiate it, and he was right with that, because there should be no real difference between interest and dividends, today things are even more fucked up.) In fact that's what Marxism is all about.

(I don't endorse Marx, but it's not helpful to build upon false criticism).

btw and more on-topic again, Gesell's Freiland is socialism, and my point of view is still that this is the big elephant in the room of his theories. If demurrage causes savers to flee into hard assets, they'll create bubbles. The same landgrabbing would happen that happens today with inflation. Gesell acknowledged that and called for "Freiland" (public/socialized land). But obviously, this will not be enough, you'd have to socialize everything then, the whole stock market, and finally the whole production. That's why Freiwirtschaft is not "ein dritter Weg", a third way (besides capitalism and communism), but rather an unstable compromise, imho.

[maaku]

Freiland was not socialized land, rather that was merely one avenue to implementation. The American Georgism is is a libertarian realization of Freiland, or at least Freiland-compatible.

EDIT: This was true of Gesell's work in general. He was a man of his times and as such an avowed statist. He though demurrage currency necessarily required a state monopoly on money. He also thought that his land-tax mechanism would have to be implemented through state ownership. Our opinion is that state monopoly is only one implementation pathway. In the case of Freigeld, p2p currency provides another more libertarian option. I personally remain optimistic that Freiland could be implemented with some sort of p2p auction to discover undeveloped value.

[Impaler]

Marxisms 'surplus value' is not interest by any stretch.  The closest approximation we would have is 'net productivity' as Marx says it is the net value a worker creates above what is needed to support the worker.  Marx then believes the capitalist steals this by oppressive manipulation of the workplace, thuggery and other unsophisticated technicians not in any way related to the nature of money.

Gesell sees through this fog and identifies hard money as the source of interest with interest defined in terms of being able to RENT, and interest then causes the manifest ill effects like unemployment, the waste of capitol in the business cycle etc etc.

As for 'real' socialism, I see no reason it would actually need to utilize any such labor theory.  Socialism has always been understood to mean 'control of the workplace and means of production by the workers', now how the workers exercise that control is wide open and in no way need it conform to some blatantly erroneous theory.

[jjiimm_64]

Has there been discussion about changing the retarget algo?  with the increase in hashrate, will frc get strangled with a high diff and little hashrate again?

[dust]

Does anyone knowledgable of Freicoin have formulas for:

1) The value of the current block reward
2) The current money supply (other variable block reward coins have a "moneysupply" field in the getinfo response)

1)

mining

before 161280   -0.000986912724567928 * block number + 254.53671561
after 161280   95.36743164

foundation

before 161280      496.03174604

2)

if cryptocoinexplorer ever comes back up its listed on there, or you can use the formula above to calculate the money supply

Thanks, this works great.

The total supply can be calculated with:

before 161280: -0.000986912724567928 * blocks * (blocks + 1) / 2 + blocks * (254.53671561 + 496.03174604)

EDIT: This doesn't factor in the demurrage.

[jtimon]

Thanks, this works great.

The total supply can be calculated with:

before 161280: -0.000986912724567928 * blocks * (blocks + 1) + blocks * (254.53671561 + 496.03174604)
after 161280: 95380700.1669 + 95.36743164 * (blocks - 161280)

Well, that doesn't account for demurrage, which occurs every block from the beginning.
After 161280 the total supply converges at 100 MM, but with lost wallets you cannot be sure that is 100 MM at any given time, even though you know all lost wallets will be recycled.
Before 161280 the total supply is more complicated, it's this chart: http://freico.in/static/images/how/coins_in_distribution.png
But sorry I don't have the formula.

[gabbynot]

Am I looking at that chart right? 10^16 is a heck of lot more than 100 million coins.

[galambo]

Am I looking at that chart right? 10^16 is a heck of lot more than 100 million coins.

The graph is in units referred to as "satoshis" because this is what Bitcoin uses internally. If you divide 10^16 by 10^8, you get 10^8 coins, or 100,000,000.

[galambo]

before 161280: -0.000986912724567928 * blocks * (blocks + 1) + blocks * (254.53671561 + 496.03174604)
after 161280: 95380700.1669 + 95.36743164 * (blocks - 161280)

That's probably a good enough approximation for blocks before 161280, but after 161280 the money supply is a constant 10^8 as jtimon said.

[mycketbra]

I have to restrain myself heavily from saying:

this coin is the biggest piece of shit ever made

don't waste your time... fuck you occupy

If this is a ban-able offense please inform me and i will edit my post.

Not sure if it is bannable , but specifics would be nice.  Why do you dislike it?

The below post sums up my feelings pretty well

If they were NASA engineers they would have had enough money to make this into something. Digital monetarism is no good

Sorry if I sound/sounded angry!

I don't think there is a demand. I enthusiastically proposed something like this long ago and it was completely shot down. And that was without asking for $28k in donations.

The pejorative name given it was "Inflatacoin".

[Praxis]

I'd make a NovaCoin-like (PoS/Scrypt) fork of Freicoin (+demurrage) if I knew C++.
Any news about Republicoin?

[herzmeister]

Marxisms 'surplus value' is not interest by any stretch.

I argued elsewhere that in a sane and honest economy, interest would always be backed by the dividends of a company, they'd essentially be the same. It's only that there are lots of arbitrators in-between today that create the same fog you mentioned, most importantly the state.

Marx's surplus value is the profit of a company which the workers are deprived of, and which they have no control of. The profit of a company is expressed in dividends. No matter if the company borrowed capital or built upon their own savings, the dividends will flow back into the economy in one way or another (mostly to their bank, either to satisfy the interest on the loan, or as savings that the bank in-turn would loan to someone else). That's why interest rates are one the most important statistic parameters in an honest market economy. There can be no other source of interest in an honest economy! Something cannot come out of nothing!

Gesell sees through this fog and identifies hard money as the source of interest with interest defined in terms of being able to RENT, and interest then causes the manifest ill effects like unemployment, the waste of capitol in the business cycle etc etc.

I agree hard money is the source of interest. There's no reason there couldn't also be 'soft' money (trust-based promises/credit created on the spot by the people) in parallel, as it happens with LETSs. Freigeld might be somewhere in-between, it may serve certain purposes, but I only see it on a local level.

In a hard money economy, business cycles would happen when nominal prices don't react and drop fast enough, as well as nominal (not real!) wages. Often that's because there's a lot of bureaucracy in the way still rooted in the industrial age.

As for 'real' socialism, I see no reason it would actually need to utilize any such labor theory.  Socialism has always been understood to mean 'control of the workplace and means of production by the workers', now how the workers exercise that control is wide open and in no way need it conform to some blatantly erroneous theory.

If there is no competition (there's a call for world-wide solidarity in communism, hence "Die Internationale"), labor theory would apply. In fact the usual argument is that the difference between the labor and the market value is what is stolen from the worker and measures the exploitation. (I do not agree because I'm not a communist. And of course worker co-operatives may also be free to compete and democratically decide what to do with the profits, so there'd be markets. Maybe Techno-Marxists like the Zeitgeist people would see this kind of competition as inefficient. But they're just pipe-dreaming imho.)

[maaku]

Any news about Republicoin?

The current development timeline is:

1. New difficulty adjustment algorithm.
2. Freicoin Assets
3. Republicoin

Since it's pretty much just me doing development, these are progressing serially. So no, not much work has gone into Republicoin yet. I welcome contributions (ideas or code) from anyone else though.

[Bicknellski]

Please close this thread it's retarded.

Really? What a Moron.

[Bicknellski]

Is there any reason to believe that the ROI, when measured in BTC, won't be negative?

No, not at all. Here's how it will work:

• collect lots of $$$$$ from donations
• release the shitcoin and mine it for some time to collect lots of freicoins
• release promotional materials to create demand for freicoins
• dump freicoins and disappear

Ummm still not seeing this happen... were you wrong?

[Bicknellski]

Yea, I really dislike the idea of a "foundation" in both this currency and devcoin (I think? If I'm understanding it right that is...)

Who's to say the foundation doesn't just cashout all of their freicoins into another currency?

You are. Foundation coins will only be spent as part of a community vetted process.  You can join the conversation at freicoin.org.

I spoke out against centralization earlier in the project and my voice was drowned out by louder voices in favor. It's like arguing about a Wikipedia article.

If you really like Freicoin EXCEPT for the foundation, you'll have an easier time just forking it. If I wanted to argue about how my own money was spent on my behalf, I'd go to city hall.

Or you can just simply refuse to mine it and avoid city hall, the whole debate and leave others to do the heavy lifting right?

[shakezula]

Look, this coin languishes because of the same reasons the "Occupy" movement died. Don't mis-understand me, I believe in Gesell's work and agree with the philosophy behind Freigeld but three or four serious people in a group of thousands of derelicts will never produce lasting or meaningful results.

Let me ask, what did Occupy accomplish? Before you tell me that it showed the world "we're not going to take it anymore," ask yourself, "take what?" The Occupy movement was headline news when it began, full of radical thinkers and youth seemingly bent on changing the world for the better, oh if only everyone loved everyone and respected human nature! If only the evil-corporate monopolies would see that the people REALLY want to live in abject squalor and stop raping the planet to produce consumer goods right? Funny, there were not a lot of Occupy movements in India, Africa, or South America--was that because of localized governmental control or because the people there couldn't expend time/effort to pitch a tent and bitch about getting more things for free?

This coin and its "foundation" are similar. Stage a digital version of the movement, fire people up with thinly-veiled political double-speak socialism under the guise that, 'ITS TIME TO DO SOMETHING!" Alas, who's listening? I feel that most people have realized that Occupy is/was not a world-changing movement. Throngs of unwashed, uninformed, and ignorant campers with drum circles and protest signs can't change the world anymore--its too big and complex now. Interesting to think that all of the iPhones/HandiCams, Tents, Water bottles, bullhorns, cardstock for signs, and even sharpie markers are products of the society Occupy complains so vehemently against.

More interesting to think that this coin, with nearly 80% of its production being held by one person could be considered a coin for the masses--but then it came to me. Gesell thought one should earn according to his ability. FRC's "foundation" is doing just that. While opining about the need for social change, the foundation is quietly amassing huge wealth under the notion that "they" are best to decide how it's used and spent. Strange...that sounds just like the current rash of premine and scam-coins only its ongoing and since its "to further the movement," the sheeple don't bother to dig any deeper.

[jtimon]

More interesting to think that this coin, with nearly 80% of its production being held by one person could be considered a coin for the masses--but then it came to me. Gesell thought one should earn according to his ability. FRC's "foundation" is doing just that. While opining about the need for social change, the foundation is quietly amassing huge wealth under the notion that "they" are best to decide how it's used and spent. Strange...that sounds just like the current rash of premine and scam-coins only its ongoing and since its "to further the movement," the sheeple don't bother to dig any deeper.

No, the notion is to avoid a huge waste of energy by issuing that money through mining.
The foundation doesn't wants to decide how to spend the money directly, that's why the community is proposing several alternatives to distribute the coins without wasting energy and without "central decisions" by the foundation. Ideas like curecoin (cure cancer instead of mindless hashing for issuance) or increasing voluntary donations in a crowdfunding platform.
The point of the proposals is to take responsibility out of the foundation and back to the community and individual decisions.
Please, post your own alternative to mining if you have any idea.