Talk-Polywell.org

That's also a good point about applying Moore's Law to coin mining.

kunkmiester wrote:If I recall correctly bit coin at least does had an absolute limit in how much can be created, though it is a very large number. The greater concern is the audit process, supposedly someone like the NSA could create a few billion coin purses, and if they have them all verify or refuse to verify transactions, things would come to a screeching halt. I'll have to look up where I read that.

Yes, bitcoin is well designed to avoid hyperinflation from excess supply. The demand side not so ensured. And if some entity could introduce a critical mass of nodes into the tracking system, they could hijack the currency, though not without it being noticed.

Regardless of Bitcoin's future, the technology behind it, the block chain, is having a lot of impact. People even want to apply the tech to voting.

I've seen support for block chain based voting. But I doubt the people I've seen supporting it properly understand the conflict between authenticating / auditing the voter, making the vote verifiable to the voter, and preventing a 3rd party from connecting votes to voters. They seem to be treating "Block Chain" like a magic incantation.

I'd had some thoughts on a labor based currency that could be interesting, but I'm not sure it would really get rid of the issues other failed labor based currencies have had. It would sacrifice some anonymity, but that's a logical sacrifice for usability.

Being backed by some tangible commodity is an improvement. Though if the currency is backed by a commodity to be produced later by a plethora of issuers, expect a default rate. And labor by one person doing one job is not the same value as another person doing a different job, further complicating the system.

That would be the joy of a digital currency, it makes accounting easier. Not necessarily practical, but easier. The chain would provide the ability to tweak rates, different people would be able to set their hourly differently, and the math to account for the difference would be automatic, so it's sipe-the-card easy to use. Coins would be tied to a number, representing a person. You could even go crazy and tie that to a biometric if you wanted to, but KunkmiesterCoin would have a set rate, with a modifier if I'm doing a transaction that involves someone paying me for shop/machine time as well as labor. When the payment is made, the receiver can see from the block chain how much currency I've produced, how much has been paid back, etc. Instant credit score basically. This would be the limit on abuse, if you're maxing out the credit card so to speak, it would raise flags and people would start rejecting your coins, or taking them at a discounted rate. Other structure would do stuff like work to move people's coins back towards them, limiting the supply. If you needed to make a big purchase, you could, but if you spend too much time spending over 60 hours a week(or whatever), people (and the computers) will question your ability to pay back.

It would be flexible enough to provide liquidity while being tied to a commodity, provide credit while preventing the abuses governments and central banks create, and the technology solves some of the issues past labor based currencies had. While it might start pegged somewhere, you'd design it to float eventually, so it can break free from the dollar or whatever.