4 ms·

> a crypto which is relatively stable could be very useful ... It seems like there's a fairly tight correlation between the value of a cryptocurrency and the e

> a crypto which is relatively stable could be very useful ... It seems like there's a fairly tight correlation between the value of a cryptocurrency and the effort required to mine it. (Which is what you'd expect -- if the price of BTC rises, more people mine it, and the per-block difficulty increases, and if the price falls, fewer people mine it, and the difficulty falls.) I wonder if we could create a more stable cryptocurrency by keeping the mining difficulty constant (or possibly tied to moore's law). It may be wildly "inflationary" in terms of the size of the monetary base, but it should be fairly stable in terms of real resources per unit of currency.

einarvollset 9y ago
Crypto assets do not actually require mining after launch I believe. You could pre-mine all the assets. I believe XRP (ripple) is an example
- cryptodogemoon 9y ago
  The contending decentralized consensus algorithm is called Proof of Stake, and it works by giving you lottery tickets based on how much wealth you already have. PoS coin supplies should be avoided, as the production cost or input work is not worth the speculative asset produced. XRP is a case study in how they've created artificial scarcity and can flood the market with sell orders from their reserves. https://www.coindesk.com/ripple-jed-mccaleb-settle-suit-over-1-million-in-disputed-funds/ https://www.coindesk.com/ripple-jed-mccaleb-settle-suit-over...
  - repsilat 9y ago
    They could also just have a centralised service validating transactions. No need to mine, no need for stake. Not exactly a traditional cryptocurrency at that point, but in day-to-day use no different (and rather more attractive to political regimes like Maduro's.)
- derefr 9y ago
  Also, Ethereum ERC20 tokens, which aren't cryptocurrencies per se, just numbers in a ledger whose updates get embedded within the cryptocurrency (ETH)'s blocks.
liamzebedee 9y ago
The difficulty is necessary for moderating consensus given more 'voters' (with their flops) joining the network. I'm interested by your idea, but you would need to work by a different consensus model. Proof-of-stake would be interesting to investigate, since mining doesn't scale with computation power, rather holding of the currency.
fjsolwmv 9y ago
Is that true? BTC has massive surged in price this year. Has mining cost matched? Or is mining cost a ceiling for trading price
IIAOPSW 9y ago
At the end of the day crypto-currency is protected by the fact that it costs more to undo a transaction than the value of the transaction. Making an individual block easier just means that we have to wait for more blocks to be mined before we consider transactions to be safe. With you're idea there will be more blocks mined per hour, but the amount of electricity consumed per confirmed tx will remain constant.
- __s 9y ago
  However that'll kind of bring out the 'bigger blocks' solution except by having 100 blocks rather than 1 100-times larger block. Downsides will line up with big block downsides
jv22222 9y ago
I've been wondering if there could be a crypto currency based on time. For example, perhaps each person in the system could automatically given one new coin every day. Assuming there there was some way to validate new users coming into the system as real people.
- ric2b 9y ago
  There's a very large set of problems that would become solvable if digital identity could be done. Sadly, as of yet there's no solution in sight that doesn't require a third party.

einarvollset 9y ago

Crypto assets do not actually require mining after launch I believe. You could pre-mine all the assets. I believe XRP (ripple) is an example

cryptodogemoon 9y ago
The contending decentralized consensus algorithm is called Proof of Stake, and it works by giving you lottery tickets based on how much wealth you already have. PoS coin supplies should be avoided, as the production cost or input work is not worth the speculative asset produced. XRP is a case study in how they've created artificial scarcity and can flood the market with sell orders from their reserves. https://www.coindesk.com/ripple-jed-mccaleb-settle-suit-over-1-million-in-disputed-funds/ https://www.coindesk.com/ripple-jed-mccaleb-settle-suit-over...
- repsilat 9y ago
  They could also just have a centralised service validating transactions. No need to mine, no need for stake. Not exactly a traditional cryptocurrency at that point, but in day-to-day use no different (and rather more attractive to political regimes like Maduro's.)
derefr 9y ago
Also, Ethereum ERC20 tokens, which aren't cryptocurrencies per se, just numbers in a ledger whose updates get embedded within the cryptocurrency (ETH)'s blocks.

liamzebedee 9y ago

The difficulty is necessary for moderating consensus given more 'voters' (with their flops) joining the network. I'm interested by your idea, but you would need to work by a different consensus model. Proof-of-stake would be interesting to investigate, since mining doesn't scale with computation power, rather holding of the currency.

fjsolwmv 9y ago

Is that true? BTC has massive surged in price this year. Has mining cost matched? Or is mining cost a ceiling for trading price

IIAOPSW 9y ago

At the end of the day crypto-currency is protected by the fact that it costs more to undo a transaction than the value of the transaction. Making an individual block easier just means that we have to wait for more blocks to be mined before we consider transactions to be safe. With you're idea there will be more blocks mined per hour, but the amount of electricity consumed per confirmed tx will remain constant.

__s 9y ago
However that'll kind of bring out the 'bigger blocks' solution except by having 100 blocks rather than 1 100-times larger block. Downsides will line up with big block downsides

jv22222 9y ago

I've been wondering if there could be a crypto currency based on time. For example, perhaps each person in the system could automatically given one new coin every day. Assuming there there was some way to validate new users coming into the system as real people.

ric2b 9y ago
There's a very large set of problems that would become solvable if digital identity could be done. Sadly, as of yet there's no solution in sight that doesn't require a third party.