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Can someone suggest a stable priced crypto that is actually useful for transactions? I have zero interest in speculating on the values of these things, but I wo

Can someone suggest a stable priced crypto that is actually useful for transactions? I have zero interest in speculating on the values of these things, but I would really like to start using crypto currency obtained from cash ATM's for all of my online purchases and avoid ever entering a credit card number anywhere again. Why hasn't that been solved?

tehlike 9y ago
the only "stable" coin is USDT, but stay away, it's not useful for anything, and it's legitimacy is in question. As long as there are finite-ish supply, I don't think any crypto would be stable.
chickenfries 9y ago
What’s your goal with that set up compared to something like one use credit card numbers that cc companies and banks provide for online shopping?
cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
Use Apple Pay then.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  Wow I guess people downvoted the heck out of this comment thinking I'm being sarcastic. I am not. Apple pay has all the encryption mechanism that makes it much safer than sending your credit card number over the Internet, which the parent was asking for.
  - j_s 9y ago
    The "obtained from cash ATM's" part of OP seemed to be specifically targeting a higher degree of anonymity to me, but it is indeed open for interpretation. Personally Apple pay is the primary appeal of Apple's ecosystem for me. No other intermediary's incentives are aligned to prioritize the customer in the transaction ahead of data mining opportunities.
- aquova 9y ago
  People may see this comment and think it's being standoffish, but it's the truth. What OP wants is a system where you transfer traditional currency into digital money (which you're going to need to use a credit card/bank account at least once to do), and then use that without having to worry about using your card on multiple different websites. This is exactly what Apple Pay/Paypal is, minus the transaction fees. This is not the purpose of cryptocurrencies, nor will it ever be.
tbabb 9y ago
If the crypto doesn't have a central bank to institute monetary policy and manage supply, it's unsolvable. I feel like a broken record saying this: Demand for the currency will fluctuate. If the supply is fixed, the price will be demand-driven. Which means volatile. Fiat currency has a central bank with active control over the supply, so it is capable of keeping a stable price if the central bank does its job. http://www.bzarg.com/p/what-bitcoin-shows-us-about-how-money-works/ http://www.bzarg.com/p/what-bitcoin-shows-us-about-how-money...
- placeybordeaux 9y ago
  There is nothing to say that all coins need a fixed supply. It wouldn't be hard to establish voting to release a given amount of funds/authorize the selling of bonds. All blockchains have a transient central authority, the miner.
- azernik 9y ago
  Have you taken a look at the Basecoin project (http://www.getbasecoin.com/ http://www.getbasecoin.com/)? It's a cryptocurrency system that's designed with a central bank in mind - you feed it the current exchange rate relative to some peg, and the system changes the money supply (through bond sales and purchases) to maintain the peg.
  - cracker_jacks 9y ago
    Who feeds the current exchange rate? Wouldn't that require trust from a central authority to determine?
    - azernik 9y ago
      The designers have proposed that as one possible solution. In their white paper (http://www.getbasecoin.com/basecoin_whitepaper_0_99.pdf http://www.getbasecoin.com/basecoin_whitepaper_0_99.pdf), page 11, the three options they give are: * Single trusted feed * Take the median of the exchange rates from a set of feeds, with that set chosen by vote of holders of the coin (I can personally see this having some conflict-of-interest issues) * Use what they call a "Decentralized Schelling point scheme" - have coinholders vote on what they think the exchange rate was in a recent time interval, use the median vote, then reward voters who were in the 25th to 75th percentile. The authors seem to view the third option, with some engineering of the incentives, to be ideal; but I'm skeptical of a system that gives holders of an asset the ability to change the value of that asset. I would honestly prefer the use of a trusted authority - at least that way you have a very clear delineation of what the central authority is supposed to do and can easily audit whether it is doing its job.
raquo 9y ago
Is it even possible to have a stable priced crypto? The crypto money supply is predetermined, but demand is not, often driven by events outside of the blockchain. Supply needs to actively balance demand if the price is to stay stable. For a stable price you'd need a crypto that adjusts mining difficulty in response to changes in the amount of demand (or something like that? My understanding of crypto currencies is only surface level). However, the USD-to-Crypto price is something outside of the blockchain, so as far as my understanding goes you can't really use that as an input because you can't get undisputable information on the price, because the entirety of undisputable information should exist in the blockchain. I guess you could try to use transaction volume as an input but that seems like a bad metric because it's a) gameable and 2) does not necessarily correlate with external demand for the crypto currency.
- smallnamespace 9y ago
  > Is it even possible to have a stable priced crypto? Stable with respect to what? Fiat? Which one? In the limit you will have a cryptocurrency backed by a fiat currency (and I don't consider Tether to be one. Bitfinex will allow you to exchange $1 for 1 tether, but nobody will guarantee you can go the other direction).
- wmf 9y ago
  The crypto money supply is predetermined No, it isn't. People just have trouble imagining non-crackpot cryptocurrency because they've never seen one. For a stable price you'd need a crypto that adjusts mining difficulty in response to changes in the amount of demand (or something like that?) Right, you can adjust the block reward so that the rate of issuance of money tracks the rate of change of demand. However, the USD-to-Crypto price is something outside of the blockchain, so as far as my understanding goes you can't really use that as an input There are some projects that use "oracles" to publish price information on the blockchain, but then you get into a bunch of complexity about electing oracles and taking the median price of multiple oracles. I guess you could try to use transaction volume as an input but that seems like a bad metric because it's a) gameable and 2) does not necessarily correlate with external demand for the crypto currency. Right. You can also use difficulty as a metric (based on the theory that higher price makes mining more profitable which causes more miners to mine which causes difficulty to increase). https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/11/search-stable-cryptocurrency/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/11/search-stable-cryptocur... Note that some of these techniques don't guarantee stable value, just less volatile value.
john_moscow 9y ago
>Can someone suggest a stable priced crypto that is actually useful for transactions? Just wait anywhere between 0.5-5 years once enough people get burned and stop acting out of FOMO and you'll get it.
6nf 9y ago
Its solved - Tether is stable.
- tehlike 9y ago
  "stable".
  - 6nf 9y ago
    Tether is always 1 USD so it is stable in the sense that the value doesn't change by 20% in a day which is what OP wants I think?
    - tehlike 9y ago
      you can't redeem or use USDT for anything, and it's supposedly backed up by real usd, but in the terms of service, it says they have no obligation to redeem it. You tell me.
- pikchurn 9y ago
  To the extent you trust tether. But if trust is centralized, why use a block chain? If tether operated a Chaumian cash server instead of some block chain thing it would be universally better for all involved with no loss of trust from what actually existed before.
xur17 9y ago
This is still in development, so it's not an immediate solution, but you may find this interesting: http://makerdao.com/ http://makerdao.com/
placeybordeaux 9y ago
I don't think a stablecoin has been made, or at least if it has it hasn't found wide adoption. That is part of the problem, if people couldn't make profit off of speculating on bitcoin it's quite likely that it wouldn't be as widely accepted/talked about. It wouldn't be too hard to make a inflationary coin, just mint coins proportional to the estimated GH of the network. That would give the coin a price ceiling.
azernik 9y ago
The Basecoin project (http://www.getbasecoin.com/ http://www.getbasecoin.com/) is an as-yet-unreleased cryptocurrency designed for stable value. It's fed an externally-sourced target exchange rate and current exchange rate against some target currency basket and automatically sells and purchases bonds to remove from and add to the money supply, maintaining the currency peg.
shafyy 9y ago
I think entering a credit card number isn't a pain for most people (from a safety and convenience perspective). It's a good enough solution, and crypto is not helping people 10x in this matter.
- h_r 9y ago
  I don't think entering the cc number is the source of pain but rather it is entering a permanent account number that is thereafter always subject to being stolen. Using digital cash would be a wonderful alternative.
  - shafyy 9y ago
    Sorry just saw this. That's what I meant by "safety". I don't think the average person cares or even knows that it could be a problem.
terencege 9y ago
There's a new project called Minexcoin(https://minexcoin.com/ https://minexcoin.com/) which aims to be a stable coin. The volatility is maintained by an autonomous algorithm acting like a central bank called Minexbank. The founder was interviewed recently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDOKNRMTPbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDOKNRMTPbI) to explain more detail about the project.

tehlike 9y ago

the only "stable" coin is USDT, but stay away, it's not useful for anything, and it's legitimacy is in question. As long as there are finite-ish supply, I don't think any crypto would be stable.

chickenfries 9y ago

What’s your goal with that set up compared to something like one use credit card numbers that cc companies and banks provide for online shopping?

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago

Use Apple Pay then.

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
Wow I guess people downvoted the heck out of this comment thinking I'm being sarcastic. I am not. Apple pay has all the encryption mechanism that makes it much safer than sending your credit card number over the Internet, which the parent was asking for.
- j_s 9y ago
  The "obtained from cash ATM's" part of OP seemed to be specifically targeting a higher degree of anonymity to me, but it is indeed open for interpretation. Personally Apple pay is the primary appeal of Apple's ecosystem for me. No other intermediary's incentives are aligned to prioritize the customer in the transaction ahead of data mining opportunities.
aquova 9y ago
People may see this comment and think it's being standoffish, but it's the truth. What OP wants is a system where you transfer traditional currency into digital money (which you're going to need to use a credit card/bank account at least once to do), and then use that without having to worry about using your card on multiple different websites. This is exactly what Apple Pay/Paypal is, minus the transaction fees. This is not the purpose of cryptocurrencies, nor will it ever be.

tbabb 9y ago

If the crypto doesn't have a central bank to institute monetary policy and manage supply, it's unsolvable. I feel like a broken record saying this: Demand for the currency will fluctuate. If the supply is fixed, the price will be demand-driven. Which means volatile. Fiat currency has a central bank with active control over the supply, so it is capable of keeping a stable price if the central bank does its job. http://www.bzarg.com/p/what-bitcoin-shows-us-about-how-money-works/ http://www.bzarg.com/p/what-bitcoin-shows-us-about-how-money...

placeybordeaux 9y ago
There is nothing to say that all coins need a fixed supply. It wouldn't be hard to establish voting to release a given amount of funds/authorize the selling of bonds. All blockchains have a transient central authority, the miner.
azernik 9y ago
Have you taken a look at the Basecoin project (http://www.getbasecoin.com/ http://www.getbasecoin.com/)? It's a cryptocurrency system that's designed with a central bank in mind - you feed it the current exchange rate relative to some peg, and the system changes the money supply (through bond sales and purchases) to maintain the peg.
- cracker_jacks 9y ago
  Who feeds the current exchange rate? Wouldn't that require trust from a central authority to determine?
  - azernik 9y ago
    The designers have proposed that as one possible solution. In their white paper (http://www.getbasecoin.com/basecoin_whitepaper_0_99.pdf http://www.getbasecoin.com/basecoin_whitepaper_0_99.pdf), page 11, the three options they give are: * Single trusted feed * Take the median of the exchange rates from a set of feeds, with that set chosen by vote of holders of the coin (I can personally see this having some conflict-of-interest issues) * Use what they call a "Decentralized Schelling point scheme" - have coinholders vote on what they think the exchange rate was in a recent time interval, use the median vote, then reward voters who were in the 25th to 75th percentile. The authors seem to view the third option, with some engineering of the incentives, to be ideal; but I'm skeptical of a system that gives holders of an asset the ability to change the value of that asset. I would honestly prefer the use of a trusted authority - at least that way you have a very clear delineation of what the central authority is supposed to do and can easily audit whether it is doing its job.

raquo 9y ago

Is it even possible to have a stable priced crypto? The crypto money supply is predetermined, but demand is not, often driven by events outside of the blockchain. Supply needs to actively balance demand if the price is to stay stable. For a stable price you'd need a crypto that adjusts mining difficulty in response to changes in the amount of demand (or something like that? My understanding of crypto currencies is only surface level). However, the USD-to-Crypto price is something outside of the blockchain, so as far as my understanding goes you can't really use that as an input because you can't get undisputable information on the price, because the entirety of undisputable information should exist in the blockchain. I guess you could try to use transaction volume as an input but that seems like a bad metric because it's a) gameable and 2) does not necessarily correlate with external demand for the crypto currency.

smallnamespace 9y ago
> Is it even possible to have a stable priced crypto? Stable with respect to what? Fiat? Which one? In the limit you will have a cryptocurrency backed by a fiat currency (and I don't consider Tether to be one. Bitfinex will allow you to exchange $1 for 1 tether, but nobody will guarantee you can go the other direction).
wmf 9y ago
The crypto money supply is predetermined No, it isn't. People just have trouble imagining non-crackpot cryptocurrency because they've never seen one. For a stable price you'd need a crypto that adjusts mining difficulty in response to changes in the amount of demand (or something like that?) Right, you can adjust the block reward so that the rate of issuance of money tracks the rate of change of demand. However, the USD-to-Crypto price is something outside of the blockchain, so as far as my understanding goes you can't really use that as an input There are some projects that use "oracles" to publish price information on the blockchain, but then you get into a bunch of complexity about electing oracles and taking the median price of multiple oracles. I guess you could try to use transaction volume as an input but that seems like a bad metric because it's a) gameable and 2) does not necessarily correlate with external demand for the crypto currency. Right. You can also use difficulty as a metric (based on the theory that higher price makes mining more profitable which causes more miners to mine which causes difficulty to increase). https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/11/search-stable-cryptocurrency/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/11/search-stable-cryptocur... Note that some of these techniques don't guarantee stable value, just less volatile value.

john_moscow 9y ago

>Can someone suggest a stable priced crypto that is actually useful for transactions? Just wait anywhere between 0.5-5 years once enough people get burned and stop acting out of FOMO and you'll get it.

6nf 9y ago

Its solved - Tether is stable.

tehlike 9y ago
"stable".
- 6nf 9y ago
  Tether is always 1 USD so it is stable in the sense that the value doesn't change by 20% in a day which is what OP wants I think?
  - tehlike 9y ago
    you can't redeem or use USDT for anything, and it's supposedly backed up by real usd, but in the terms of service, it says they have no obligation to redeem it. You tell me.
pikchurn 9y ago
To the extent you trust tether. But if trust is centralized, why use a block chain? If tether operated a Chaumian cash server instead of some block chain thing it would be universally better for all involved with no loss of trust from what actually existed before.

xur17 9y ago

This is still in development, so it's not an immediate solution, but you may find this interesting: http://makerdao.com/ http://makerdao.com/

placeybordeaux 9y ago

I don't think a stablecoin has been made, or at least if it has it hasn't found wide adoption. That is part of the problem, if people couldn't make profit off of speculating on bitcoin it's quite likely that it wouldn't be as widely accepted/talked about. It wouldn't be too hard to make a inflationary coin, just mint coins proportional to the estimated GH of the network. That would give the coin a price ceiling.

azernik 9y ago

The Basecoin project (http://www.getbasecoin.com/ http://www.getbasecoin.com/) is an as-yet-unreleased cryptocurrency designed for stable value. It's fed an externally-sourced target exchange rate and current exchange rate against some target currency basket and automatically sells and purchases bonds to remove from and add to the money supply, maintaining the currency peg.

shafyy 9y ago

I think entering a credit card number isn't a pain for most people (from a safety and convenience perspective). It's a good enough solution, and crypto is not helping people 10x in this matter.

h_r 9y ago
I don't think entering the cc number is the source of pain but rather it is entering a permanent account number that is thereafter always subject to being stolen. Using digital cash would be a wonderful alternative.
- shafyy 9y ago
  Sorry just saw this. That's what I meant by "safety". I don't think the average person cares or even knows that it could be a problem.

terencege 9y ago

There's a new project called Minexcoin(https://minexcoin.com/ https://minexcoin.com/) which aims to be a stable coin. The volatility is maintained by an autonomous algorithm acting like a central bank called Minexbank. The founder was interviewed recently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDOKNRMTPbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDOKNRMTPbI) to explain more detail about the project.