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Anyone can mine. Anyone can earn bitcoin. Early adopters have been rewarded, sure, but the distribution of bitcoin has been steadily increasing. The vast maj

Anyone can mine. Anyone can earn bitcoin. Early adopters have been rewarded, sure, but the distribution of bitcoin has been steadily increasing. The vast majority of the world is able to exchange their local currency for bitcoin should they decide to take that risk. How exactly do you propose a decentralized currency controlled by no one bootstrap itself?

Retric 9y ago
The reasonable choice would be to mine a fixed amount of coins per year over ~100+ years not have a perimid scheme designed to artificially reward early adopters, and simulate a pyramid scheme. And that's sidestepping the issue with ~1/5 of all possible coins already being lost.
- nosuchthing 9y ago
  Or even further, keep the internal economic work:payment model consistent. All work pays equal tokens. Computational work = constant payment. Unfortunately no one has been able to create an algorithm which creates valuable compute work. Satoshi's Proof-Of-Work is more like Proof-of-Capital-Burning ÷ time passed ÷ sum of all users and capital burning in network PoW is effectively guessing a random number. Nonce-cents
  - gruez 9y ago
    >Computational work = constant payment. With moore's law, that would result in hyperinflation. Who wants gold if the amount that is mined doubles every 2 years?
    - nosuchthing 9y ago
      Gold? Computational work is not Gold. Database tokens acquired though a software game of number guessing (Satoshi's PoW algorithm), rewarding less and less as the number grows larger would be more akin to fools gold.
- jonnydubowsky 9y ago
  It's likely that there won't ever be a single cryptocurrency that solves all the messy and complex problems of our global financial systems. Bitcoin is certainly far from delivering on that promise at the moment. It has however delivered a significant improvement in providing a trustless, secure, fault tolerant and immutable environment in which to implement a clean slate in monetary policy. Ethereum evolved this from a ledger of transactions to a ledger of computational states, and off to the races we've gone in using these as inspirations toward improving the broken qualities of our modern financial services industry. Factom offered a different take on inflation and deflation, dozens more tinker and toil to get it right. Transparency has improved, regulations have begun to take shape, and its just the first inning.
- gruez 9y ago
  >The reasonable choice would be to mine a fixed amount of coins per year over ~100+ years But that doesn't fix the underlying problem which is that early adopters can get the coins for pennies, whereas late adopters have to pay thousands.
  - acjohnson55 9y ago
    That presumes there's a pressing reason to pay thousands of dollars for a bitcoin. Which seems absurd to me. If it ceased to exist, my life wouldn't be affected in the least.
    - freejulian 9y ago
      You’ve chosen an arbitrary amount of Bitcoin and said “1000$ for this arbitrary amount is absurd!!1” Would you feel better if I told you one satoshi is worth $0.00008?
      - nosuchthing 9y ago
        Completely missed the point. The work required to acquire 50 Bitcoins every 10 minutes was trivial for a small group of users. Imagine some guy pressing a button and receiving a 50 Bitcoins. Now imagine you pressing a button 700 times to receive .0001 Bitcoins.
        freejulian 9y ago
        I understand how proof of work functions, thanks. The person I was replying to claimed $1000 was an absurd amount for a bitcoin. I was merely pointing that 1 btc is an arbitrary amount of satoshis. Anyways, my point stands: how do you expect a grassroots currency to bootstrap itself? Of course the first miners had it easy, no one took the currency seriously back then.
        nostrademons 9y ago
        Regardless of the numbers, the other posters on this subthread are making an important point: too much wealth concentration deters new adopters. Think of it in terms of the Ultimatum Game [1]: when faced with a new system of wealth distribution, potential new participants not currently within the system have two choices. They can choose to trade something they possess that would be of value to the existing participants (labor, wampum, or $USD, for example) for the new currency. Or they can say "Fuck you, I'm not playing in your sandbox." The challenge for Bitcoin is that only ~0.3% of the population is involved in it, but the amount of money you have to spend to get a tiny fraction of the wealth that early adopters got just for showing up early is ridiculous. Under those conditions, the incentives for the remaining 99.7% is to say "Fuck you, I'll stick with my dollars". Or, alternatively, to create new currencies with their own pyramid schemes in the hopes of replicating Bitcoin's success. Too little reward for early adopters and the new currency never gets adoption. Too much, and its adoption stalls out before it reaches a critical mass of the population. Ramp up the inflation rate later, and you can get continued growth after adoption, but at the expense of overall trust in the currency. It seems like you need a steady stream of broken promises, buried history, and disaffected outsiders to both gain adoption of a new currency and continue its growth. (Interestingly, fiat has the same problem now: a significant number of people believe their chance of amassing significant wealth is near-zero within the current system, which is one of the major factors driving adoption of Bitcoin. They're effectively saying "Fuck you, I'm not playing in your sandbox" to the financial system of the developed world. But the other posters in this thread are pointing out that this problem is not unique to fiat, and that Bitcoin itself has this problem too, as does every other attempt to coordinate a new store of value.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game

Retric 9y ago

The reasonable choice would be to mine a fixed amount of coins per year over ~100+ years not have a perimid scheme designed to artificially reward early adopters, and simulate a pyramid scheme. And that's sidestepping the issue with ~1/5 of all possible coins already being lost.

nosuchthing 9y ago
Or even further, keep the internal economic work:payment model consistent. All work pays equal tokens. Computational work = constant payment. Unfortunately no one has been able to create an algorithm which creates valuable compute work. Satoshi's Proof-Of-Work is more like Proof-of-Capital-Burning ÷ time passed ÷ sum of all users and capital burning in network PoW is effectively guessing a random number. Nonce-cents
- gruez 9y ago
  >Computational work = constant payment. With moore's law, that would result in hyperinflation. Who wants gold if the amount that is mined doubles every 2 years?
  - nosuchthing 9y ago
    Gold? Computational work is not Gold. Database tokens acquired though a software game of number guessing (Satoshi's PoW algorithm), rewarding less and less as the number grows larger would be more akin to fools gold.
jonnydubowsky 9y ago
It's likely that there won't ever be a single cryptocurrency that solves all the messy and complex problems of our global financial systems. Bitcoin is certainly far from delivering on that promise at the moment. It has however delivered a significant improvement in providing a trustless, secure, fault tolerant and immutable environment in which to implement a clean slate in monetary policy. Ethereum evolved this from a ledger of transactions to a ledger of computational states, and off to the races we've gone in using these as inspirations toward improving the broken qualities of our modern financial services industry. Factom offered a different take on inflation and deflation, dozens more tinker and toil to get it right. Transparency has improved, regulations have begun to take shape, and its just the first inning.
gruez 9y ago
>The reasonable choice would be to mine a fixed amount of coins per year over ~100+ years But that doesn't fix the underlying problem which is that early adopters can get the coins for pennies, whereas late adopters have to pay thousands.
- acjohnson55 9y ago
  That presumes there's a pressing reason to pay thousands of dollars for a bitcoin. Which seems absurd to me. If it ceased to exist, my life wouldn't be affected in the least.
  - freejulian 9y ago
    You’ve chosen an arbitrary amount of Bitcoin and said “1000$ for this arbitrary amount is absurd!!1” Would you feel better if I told you one satoshi is worth $0.00008?
    - nosuchthing 9y ago
      Completely missed the point. The work required to acquire 50 Bitcoins every 10 minutes was trivial for a small group of users. Imagine some guy pressing a button and receiving a 50 Bitcoins. Now imagine you pressing a button 700 times to receive .0001 Bitcoins.
      - freejulian 9y ago
        I understand how proof of work functions, thanks. The person I was replying to claimed $1000 was an absurd amount for a bitcoin. I was merely pointing that 1 btc is an arbitrary amount of satoshis. Anyways, my point stands: how do you expect a grassroots currency to bootstrap itself? Of course the first miners had it easy, no one took the currency seriously back then.
        nostrademons 9y ago
        Regardless of the numbers, the other posters on this subthread are making an important point: too much wealth concentration deters new adopters. Think of it in terms of the Ultimatum Game [1]: when faced with a new system of wealth distribution, potential new participants not currently within the system have two choices. They can choose to trade something they possess that would be of value to the existing participants (labor, wampum, or $USD, for example) for the new currency. Or they can say "Fuck you, I'm not playing in your sandbox." The challenge for Bitcoin is that only ~0.3% of the population is involved in it, but the amount of money you have to spend to get a tiny fraction of the wealth that early adopters got just for showing up early is ridiculous. Under those conditions, the incentives for the remaining 99.7% is to say "Fuck you, I'll stick with my dollars". Or, alternatively, to create new currencies with their own pyramid schemes in the hopes of replicating Bitcoin's success. Too little reward for early adopters and the new currency never gets adoption. Too much, and its adoption stalls out before it reaches a critical mass of the population. Ramp up the inflation rate later, and you can get continued growth after adoption, but at the expense of overall trust in the currency. It seems like you need a steady stream of broken promises, buried history, and disaffected outsiders to both gain adoption of a new currency and continue its growth. (Interestingly, fiat has the same problem now: a significant number of people believe their chance of amassing significant wealth is near-zero within the current system, which is one of the major factors driving adoption of Bitcoin. They're effectively saying "Fuck you, I'm not playing in your sandbox" to the financial system of the developed world. But the other posters in this thread are pointing out that this problem is not unique to fiat, and that Bitcoin itself has this problem too, as does every other attempt to coordinate a new store of value.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game