15 ms·

Fictional Cryptocurrencies

213 points by gadtfly 6y ago

blamestross 6y ago
It misses one of the coolest ones. Slow Money, from (Neptune's Brood)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune%27s_Brood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune%27s_Brood] is based on using the speed of light and the triangle inequality to verify transactions via the laws of physics. You are allowed to double spend as long as the two expenditures are outside each other's light cones.
- LolWolf 6y ago
  I think these are just made up by Scott, but that is a phenomenal-sounding book! I am quite curious and will check it out :)
- sxp 6y ago
  This was an awesome concept at the time. It was one of the reasons I became pro-Bitcoin along with Cryptonomicon. Unfortunately, Stross became anti-crypto afterwards: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want-bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-w... The technolibertarian ideology that was in some of his earlier writing were replaced with more authoritarian & leftist views so he said "BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions." as if it was a bad thing. P.S, what's the basis of your username? Any relation to https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cstross https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cstross ?
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    > as if it was a bad thing. Future generations may look back on mandatory financial surveillance the same way we look back on general warrants. Especially because the claims don't match the requirements. If you want to make sure someone is paying their income tax, you don't need to know who the buyer is. But the same is true of sales tax, which is likewise collected by the seller. And it's the buyer who most needs privacy. The mosque or synagogue or gay bar or abortion clinic or adult book store may not be hiding what it is from the government, but their patrons shouldn't have to reveal that they're patrons. Yet if you try to activate a prepaid credit card, they want your name. For what?
    - toss1 6y ago
      What they want to track with prepaid cards is money laundering. And this is not money laundering of the corner drug dealer, it is the laundering of the wealth of entire nations by transnational crime syndicate masquerading as governments (e.g., see RUS, VNZ), and transnational gangs which are large enough to warrant military attention, which is currently driving geopolitics. And yes, your tiny prepaid card is probably an irrelevant bit of collateral damage in that picture, but that is why they'll ask your name. And, no, FINCEN DGAF if you spend it at any of those places. They DO care if it turns out some of those places are laundering a lot of crime money, and they DO care if you get dozens of those cards and spend 90% of it at one of the launderer's places. they will also care if you are working in a scam organization that convinces marks to send payment as prepaid card codes, and you are cashing those cards... If it is untraceable and at all scaleable, you can guarantee that organized crime is using it to launder money, and that there will be real efforts to make it traceable.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        > And this is not money laundering of the corner drug dealer, it is the laundering of the wealth of entire nations by transnational crime syndicate masquerading as governments (e.g., see RUS, VNZ), and transnational gangs which are large enough to warrant military attention, which is currently driving geopolitics. The problem is that it doesn't actually work for organizations with that level of resources. A multi-billion dollar criminal enterprise doesn't need prepaid cards to launder their money. They can buy arbitrary amounts of soybeans or crude oil or laundry detergent. There is nothing suspicious or even illegal about a shipping container full of soybeans. Anybody can cook up some books that say that Alice paid Bob a billion dollars for soybeans and Bob paid Alice a billion dollars for licensing intellectual property netting to zero, when it was really a billion dollars under the table and the intellectual property was worthless. Then the commodity goes to whatever country, get sold on the commodity market there and turns back into money. That's assuming they don't just use Bitcoin. That's assuming they don't just keep doing this: https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/hsbc-moved-vast-sums-of-dirty-money-after-paying-record-laundering-fine/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/hsbc-moved-... Anti-money laundering laws are a failed experiment. They don't work. They cost far more than they're worth.
  - orwin 6y ago
    I'm anti-bitcoin, and pro-crypto. I think the only thing that should be taxed is wealth, regardless of debt, and not work or transactions; so state don't need to monitor financial transaction at all. BUT bitcoin is not a smart crypto: its inefficient, POW is not a good idea and is worse when the algorithm can be optimized with specialized processor. It gives too much power to state actors (like most computational activities tbh) . If the US, China or Russia wanted to do a 51% attack, it realistically could with some investments.
    - dnautics 6y ago
      > the only thing that should be taxed is wealth How would you value non-monetary assets? And let's say I hated someone, could I get a group of assessors to overvalue their house and put them into bankruptcy?
      - FeepingCreature 6y ago
        > How would you value non-monetary assets? One cool idea I've seen proposed is mandatory sales. So maybe once a year, you have to specify a value for everything you own, and people can buy it from you for that value. So you can set your sentimental value as high as you like, and make it impossible for anyone to buy your valued property. But then taxes are calculated off that value...
        2038AD 6y ago
        That's one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. I'm sincerely astounded how bad it is and it gets worse the more I think about it. To start, it shows a complete lack of respect for the right of ownership. Under this system you wouldn't own anything and would be subjected to compensated theft regularly. This system would simultaneously represent the worst ideas of what Socialist and capitalistic life can be. To an anti-socialist, socialism represents theft. The problem is the forcible reappropriation of assets. The justification for this is twofold: property being theft in itself & it being immoral to deprive the in-need of assets you don't need. Private property represents theft since claims must begin somewhere and that somewhere is the state of nature, the commons. In our imagined socialist commonwealth, goods ought to be for the benefit of all. The problem with this is that some goods are exclusive by nature. Only I can wear the clothes on my back, it's more hygienic if we have a toothbrush each and frankly we should have enough goods that, in general, we don't need to argue over use. For this socialists make a distinction between private and personal property. This distinction diminishes possession but at least it comes from a place of wanting help for others. Mandatory sales mean your rights are trumped by capital, or more accurately those holding it. If mandatory sales apply literally to all goods then go ahead and take the clothes off my back. There's little room for dignity when those richer than you can take even the most sentimental of belongings. Why don't we go a step further? Apply the concept the any service a person may provide, recognise that sex work is real work and you've just legalised rape. This may seem a disproportionate response but I'm sick of people being so detached that they think reengineering society is something to be taken lightly. Reminds me of a sketch which had the line > Have you tried 'raise VAT' and 'kill all the poor'? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg I'm sure any objection I have could be rebutted with something which amounts to 'there are loopholes'.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    From what I've read, it's not a political/ideology shift in Stross but more a shift in how you (don't) read the books. Stross has been very critical and antagonist against runaway effects ("anti-crypto") since his first book Accelerando. While a lot of the "cool stuff" and many of the characters, including some of the protagonists, are very "technolibertarian" most of Stross' plots are generally Very Bad Things happening to them, including various sorts of cascade failures in the "cool stuff" domains (up to and including Lovecraftian apocalyptic doom in the Laundry universe). Generally the moral arc in a lot of Stross' (as such exists) from meta/high-level usually seems to be wary of the "cool stuff" as Very Bad Things Can Happen. He's a great writer because those moral arcs are left subtle and to the reader rather than tagged on the end like Aesop's Fables. (Sometimes I wish they were blandly tagged at the end like Aesop's Fables to avoid some of these conversations, because we're living in a post-Poe's Law Singularity and subtlety is all too often easily overlooked.)
    - Apocryphon 6y ago
      Yeah, it's hard to see Stross as libertarian at all. Pertinently, he just wrote about Neptune's Brood and medium money recently: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/02/central-banking-on-mars.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/02/central...
      - sxp 6y ago
        > MuskCoin is required in payment for cargo capacity on Earth-to-Mars shipping, or for purchasing real estate on Mars. It has a floating terrestrial exchange rate: the idea is that it's used for mediating interplanetary exchanges. That sounds like the currency in Artemis by Andy Weir (of The Martian fame) which used "slugs" as a currency on Luna: > “It’s short for soft-landed grams. S-L-G. Slug. One slug gets one gram of cargo delivered from Earth to Artemis, courtesy of KSC.” “It’s technically not a currency,” Trond said from the credenza. “We’re not a country; we can’t have a currency. Slugs are pre-purchased service credit from KSC. You pay dollars, euros, yen, whatever, and in exchange you get a mass allowance for shipment to Artemis. You don’t have to use it all at once, so they keep track of your balance.” ... “It ended up being a handy unit for trade. So KSC is functioning as a bank. You’d never get away with that on Earth, but this isn’t Earth.”
  - blamestross 6y ago
    cstross's books were formative for me. I read accelerando when I was 16. He convinced me that making new technology (and avoiding others) was a task worthy of my life's focus. So, in part, blame him for me :sweat-smile:
    - krapp 6y ago
      Have you been sitting on this username for nearly five years just waiting to be able to make this comment?
      - blamestross 6y ago
        Yes.
    - sxp 6y ago
      Yes! Accelerando was the first Singularitarian novel I ever read and I read it in college around the time I read Vinge's original essay so it had a strong influence on my career path.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Even better, the author, Charles Stross, has kind of predicted cryptocurrencies (specifically Ethereum and this "RedCoin") in his (begun in 1999 !) book : Accelerando (Which otherwise is first about a technological singularity.) : > One of his e-mail accounts is halfway to the moon with automatic messages, companies with names like agalmic.holdings.root.8E.F0 screaming for the attention of their transitive director. Each of these companies – and there are currently more than sixteen thousand of them, although the herd is growing day by day – has three directors and is the director of three other companies. Each of them executes a script in a functional language Manfred invented; the directors tell the company what to do, and the instructions include orders to pass instructions on to their children. In effect, they are a flock of cellular automata, like the cells in Conway's Game of Life, only far more complex and powerful. > Manfred's companies form a programmable grid. Some of them are armed with capital in the form of patents Manfred filed, then delegated rather than passing on to one of the Free Foundations. Some of them are effectively nontrading, but occupy directorial roles. Their corporate functions (such as filing of accounts and voting in new directors) are all handled centrally through his company-operating framework, and their trading is carried out via several of the more popular B2B enabler dot-coms. Internally, the companies do other, more obscure load-balancing computations, processing resource-allocation problems like a classic state central planning system. None of which explains why fully half of them have been hit by lawsuits in the past twenty-two hours. > The lawsuits are ... random. That's the only pattern Manfred can detect. Some of them allege patent infringements; these he might take seriously, except that about a third of the targets are director companies that don't actually do anything visible to the public. A few lawsuits allege mismanagement, but then there's a whole bizarre raft of spurious nonsense: suits for wrongful dismissal or age discrimination – against companies with no employees – complaints about reckless trading, and one action alleging that the defendant (in conspiracy with the prime minister of Japan, the government of Canada, and the Emir of Kuwait) is using orbital mind-control lasers to make the plaintiff's pet chihuahua bark at all hours of day and night. > Manfred groans and does a quick calculation. At the current rate, lawsuits are hitting his corporate grid at a rate of one every sixteen seconds – up from none in the preceding six months. In another day, this is going to saturate him. If it keeps up for a week, it'll saturate every court in the United States. Someone has found a means to do for lawsuits what he's doing for companies – and they've chosen him as their target. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
epx 6y ago
This will cost me some HN points (that could be a digital currency itself) but http://viuvasdobitcho.blogspot.com/2014/01/bitchocoin-launched.html http://viuvasdobitcho.blogspot.com/2014/01/bitchocoin-launch...
- bitxbitxbitcoin 6y ago
  A centralized digital currency. Just like fiat currencies nowadays.
vmception 6y ago
Forgot to add PETRO to the list Fictional because they never issued it
aminozuur 6y ago
USD - You mine USD coins by exchanging goods or services, or by prostituting your time. But the coin is centralised and the governing authority is constantly adding supply.
- mckirk 6y ago
  It's basically Dogecoin with old presidents instead of a dog.
  - anonisko 6y ago
    At least dogecoin has a static and predictable supply inflation and doesn't glorify slave owners and indian killers.
    - emptyparadise 6y ago
      Kabosu the Shiba Inu is my president.
    - WoahNoun 6y ago
      Inflation and changes to the money supply are not the same thing. This conflation gets pushed by libertarians/techno-libertarians constantly. The money supply can increase and inflation (the price of goods and services) can go down.
      - mdpopescu 6y ago
        To inflate = to increase in size. The money supply increases = it inflates.
        j4yav 6y ago
        That's correct, and also prices increase (or inflate). The parent is saying conflating increase in prices and increase in monetary supply can be incorrect.
keyle 6y ago
This was a great, fun read. I'd like to add one I just thought off in the same vain. Sudokucoin, where the chain is advanced by the first person solving a complex puzzle (by hand) which the hash of which generates the next complex puzzle, using added skull chips accelerating the trans-human evolution. And Properdogecoin, where the first dog bringing the ball back shows proof of work and is a good boy. May lead to a lot of puppy death by fatigue though so I'm not on board with this one.
travisjungroth 6y ago
I just made a site for OrangeGroveCoin[1]. It's a fictional cryptocurrency that you should definitely buy because: 1. It’s an investment of money. 2. It’s a common enterprise. 3. You can expect to make money from the efforts of others. It's also not a security because it's a token. I made it recently, after having the idea years ago when I worked at Coinbase. I didn't do it then because I wasn't sure that the SEC would get the joke. It seems like maybe they would have, because they would later make a site for HoweyCoins[2] I published the site and made a post on LinkedIn. I also had an accompanying joke startup persona. It did not really go as I hoped. No one got the joke. People commented on my pivot, or asked to buy. Old coworkers I emailed about it ignored it, assumably numb to crypto announcements. I might as well dump the rest of the content here[3]. [1]https://orangegrovecoin.com/ https://orangegrovecoin.com/ [2]https://www.howeycoins.com/ https://www.howeycoins.com/ [3]https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q1zkWGth2xcg581K81S4X6-PPfHtZ9-PmHrKQ3Vg4z8/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q1zkWGth2xcg581K81S4X6-P...
scyclow 6y ago
You'd really think that some of the real coins out there are fake. I still can't believe FastCashMoneyPlus[1] is real [1]http://fasrtcashmoneyplus.biz http://fasrtcashmoneyplus.biz
- byecomputer 6y ago
  1.) You misspelled your own URL, goof 2.) I truly enjoyed that, especially how it's interlinked with your other satire to create this dumb little alternate universe. Thanks for the laugh, you're funny, keep it up.
- brabel 6y ago
  I love the outrageously colourful website, with color changing popup windows and a truly gigantic CLICK HERE TO MAKE CASH FAST button and all :D They even have merchandising (I don't think that's real, but at least they seem to have paid some models to pose with the masks, t-shirts and so on). And of course, it includes a whitepaper (link at the bottom) to add credibility!!! I didn't click anything on this website for obvious reasons, but would be curious to know what's in that whitepaper.
  - crtasm 6y ago
    the merch photos are clearly edited stock shots but click through to zazzle and you can buy the items for USD!
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Since I recently created a fictional cryptocurrency in another thread, I'll just repost it here: I also have a cryptocurrency, it's called IdiotCoin. Only a single idiot exists and I own it. It can be divided into 2^64-1 dolts. If you want to buy a dolt from me, the cost is one US cent, however, for every dolt purchased I will double the price of the next dolt. So you see, the value of dolts will always exponentially increase, provided the US dollar doesn't inflate even faster. This is great because it means that no matter when you purchase a dolt you are guaranteed to see the value double as soon as someone else buys a dolt from me. If you buy a dolt from someone else the price could of course be lower, and they'll be giving you one hell of a deal! Banned because: The pyramid scheme was too obvious
- rspeele 6y ago
  What's the ratio of dolts to Stanley Nickels?
  - williamtrask 6y ago
    approximately equal to the ratio of unicorns to leprechauns!!!
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  That's not a pyramid scheme though?
- Clewza313 6y ago
  I'm afraid truth is stranger than fiction, because PonziCoin was already created in 2018: https://www.coinbureau.com/analysis/ponzicoin-crypto-crazy https://www.coinbureau.com/analysis/ponzicoin-crypto-crazy
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    Ponzis actually pay [some of the] people back.
- divs1210 6y ago
soheil 6y ago
FakeCoin: used to let others know not to waste their time on articles that yield no utility or usefulness whatsoever. Proof of work: reading random bullshit on the internet about fictional cryptos.
riwsky 6y ago
To go with fictionalized cryptocurrency, some cryptocurrencied fiction: OCEAN’S ELEVEN: Danny Ocean, The Organizer, gets a crack team back together to pull off One More Big Heist—of an online casino. He recruits The Acrobat, The Demolitions Expert, The Pickpocket, The Two Expert Mechanics, The Inside Man Who Works At The Casino, and The Hacker—and then he fires everyone but The Hacker, sits in a Starbucks for twenty minutes guessing the right password, and makes off with millions of bitcoin. Or, rather: logs off with. The End. PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: Captain Jack Sparrow, drunkenly interrogating an ancient mariner at a pirate speakeasy, hears tell of a USB stick with millions of bitdubloons that the Dread Pirate Blackbeard had on him when he sank in the Bermuda Triangle. As everyone knows, USB sticks aren’t waterproof, and those funds are mathematically impossible to recover. The End. THE MATRIX: Nothing changes for Neo one day when he learns that he lives inside The Matrix, a new virtual currency. While he admits that such an existence has no intrinsic worth, he is afraid to leave “because what if the price skyrockets, and I miss out?” And besides, getting in or out of the Matrix entails a small fee. The End. SCARFACE: Cuban ex-con Tony Montana arrives in ‘80s Miami with dreams of both being a drug kingpin AND snagging a hot wife to match. Unfortunately for him, the Silk Road—a site on the dark web where people can anonymously buy illegal substances via bitcoins—has long run mom-and-pop drug empires out of business, Amazon-dot-com style, through a combination of customer convenience and economies of scale. Tony works, peacefully, as a dishwasher in a diner. The End. ALADDIN: Jafar, advisor to the Sultan of Agrabah, marries the Princess Jasmine after many years of canny political maneuvering against her dim-witted father. There was a magic cave full of legendary treasure that could have shaken things up, but it’s protected by strong encryption and no one can open it. The End. THERE WILL BE BLOOD: Prospector Daniel Plainview discovers a bitcoin mine in his computer. He doesn’t go crazy or anything, because everyone’s computer can be a bitcoin mine—you just download the program. No one gets hurt, especially not Paul Dano. The End. BREWSTER’S MILLIONS: Montgomery Brewster is in the bathroom one day when an email tells him he’s inherited 7 million bitcoins from his uncle—but there’s a twist: he only gets the 7 million if he can spend a separate, 1 million bitcoin inheritance from his grandfather within one year, under strict stipulations in the relatives' respective wills, both of which were implemented as “smart contracts” on what is known as “the blockchain”. There’s a bug in grandpa’s smart contract which makes the rules trivial to circumvent, and the anonymized nature of bitcoin makes it impossible for the ludditical old executor to enforce the will via his normal legal means. Brewster does some cursory googling, launders the first million bitcoins through a server in the Cayman Islands, and inherits all 8 million of the bitcoins before he gets off the toilet. The End.
jchanimal 6y ago
Something I imagined in 2014 turned out to inspire some art cryptocurrency projects https://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin https://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin
miguelrochefort 6y ago
Exodus: Bitcoin consumes more energy than all of China and transaction fees exceed 1 BTC. Exodus is a modern (scalable, environmentally friendly) implementation of Bitcoin that uses proof of burn to generate 1 XDS for each 1 BTC burned. Users permanently burn Bitcoin by sending them to randomly generated public addresses whose private keys are unknown. Exodus is expected to surpass Bitcoin as the Internet's de facto store of value by 2025.
- shinryuu 6y ago
  That might actually become a thing, doesn't seem too farfetched. Would require high conviction by the first participants.
- herbst 6y ago
  How is that even not a thing yet?
- FeepingCreature 6y ago
  You cannot prove that a piece of information is unknown. edit: Hm, maybe you could use nothing-up-my-sleeve numbers for the public addresses, like a hash of that day's closing prices.
- CloselyChunky 6y ago
  > Bitcoin consumes more energy than all of China This is not true. Bitcoin energy consumption is somewhere between Chile and Argentina.
  - miguelrochefort 6y ago
    > Fictional Cryptocurrencies
  - biztos 6y ago
    So it's in northern Patagonia?
debbiedowner 6y ago
A really innovative coin would be a coin that must be mined in a low energy way. I could envision a special new processor, eg something neuromorohic, that can perform unique algorithms at low power that are expensive to simulate on cpus or GPUs. Then if these are cheap enough to manufacture, the mining must be done on the special device to be worthwhile, and then the mining would have tiny energy impact. I would hope it would be a milliwattcoin. It would only take a milliwatt to mine a block and create a coin, but it could still take 10 mins. Somehow I think there is a contradiction here, but at the same time it sounds alluring.
- PurpleFoxy 6y ago
  We already have an answer to this, it’s called proof of stake. The logic is that mining is to distribute votes and make it very difficult (expensive) to have the majority of the votes. Proof of work does this since it takes a lot of money to buy and run miners, the mining proves you spent this money so you get your votes. The idea behind proof of stake is that you skip the mining entirely and just say the users with the most coins under their name get the most votes in the system. It achieves the same result without having to buy hardware or electricity.
  - alexmingoia 6y ago
    There's an even better alternative than Proof-of-Stake, which is Open-Representative-Voting (ORV) consensus, used by Nano. No fees, no inflation, no mining. https://docs.nano.org/protocol-design/introduction/ https://docs.nano.org/protocol-design/introduction/
    - brabel 6y ago
      This is, according to this link you posted yourself, a work-in-progress. There's no evidence this system is resilient to attacks or that it will work at scale. Only time will tell that. While this is definitely better than the outrageous waste of energy promoted by BitCoin and other proof-of-work crypto coins, the fact that BitCoin has been so popular for so long proves that it doesn't matter if it actually is "good" as a crypto coin or not: all that matters is whether people believe its price will keep going up - even on HN you see people who couldn't care less if its energy consumption is on par with Argentina's as long as they can make a few bucks betting on it.
firefoxd 6y ago
RenlyCoin - The rent friendly coin. Also the coin that never was. When my start-up was failing, the team decided to diversify and explore new ideas. The CEO called me one day and said "RenlyCoin" I said, no thank you. The CTO called me later and he said it's actually a pretty good idea. I said no thank you. We met with our investor and turns out they had already pitched it to him. I said we have no business doing crypto. We should instead try to figure out why things are not working. Yes, among the co-founders I held the title Naysayer. Turns out the CTO didn't come up with the idea. It was not the CEOs idea either, well it was a new friend of his that proposed it. He would create the coin for us for only $25k. he would take care of everything. They did, they gave him the money. Banned because: Well not banned really, because they never saw him again. I only learned about it two weeks after they couldn't get a hold of him. I left the start-up.
- yerwhat01010 6y ago
  Presumably RenlyCoin has less value than its brother, StannisCoin?
  - cptnapalm 6y ago
    StannisCoin is the MannisMoney
tornato7 6y ago
I'd like to make PlunderCoin, basically the network sits computing EC public keys for all possible private keys and when it runs into a Bitcoin/ETH wallet with money in it, that gets liquidated and distributed to PlunderCoin holders.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Aren't the odds such that even if you got everyone on earth generating keys, you still would be extremely unlikely to even find one?
  - JauntyHatAngle 6y ago
    Yes. Last time I checked if all hash power of btc tried to find a collision it would still take a few hundred million years or so.
    - biztos 6y ago
      This could be an advantage! If the market truly prices in the entire future, PlunderCoin should be worth trillions! Now if we can just get Masayoshi Son on board and use the word "quantum" a lot!
  - whoooooo123 6y ago
    Yes, except keys aren't distributed uniformly. Some people foolishly generate their random key using low-entropy seeds e.g. "English words". There are already people running scripts which look for these kind of easily-guessable keys in the wild; I've read reports from people getting their coins stolen because they used a stupid, guessable private key.
    - jcpham2 6y ago
      Distribution is mining nonces also not random
      - yerwhat01010 6y ago
arisAlexis 6y ago
Isn't it crystal clear by now that Driverify coin (explained in the post) will happen any day IRL?
lloeki 6y ago
ViCoin: proof-of-work, block mining is performed using input of users looking for a way to exit. EMACoin: proof-of-stake, the more swap used, the more one can stake. Use M-x C-mine. Supports smart contracts using a LISP dialect. EdCoin: proof-of-standard. It is the one standard coin, that raises above all others. Its only block can be mined but the output is always the same, always consistent, by standard. There is only one coin, labelled `?`. It is the one true coin, the path to Nirvana. See `man coin`.
motohagiography 6y ago
I was part of some discussions some years ago about a GovCoin for handling budget allocations in the public sector, which is essentially a planned economy where the over-educated manage the under-educated. If you ever want to see polarized inequality, it's a kind of intellectual feudalism. My impression is a cryptocurrency failed because it would work a little too well. It was only then I learned that all processes are mere pretext for the discretion of the people who control them. How naive I was. :)
- rudderz 6y ago
  > which is essentially a planned economy where the over-educated manage the under-educated Why do you feel this way? Couldn't there be a democratic mechanism to asset allocation? A democratically master-planned community wouldn't be unfathomable. Issue municipal debt with GovCoin serviced by taxes generated by the community.
  - motohagiography 6y ago
    Having consulted to scores of public sector projects, the institutions are artifacts of their incentives. See the Gervais Principle for example dynamics. An internal GovCoin would technically work very well, as unincorporated project billings and budgets aren't real money inside large organizations. The main question is, for who? It would obviate layers of management in organizations whose main purpose is to generate layers of management. The only time real money gets exchanged is during settlement with outside vendors, otherwise, it's fiat funny money run through multiple inconsistent departmental ledgers. Imagine it working inside a university, and then expand that to government ministries, as they're organized in essentially the same way. They don't want a means of exchange based on consumer need or desire, they want to decide based on narrative discussions.
    - rudderz 6y ago
      > the institutions are artifacts of their incentives Perhaps there's value in sidestepping the institutions entirely. The bitcoin playbook if you will. Cutting out layers of management seems to be a popular idea. Nevada recently passed a law that would allow companies to incorporate towns that have the authority of a county. Would love to see a kick-started GovCoin like the DAO where investors and future residents can collaborate on a brand new government tailored with the customers -- I mean "citizens" interests in mind. Start with a clean slate and build a new model society that can be forked and cloned globally.
biztos 6y ago
For a while I was listening to A16Z on the treadmill and they went into a phase where every second podcast was just thirty minutes of crypto buzzword salad. When the endorphins kicked in my poor brain would start spewing ever more tenuous ICO concepts. IIRC that was right about when I was not buying $BTC because "18,000 is nuts!" Clearly the endorphin-high brain was on the right track.
elwell 6y ago
For the climate change greater good, can someone devise a hashing algorithm that is similar as possible to the formula for photosynthesis? One that requires the miner to use sunlight and CO2 to compute block solutions

213 points by gadtfly 6y ago

It misses one of the coolest ones. Slow Money, from (Neptune's Brood)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune%27s_Brood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune%27s_Brood] is based on using the speed of light and the triangle inequality to verify transactions via the laws of physics. You are allowed to double spend as long as the two expenditures are outside each other's light cones.

LolWolf 6y ago
I think these are just made up by Scott, but that is a phenomenal-sounding book! I am quite curious and will check it out :)
sxp 6y ago
This was an awesome concept at the time. It was one of the reasons I became pro-Bitcoin along with Cryptonomicon. Unfortunately, Stross became anti-crypto afterwards: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want-bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-w... The technolibertarian ideology that was in some of his earlier writing were replaced with more authoritarian & leftist views so he said "BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions." as if it was a bad thing. P.S, what's the basis of your username? Any relation to https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cstross https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cstross ?
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > as if it was a bad thing. Future generations may look back on mandatory financial surveillance the same way we look back on general warrants. Especially because the claims don't match the requirements. If you want to make sure someone is paying their income tax, you don't need to know who the buyer is. But the same is true of sales tax, which is likewise collected by the seller. And it's the buyer who most needs privacy. The mosque or synagogue or gay bar or abortion clinic or adult book store may not be hiding what it is from the government, but their patrons shouldn't have to reveal that they're patrons. Yet if you try to activate a prepaid credit card, they want your name. For what?
  - toss1 6y ago
    What they want to track with prepaid cards is money laundering. And this is not money laundering of the corner drug dealer, it is the laundering of the wealth of entire nations by transnational crime syndicate masquerading as governments (e.g., see RUS, VNZ), and transnational gangs which are large enough to warrant military attention, which is currently driving geopolitics. And yes, your tiny prepaid card is probably an irrelevant bit of collateral damage in that picture, but that is why they'll ask your name. And, no, FINCEN DGAF if you spend it at any of those places. They DO care if it turns out some of those places are laundering a lot of crime money, and they DO care if you get dozens of those cards and spend 90% of it at one of the launderer's places. they will also care if you are working in a scam organization that convinces marks to send payment as prepaid card codes, and you are cashing those cards... If it is untraceable and at all scaleable, you can guarantee that organized crime is using it to launder money, and that there will be real efforts to make it traceable.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      > And this is not money laundering of the corner drug dealer, it is the laundering of the wealth of entire nations by transnational crime syndicate masquerading as governments (e.g., see RUS, VNZ), and transnational gangs which are large enough to warrant military attention, which is currently driving geopolitics. The problem is that it doesn't actually work for organizations with that level of resources. A multi-billion dollar criminal enterprise doesn't need prepaid cards to launder their money. They can buy arbitrary amounts of soybeans or crude oil or laundry detergent. There is nothing suspicious or even illegal about a shipping container full of soybeans. Anybody can cook up some books that say that Alice paid Bob a billion dollars for soybeans and Bob paid Alice a billion dollars for licensing intellectual property netting to zero, when it was really a billion dollars under the table and the intellectual property was worthless. Then the commodity goes to whatever country, get sold on the commodity market there and turns back into money. That's assuming they don't just use Bitcoin. That's assuming they don't just keep doing this: https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/hsbc-moved-vast-sums-of-dirty-money-after-paying-record-laundering-fine/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/hsbc-moved-... Anti-money laundering laws are a failed experiment. They don't work. They cost far more than they're worth.
- orwin 6y ago
  I'm anti-bitcoin, and pro-crypto. I think the only thing that should be taxed is wealth, regardless of debt, and not work or transactions; so state don't need to monitor financial transaction at all. BUT bitcoin is not a smart crypto: its inefficient, POW is not a good idea and is worse when the algorithm can be optimized with specialized processor. It gives too much power to state actors (like most computational activities tbh) . If the US, China or Russia wanted to do a 51% attack, it realistically could with some investments.
  - dnautics 6y ago
    > the only thing that should be taxed is wealth How would you value non-monetary assets? And let's say I hated someone, could I get a group of assessors to overvalue their house and put them into bankruptcy?
    - FeepingCreature 6y ago
      > How would you value non-monetary assets? One cool idea I've seen proposed is mandatory sales. So maybe once a year, you have to specify a value for everything you own, and people can buy it from you for that value. So you can set your sentimental value as high as you like, and make it impossible for anyone to buy your valued property. But then taxes are calculated off that value...
      - 2038AD 6y ago
        That's one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. I'm sincerely astounded how bad it is and it gets worse the more I think about it. To start, it shows a complete lack of respect for the right of ownership. Under this system you wouldn't own anything and would be subjected to compensated theft regularly. This system would simultaneously represent the worst ideas of what Socialist and capitalistic life can be. To an anti-socialist, socialism represents theft. The problem is the forcible reappropriation of assets. The justification for this is twofold: property being theft in itself & it being immoral to deprive the in-need of assets you don't need. Private property represents theft since claims must begin somewhere and that somewhere is the state of nature, the commons. In our imagined socialist commonwealth, goods ought to be for the benefit of all. The problem with this is that some goods are exclusive by nature. Only I can wear the clothes on my back, it's more hygienic if we have a toothbrush each and frankly we should have enough goods that, in general, we don't need to argue over use. For this socialists make a distinction between private and personal property. This distinction diminishes possession but at least it comes from a place of wanting help for others. Mandatory sales mean your rights are trumped by capital, or more accurately those holding it. If mandatory sales apply literally to all goods then go ahead and take the clothes off my back. There's little room for dignity when those richer than you can take even the most sentimental of belongings. Why don't we go a step further? Apply the concept the any service a person may provide, recognise that sex work is real work and you've just legalised rape. This may seem a disproportionate response but I'm sick of people being so detached that they think reengineering society is something to be taken lightly. Reminds me of a sketch which had the line > Have you tried 'raise VAT' and 'kill all the poor'? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg I'm sure any objection I have could be rebutted with something which amounts to 'there are loopholes'.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  From what I've read, it's not a political/ideology shift in Stross but more a shift in how you (don't) read the books. Stross has been very critical and antagonist against runaway effects ("anti-crypto") since his first book Accelerando. While a lot of the "cool stuff" and many of the characters, including some of the protagonists, are very "technolibertarian" most of Stross' plots are generally Very Bad Things happening to them, including various sorts of cascade failures in the "cool stuff" domains (up to and including Lovecraftian apocalyptic doom in the Laundry universe). Generally the moral arc in a lot of Stross' (as such exists) from meta/high-level usually seems to be wary of the "cool stuff" as Very Bad Things Can Happen. He's a great writer because those moral arcs are left subtle and to the reader rather than tagged on the end like Aesop's Fables. (Sometimes I wish they were blandly tagged at the end like Aesop's Fables to avoid some of these conversations, because we're living in a post-Poe's Law Singularity and subtlety is all too often easily overlooked.)
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    Yeah, it's hard to see Stross as libertarian at all. Pertinently, he just wrote about Neptune's Brood and medium money recently: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/02/central-banking-on-mars.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/02/central...
    - sxp 6y ago
      > MuskCoin is required in payment for cargo capacity on Earth-to-Mars shipping, or for purchasing real estate on Mars. It has a floating terrestrial exchange rate: the idea is that it's used for mediating interplanetary exchanges. That sounds like the currency in Artemis by Andy Weir (of The Martian fame) which used "slugs" as a currency on Luna: > “It’s short for soft-landed grams. S-L-G. Slug. One slug gets one gram of cargo delivered from Earth to Artemis, courtesy of KSC.” “It’s technically not a currency,” Trond said from the credenza. “We’re not a country; we can’t have a currency. Slugs are pre-purchased service credit from KSC. You pay dollars, euros, yen, whatever, and in exchange you get a mass allowance for shipment to Artemis. You don’t have to use it all at once, so they keep track of your balance.” ... “It ended up being a handy unit for trade. So KSC is functioning as a bank. You’d never get away with that on Earth, but this isn’t Earth.”
- blamestross 6y ago
  cstross's books were formative for me. I read accelerando when I was 16. He convinced me that making new technology (and avoiding others) was a task worthy of my life's focus. So, in part, blame him for me :sweat-smile:
  - krapp 6y ago
    Have you been sitting on this username for nearly five years just waiting to be able to make this comment?
    - blamestross 6y ago
      Yes.
  - sxp 6y ago
    Yes! Accelerando was the first Singularitarian novel I ever read and I read it in college around the time I read Vinge's original essay so it had a strong influence on my career path.
BlueTemplar 6y ago
Even better, the author, Charles Stross, has kind of predicted cryptocurrencies (specifically Ethereum and this "RedCoin") in his (begun in 1999 !) book : Accelerando (Which otherwise is first about a technological singularity.) : > One of his e-mail accounts is halfway to the moon with automatic messages, companies with names like agalmic.holdings.root.8E.F0 screaming for the attention of their transitive director. Each of these companies – and there are currently more than sixteen thousand of them, although the herd is growing day by day – has three directors and is the director of three other companies. Each of them executes a script in a functional language Manfred invented; the directors tell the company what to do, and the instructions include orders to pass instructions on to their children. In effect, they are a flock of cellular automata, like the cells in Conway's Game of Life, only far more complex and powerful. > Manfred's companies form a programmable grid. Some of them are armed with capital in the form of patents Manfred filed, then delegated rather than passing on to one of the Free Foundations. Some of them are effectively nontrading, but occupy directorial roles. Their corporate functions (such as filing of accounts and voting in new directors) are all handled centrally through his company-operating framework, and their trading is carried out via several of the more popular B2B enabler dot-coms. Internally, the companies do other, more obscure load-balancing computations, processing resource-allocation problems like a classic state central planning system. None of which explains why fully half of them have been hit by lawsuits in the past twenty-two hours. > The lawsuits are ... random. That's the only pattern Manfred can detect. Some of them allege patent infringements; these he might take seriously, except that about a third of the targets are director companies that don't actually do anything visible to the public. A few lawsuits allege mismanagement, but then there's a whole bizarre raft of spurious nonsense: suits for wrongful dismissal or age discrimination – against companies with no employees – complaints about reckless trading, and one action alleging that the defendant (in conspiracy with the prime minister of Japan, the government of Canada, and the Emir of Kuwait) is using orbital mind-control lasers to make the plaintiff's pet chihuahua bark at all hours of day and night. > Manfred groans and does a quick calculation. At the current rate, lawsuits are hitting his corporate grid at a rate of one every sixteen seconds – up from none in the preceding six months. In another day, this is going to saturate him. If it keeps up for a week, it'll saturate every court in the United States. Someone has found a means to do for lawsuits what he's doing for companies – and they've chosen him as their target. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

epx 6y ago

This will cost me some HN points (that could be a digital currency itself) but http://viuvasdobitcho.blogspot.com/2014/01/bitchocoin-launched.html http://viuvasdobitcho.blogspot.com/2014/01/bitchocoin-launch...

bitxbitxbitcoin 6y ago
A centralized digital currency. Just like fiat currencies nowadays.

vmception 6y ago

Forgot to add PETRO to the list Fictional because they never issued it

aminozuur 6y ago

USD - You mine USD coins by exchanging goods or services, or by prostituting your time. But the coin is centralised and the governing authority is constantly adding supply.

mckirk 6y ago
It's basically Dogecoin with old presidents instead of a dog.
- anonisko 6y ago
  At least dogecoin has a static and predictable supply inflation and doesn't glorify slave owners and indian killers.
  - emptyparadise 6y ago
    Kabosu the Shiba Inu is my president.
  - WoahNoun 6y ago
    Inflation and changes to the money supply are not the same thing. This conflation gets pushed by libertarians/techno-libertarians constantly. The money supply can increase and inflation (the price of goods and services) can go down.
    - mdpopescu 6y ago
      To inflate = to increase in size. The money supply increases = it inflates.
      - j4yav 6y ago
        That's correct, and also prices increase (or inflate). The parent is saying conflating increase in prices and increase in monetary supply can be incorrect.

keyle 6y ago

This was a great, fun read. I'd like to add one I just thought off in the same vain. Sudokucoin, where the chain is advanced by the first person solving a complex puzzle (by hand) which the hash of which generates the next complex puzzle, using added skull chips accelerating the trans-human evolution. And Properdogecoin, where the first dog bringing the ball back shows proof of work and is a good boy. May lead to a lot of puppy death by fatigue though so I'm not on board with this one.

travisjungroth 6y ago

I just made a site for OrangeGroveCoin[1]. It's a fictional cryptocurrency that you should definitely buy because: 1. It’s an investment of money. 2. It’s a common enterprise. 3. You can expect to make money from the efforts of others. It's also not a security because it's a token. I made it recently, after having the idea years ago when I worked at Coinbase. I didn't do it then because I wasn't sure that the SEC would get the joke. It seems like maybe they would have, because they would later make a site for HoweyCoins[2] I published the site and made a post on LinkedIn. I also had an accompanying joke startup persona. It did not really go as I hoped. No one got the joke. People commented on my pivot, or asked to buy. Old coworkers I emailed about it ignored it, assumably numb to crypto announcements. I might as well dump the rest of the content here[3]. [1]https://orangegrovecoin.com/ https://orangegrovecoin.com/ [2]https://www.howeycoins.com/ https://www.howeycoins.com/ [3]https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q1zkWGth2xcg581K81S4X6-PPfHtZ9-PmHrKQ3Vg4z8/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q1zkWGth2xcg581K81S4X6-P...

scyclow 6y ago

You'd really think that some of the real coins out there are fake. I still can't believe FastCashMoneyPlus[1] is real [1]http://fasrtcashmoneyplus.biz http://fasrtcashmoneyplus.biz

byecomputer 6y ago
1.) You misspelled your own URL, goof 2.) I truly enjoyed that, especially how it's interlinked with your other satire to create this dumb little alternate universe. Thanks for the laugh, you're funny, keep it up.
brabel 6y ago
I love the outrageously colourful website, with color changing popup windows and a truly gigantic CLICK HERE TO MAKE CASH FAST button and all :D They even have merchandising (I don't think that's real, but at least they seem to have paid some models to pose with the masks, t-shirts and so on). And of course, it includes a whitepaper (link at the bottom) to add credibility!!! I didn't click anything on this website for obvious reasons, but would be curious to know what's in that whitepaper.
- crtasm 6y ago
  the merch photos are clearly edited stock shots but click through to zazzle and you can buy the items for USD!

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

Since I recently created a fictional cryptocurrency in another thread, I'll just repost it here: I also have a cryptocurrency, it's called IdiotCoin. Only a single idiot exists and I own it. It can be divided into 2^64-1 dolts. If you want to buy a dolt from me, the cost is one US cent, however, for every dolt purchased I will double the price of the next dolt. So you see, the value of dolts will always exponentially increase, provided the US dollar doesn't inflate even faster. This is great because it means that no matter when you purchase a dolt you are guaranteed to see the value double as soon as someone else buys a dolt from me. If you buy a dolt from someone else the price could of course be lower, and they'll be giving you one hell of a deal! Banned because: The pyramid scheme was too obvious

rspeele 6y ago
What's the ratio of dolts to Stanley Nickels?
- williamtrask 6y ago
  approximately equal to the ratio of unicorns to leprechauns!!!
Dylan16807 6y ago
That's not a pyramid scheme though?
Clewza313 6y ago
I'm afraid truth is stranger than fiction, because PonziCoin was already created in 2018: https://www.coinbureau.com/analysis/ponzicoin-crypto-crazy https://www.coinbureau.com/analysis/ponzicoin-crypto-crazy
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  Ponzis actually pay [some of the] people back.
divs1210 6y ago

soheil 6y ago

FakeCoin: used to let others know not to waste their time on articles that yield no utility or usefulness whatsoever. Proof of work: reading random bullshit on the internet about fictional cryptos.

riwsky 6y ago

To go with fictionalized cryptocurrency, some cryptocurrencied fiction: OCEAN’S ELEVEN: Danny Ocean, The Organizer, gets a crack team back together to pull off One More Big Heist—of an online casino. He recruits The Acrobat, The Demolitions Expert, The Pickpocket, The Two Expert Mechanics, The Inside Man Who Works At The Casino, and The Hacker—and then he fires everyone but The Hacker, sits in a Starbucks for twenty minutes guessing the right password, and makes off with millions of bitcoin. Or, rather: logs off with. The End. PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: Captain Jack Sparrow, drunkenly interrogating an ancient mariner at a pirate speakeasy, hears tell of a USB stick with millions of bitdubloons that the Dread Pirate Blackbeard had on him when he sank in the Bermuda Triangle. As everyone knows, USB sticks aren’t waterproof, and those funds are mathematically impossible to recover. The End. THE MATRIX: Nothing changes for Neo one day when he learns that he lives inside The Matrix, a new virtual currency. While he admits that such an existence has no intrinsic worth, he is afraid to leave “because what if the price skyrockets, and I miss out?” And besides, getting in or out of the Matrix entails a small fee. The End. SCARFACE: Cuban ex-con Tony Montana arrives in ‘80s Miami with dreams of both being a drug kingpin AND snagging a hot wife to match. Unfortunately for him, the Silk Road—a site on the dark web where people can anonymously buy illegal substances via bitcoins—has long run mom-and-pop drug empires out of business, Amazon-dot-com style, through a combination of customer convenience and economies of scale. Tony works, peacefully, as a dishwasher in a diner. The End. ALADDIN: Jafar, advisor to the Sultan of Agrabah, marries the Princess Jasmine after many years of canny political maneuvering against her dim-witted father. There was a magic cave full of legendary treasure that could have shaken things up, but it’s protected by strong encryption and no one can open it. The End. THERE WILL BE BLOOD: Prospector Daniel Plainview discovers a bitcoin mine in his computer. He doesn’t go crazy or anything, because everyone’s computer can be a bitcoin mine—you just download the program. No one gets hurt, especially not Paul Dano. The End. BREWSTER’S MILLIONS: Montgomery Brewster is in the bathroom one day when an email tells him he’s inherited 7 million bitcoins from his uncle—but there’s a twist: he only gets the 7 million if he can spend a separate, 1 million bitcoin inheritance from his grandfather within one year, under strict stipulations in the relatives' respective wills, both of which were implemented as “smart contracts” on what is known as “the blockchain”. There’s a bug in grandpa’s smart contract which makes the rules trivial to circumvent, and the anonymized nature of bitcoin makes it impossible for the ludditical old executor to enforce the will via his normal legal means. Brewster does some cursory googling, launders the first million bitcoins through a server in the Cayman Islands, and inherits all 8 million of the bitcoins before he gets off the toilet. The End.

jchanimal 6y ago

Something I imagined in 2014 turned out to inspire some art cryptocurrency projects https://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin https://www.wired.com/2014/07/document-coin

miguelrochefort 6y ago

Exodus: Bitcoin consumes more energy than all of China and transaction fees exceed 1 BTC. Exodus is a modern (scalable, environmentally friendly) implementation of Bitcoin that uses proof of burn to generate 1 XDS for each 1 BTC burned. Users permanently burn Bitcoin by sending them to randomly generated public addresses whose private keys are unknown. Exodus is expected to surpass Bitcoin as the Internet's de facto store of value by 2025.

shinryuu 6y ago
That might actually become a thing, doesn't seem too farfetched. Would require high conviction by the first participants.
herbst 6y ago
How is that even not a thing yet?
FeepingCreature 6y ago
You cannot prove that a piece of information is unknown. edit: Hm, maybe you could use nothing-up-my-sleeve numbers for the public addresses, like a hash of that day's closing prices.
CloselyChunky 6y ago
> Bitcoin consumes more energy than all of China This is not true. Bitcoin energy consumption is somewhere between Chile and Argentina.
- miguelrochefort 6y ago
  > Fictional Cryptocurrencies
- biztos 6y ago
  So it's in northern Patagonia?

debbiedowner 6y ago

A really innovative coin would be a coin that must be mined in a low energy way. I could envision a special new processor, eg something neuromorohic, that can perform unique algorithms at low power that are expensive to simulate on cpus or GPUs. Then if these are cheap enough to manufacture, the mining must be done on the special device to be worthwhile, and then the mining would have tiny energy impact. I would hope it would be a milliwattcoin. It would only take a milliwatt to mine a block and create a coin, but it could still take 10 mins. Somehow I think there is a contradiction here, but at the same time it sounds alluring.

PurpleFoxy 6y ago
We already have an answer to this, it’s called proof of stake. The logic is that mining is to distribute votes and make it very difficult (expensive) to have the majority of the votes. Proof of work does this since it takes a lot of money to buy and run miners, the mining proves you spent this money so you get your votes. The idea behind proof of stake is that you skip the mining entirely and just say the users with the most coins under their name get the most votes in the system. It achieves the same result without having to buy hardware or electricity.
- alexmingoia 6y ago
  There's an even better alternative than Proof-of-Stake, which is Open-Representative-Voting (ORV) consensus, used by Nano. No fees, no inflation, no mining. https://docs.nano.org/protocol-design/introduction/ https://docs.nano.org/protocol-design/introduction/
  - brabel 6y ago
    This is, according to this link you posted yourself, a work-in-progress. There's no evidence this system is resilient to attacks or that it will work at scale. Only time will tell that. While this is definitely better than the outrageous waste of energy promoted by BitCoin and other proof-of-work crypto coins, the fact that BitCoin has been so popular for so long proves that it doesn't matter if it actually is "good" as a crypto coin or not: all that matters is whether people believe its price will keep going up - even on HN you see people who couldn't care less if its energy consumption is on par with Argentina's as long as they can make a few bucks betting on it.

firefoxd 6y ago

RenlyCoin - The rent friendly coin. Also the coin that never was. When my start-up was failing, the team decided to diversify and explore new ideas. The CEO called me one day and said "RenlyCoin" I said, no thank you. The CTO called me later and he said it's actually a pretty good idea. I said no thank you. We met with our investor and turns out they had already pitched it to him. I said we have no business doing crypto. We should instead try to figure out why things are not working. Yes, among the co-founders I held the title Naysayer. Turns out the CTO didn't come up with the idea. It was not the CEOs idea either, well it was a new friend of his that proposed it. He would create the coin for us for only $25k. he would take care of everything. They did, they gave him the money. Banned because: Well not banned really, because they never saw him again. I only learned about it two weeks after they couldn't get a hold of him. I left the start-up.

yerwhat01010 6y ago
Presumably RenlyCoin has less value than its brother, StannisCoin?
- cptnapalm 6y ago
  StannisCoin is the MannisMoney

tornato7 6y ago

I'd like to make PlunderCoin, basically the network sits computing EC public keys for all possible private keys and when it runs into a Bitcoin/ETH wallet with money in it, that gets liquidated and distributed to PlunderCoin holders.

StavrosK 6y ago
Aren't the odds such that even if you got everyone on earth generating keys, you still would be extremely unlikely to even find one?
- JauntyHatAngle 6y ago
  Yes. Last time I checked if all hash power of btc tried to find a collision it would still take a few hundred million years or so.
  - biztos 6y ago
    This could be an advantage! If the market truly prices in the entire future, PlunderCoin should be worth trillions! Now if we can just get Masayoshi Son on board and use the word "quantum" a lot!
- whoooooo123 6y ago
  Yes, except keys aren't distributed uniformly. Some people foolishly generate their random key using low-entropy seeds e.g. "English words". There are already people running scripts which look for these kind of easily-guessable keys in the wild; I've read reports from people getting their coins stolen because they used a stupid, guessable private key.
  - jcpham2 6y ago
    Distribution is mining nonces also not random
    - yerwhat01010 6y ago

arisAlexis 6y ago

Isn't it crystal clear by now that Driverify coin (explained in the post) will happen any day IRL?

lloeki 6y ago

ViCoin: proof-of-work, block mining is performed using input of users looking for a way to exit. EMACoin: proof-of-stake, the more swap used, the more one can stake. Use M-x C-mine. Supports smart contracts using a LISP dialect. EdCoin: proof-of-standard. It is the one standard coin, that raises above all others. Its only block can be mined but the output is always the same, always consistent, by standard. There is only one coin, labelled `?`. It is the one true coin, the path to Nirvana. See `man coin`.

motohagiography 6y ago

I was part of some discussions some years ago about a GovCoin for handling budget allocations in the public sector, which is essentially a planned economy where the over-educated manage the under-educated. If you ever want to see polarized inequality, it's a kind of intellectual feudalism. My impression is a cryptocurrency failed because it would work a little too well. It was only then I learned that all processes are mere pretext for the discretion of the people who control them. How naive I was. :)

rudderz 6y ago
> which is essentially a planned economy where the over-educated manage the under-educated Why do you feel this way? Couldn't there be a democratic mechanism to asset allocation? A democratically master-planned community wouldn't be unfathomable. Issue municipal debt with GovCoin serviced by taxes generated by the community.
- motohagiography 6y ago
  Having consulted to scores of public sector projects, the institutions are artifacts of their incentives. See the Gervais Principle for example dynamics. An internal GovCoin would technically work very well, as unincorporated project billings and budgets aren't real money inside large organizations. The main question is, for who? It would obviate layers of management in organizations whose main purpose is to generate layers of management. The only time real money gets exchanged is during settlement with outside vendors, otherwise, it's fiat funny money run through multiple inconsistent departmental ledgers. Imagine it working inside a university, and then expand that to government ministries, as they're organized in essentially the same way. They don't want a means of exchange based on consumer need or desire, they want to decide based on narrative discussions.
  - rudderz 6y ago
    > the institutions are artifacts of their incentives Perhaps there's value in sidestepping the institutions entirely. The bitcoin playbook if you will. Cutting out layers of management seems to be a popular idea. Nevada recently passed a law that would allow companies to incorporate towns that have the authority of a county. Would love to see a kick-started GovCoin like the DAO where investors and future residents can collaborate on a brand new government tailored with the customers -- I mean "citizens" interests in mind. Start with a clean slate and build a new model society that can be forked and cloned globally.

biztos 6y ago

For a while I was listening to A16Z on the treadmill and they went into a phase where every second podcast was just thirty minutes of crypto buzzword salad. When the endorphins kicked in my poor brain would start spewing ever more tenuous ICO concepts. IIRC that was right about when I was not buying $BTC because "18,000 is nuts!" Clearly the endorphin-high brain was on the right track.

elwell 6y ago

For the climate change greater good, can someone devise a hashing algorithm that is similar as possible to the formula for photosynthesis? One that requires the miner to use sunlight and CO2 to compute block solutions