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Maybe the world just needs less people trying to get something for nothing. If the scammers operating these currencies teach the greedy traders a lesson we'll a

• brettermeier 5y ago
  WORD!
• __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
  Agreed. I'd like to figure out how to build a cryptocurrency that is useful for conducting actual business but toxic to investors. An economy that lacked parasitic middle men would be a good thing for the status quo to have to compete with.
  • saalweachter 5y ago
    Every day the largest wallet is confiscated, divided into ten equal portions, and each piece is randomly awarded, lottery-style, with every transaction from the previous day serving as a lottery ticket.
    • bombcar 5y ago
      Ironically that's not far from what SafeMoon purported to be. But people would "invest" in it as a form of a lottery.
    • __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
      I dunno, it's not about wealth concentration, be rich, that's fine. It's about whether your wealth was gathered by contributing useful work, or by parasitizing it. I imagine a proof of work system where there's a community work queue, and "mining" is completing tasks in the queue, borderlands-style (though hopefully without the violence). The mined tokens can be resolved to nft's which stay attached to the wallet of the user who requested that the work be done. There's also a web of trust and a UBI component (Circles-UBI style) to disinventivise sybil accounts. If the work-originator deems the work unsatisfactory, they can invalidate the tokens that were mined from its "completion" and recoup a fraction of what they paid to have it done. So doing business with somebody who has a reputation of doing shoddy work, or of failing to respect good work, is risky because your tokens might evaporate. An would-be investor in this token would have to decide whose tokens to buy, which requires much more research. You could also have some system to disinventivise hoarding, like a token half-life. Or you know, something like that.
      • saalweachter 5y ago
        The difficulty is that once you move from things like my joke solution to earnest attempts like yours you start involving the real world in your model, and you end up with something that is more like a social solution than a technological one. Once you start talking social solutions you start looking more like a business or a commune or a community and less like a technology. You don't just have algorithms and widgets and cryptographic hashes, you have people who are supposed to execute fuzzy decision making processes like authenticating that someone "did good work", and then you need validation protocols to check whether people are executing their human-algorithms correctly, and identity and spam systems to ensure that someone isn't running a bot-net that simulates a town of people pretending to do useful work... Which in addition to making everything way more complicated, makes you step back and say, "Wait, what am I trying to accomplish here by creating a cryptocurrency which is a currency and not a speculation-vehicle again? And why am I trying to do it by creating a cryptocurrency again?"
        • __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
          Oh yeah, it gets messier for sure, and I think that providing the protocols is probably the smaller part of it. Teaching people to use them is probably harder. But the benefits of taking on those challenges strike me as too big to ignore. As for the botnet thing, I really like how CirclesUBI handles it. "Trust" is a pact to treat tokens minted for the other party as indistinguishable from tokens minted for yourself. So by all means, go simulate a small town doing "useful" work. Nobody is going to value the fruits of that labor unless they've seen them, and so your tokens will be worthless. Once you have the base web of trust set up, you can layer other types of trust on top of it, like returns-borrowed-tools-undamaged trust and other things that lower the cost of doing business. It's about using technology to take things that already work (cooperation) and make them work at scale (1000 people instead of 10). No need for global consistency, the resources are all local anyway. As for being called a commune, that's fine. Communism allegedly doesn't work, so the idea that people might be doing this in tandem with traditional economics ought to be considered "not-a-threat" except in cases where traditional economics produces exceptionally troublesome outcomes.
        • 5y ago
  • georgeecollins 5y ago
    >> I'd like to figure out how to build a cryptocurrency that is useful for conducting actual business but toxic to investors. Yes, perhaps a currency that you could trade quickly and cheaply all over the world, with 2-3% reduction in its purchasing power each year so that no one has a reason to hoard it or speculate. I wish we had the technology to create such a currency./s
    • __MatrixMan__ 5y ago
      We lose a lot more than 2% each year to wasteful policies designed to ensure that investors get their returns. Downtown there are hungry people, downstream there are thirsty people, and yet my HOA won't let me stop watering my lawn, nor will they let me replace the grass with something edible. And if you won't accept food and drink as part of that 2%, consider the more measurable economic costs of the climate of of unrest that these practices create.
• president 5y ago
  I think that's just human nature.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• fleddr 5y ago
  It won't work, the lessons won't be learned. Within the larger space of crypto are the "degenerates" and "ape investors". That's what they call themselves. They're fully self-aware of their unhinged choices and behavior. They embrace it and laugh at it. This is important to understand. They aren't uninformed or gullible. They know they're crossing a field of land mines and decide to go for it anyway.