Quote from: Blitz on January 13, 2015, 07:48:39 PM

Quote from: NotLambchop on January 13, 2015, 01:23:52 PM

Rpietila promised me $10k coin by last Christmas. Are we still on track?

You remember wrong.

It was 300k USD. Not even kidding.

Quote from: nanobrain on January 13, 2015, 02:05:11 PM

Quote from: JorgeStolfi on January 13, 2015, 01:55:03 PM

Quote from: inca on January 13, 2015, 11:59:33 AM

What possible reason will there be for no more speculation or hoarding in a currency that is designed specifically for that?

The white paper does not mention that, does it? The declared purpose of bitcoin was to be a currency for e-payments, not a get-rich-by-sittng-on-it instrument. Given that goal, making the supply fixed probably was a mistake, as economists keep saying (after all, "Satoshi" was a computer scientist, not an economist.)

Besides perhaps the mistaken notion that the inflation of national currencies is a bad thing, the fixed money supply is something that a computer scientist would have chosen for ease of implementation. An unbounded money supply would have been a pain to program; he could not have used a fixed block and transition layout with 64-bit long ints, he would have needed a variable-length multiword integer, in the layout and in the implementation.

That is only one of many details in the protocol that suggest that it was never meant to be more than a computer experiment. Take, for example, the abrupt halving of the reward every 4 years: it is a source of instability and uncertainty, the 2016 halving is already having people worried now. Why didn't he specify a more gradual decrease, that would give the same 0.5 factor in 4 years but in small monthly steps? The only reason I can think of is that it would have required another page or two of source code, and a table of 48 steps, properly rounded, and another paragraph in the white paper...

Oh Jorge....this sort of stuff is the equivalent of drawing a cartoon of Muhammad with coke and hookers: criticising Satoshi will have the cultists calling Fatwah on you Wink

"All hail Satoshi"

Je suis Jorge Stolfi. Cheesy

Brilliant Blitz, you've still got it Wink

I'm having that one!!
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