Quote from: Zangelbert Bingledack on March 15, 2015, 09:03:33 PM

Quote from: smooth on March 15, 2015, 08:15:58 PM

Explain why, other than "technical considerations" (as in how the hell do you do it) perhaps, Bitcoin should not have been created as a spin-off of the fiat ledger. Economically speaking, Bitcoin essentially did exactly what altcoins are accused of doing: failing to respect the existing ledger and instead attempting to impose its own. This gets attacked in both cases as pump-and-dump scams. The similarity should be quite apparent.

You seem to think I'm making a fairness argument; I'm not. I'm simply saying that it is a recipe for failure to not employ the spin-off method using the primary ledger when it can be done.

Actually I wasn't, it was more of an argument about likelihood of success. Fairness enters into it in so far as those who's economic interests aren't respected don't support the spin-off. I think you made this exact same argument.

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And if that could have been done with the transition from fiat to Bitcoin, it would have. And that is basically what mining is.

Fair points. Mining is more like proof-of-burn (almost literally!) than spin-off, but there is certainly a similarity. A conventionally mined altcoin can be obtained from Bitcoin via using the Bitcoin to pay for mining right?

It is interesting to think about the subtle differences between these methods.

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Quote from: smooth on March 15, 2015, 08:15:58 PM

Vitalik makes an argument somewhere that you can get a sort of equilibrium if coins done as spin-offs only respect the ledgers of other coins that have themselves respected previous ledgers. By that standard no one should spin-off from Bitcoin.

That's pretty hilarious coming from him.

I see it as having a bit of credibility since it contradicts, in a way at least, rather strongly with what was done with Ethereum.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how you ever bootstrap this, since there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to spin off from fiat.