Last nigh, in JD chat, I had a discussion precisely on this issue.  The position of the other party is that owning a digital coin is not really owning it and certainly not private property.  Plus, these are experimental and change is necessary.  My question is what is the status of the holders of this digital currency?  Most importantly, what is the ownership status of the people who have yet to dig their clams?  

The way this discussion and solution seem to be winding its ways to is that early clam diggers not only have a disproportionate say in the coin network but they also have a right to exclude future stakeholders from exercising their opinions through the Clamchain.  The big one is that current stakeholders can expropriate the property of others without compensation if it is deemed in the interest of the community.  I call this the "I got mine, jack, screw you" process of policy making.  These events really expose what stakeholder democracy is and it isn't pretty.  Early adopters, special interest groups and certain individuals claim a seat at the table which ends up excluding a large portion of the citizenry as it diminishes their votes in the election and gives an out sized voice to the loudest or with the most money.  

One other item that is irritating, I think CC takes economics issues surrounding the emergence of a digital currency seriously as it is clear she paid attention in her economic classes.  It is quite obvious that a substantial number of participants didn't and are, by and large, ignorant of finance and monetary issues.  Like the person mentioned above who doesn't think that owning a digital currency is private property, many seem oblivious to the trust needed in managing the money supply.  For those that haven't figured it out yet, the blockchain based financial system is looking more and more like the fiat based one most despise.  There is no reason to reinvent the wheel and the same issues that plague fiat will come to digital.  It is only a matter of time.  Silicon Valley has promised a revolution in finance several times now but what we have seen is new technology fit into the old infrastructure to make it more productive.  This is not to say some PhD will have a better ability to make decisions and experiments have shown that academics aren't really experts as they have less predictive power than randomness or Bubbles the chimp.  I would have greatly preferred Bubbles to Ben Bernanke as the former pretty clearly has a better head on his shoulders. What we need is people who have a good mental model and understand that emotions are part of them not the ignorance and ruled by emotion that is driving this.  (The above comment is directed at a substantial minority, perhaps a plurality, but it is quite obvious fairly quick who has an understanding of economics, those who at least have the right mental model and those who have no idea.)

Another issue I have is why this is an issue at all.  Dooglus said he was just responding to the people in the thread which is fine.  However, keep in mind that many of us and probably a good majority has repeatedly asked the simple question what is the problem or crisis?  It isn't very helpful to write "nothing" in a post and that's about sums up my attitude towards this.  If writing wasn't a painful exercise, I would have written more and perhaps will address some issues in the future.  One thing I will say right now is that there are a lot financial crisis which are of the subset of currency related.  They happen all the time and yet there isn't a problem and there ends up being no real crisis at all.  These are ignored by academics and thrown out but one of prominent methods to ascertain if a crisis is happening has a lot of false signals.  Besides, a large move down, what is the issue?  On the other hand, it is popular among certain people to claim there was no financial crisis between the enactment of Glass-Steagall which is in fact wrong.  There are several during the 65 year period.  One is the Latin American debt crisis in which Brady Bonds were issued.  Another is the S&L crisis that took a few hundred billion to clean up.  You could say that Bretton Woods collapse was a currency crisis.  There was a subprime crisis a decade before this past one in the late 90's.  I'm sure I can come up with a few more if i go through my notes and look up a few data sets.  Once again, there are a few who can understand what I just wrote but how many here have their eyes glaze over.  Final question, how does our to do compare to any of the fiat crisis we have experienced in recent years?

I don't leave this in a pretty place as it is quite obvious that many of the decisions will be wrong.  The public is ignorant and rent seekers just as much as Wall Street.  The economic experts really have a degree in applied math and need never open an introductory book, take economics 101 or ever have held an actual job outside of the PhD qualifacated ones.  So, the fewer decisions and changes that are made to the basic structure the better is my advice.  If you are going to make fundamental changes, besides expropriating clams, they should be done now before the economic infrastructure gets built around Clams.

That is all.