I've been a member for a (reasonably) long time, but have rarely been logged in when reviewing posts. I rarely see much of anything to post about in the newbie forums (to be honest, I rarely see anything in the newbie forums).

I occasionally see things that I'd like to reply to in the other forums though.  The thread that inspired this message is the "Faircoin" thread. I'd like to respond to the authors idea with a possible solution to his (or her) idea that initial blocks in a "faircoin" system would have no reward.  This (IMHO) is completely defective as there is no incentive for people to participate until after many people are already participating.  I would suggest to him that a more appropriate schema would be:

1. Reward based on a combination of the block number and the difficulty. Reward gradually reduces as block number increases, but not as rapdily as the Satoshi system since it's also regulated by the difficulty.
2. Reward has a lower limit (maybe 0.01 FC or something) and there is no cap on the total volume of currency, to allow for permanent expansion of the  economy, but in a very limited way.
3. Difficulty adjustments every N blocks (to ensure that rapid growth means rapid difficulty adjustment - downside: negative growth takes a long time to correct for, but keep N smallish to mitigate that)
4. Transaction fees remain the same as the bitcoin system.

This leaves people with incentive to participate from the beginning.
Mining rewards (even in the beginning) are tied loosely to mining costs.
Still acts somewhat like gold in that there isn't an actual limit on total currency, but there is a practical one..