Quote from: fergalish on May 31, 2011, 08:13:28 PM

Hmm. What if your investment in BTC raises the price enough to attract commerce. Is that not indirectly providing jobs?

What does the price of BTC have to do with jobs? Jobs are created by matching labor with market needs. If I start a useful BTC-related business and hire people to help me run it, then I have created jobs. But simply driving up the price through speculation doesn't accomplish that.

Quote from: fergalish on May 31, 2011, 08:13:28 PM

Your proposal misses a big sore point. If it passes, then the value of *your* bitcoins will seriously diminish. The guy who mined already got his profit, so the loser would be *you*, and all the other people who are buying old coins now. You might not worry so much, but I expect that just about anybody who has invested in bitcoins will not cooperate with your proposal, i.e. everyone on this forum. Therefore, you'd be much better off taking your proposal elsewhere and begin a whole different project, based on bitcoin, with just the btc convertability you suggest, but appealing to a whole new audience, not to those who have already invested in btc.

I agree with you - I could be diminishing my own BTC. But the way I see it, I have already sold enough to recover well more than my initial investment, and if somehow my forum postings were to tank away my opportunity to ~~make~~ take more money from people, then oh well. It's not money that was ever my God-given right to take in the first place, no different than if I find your wallet and beat myself up over the chance I missed to take your money before I gave it back.

Quote from: fergalish on May 31, 2011, 08:13:28 PM

Another point, what about bitcoin mixers? If I send 100 bitcoins to a mixer, then eventually I get 100 bitcoins back, but they could be newer, older, or a mix of newer and older coins. There'd be no way to tell who got what. The 'penalty' to early adopters would be completely random.

Yep you're right, but the idea isn't to punish early adopters, it is to remove the collective leverage they have over the wealth of future participants. Besides, the reward is already pretty random as it is. I could sell 100 BTC on June 10th, and I have no clue whether I will get $1 or $50 per coin. So I'm not really shaking anyone's fate far from their expectations to begin with.

Quote from: fergalish on May 31, 2011, 08:13:28 PM

In the long run, I'd say you'd be simply better off starting a new block-chain, in which old bitcoinsPlus, in every transaction, are converted to new bitcoinsPlus, in proportion to the difficulty now and the difficulty when generated.

That's essentially what I have proposed - while maintaining full compatibility with BTC so as to make it attractive to those who are currently stuck with a relatively buggy and very non-intuitive client. I am essentially proposing riding the coattails and exploiting the fact that development on the client is at a snail's pace and is lacking numerous important features.