Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Let's Talk about Scamcoins - Researching for Let's Talk Bitcoin! show
by
Impaler
on 25/05/2013, 04:23:39 UTC
This is true on some levels but I despise the notion that someone took Bitcoin and modified it to enforce their sense of social justice. Of course, it's perfectly within their right. I just feel that it is not particularly innovative. You have a good point about an alternative that has interestingly different properties - but what properties does Freicoin have besides turning your account balance into a hot potato?

I fear we are derailing the thread but I will respond once more.  I find your statement a bit irronic when BTC itself was a codification of the social justice standards of the Austrian 'hard' money school of economics and it enforces that code amongst it's users quite effectively.  Everyone's got their own sense of social justice and the source code is open source so all alternatives will eventually be created and will likely coexist alongside each other, demurrage was one of the more obvious things to do with BTC because it solves much of the difficult book keeping with demurrage.  In fact the first thing I did upon learning of BTC was look to see if anyone had done a demurrage implementation and discovered the Freicoin project when it was still in it's infancy.

As for innovation, we at FRC credit Gesell with the monetary theory behind demurrage, it had already been implemented in paper form many times and we were just the first to implement it in cryptographic currency.  maaku can attest to considerable technical challenge involved their, it was not simply a matter of tweaking some values in BTC.  Other features maaku has implemented for us include a smoothly declining mining reward curve which avoids those sharp drops that add unnecessary volatility to the market.  We also have a shortened 3 year period to reach full coin-base, our purpose here is to try to see if cryto-currency really is sustainable with a fixed supply.  Lastly we have our foundation which will distribute 80% of the coinbase, the mechanic we implemented of splitting each blocks rewards between miners and foundation addresses is public and entirely traceable as those addresses are compiled in the source.

P.S.  mindtomatter, if your at all interested in hearing more about FRC or are looking for a guest to interview, maaku and myself are available.