Quote from: ranlo on May 28, 2013, 10:36:49 AM

Quote from: markm on May 28, 2013, 10:24:34 AM

It is kind of weird that once we made GRouPcoin and DeVCoin the constant complaints about bitcoin NOT constantly creating coins seems to have died out.

Maybe all the people who claimed that it is economically vital to keep creating coins forever were just bullshitting?

It would be useful to have them around to re-interate all their arguments, explaining that coins such as GRouPcoin and DeVCoin that keep creating coins forever are far superior to the intrinsically flawed "limited number ever" model exemplified by bitcoin...

-MarkM-

Well, the issue with limited number of coins is that... it's limited. Take the USD, for example. We have inflation because the government keeps adding more money to the pile. Why? Because the population increases. As we have more people, we need more money to help create a sort of middle ground.

I think coins like DVC are really the same. Our population (in relation to the US in the example) would be people coming on board. Think about it like this:

We have 10 coins and 10 people. Each person has one coin. Ten new people jump on board. At any given time only ten coins can be out there, which means hoarding becomes necessary or you have 0.

On the opposite side:

We have 10 coins and 10 people. Each person has one coin. Ten new people jump on board, so we create 10 new coins. As time goes on, each person can end up with their coin. Being that there is no more fear of not having any coins left, they are traded as a currency.

This is a very watered down simplification but it should help illustrate the point. The only downside to DVC is that it continues printing the same number of coins forever. So in the example above, if we got 2 more people we still have 10 new coins. If we got 0 new people, there are still 10 new coins. And if we got 50,000 more people from a village, there are still just 10 new coins.

There should be a way to adjust, in some way or another, the output based on some criteria.

I'm not against inflation, it's the rate of inflation that matters. If you inflate at 1% like PPcoin it's fine because it's still going to be scarce and it's inflating at a rate that is so small that it doesn't change that. Gold inflates too but is scarce. You can have a small amount of inflation, 1% or less. But to have infinitely large amounts like Devcoin simply does not work well for a commodity or a currency.

If the dollar is such a great currency why don't you have a lot of dollars? After all, a lot of dollars are printed up and there are way more of them than Bitcoins so why are you buying Bitcoins with your precious dollars?

For a community token you can have one token per person because the token itself is supposed to be worthless. For negotiable instruments or paper money you can have 1 dollar per person, but once again in my humble opinion it's better to keep the rate of inflation so low that demand always vastly outnumbers supply. Nintendo used to do this with game console launches, they would deliberately not produce enough of them around the Christmas season and people would have to stand in line to get them. Apple does this too, they deliberately keep supplies low to boost the demand. I'm saying there should never be 1:1 coin per person on earth because then each person will have to have thousands or millions of coins to distinguish themselves from others as "rich". No economy is going to work when everyone has an equal stash because that isn't capitalism, so some people have to be rich.

In Bitcoin the early adopters will be rich. Early adopters include some of us. In fiat currencies whoever is more politically connected to the central banks and those who already have money are more likely to have money. Bitcoin with it's early adopter premine is still much more fair than the political distribution system we have. At least with Bitcoin anyone could have been an early adopter with some luck and even if you weren't an early adopter you can still through hard work make yourself very rich as is happening with people who start successful startups.