Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Price stability, difficulty changes, fairness. infnite coins is NOT inflation
by
hashcoin
on 01/07/2011, 05:16:28 UTC
[
Would it not be in the interest of subsequent miners to increase appreciation. Say early adopters have mined 1M in one year. Secondary adopters with twice as much computational power decide on an appreciation rate of 500%. So after year two there would be 5M (early adopters) + 10M (secondary adopters) + 1M, and the secondary adopters clearly have more Hashcoins/power etc.

With the "inalienable rights" scheme the "tyranny of the majority" (in above example, or otherwise) would render Hashcoins impossible to function as "their" blocks would be accepted by the "majority", whereas "the minority" may not want to continue on those terms - or am I missing something?

I wrote the edit after the first part so there may have been inconsistency.  In the edited scheme, the blockchain would basically fork at that point.  Basically the blockchain is a state of all transactions and generations up until some point in time.  Say we're at block number 100, and I see a new block 101 just made that gives a ridiculous amt of BTC to the generator.  If I find that unreasonable, I just pretend I never saw it: I go on continuing to try to build block 101 from block 100.  On the other hand, if someone else gives me block 101 that is agreeable, I shift work to continuing on block 102 ontop of that.

Now things get a bit weird: some transactions (like transfers of old coins) will be valid in both chains, while some will be valid in one and invalid in the other (e.g. spends of those new coins).  Now we can do business together even if we don't agree on everything: as long as all the money involved respects both of our rules, any tx between us will be valid in both chains, and so both of us is happy (actually, I guess all that matters is the person receiving the money wants it to be valid in their chain).  But I will not do any business involving coins I didn't accept (i.e., txs that would be invalid in my chain).

Ofcourse, it would be a headache to keep track of these things and the goal would be for this to never, or rarely happen.  A fork should be like a "revolution", not a common occurence, and people would draw their lines in the sand and stick to their chains.