Quote from: Anenome5 on December 07, 2013, 07:33:33 PM

I like the goals of this creation, and I applaud the OP for following through. I have a couple comments.

1. Trolls: I think one major reason why Emunie is attracting trolls, as you put it, is that the name of it is a bit goofy, if you don't mind me saying so. It's kitsch. It's misspelled. It's like self-parody almost. You might consider a new name.

2. Inflation: Your inflation model is unnecessary. There's no intrinsic difference between doubling the existing currency of people holding emunie, thus inflating the currency base amongst those people, and bitcoin's system of deflation which causes people to divide their earnings, only the latter is far simpler and likely less exploitable (if an exploit does appear), but at the least causes less worry. Everyone knows there's only 21m bitcoin ever, but there's no upper limit of emunie, so that's a bit less good. Because currencies in the past have often been destroyed by hyperinflation--that's the typical way for fiat to die in fact, and bitcoin makes that impossible, but it looks like your system does not, and that's a worry.

The only reason people/economists/governments want an inflationary currency if because most people are debtors and want their loans to become cheaper over time; most economists are Keynesians and want to manipulate the economy with credit and by creating new money, and governments can greatly increase their wealth and power by controlling where new money gets spent.

You create here a system where people who have emunie also receive the new inflated money. That satisfies none of the concerns and wishes of the people above and they'll be just as against it as bitcoin's deflationary model.

But at least you're not outright making it inflationary in the way that a government makes new currency for themselves and gets to spend it all themselves, stealing value from all currency holders, at least you're not doing that, so I consider it workable if unnecessary.

3. Programmatic Security: SNakamoto programmed bitcoin using a specific means designed to make it very difficult to hack, have you taken similar precautions? Without the system being open source no one can really say. I appreciate your reasons for keeping it closed source for now and I think many will take this effort far more seriously once you do OS it, so you have a bit of a problem there--you want to see uptake before you OS it, but it not being OS'd actually hampers serious uptake.

4. Patching Bitcoin: To actually overtake bitcoin you will have to produce a system that can do things that bitcoin cannot do. It looks like you're doing that, and bravo. But if bitcoin can be patched to do many of the things that make your system more attractive as an ecurrency, then it's all for naught and your system becomes just another alt-currency proving ground for good ideas that end up adopted by the king-currency.

I actually find this rather likely, that bitcoin partisans if facing a true threat from another currency like this will simply mod in the missing functionality. They have the will, the developers, and the resources to do so, and it's hard to believe that they couldn't replicate just about anything.

I don't think they'd bother with the modular aspects you talk about here, the messaging and marketplace, those are better left as separate projects, and it's a bit unusual for an effort like this to spend time on them since they're adjunct concerns, unless the nature of this project makes implementing them as a corollary of the main system so simple that it's beautiful. Time will tell.

The main feature everyone wants in a cryptocurrency, now that bitcoin is making waves, is privacy of transactions. This system addresses it, but are you sure it's something that could never be patched into bitcoin ultimately. I have no idea.

5. A stumble: Lastly, circumstances of uptake. I can see either way this could go--I think bitcoin would have to stumble in some major way before the mainstream of cryptocurrency partisans, like all of us on here, would throw weight behind an alt-currency even as promising as this one--and it would already have to be OS'd at that point, or a system like this becomes the new defacto currency of the darknet for people conducting business so elicit that they can't rely on just Tor anymore, and then you'd better hope your programmatic security is up to snuff as the world's governments apply pressure.

And btw, how is your own personal opsec, because if that happens then they're going to find you and put pressure on you to corrupt your own creation in line with their desires. It is not for nothing that SNakamoto remained anonymous.

All that said, I've never even considered sneezing at another cryptocurrency, knowing bitcoin already had path dependence and the bandwagon effect on its side, but this is different enough to be interesting, so I wish you much luck. At the very least I hope an effort like this puts enough pressure on bitcoin to make it more private in various ways to match your effort.

+1 on this, some really good questions here.