Backing bitcoin-like currencies with commodities seems like an insanely bad idea.
I think is impossible to "back" a currency without introducing centralization.
In this case, he want to use option contracts but I see a few problems.
1) As far as I know, option contracts are not fungible. I didn't get the Gascoin/antigascoin thing.
-Suppose oil is at 10 btc right now. How many btc to buy the oilcoin, a much for the antioilcoin?
dacoinminster, can you elaborate a little bit more on this?
2) If you could peg a chain currency to a commodity using contracts, the options market still needs an arbiter to determine what the price of the commodity is at a given moment. How do you make that arbiter decentralized?
And wouldn't it be easier to just somehow expand the bitcoin pool with some sort of parallel block chains instead of 2 separate currencies to confuse the hell out of people and make vandors less inclined to accept them? Can't someone just develop 10 structurally identical chains running in parallel and sharing info with each other but with the same difficulty ratings at all times?
But for the bitcoin to go from one chain to another you have to modify the rules of acceptable block in the main bitcoin chain. If you're going to do it, you could just generate more coins within the first one instead of making new chains. But to change such a rule you need to convince more than 51% of the miners...