Post
Topic
Board Economics
Re: Current Bitcoin economic model is unsustainable
by
NewLibertyStandard
on 18/02/2010, 19:58:55 UTC
There isn't a right and wrong economic model. Every model adjusts to supply and demand, they just adjust in different ways.

The current model is beneficial to early adopters in three different ways. First, early adopters generate more bitcoins while there is less competition at the beginning. Second, the availability of bitcoins decreases, which cements their position of wealth. Last, the early adopters have the potential to get rich off the latecomers once generating blocks becomes extremely difficult. Latecomers will have to inject dollars or something else of worth in order to get access to bitcoins and the wealth will go disproportionately to the early adopters.

The idea of the swarm increasing the amount of bitcoins awarded as processing power increases is interesting, but I think it would give too much advantage to botnets. With a constant amount of bitcoins being generated, they can only collect a days worth of bitcoins per day, but if the number of bitcoins was variable, they could swoop in and generate a thousand years worth of bitcoins in a few weeks.

In my ideal model, the same amount of blocks would be generated per day, but 100 bitcoins with no decimal would be awarded for generating a block instead of 50.00 and the amount of bitcoins awarded per block would stay the same forever instead of halving every four years. This would give one advantage to the early adopters who would be able to generate bitcoins more easily while there is less competition at the beginning and it would allow deflation as more people adopt bitcoins, but it would also allow for inflation as more bitcoins are generated, thus encouraging people to spend their bitcoins. Eventually creating bitcoins will still become very difficult and dollars or something else of worth will have to be injected in order for latecomers to get access to bitcoins, but as time passes, that wealth will be distributed more and more evenly between early adopters and latecomers. I prefer 100 to 50.00 because bitcoins are going to take a while before they are worth enough to need to be more divisible and because it's not clear whether a single bitcoin is ฿1.00 or ฿0.01.