Quote from: pmconrad on December 17, 2013, 08:48:04 PM

You may want to have a look at emunie ( http://forum.emunie.com/ ), which has a built-in mechanism to stabilize the value of the currency.

Emunie sounds like it's made some interesting technical innovations. (Described here for the benefit of others: http://forum.emunie.com/index.php/topic/139-emunie-latest-technical-and-feature-set-ramblings-29th-june-2013/ ). The "hatcher" mechanism is an interesting new supply mechanism for one, and the multiple chains sound like a good idea.

But it's naive to expect to be able to stabilise the value of the currency via reacting to base money demand. The theory, if I understand correctly, is that if you know the elastic supply schedule (because you're in charge of that supply), then you can back out demand fluctuations from movements in price. The natural price for a currency is the nominal interest rate denominated in it, but there's no mention of a bond market in the eMunie proposal. Nor are they responding to an exchange rate, it seems (not that that's ideal either). Instead, it seems from the second post in that thread that they're proposing to respond to the price of generating the currency, which there's no reason to suppose is in any way related to the currency's value.

There's an even greater problem with this proposal, in that controlling the supply of base money is not the same as controlling the money supply. Central banks around the world tried this approach in the 80s, inspired by Friedman, and the result was massive volatility in inflation. Fractional reserve banking means the money supply exceeds the monetary base. And hoarding of money as an asset implies the supply may be lower than the base. In any case, true money supply is not observable, so the controller's of the currency couldn't distinguish between demand and supply fluctuations, leading to unstable value.

The author's of that proposal also seem somewhat confused about what is and what is not inflationary. Paying interest on the currency is inflationary. (Money creation is money creation.)

So, it's a step in the right direction, but still doesn't seem like something that could challenge traditional currencies in the long run. Perhaps everything that is wrong with the proposal is contained in this sentence:

"The result is a reliable, predictable real world value increase, which when rising ultimately results in ... profit for for the stake holder."

This is pretty much the definition of a ponzi scheme. Holding an asset just because you'll be able to sell it for more later, even in the absence of any fundamental value. (And no, unless you can consume solutions to cryptographic puzzles, "mining" doesn't count as value generation.) The true value of a currency comes from its use in transactions, and a necessary condition for being useful in transactions is roughly stabilising the price level.