Post
Topic
Board Economics
Re: Freicoin: decreasing fees by charging demurrage
by
Sepp
on 06/08/2011, 19:27:41 UTC
Let's concentrate then in another advantages.

1) Transaction fees are not a problem, but demurrage fees reduce them. Bitcoin holders are receiving a service that bitcoin transactors pay for in form of transaction fees. I mean in the future, currently holders also pay through monetary inflation. But in the future it will be an externality.

2) Demurrage fees increase the velocity of freicoin. That is good for merchants that will make more sells.

1) I see transaction fees as being quite separate from demurrage. As you say, with demurrage there is no need to use transaction fees for ensuring currency stability or as a reward for miners. I don't understand why in the future currency holders would pay through monetary inflation, or how that would be an externality. Care to specify?

2) Yes, agreed that demurrage increases velocity of circulation, and thus make the currency better for commerce.


Quote
Although miners prefer bitcoins over freicoins for their superior speculative value, with merged mining, miners will get the bitcoins the namecoin and the freicoins and sell the ones they don't like for whatever they get, because they don't have additional hashing costs. At 1 satoshi per freicoin, I will buy all the freicoins if no one else want them, so mining won't be a problem.
The problem is acceptance from users and that relies heavily in the acceptance from developers entrepreneurs. We need them to adapt the current bitcoin software and services to also work with freicoin.
Well, first we should code freicoin...
Making a fork from namecoin or collaborating with multicoin (that already have merged mining) seem the better alternatives for now.

Merged mining seems a good idea.

I think users will accept freicoins, but I have some doubts about the ease of use for commerce with the software as it is now. It isn't to everyone's taste to be deal with bugs in transfers or complications with wallets. Things will have to get simpler from the end user standpoint, if the currency is going to have wide appeal. 


Quote
A currency that stabilizes its price through changing the monetary base is being discussed in another thread, and I think it could be done better with demurrage than with destructive fees.

I don't want to change the stable monetary base feature of bitcoin, because I don't want the people in the forum to confuse demurrage with monetary inflation. In fact, the monetary base is more constant in freicoin than in bitcoin because it recovers lost wallets.


Thanks for that link. I posted in the other thread.

I can understand why you would like to keep the two things separate.

It is difficult enough to explain one concept at a time...