Quote from: ribuck on August 09, 2011, 04:10:50 PM

Stablecoin is an appealing goal, but ultimately it's not necessary.

Over time, Bitcoin usage will grow rapidly and then eventually stabilize. Over time, new Bitcoins are generated but in smaller and smaller quantities, so the supply will eventually stabilize.

Therefore, if we give Bitcoin a bit of time to find its long-term value, it's going to be fairly stable anyway.

We don't know how long it will take for bitcoin to get stable, or how stable it will be. Stablecoin gives us known stability right now. Also, this method of tracking an external price has a HUGE number of applications. Stablecoin is only one of them.

Quote from: sacarlson on August 09, 2011, 04:11:41 PM

I can only think that only a real market can control a price of any commodity or currency and the a central bank that dumps and buys as needed to control the price would be the only way I know to make a stable currency possible. as I said before you can peg the value of a currency to anything you want. It's "The Trust" holders that should decide what they want to hold as there base of value of the asset holdings and just use the crypto coins to pass the value for P2P transactions. I have almost completed the infrastructure to make all that possible in the BeerTokens model http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=9493.msg138247#msg138247. The first beerA coins have already been minted with the new merge mining feature using MulitCoin-exp https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=24209.msg300830#msg300830. With MultiCoin we also can setup secure exchanges with escrow deposits to prevent third parties from stealing from a central exchange. I will continue to develop what I feel is missing in the infrastructure to make what sounds some of you want in the near future. The basic concept is that the holders of "The Trust" decide how they want things to be and what needs to be changed, Not the developers and miners. Each holder on record has a voice. You just have to make it heard by being a part of it.

Like you, I started with the idea of a fund which would be collectively held to back up the value of new coins/tokens released. I eventually became convinced that Morpheus' idea was better due to its incredible simplicity.

I haven't tried to use Multicoin, but morpheus stated he was unable to get it to work. The future of distributed currencies is definitely going to be one client which is able to support multiple block chains, and hopefully even a distributed exchange built in for converting between them. I suggest you put some effort into getting morpheus set up to use multicoin!