Quote from: giantdragon on January 25, 2014, 04:42:47 PM

Nobody of the capital owners will accept these altcoins IMHO.

(It's too awkward to keep calling this 'the altcoin'. I'm going to call it Mincoin until someone comes up with a better name. Refers to both 'minting your own coins" and "minimum income".)

The main factor Mincoin has going against it, is a rapid devaluation rate. That makes it very poor as a long term store of value.

But merchants do accept 'worthless scraps of paper' that commonly lose 2% to 10% of their value in a year. And they accept credit cards that charge them transaction costs as high as 3%. Those are just costs of doing business, factored into their prices.

So it doesn't seem too incredible that they might eventually do the same with Mincoin. As long as they can turn over their mincoins in less than a week, a 2%/week devaluation could be considered a cost of doing business.

One other thought I had: if Mincoin requires a public account into which coins are created (to combat fraud), one could exclude about a month's worth of coins kept in that account from decay. So if one can generate 3 mincoin a day, 100 mincoin in the identity-tied creation account wouldn't decay. That allows one a month to spend the free coins, and merchants can hold a small amount of "cash" on hand without loss. The increase in the total money supply would only be about 10% from implementing this.

Clearly, as with Bitcoin, there would have to be a 'bootstrap' process for Mincoin. Mincoin has a number of strong factors going for it in that regard:

People like to get "free" stuff. In this respect, Mincoin might prove much more attractive than Bitcoin, where by design only a few get free coins. Mincoin embraces one of the common misconceptions about Bitcoin - Mincoin really WOULD give people free coins.

If the Mincoin concept gains wide understanding, a large fraction of the population might see it as a worthy cause and deliberately seek to spread it and give it real world value, in order to 'support the cause'. Popular authors might write stories that can only be purchased with mincoin; school kids might organize "Walks for Mincoin" to raise awareness and get people to sign up. Charities might get donors to donate $1 for each person signing up to accept the free Mincoin (and payment in Mincoin).