Quote from: jaked on February 01, 2014, 07:57:08 PM

Quote from: LudwigW on January 31, 2014, 05:55:47 PM

Decentralized crypto-transaction networks such as Bitcoin, Ripple, Ethereum and pretty much all others all include their own built-in currencies. As far as I can tell they do this for one or more of the following reasons:

1) as a reward for those who provide their computing power to secure the network
2) as a mechanism for paying the transaction fees that help to minimize spam in the network
3) to provide rewards for the founders (who either pre-mined (part of) the currency or who are among the first to mine the currency)
4) to encourage people to start using the network by rewarding them (if the currency appreciates in value) for buying into the currency that needs to be and can only be used on said network

But are there other ways than by creating a built-in currency in which decentralized crypto-transaction networks can solve these problems? I'm particularly interested in alternative ways of solving the first 2 problems (network security & anti-spam).

For any network to function, the people running the nodes must be properly incentivized.

Bitcoin has a built-in incentive.

I know and my question is whether there are other ways to incentivize node-operators than by using a built-in currency

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What would your network transact, and what incentive will node-operators have?

the idea is that the network would function as a ledger the same way Bitcoin does but while bitcoin has a limited number of units that can be used for transactions this network would have an unlimited number of units. That makes those units useless as a currency and so valueless in and of themselves. Instead they only come to have value bwhen they are used to represent something external to the network (e.g. a stock, a dollar, a bitcoin), and so transacting in the unit is transacting in the thing that it represents outside of the network. (similar to how e.g. colored coins work)

Because there would be an infinite supply of units (but of course only a limited number of units that each represent e.g. a stock in company X) they are not currency units and value-less in and of themselves, so they can not be used to reward e.g. node-operators. So the question then is whether there would be other ways to reward node-operators.