Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: Hypothetical New Cryptocurrency version 0.1
by
Meni Rosenfeld
on 08/09/2011, 11:42:13 UTC
The problems I was referring to don't come up in maintaining the ledger for transfers, but rather in the mechanism for issuance of new coins/property.  Once you already have a notion of a "participant", "voter", or "owner", maintaining the ledger is just a straightforward application of distributed consensus.  The problems arise when you want to add new participants/voters/owners.
Ok, I misinterpreted the scope to which your comments applied.

Equivalently, what you actually realized is "hey wait, that means issuance is a much, much harder problem than transfers".
Well, I didn't ponder much how difficult issuance is, because I don't think it is ultimately consequential, at least for a currency like Bitcoin. Once every coin passed hands hundreds of times, facilitating trade each time, will it really matter to whom it was originally issued?