Quote from: Suggester on October 06, 2011, 06:00:05 PM

Etlase, the EnCoin concept seems very promising! It's what I've been hoping for since I started my infamous thread almost two years ago. You're welcome to read the initial post and kick some skeptic butts if you feel like as I revived it again today after the hacking of Bitcoin7. I believe the instability of prices is making users vulnerable to exchangers as they need to keep their "bitcoiny" wealth in fiat form to avoid price fluctuations, which defies the whole point as puts us back to square one.

I don't address any security issues or drastic changes like you do here though. The whole premise is about the economic necessity and the practical plan to tie bitcoin's price to electricity.

It'd be very sad if you had to go through publicity and advertising from scratch for EnCoin though. I was hoping the Bitcoin's developers would listen to the sound of reason and introduce these changes to the original client instead. If no steps are taken to ensure the coin's price stability it will never go mainstream. It'll be regarded as a very risky investment almost like gambling instead of being a friendly medium of exchange which everybody can use to escape the control of big corporations and big brothers.

I was completely unaware of your thread, thanks for pointing it out. I don't believe the Bitcoin developers will be listening to the sound of reason any time soon. And the vocal majority around here is very pro-pyramid, so that could very well be used as the reasoning for not changing it.

I haven't read the whole thread, but it appears you want to stabilize the price of a bitcoin with the dollar, based on the estimated number of CPUs mining. This has 3 major problems, imo: 1) it doesn't protect against dollar inflation (which isn't terrible, but if the fed prints more dollars so does bitcoin), 2) estimating the number of CPUs is difficult if not impossible with the bitcoin proof-of-work design, 3) the security/continuity/dependability of the network still relies on massive amounts of hashing power, and always will. Bitcoin also has terrible scalability issues.

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Once enough coins are produced for ฿1 equaling $1, miners would generate just enough to cover the economy's expansion because any excess will come to them at a loss.

This opens up the network to attack, unfortunately. edit: Or would your "cooling down" settle up transactions too? Then that isn't bad. I'll have to read some more.

Although it's not in the proposal yet, I did mention somewhere in this thread I came up with a very reasonable solution to not require hashing power at all: let merchants put their money on the line to secure the network, and in return, refund most or all of their mandatory transaction fees. So if the economy is completely stable, no hashing power is necessary.

I'll peruse the rest of the thread when I have time as there might be some good discussion in there somewhere (I hope). I'm probably going to work on one final, major revision to the proposal, then that will be it from me for the rest of the year at least. If enough interest has been generated, I might be persuaded to even hire some coders if necessary. I simply don't have the skills to make this happen and I have no problem admitting that. And I don't have the time to invest in acquiring the skills for a non-profit venture of this scale. I love the concept of bitcoin, it's such a shame its vision is based on greed.