Quote from: moonman787 on March 22, 2014, 04:42:04 PM

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Surely they'd want valuation, nothing wrong with being rich internationally, but its not at all necessary for the success of the coin as a currency for Lakotas. Their only risk is having the inflation and supply dominated externally - whales abroad would have the power to manipulate supply and the price of goods within the reserve. They don't need investors. "Investor", unless they're local, means coins being owned outside the reserve. Its counter-intuitive. Its actually better for the coin if we all lose interest - the only people left to pick up the torches would be those with an actual reason to own the coin beyond speculation (Lakotas). . . If Maza reaches a high price its unlikely that would happen because of Lakota investors. High price means the coin is dominated outside the reserve; high price could very well doom MZC to failure.

And the problem with USD isn't the inflation itself but the fact that tyrants control the flow and distribution. There is NO free market, the currency is controlled completely. This is not true in cryptos (the good ones) - they have predictable inflation that is randomly distributed. Its a fair system where no one gets to run things. Decentralized vs Centralized > that's the advantage.

I said it earlier and I'll repost what I said in reference to how the importance of outside valuation is (i.e., from the investors):

I think you're dead wrong with the assumption that the tribe will set the "real price" of the coin, and here's why: Say they have a grocery store and someone wants to buy 1 weeks worth of food with 80 maza lets say, the whole supply chain would have to agree on such a price for it to work. So what this means is the grocery store pays for their supply of goods from outside vendors and distributors, who would have to agree to the maza standard and accept it's worth. Then, they would have to pay the individual food brands who supply the store in maza who would have to pay their workers in maza, etc...

The whole system breaks down immediately because if I want to buy a loaf of bread with 1 maza lets say, the store who is selling that loaf to me actually paid USD for it from their vendors, and so on and so on. The entire chain of supply would have to acknowledge to a universally standard of what 1 maza is really worth. Otherwise, the store clerk would say, "wait a sec, we just paid $1.50 for this bread in real money and now we're selling it for something worth less than a penny?"

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think adopting a different standard for the worth of maza outside of what the market says is completely pointless, because the supply chain simply won't allow it. Now if you have two people who independently create something and sell/trade with each other, then yes, they can price 1 maza for whatever they want. Once you add in outside factors of the supply chain, then you would have to convince each and every factor to adopt the "real price" according to the tribe. The supply chain extends to everything you could think of...buildings, streets, schools, food, gas...whatever. Each industry has multiple supply chains and countless companies who agree to the USD value of goods and services. I highly doubt anyone of those checkpoints in the supply chain are going to spend millions of USD on supplies or services and get paid on the backend with the "real value" of maza. Sure, they can get paid with maza, so don't get me wrong there. But the price of each maza will solely depend on USD market value.

So, it truly is the investors who set the price of the coin and not the tribe saying, "No, Maza is worth $1 each on the reservation." It doesn't work that way because 99.9% of the supply chain works outside of the reservation to produce the goods and services to bring into the reservation and as such, it spends USD in doing so.

Again, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Well of course you're right, but I assumed that it would be treated like other natural currencies. You could make the same argument about the USD/Euro.

Yes, it will have to stablize in price before it gets adopted in a fashion that third party non-traditional users would consider dealing in it, but for local transactions within the Lakota Nation that do not rely on external logistics (such as agricultural, carpentry, etc...) I could see it working. You'd have to deal in USD for things imported for the time being, but internally created items and services could work, provided the service providers were able to procure some USD for imported items.