Quote from: Blinken on November 04, 2011, 06:16:47 PM

I have said it before, but asymptotically limiting the number of bitcoins has bad repercussions.

One of the most serious problems is hoarding. Whenever you have a commodity that has a fixed supply against an increasing demand, inevitably hoarding occurs.

This is one of the key reasons why currencies are designed to expand: steady expansion of a currency improves liquidity.

Bitcoiners complain about non-use of coins and liquidity, but I think it is largely their own fault for capping the bitcoin supply, an elementary design blunder. Not only that, the closer we get to 21 million and the more users there are, the more intense the hoarding will become. This is basic economics stuff. Seriously, people around here need to read Adam Smith. (Hey, I know its a fat book, maybe your mom can help you with the big words.)

Also, as long as I am ranting, the procedure of giving bitcoins to people who run computational server farms is totally off the wall. The natural way to do P2P currency expansion is to award new coins proportionately to those who hold existing coins. Duh.

Lucky for you there now are several alternate currencies which address your concerns. See the forum section "Alternate cryptocurrencies" for more info:
- http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=67.0

Personally, I'm sticking with Bitcoin. I see it this way -- because it is trivial to "restock" my supply of bitcoin, I don't hesitate to choose it as the currency I use for spending. And because when I spend using Visa/MC/PayPal, the merchant gets less than a dollar for each dollar I spend, I believe it is only a matter of time before we start seeing incentives from merchants driving us to use Bitcoin as the payment method. i.e., I as a consumer gain more from using bitcoin for a payment than I would gain as a speculator from the increase in its value.