Quote from: gavinandresen on July 29, 2010, 06:49:18 PM

He/she/they want an easier way for The Crowd to control The Policy

Exactly. Right now BitCoin is centralized in the sense that the rules are established by Satoshi, in code. Is it good to have a limit for the money supply? I have no ideea (I believe it's not because of what I said in the previous post: timing). Does Satoshi actually know that? I think the network itself would know better.

Quote from: gavinandresen on July 29, 2010, 06:49:18 PM

I have no idea how you could actually make it work, and it would open up a whole other can of potential security problems (what if somebody controls a bunch of IP addresses and decides to "vote" for a policy that benefits them?

Well, today if the majority of the network were controlled by rogue peers, they would in effect control BitCoin, so I don't see a difference. However, I don't know enough architecture of either BitCoin or P2P networks to say it can work effectively, with no more potential security issues.

Any peer editable parameter could be changed within certain limits, say once a year, and only if a high enough percentage from the peers change that parameter. Of course, not all peers would use the same value, some would want more, some less; just take an weighted average. Perhaps the per-peer voting power should be weighted by the total mining / spend throughput, or something. Don't make the change instant; wait a few months while things cool down and the peers change their protocol parameters.

I've tossed this idea around, maybe it can be useful to the people involved in designing the protocol. The money supply is just an example.