Quote from: aminorex on May 15, 2014, 12:45:42 AM

I agree with all of your points, for the most part -- with two exceptions:

Firstly, it is, for the present, more challenging to buy bitcoin anonymously than your text suggests. Even an easy, effective anonymous currency does not suffice to make it easy to buy bitcoin with reliable and effective anonymity.

This is a good point. If your initial trade into the currency isn't anonymous, per bitcoin's publicly available blockchain .. then your pursuit of anonymity is potentially (most likely) lost. You may still have private transactions that can't be traced if you were to trade into Monero, but the fact that you traded first into Bitcoin and then to Monero would be a weak link in the anonymity chain. I guess the question that would come up is exactly how one would obtain Monero (other than mining) in the first place without compromising identity? I've been told avenues using coinjoin over tor/i2p are only partially anonymous at best .. so that puts us back to buying into it face to face for now. Unless you have other ideas?

Quote from: aminorex on May 15, 2014, 12:45:42 AM

Secondly, I think that for quite some time the valid theoretical point of Gresham's Law is largely irrelevant, in practical terms, because the overwhelming barrier to use of crypto as currency is lack of infrastructure and vendor support, next to which all other considerations are secondary. (And which renders crypto useful only for a very special class of typically very high value or else crucially private transaction, where Gresham's Law doesn't really apply.)

Quote from: Gresham's Law

"When a government overvalues one type of money and undervalues another, the undervalued money will leave the country or disappear from circulation into hoards, while the overvalued money will flood into circulation."[1] It is commonly stated as: "Bad money drives out good".

I'm trying to take understanding from your correlation. Are you saying there is largely no "good money" to drive out, in the cryptocurrency markets currently? If that's true, then I'm starting to see where you're coming from in your desire to pursue a store of value first rather than a currency for everyday use. I think I understand your stance now. The question that I'd ask here is : If we were to build a currency from the ground up .. would you start with having a store of value on which you may trade something representative of that value for value (notes for market goods), or would you start with a bartering system where the store of value is what is traded (rather than the value) for value? Let me know if I'm way off here.

Quote from: aminorex on May 15, 2014, 12:45:42 AM

Hoarding is part of the PR, as is price appreciation. If you are debasing early, you tend to lose value early, which turns people away from the coin. BTC is much more usable than DOGE, presently, for example, which is in serious decline and unlikely to recover a growth trajectory, whereas BTC has never lost its exponential growth momentum despite a price collapse, in part because it is deflationary. I.e. the empirical evidence at present is contradictory to Gresham's Law, and I claim this is because of the immaturity of infrastructure, but will change eventually, to bear out Gresham.

With the massive amount already being produced daily, i agree that we have enough debasement for now. I think the main focus I see come up is how to handle it when the large block rewards are close to zero (quite a number of years)

Quote from: aminorex on May 15, 2014, 12:45:42 AM

For these reasons, I would suggest that any persistent debasement be tied to the number of active transactors in the ecosystem, e.g. a 7-day moving average. If the number is stable or declines over time, debasement should be nil. If the number is increasing, debasement should kick in. If the number is accelerating, debasement should accelerate. But even that is premature until infrastructure exists to support an economy, so I would suggest another factor, to threshold at some level of activity indicative of a working bootstrap.

Have you considered this in respect to the adaptive block sizes and rewards? Factoring in another scaling variable may prove problematic to tune correctly .. when the block size itself is still a factor in the equation. Would you support a move to this at the end of the high block rewards above 0.xxxx MRO (almost dust sized rewards), or would you see it as something that can be included and tuned well before that time. Where would transaction fees come into play here? Could they overcome the sliding inflation?