Quote from: hbadger on June 12, 2014, 03:55:54 AM

Quote from: smooth on June 12, 2014, 03:49:15 AM

Quote from: hbadger on June 12, 2014, 02:11:41 AM

Forgive me for saying this again, but using inflation as a means to pay miners (or anyone else) sounds a lot like a government "trick".

It is, in a way, except that it's exactly Satoshi's trick that makes these coins possible. Since the network has no access to resources from outside the network, it can only rely on internal resources to reward miners. Which basically comes down to issuing coins out of thin air. No one disputes that this is how PoW coins work. The only issue is what happens "in a long time" when the rewards diminish to near zero or zero.

If you don't like issuing coins out of thin air, then you really can't like Satoshi-style PoW coins. You wouldn't be alone, BTW, there are plenty of critics.

Obviously there is a difference between issuing coins until certain max cap is reached (or at least tending towards a limit - as in calculus -), and issuing coins forever at an ever growing rate (which is what happens when you set a % of inflation).

One resembles the mining of gold, the other one is exactly like fiat.

Well, actually, in reality there are always some more uneconomic gold reserves that would become economic if the price went up enough. And no one knows the number and size of the as-yet-undiscovered gold fields..... so the economics of gold as a currency is nowhere near as clear cut as you imply.

That, and the big one is that there's really no way to know the amount of gold that's been mined already. There's a popular figure that's often bandied about, but it's really just an educated guess - and there's no way to confirm it.

roy