Quote from: coinclown on July 06, 2014, 03:37:37 PM

Quote from: HunterMinerCrafter on July 05, 2014, 05:26:42 PM

Right now there are a few issues with the total subsidy. There are quite a few "motocoin TODO" notes around the source related to it. Personally I think we should actually cap total supply, but this would need discussion.

Any doubts? Really? This is the must for real crypto. Please, respect our prothet (Satoshi) and cap the total supply.

It is well understood that scarcity is a necessity, but it is largely an open question as to what parameters this scarcity can/should have for a successful coin. Did Satoshi ever give strong criteria for a finite bound? Is 42 or the "one" coins inherently better because they are more finite? Personally, I'm not so sure. I think as long as the security parameters "fit together" to establish an appropriate security threshold on the consensus the actual numerical values chosen for this cap (and some (but not all) other factors) are not so relevant. If, as long as there is relative scarcity, we can accept that there is no pragmatic difference between having the one coin, the 42 coins, the 21million-ish coins, the 84million coins, the 969 quadrillion coins, why not extrapolate out to "the virtually infinite coins?" Of course it can also be said that nothing is ever really without some finite bound, even when we say the total supply is not capped it is of course a little white lie, there is and will always be some finite bit-width to balances which cannot be exceeded. There is only so much accessible energy in our universe.

Quote from: WilliamLie2 on July 06, 2014, 04:03:05 PM

Yeah, I have doubts. Why whould we cap the total supply?

MOTO does have a scarcity function and although it is relatively less scarce than, for example, btc it will at least attempt to meet some measure of scarcity criteria, as is. I think it is, however, a bit of a discomfort to many people (particularly cryptocurrency speculators) to not know ahead of time this measure or the very-long-term net effect of that scarcity. With a finite cap, it is very easy to point to a particular span of time and declare a relative scarcity. With a scarcity function as moto has currently it is left as something of an open question as to how effective the utility of that scarcity function will actually be, over time. To compound the psychological impact of this, the utility becomes even more questionable at ever increasing scales of time, so when people naturally extrapolate out to "at some point in the ridiculously distant future there will be more of this token than anyone could ever possibly want" they conclude that the token must ultimately be of virtually zero value, and as such they should not hold it. Even if they concede that it only asymptotically approaches zero, they will still devalue the coin simply because it will, eventually, overcome the utility of the scarcity function and approach that zero.

Never mind that they may be extrapolating well beyond any meaningful scale. By the time we are down to 10% of the relatively scarcity of btc, a few hundred years from now, everyone reading this thread today will likely be long gone. (From there down to less than 1% of relative scarcity is a mind boggling time-frame, in financial terms.) If you consider scarcity alone to be the primary source of value, and really do use a decades-per-candle chart to trade on, looking hundreds of years out (maybe you are investing to build a college fund for great great great grandchildren or something) you should still conclude that this puts moto at around $60 without any other factor. Anyone extrapolating all the way out to "this coin is not scarce enough on a long curve so I'm going to value it at one satoshi" (yes, some/many people really do think this way) is probably not considering just how long of a curve we are really talking about!

And yet they extrapolate. Because of this natural (and arguably even rational, maybe the investor really is considering his lineage generations out) risk-aversion behavior many coin developers feel it best to simply put the whole question to bed and enforce finite supply. The ones that don't tend to be the ones that also, for one reason or another, don't "take themselves seriously" which further leads speculators to feel that they shouldn't take seriously any coin that tries to go against the grain.

I entirely understand why moto chose to go the other direction, and leave the question open. It will not be trivial to cap the supply, and not create an eventual (though still likely decades-to-centuries away) alternative problem, where we hit a bit of a catch-22 where no-one is left with motivation to mine the coin until a large set of transactions reach mempool, but at the same time no-one would want to use the coin because tx processing will be slow because there are no active miners until tx records come in! This problem is solvable, but I'm personally not surprised that the implementation did not attempt to solve it. Any of the things that you can do to solve it will take a lot of work.

From a purely intellectual perspective, I find it entirely reasonable that a coin with a scarcity function like MOTO's could/should/would work just fine. From a "let us make moto a successful experiment" perspective I tend to agree that it is likely best to simply not leave the question open in the first place and declare a final, total block subsidy cap.