Quote from: wogaut on March 25, 2012, 06:40:39 PM

Quote from: Cinnamon Cayenne on March 25, 2012, 06:19:01 PM

I am uncertain. There is a part of me which imagines that the current system also provides advantages to the money power, via access to the mechanism by which money is created. And these advantages are removed in a system where anyone can become a transaction signatory, given a landlord who pays utilities.

The other side of the coin, however, is that, if Bitcoin is truly an "experiment", then people ought to be willing to learn from it. If your proposed scenario is truly how things go, then I should hope that, once the story starts to play out in our economy, people will be wise enough to notice, and will react by creating another blockchain that has more Keynesian properties - leveling out to, say, a one percent expansion per year, rather than zero.

Absolutely. That's why we need to continue to have these discussions and not just treat Satoshi's white-paper as the Bitcoin bible; he proposed an experiment that will provide insights which could be used to improve our monetary system.

We will probably see more block chains with modified characteristics in the future.

Probably.

By the way, we've been having this kind of discussion repeatedly for two years. Many people have tried to spin off new blockchains that incorporate various tweeks to the protocol to compete directly with bitcoin based upon whatever perceived flaw they though existed. Only one of those blockchains remains remotely within the realm of viablitity, and that's Namecoin, which technically isn't a currency so much as it's a domain name registration & transfer ledger.