Post
Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: [Moderated] [ANN][URO] A Real Long Term Currency: 1 Uro = 1 Metric Tonne Urea
by
busywork
on 08/08/2014, 06:13:24 UTC
Flaws of pegging a virtual currency to a commodity

Given that the fatal flaws in pegging a virtual currency to a commodity haven’t been relevant to the discussion (since it’s an easily provable scam) I haven’t touched on them yet but will try and handle them briefly here.
Although this subjects been explained by people far more intelligent then me over the past few years on Bitcointalk, I can’t be bothered to search through the sea of stupidity this forums become to find the posts! I’ll have a stab at a few obvious reasons that stand out in my mind. However if you’d like to search for more acedemic reasoning i’d suggest the original Mastercoin threads or try Daniel Krawisz insightful post here http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/mastercoin-is-a-nightmare-of-insanity/

If a market participant sees the level of sales is exceeding the depth and velocity of the market to the extent they can clearly predict their investments going to drop they wont bother investing in the first place causing an avalanche effect with those at the top of the market fearful of being dumped on.

A fixed supply of Uro coins on the free market means there’s no reason why a purchaser could ever acquire enough coins to meet a minimum order, on Bittrex the most liquid exchange there’s only 10.5 Bitcoins worth for sale at the time of writing this, even given the exceptionally cheap Urea price they’re claiming, this is no where near sufficient to complete a minimum order.

The closer you get to the spot price of Urea the more the market will know they are going to get dumped on, again creating an avalanche effect on the price., even if the price held at 1% below the spot price it would completely undermine the cost savings of the scheme.

This is exactly how I see it. In order to make URO work, everyone involved in the trade of urea has to buy in and come to an agreement to make URO the standard of payment - just like how OPEC decided to make the USD the standard. I'm not going to go as far as calling it a scam but the theory of using URO as an alternative form of payment just doesn't make sense.