Satoshi created a currency unit without a central party being necessary to prevent unit duplication.

And you want to tell me it's impossible for centralized exchanges to build a clever system that enables users to have some form of control over their trading funds? Well, perhaps it is.

Good initiative, thanks for showing us that this can work, and illustrating how irresponsible and borderline criminal established exchanges are for not adopting such practices.

Think about what Bitstamp have been working on instead: A fancy chart UI for trading and an Android app. Meanwhile, they can't even ensure or prove that cold wallet coins aren't lost.

This becomes nitpicking, but OK.

Consider the fixed group of people who will mine "before" and "after" the difficulty drop.  Let X be a randomly chosen miner in that group.

For some choice X (say, Alice), the production will maybe increase, but for another choice of X (say, Bob), the production has to decrease.

Somebody has to switch of mining equipment to have the difficulty go down, otherwise it wouldn't go down.  

The *average miner* now still mines 1/10 (8 at 1/8 and 2 at 0), but spends only 1.6 (8 at 2, and 2 at 0).

So the average miner mines the same, and spends less.

Miners will not "mine more at the same expense".  They will mine the same thing at less expense.

If the total network hashrate is 277 Petahashes and stays constant, won't they produce 3600 coins faster at a difficulty of 39 bln than they would at 40 bln?

i bet to differ. a difficulty drop will entice more miners to switch on redundant rigs, putting more BTC into the market, thus, having effect on price.

BTC price is largely commanded by market demand, and with lower difficulty, market demand to purchase BTC goes down - as does price.

There's a limit on the price not least because too much electricity would be used to mine the coins.

i.e. If BTC were to go to $500,000 in this era it would cause a catastrophic mining bubble:

   $500,000 x 25 = $12,500,000 per block = $75,000,000 per hour

   $75 million per hour would drive the mining to attempt to use 675 GW.  This is about 30% of all the power generated on the planet.

Ref: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=518111.msg8674306#msg8674306

Unfortunately for your desires, reality does not cooperate with that position.

Money is an all-or-nothing proposition because of opportunity cost.

Every Bitcoin one holds is held at the exclusion of every other possible use for that money, especially other currencies.

The act of holding Freicoin instead of Bitcoin has a calculable cost associated with that action.

If the benefits of holding Freicoin do not exceed that cost, then nobody will hold Freicoin.

When we're talking about the opportunity costs associated with currencies, then it's even worse for small currencies.

The opportunity costs associated with not holding the largest currency increase greater-than-linearly based on the relative difference in adoption between the two currencies.

You can both feel free to invest in Freicoin, I'll stick with bitcoin as is thank you very much.

lmao those are not respectable market cap... $100m? lmao..... this must be comedy hour on bitcointalk

Alt coins need to offer something pretty good to overcome the network effect of bitcoin. So far, they don't. And with sidechains on the horizon, it's possible "real" altcoins never will.

Bitcoin was meant to be an e-payment method (decentralized, trutless, etc.).  A fixed bitcoin supply is not necessary for that goal.  Indeed, bitcoin is being used in that role, in spite of still having 10%/year inflation (and even higher in the past).  And dollars and euros work fine as payment methods, in spite of their "horrendous" 1-2%/year inflation rate.

Thus, the argument that "raising the emission limit would destroy the value of bitcoin" does not sound convincing.  Hoarders would be very unhappy, of course.  Miners, however, may someday find it advantageous, especially by the time they are expected do depend on transaction fees instead of block rewards.  Block reward is steady and predictable, whereas fees depend on transaction volume -- which will probably shrink substantially if fees became mandatory.   People who use bitcoin for payments may not care, or may prefer block rewards because they provides "free" transactions.

It has been argued that, if some miners tried to change the protocol, the rest of the network would stick to the old one.  However, this correction mechanism has never been tested, and it seems difficult to predict what would happen, in all possible scenarios.  (After all, it was "proved", with the same certainty, that altcoins would die as soon as they were born.)  What if those "some miners" had 70% of the hash rate?  What if a large subset of the users became convinced that the change was necessary for the health of the network, or got some immediate benefit from it (such as no-fee transactions)? What if payment processors and merchants accepted only the "new" bitcoin?  

(By the way, some bitcoiners seem to be trying to convince people to adopt bitcoin by telling them that money sucks.  I sense a problem with that marketing strategy: it seems that many people have used money sometime in their lives, and may even have enjoyed the experience -- unlikely as that may sound.  )

You know what you're proposing is utterly wrong right?
Economics 101:
-What gives money it's "power"?
-The "agreement" between 2 or more individuals/entities/countries etc to ACCEPT a commodity as money.

To "break it down" for you, this is as simple as you and me having an agreement that from now on we will be using Euros or Zimbabwean dollars for our transactions. This is what powers the grid. The more we agree to do so - the greater the "power".

Now, there's a glitch. *IF* one of the participants decides to forfeit / steal / type more money, the agreement is invalid. You know what they say right? Whenever there's money involved, there's greed as well.

THIS is what Bitcoin is. The ability of Random Matrix Math to solve the human greed factor. The flaw is not the money. It's US.

I'm pretty sure I know how it works.  You may not be able to predict the exact number, but the math restricts it to a pretty small range.  I'm pretty sure that no such math exists for CNY.

Inflation is never needed.  It is a tax that, for all intents and purposes, is paid only by the poor.

EDIT: Hey, notice how I was able to make my point w/o including a picture of ponies?  You should strive to emulate that kind of self-restraint

Yeah you're not telling me anything.

Just because its decentralized doesn't mean it can't have price stability.

[snip]

Bitcoin is not currency its a digital collectible. It is the equivalent of a digital baseball card. A lot of people around here dont see that as a problem, but if your goal is mass adoption or price stability it's a massive problem.    

I agree, hashrate increases have slowed significantly and may even stop shortly which is a huge tell that we are very near cost of production, if not already below. The last time this happened marked the long term bottom.

Forward sales of mined coins may have even artificially depressed prices 'ahead' of schedule by bringing inflationary effects forward in time. At a price point lower than the forward sale though the hedged miners switch from natural shorts to floor-setting determined buyers, as they can make guaranteed profits buying at market and selling at their hedged price.