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Strangecoin: a proposal for a nonlinear currency

digitalinterface.blogspot.com

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Re: Strangecoin: a proposal for a nonlinear currency

#31

Post by ajcarpy2005 »

NoodleIncident wrote: post #29
A1kmm wrote: post #9

'Basic income' which is not coupled to any expenditure (e.g. by mining) will have a tragedy of the commons problem in a pseudonymous system. In a pseudonymous system, I can make as many addresses / accounts as I like (since a pseudonym is, by definition, not tied to any real identity). Therefore, to maximise income, someone can create duplicate addresses, causing the basic income to be distributed according to the nu…

djestrada 2 hours ago | link [dead] Answered to another question below, from my G+ reshare, in the context of a question about account caps: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm > I suppose one way around the cap would be for users to maintain multiple accounts. I have no objection to this in principle, although it has an impact on the networks they can develop on any one account. If I have 20…

Ah, so he's counting on the scarcity of the 'external' account balance (eg. Dollars) to keep people from cheating? But if there are dividends to be made which are proportional to # of Strangecoin accounts, not just the wealth flowing through them, it seems people could cheat that system.

I think some level of verification should happen to limit people from gaming the system.

Or...did he mean there would be a master Strangecoin account that must be verified and sub-accounts could be pseudonymous?

Re: Strangecoin: a proposal for a nonlinear currency

#32

Post by rdl »

This seems incredibly complex and described in an even more complex way, but I think you could accomplish most of the good from this proposal by having an infinity of potential instruments, issued by individuals, with the market sorting out the meaning -- e.g. PG General Liability IOUs trade independently of rdl general liability ious which trade differently from rdl newproject equity.

Re: Strangecoin: a proposal for a nonlinear currency

#33

Post by lovemenot »

djestrada wrote: post #26
jchrisa wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Strangecoin is super interesting. I think his analogy was that with a coin where relationships matter, you have to care how a person is connected, when you deal with them. I think it could be a feature, not a bug, even if it makes things less efficient.

Efficiency isn't some absolute value. Efficiency is always relative to the goals we have.

Well, it can be either depending on the perspective you are using at the time: objective or subjective. Some kinds of efficiency hew more to the former and some to the latter. In the last few thousand years money has done more than perhaps anything else to generate macro-economic efficiencies. So much so that it's hard to now imagine that it might be time for alternatives.

Re: Strangecoin: a proposal for a nonlinear currency

#34

Post by eatitraw »

> If I give you a dollar for a burger, then I've lost a dollar and gained a burger, and you've gained a dollar and lost a burger. Assuming this was a fair trade (that dollars and burgers are of approximately equal value), then as a result of the transaction we've simply rearranged who has which good, and no additional value was created in the process.

This is incorrect. I sell a burger because I value it less than your dollar, and you buy a burger because you value it more than one dollar. Win-win. It is a positive sum game, not a zero sum one.

Re: Strangecoin: a proposal for a nonlinear currency

#35

Post by aninhumer »

eatitraw wrote: post #34

> If I give you a dollar for a burger, then I've lost a dollar and gained a burger, and you've gained a dollar and lost a burger. Assuming this was a fair trade (that dollars and burgers are of approximately equal value), then as a result of the transaction we've simply rearranged who has which good, and no additional value was created in the process. This is incorrect. I sell a burger because I value it less than yo…

And the article goes on to say that two paragraphs after that line.

Re: Strangecoin: a proposal for a nonlinear currency

#37

Post by evv »

djestrada wrote: post #27
aaron987 wrote: post #25

This is an interesting economics thought experiment, but I don't see this working simply because it is too complicated. Virtual currency already has a learning curve that most people haven't gotten used to. Adding strange attractors into the mix certainly isn't going to help.

My idea isn't so much to propose a single solution to the worlds economic problems, but instead to ask: what else might digital currencies do? I don't know of anything else being proposed that works in a nonlinear way, and I don't know if the idea is even on the table as a possibility. I'm hoping that putting it on the table might give other people who can penetrate the complexity ideas for how to make the system wor…

I agree that truly different crypto-currencies is a very exciting frontier. The distributed block-chain technology has implications far wider than a basic ledger. For example, I'm quite excited by namecoin, a distributed DNS. I share your enthusiasm about extending bitcoin's technology to create a distributed, general-purpose trust network.

However, I am quite confused about strangecoin. Maybe the whole thread is going over my head and I'm lacking an Explain-Like-I'm-Five description of your idea. I'd love to be a supporter, but I don't see how you can build a trust network around something as complicated as this. Could you explain how, even in a vague sense, strangecoin could act as a reputation system?

It seems like bitcoin itself works as a pretty great trust network. Just look at the mess surrounding MtGox: everybody seems to have a clear understanding that MtGox is totally culpable, despite the claims of transaction malleability attacks. Because the block-chain is entirely available for analysis, the financial activity of all organizations can be traced, which can reliably verify trust.

Re: Strangecoin: a proposal for a nonlinear currency

#39

Post by andrewaylett »

ajcarpy2005 wrote: post #31
NoodleIncident wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

djestrada 2 hours ago | link [dead] Answered to another question below, from my G+ reshare, in the context of a question about account caps: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+DanielEstrada/posts/hQfNmirDfsm > I suppose one way around the cap would be for users to maintain multiple accounts. I have no objection to this in principle, although it has an impact on the networks they can develop on any one account. If I have 20…

Ah, so he's counting on the scarcity of the 'external' account balance (eg. Dollars) to keep people from cheating? But if there are dividends to be made which are proportional to # of Strangecoin accounts, not just the wealth flowing through them, it seems people could cheat that system. I think some level of verification should happen to limit people from gaming the system. Or...did he mean there would be a master S…

More, I think, that while you may be able to create yourself a clique of accounts, artificially inflating the number of users, that clique will have no more links to accounts outside the clique than you would have if you only had a single account. Since your basic income depends on your interaction with the rest of the network, not just with your clique, you wouldn't gain any global advantage.

Re: Strangecoin: a proposal for a nonlinear currency

#40

Post by gus_massa »

There are many problems. I’ll try to explain two:

> The Universal Account (TUA):

> [...]

> TUA can make a payment only in the following situations:

> [...]

> X's account balance = 0 at t. Any additional transactions outgoing from X at t are drawn from TUA.

When your wallet is empty, you can continue to make payments! Perhaps you can’t make payments directly, but pay indirectly with the other type of transactions. I suppose this works unless TUA is empty, but in this case TUA will be empty all the time. And there will be a lot of bots trying to empty it just in case.

Most of the transactions can be implemented as a strange Bitcoin/AltCoin wallet: Payment is easy. Support, Endorsement and Coupling are just a matter of sending the correct amount at the correct time. Even the balance cap can be implemented as a voluntary automatic payment. The strange part is the Inhibition transaction.

> Inhibition is a two-sided transaction over some duration t. If X inhibits Y over t, then X reduces the income or expenses of Y over t by some proportion i. By inhibiting Y, X effectively reduces the impact that Y has on the Strangecoin network by i over t by forfeiting that proportion of income and expense. To initiate the transaction, X specifies Y, t, and i, which must be approved by Y.

If Y has to approve it, I don’t understand why is there an X there. It can be a 1 side transaction where Y inhibits itself. In Inhibition is bad for Y, then it’s easier to implement using NOP, because nobody would use it.

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