
Arscoin, our own custom cryptocurrency - AndrewDucker
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/behold-arscoin-our-own-custom-cryptocurrency/
======
fennecfoxen
> The dollar is said to be "elastic," as the Fed can increase or decrease the
> money supply at any given time essentially by telling the Bureau of
> Engraving and Printing to simply print more money using fancy moneymaking
> machines and crazy-complicated inks and textiles.

Or they could just tell them to conduct open-market operations and buy an
existing US Treasury bond from the lowest bidder on the open market. Which is
what they _really_ do to manipulate the supply.

(To say nothing of banks creating money with loans...)

~~~
penguindev
Don't you hate it when people conflate money with credit. That's why all the
bitcoin fans can never win; even if bitcoin was the world reserve currency
(similar to how gold still is today - held by central banks), it would mean
jack shit because everyone would use fractional reserve lending and credit,
like we've done for ages, with the booms and busts and skimming that go with
it. So IMHO nothing will _ever_ change.

~~~
dualogy
> Don't you hate it when people conflate money with credit

Is it any wonder? _Any_ medium-of-exchange immediately becomes credit -- a
claim on some unknown-person's future offering of something.

Everything else more-complicated derives from this inherent money-is-a-claim
characteristic IMHO.

The medium truly is the claim, aka credit.

~~~
sitkack
Did I just realize that all money in our current form is credit and I never
actually own anything? And whom ever controls the biggest source of credit
controls the value of the "money" in my pocket at anytime? The only truly
valuable thing is experience.

~~~
dualogy
> Did I just realize that all money in our current form is credit and I never
> actually own anything?

You own whatever you exchange your money for, in the simplest terms. Even if
it's a bitcoin or a "financial security" or a share or a chunk of gold, or
indeed a pork-belly, an iPad etc. etc.

~~~
sitkack
It is actually the credit aspect I just started to understand. Money
represents credit. Just like politics, you can ignore it but you can't escape
it.

~~~
penguindev
Try this on for size:

How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0)

in particular, see the graph of total domestic debt (i.e. credit) to gdp, and
how they have short and long term cycles.

------
whyenot

        “The whole point is that we’re not a quick scam," Nathan
        Gudmunson, the chairman of the Worldcoin Foundation, told
        Ars. "Our coin is clearly not that, and we’re trying to
        build up a payment system around it.
    

...well that didn't turn out too well. Gudmunson and several other (now
former) Worldcoin Foundation board members started an exchange/payment system
called Scharmbeck. Scharmbeck took large amount of investor money by selling
"fee shares." Scharmbeck shut down shortly after. Gudmunson and several other
members were removed from the Worldcoin Foundation board, the cryptocurrency
collapsed and has never recovered. Investors holding Scharmbeck "fee shares"
will likely never see a return and have lost almost all of their initial
investments

------
higherpurpose
This has been predicted by Ethereum's founder (and others, I'm sure). There
will be _millions_ of crypto-coins in the future. Any company could launch its
own crypto-coin, as some sort of "shares" from the company, and a way to fund
the company as some sort of mini-IPO. Think of it like Kickstarter for
crowdfunding, but you'd actually own part of the company by buying their
coins, and your coins will grow in value as the company's value grows. You
could also easily sell those coins back into other currencies whenever you
want.

Of course, this would be much easier if all of these millions of coins would
be built on top of a crypto-coin _platform_ , where you could also have P2P
exchanges that can exchange these currencies much more easily and securely
than a centralized exchange can. Things could get easier still for doing this,
if companies just become Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. That's
basically what Ethereum is trying to achieve, among other things.

[http://www.coindesk.com/ethererum-launches-
cryptocurrency-2-...](http://www.coindesk.com/ethererum-launches-
cryptocurrency-2-0-network/)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9dpjN3Mwps](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9dpjN3Mwps)

~~~
nly
> There will be millions of crypto-coins in the future

This doesn't make sense. If everyone had their own altcoin, even if they all
used Scrypt, nobody would be secure because a 50% attack on your personal
blockchain would be trivial. Bitcoins security relies solely on it being one
of few significant coins of its kind.

In any case, Bitcoin is huge because its decentralised and nobody has to make
decisions. If everyone had to decide what chains to trust then you may as well
switch to a superior cryptographic protocol that allows you to mint your own
coin without a blockchain. These exist, there's just no incentive for them
inside the traditional banking system (too anonymous), or indeed on the inter-
personal micro scale (too inconvenient).

Coloured coins make sense, but that's not really the same thing.

~~~
exelius
So a form of arbitrage against Bitcoin may be to create your own
cryptocurrency, mint a few million of them for yourself, hype it on HN, then
cash out and profit? Sounds like a classic pump-and-dump junk bond scam, to
me.

~~~
zevyoura
This is called premining and it's a common accusation towards new altcoins.

------
brudgers
CryptoCurrency as a replacement for internet karma points and JesusBucks given
away at Wednesday night Methodist Youth Fellowship meetings.

When my hairdresser has their own CryptoCurrency how shall I maintain my faith
that bitcoin has a value these others don't?

~~~
jmount
"If I had before me a fly and an elephant, having never seen more than one
such magnitude of either kind; and if the fly were to endeavor to persuade me
that he was larger than the elephant, I might by possibility be placed in a
difficulty. The apparently little creature might use such arguments about the
effect of distance, and might appeal to such laws of sight and hearing as I,
if unlearned in those things, might be unable wholly to reject. But if there
were a thousand flies, all buzzing, to appearance, about the great creature;
and, to a fly, declaring, each one for himself, that he was bigger than the
quadruped; and all giving different and frequently contradictory reasons; and
each one despising and opposing the reasons of the others—I should feel quite
at my ease. I should certainly say, My little friends, the case of each one of
you is destroyed by the rest. I intend to show flies in the swarm, with a few
larger animals, for reasons to be given."

[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23100/23100-h/23100-h.htm](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/23100/23100-h/23100-h.htm)

~~~
joeguilmette
How on earth did you pull this quote out of thin air?

~~~
jmount
I have owned the book for quite a while, the quote was originally about
science- but it is so harsh it stuck with me.

------
middus
Off topic: as someone who grew up learning British English, ars[e]coin is a
very unfortunate name.

~~~
gwern
What makes you think that wasn't partially intended? :)

------
chaseideas
Speaking of altcoins/cryptocurrency…

Has anyone heard much about MazaCoin?

It just became the official currency for the Lakota nation. Wanted to hear
what fellow HN'ers think about this.

[http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/5/5469510/native-americans-
as...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/5/5469510/native-americans-assert-their-
independence-through-cryptocurrency-mazacoin)

Out of all the altcoins, seems like this one has strong real-world application
and brings a lot of value to these Indian tribes. Similar to what Bitcoin has
done in other nations that lack a strong national currency.

MazaCoin is also the "official national currency" of a Sovereign Nation, so it
can't "technically" be outlawed. Huge step forward for crypto currencies?
Outright scam? What do you guys think?

Thoughts on this coin in specific? Altcoins/cryptocurrency in general?

~~~
flatline
For now it's just another altcoin (zetacoin clone) that is riding the same
speculative trend as auroracoin has been for the last couple weeks. _If_ it is
actually officially recognized by the tribe and _if_ it starts getting used
more like a real currency on tribal lands, it stands a chance at establishing
a more stable value and breaking new ground as a cryptocurrency. I figure this
is at least several years off and is highly speculative in itself. The coin
additionally still has the problem that all the others do, and most of them
will end up in the hands of cryptocurrency speculators and not indians, which
would seem to cast a rather uncertain future on the coin.

That being said, I bought some and am mining some, I think it's cool.

------
jmnicolas
Arscoin ? I think they would have been better served with Technicoin or
something like that ...

~~~
izolate
Don't you want some arse coins?

~~~
hackerboos
Let's get them all out the way:

* Get your ars out!

* Mining ars.

* There's no liquidity in ars.

* Where can I sell my ars?

~~~
a3n
* Pulling coins our of our ars.

------
noonespecial
Soon there will be a "make your own crypturrency" kit and every little
retailer will offer them like giftcards. It's almost like the rise of money
all over again, expect this time instead of nationstates, it will be large
multinational corporations likely to dominate. What's the Target/Walmart rate
today on the forex?

I'd be surprised if Paypal (or the people likely to kill them) aren't secretly
chewing on this as we speak.

~~~
smacktoward
Which will be kind of like the olden days of a hundred or two hundred years
ago, when every state issued its own currency, or every bank, or every
goldsmith.

Which is to say that it will fly in the face of the general trend of
development of these things, which has been towards _fewer_ currencies, not
more. More currencies means more friction in trade and commerce, since it
makes price comparisons harder and forces buyer and seller to constantly be
making conversions; this in turn means less commerce happens, which makes
everyone poorer. That's a bad thing, not a good thing.

~~~
waterlesscloud
If only there was some sort of device that could automate the conversion
process, perhaps to the extent that humans never have to worry about any
friction on their level at all.

~~~
ceallen
"Just give me a few minutes to upload my XCoins from my XWallet to XY-
Exchange, convert them to YCoins, and a few more minutes to transfer my YCoins
to my YWallet".

Either that or you keep all your coins sitting in said exchange so you can
instantaneously convert them and pay out. And then lose them all permanently
when the exchange has a security flaw.

Currency of the future.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Mocking on the basis of the clumsiest possible option isn't very convincing,
it's just lazy.

~~~
ceallen
I provided the convenient option. It's just that it leaves your funds
massively exposed. The relatively lengthy transaction times built into *-coin
transfers are going to make most conversions 'clumsy'. What alternative would
you recommend?

~~~
waterlesscloud
One possible option that required 10 seconds of thought to come up with-
multicoin wallets on both ends of the transaction.

Why can't people (on this site of all places) spend just a little bit of time
thinking about how things could work well instead of merely pointing out
problems?

------
jemeshsu
Will there be a CaaS (Cryptocurrency as a service)? To allow anyone to create
their own branded altcoin.

~~~
r721
[http://coingen.io/](http://coingen.io/)

------
panarky

      The whole value proposition [of cryptocurrency] is the digital
      scarcity, and if you have a million of these things then you’ve
      devalued all of them.
    

...

    
    
      I say the more the merrier, the more people trying stuff. You can
      create these economies out of nothing! ... I will buy any coins I
      can get my hands on.
    

I haven't seen much discussion of this topic. If you assume that Bitcoin and
Litecoin have value, and that value is preserved through scarcity, what does
it mean when anyone can clone it and create their own currency?

~~~
firstOrder
> have value, and that value is preserved through scarcity

Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, Thomad Malthus, David Ricardo, Jean-Baptiste
Say, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill etc. and all the early economists did
not believe value was preserved through scarcity.

People tried to change this idea in the 19th century, but in the early 1950s
the idea that value was preserved through scarcity was only held widely in the
USA, and perhaps in some quarters in Western Europe.

Nowadays things are contradictory. Contradictory in the sense that the
establishment speaks about government and free market in a certain way, then
flips to the total opposite idea and demands banks be bailed out by taxpayers,
then flips back to what they were originally saying once that is done.

The establishment economists say value is through scarcity. Then they demand
that mp3's, movies etc. not be "pirated" because "artists deserve the fruit of
their labors" and the value they imputed to these mp3's, movies etc. But how
can that be if value is derived through scarcity? If things are write once,
read many, then there is no unfairness going on if no one buys movies and
songs and "pirates" them.

The mainstream economists say value is derived through scarcity, but then,
when things can be reproduced digitially with no more scarcity, they try to
impose the old legal system on things - the legal system which always more-or-
less acknowledged that value came from labor time, whether or not the
idealogues acknowledged things as such.

This is also why Bitcoins are as worthless as tulips were in 1637 Holland (
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania)
), or bum real estate projects in 2008, or Pets.com and Webvan stock in 2000
etc. The Mt. Gox collapse and such is just the heralding of the inevitable
collapse of the worth of Bitcoins.

In science, facts, such as say the inevitable collapse as Bitcoin, or the
contradiction of where mp3's derive their value, and so forth, change
established theory. But as who gets a bigger piece of the big pie is not a
scientific endeavor, it's a struggle with lots of propaganda and such. If
scientists predicted something, and then the evidence showed them wrong, they
would change their theories. The inevitable collapse of Bitcoin will not
change its slick huckster's propaganda one iota. They'll just sucker you into
buying into their next MLM scheme. How long until it happens? However long
Dutch tulip bulbs, or the housing bubble, or the dot-com bubble went on should
be a clue. As Keynes said, markets can remain irrational longer than you can
remain solvent. But those who want to understand how the world really works,
will look at the inevitable crash of Bitcoin, meaning when they are worth not
$630 or so each, but 63 cents each, or less - those who want to understand how
the world works will see when that happens and will reconsider whether value
comes from scarcity or not. Most won't. The ones who hype it today will have
other reasons for why that collapse, which today they say will never happen,
will have had happened. The propaganda will go on. But those who want to
understand the world can take that time to reconsider things. Even though the
discourse will be dominated even then by the phonies and hucksters who were
just proven to be frauds. That day will come in the next few years, as it is
impossible for Bitcoins to retain value due to "scarcity".

~~~
valtron
I would be inclined to agree; that value is _not_ entirely caused by scarcity.
(Though I will point out that if a resource is scarce, people might put more
value on it and try to acquire more now because they're afraid they might not
be able to get it later.)

However, for a currency, scarcity is critical! Let's say it was easy (and
cheap) for people to print their own dollars. You then want to buy an apple.
How much is an apple these days, about $1? That doesn't make sense, the apple
store can easily print $1 worth of money and keep the apple. What about for
$100? Same thing: it's still one bill. What about $1000000? Maybe. Depends how
much harder it is to acquire that amount of paper and ink than the apple. At
this point, congratulations, your currency is basically paper and ink. Buying
anything remotely expensive (like groceries) involves hauling around tons of
paper and ink.

[http://w3.newsmax.com/newsletters/uwr/images/transcript-
img1...](http://w3.newsmax.com/newsletters/uwr/images/transcript-img14.jpg)

~~~
firstOrder
Currency is a commodity, just like any other commodity. Why have certain
commodities, such as gold, often become currencies over the past millennia?
Because certain commodities like gold are durable, divisible, portable,
uniform etc. and thus make good currencies. The US dollar was just a note
exchangable for equivalent gold at the Federal Reserve until 1971.

States have tried to issue currencies without backing for thousands of years.
Have any of those currencies lasted long? The answer is no. There's nothing
about the US dollar which makes me think it will be any different than such
schemes hatched in Ancient Mesopotamia or Greece. In fact the worth of three
dollars today is about equivalent to one 1980 dollar. The dollar will not
retain its value over time, while an ounce of gold from 4000 years ago has a
somewhat equivalent value to an ounce of gold today. Inevitably there will be
a crisis of confidence, and the dollar, euro, yen etc. will either become
worthless, or will be backed by gold, or silver or the like. It's not as if
governments today have some magic which makes their dollars and euros valuable
in a way that governments 2000 years ago could not.

I can pay taxes with dollars, I can go to USPS and buy stuff, I can go to an
Army PX and buy stuff - but this only goes so far. The day will come, maybe
decades from now, maybe a century or two from now, when a crisis of confidence
happens and the dollar either becomes worthless or backed by gold from Fort
Knox.

If the dollar has a real underlying value - WHY does the government still
stockpile gold in Fort Knox?

Again I want to stress I'm talking historically and what must happen in a
century or two. I am not claiming the dollar's value will collapse in the next
year. But if it is not backed by a real commodity once a real crisis of
confidence occurs, then it will inevitably lose its value.

Scarcity has nothing to do with it. The dollar until 1971 backed by the
commodity gold, is the historical norm. The past 40-something years is the
historic abnormality. Which will inevitably transform back to the old way.

~~~
icebraining
If I could make gold out of air, how long do you think it would remain in use?

------
ThomPete
So in the end each of us will have our own crypto-currency who's value is
determined by how popular we are.

~~~
dualogy
KloutCoin? So all the "attention economy" peddlers had it right after all?
Then many of us doing old-school value-adding are royally screwed.

~~~
ThomPete
Haha KloutCoin. Don't tell that to klout they WILL do it.

------
Dn_Ab
You know what would be _totally_ awesome? A cryptocoin whose core workings are
derived from _Charity_. A coin based on Charity† would offer stronger safety
guarantees for complex contracts than any other existing or proposed coin
(certainly more than Ethereum). Especially if extended to _implicitly capture
complexity_.

†If you understand the multiple levels on which that statement works -
especially on a site named after a fixed point combinator - then I think you
will agree I deserve to feel as clever as I did when I wrote it =D.

~~~
makmanalp
Could you elaborate a bit? This sounds promising but I'm having trouble
understanding how it would work. You need to donate to charity to verify a
transaction?

~~~
silentOpen
Charity is an experimental FP language. <
[http://pll.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/charity1/www/home.html](http://pll.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/charity1/www/home.html)
>

------
ck2
It's a shame they cannot figure out how to make a SETIcoin or folding@home
coin, where you earn based on how much data you process for the cause.

Would be better than just burning electrons for scrypt.

~~~
tromp
While they haven't yet figured out how to make a proof-of-work do useful work,
one can make a relatively low-power one that mostly (95%) substitutes memory
latency for computation, as in my
[https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo](https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo)

------
pbharrin
"if you look at Bitcoin and you see the contributor list, it’s a dozen people
writing a majority of the code. If you lower the barrier to entry and allow
people to experiment, you bring more people to develop it in the space."

So true, the biggest complaint from the Bitcoin core devs is that there are
few people contributing. Especially when there are heavily funded companies
relying on this code.

------
eik3_de
Ok so let's launch HNcoin

------
bruceb
Breaking News: 300 Arscoins just stolen. Film at 11.

------
AndrewDucker
I love that you can use it to buy hats. Clearly they have bought into the
Valve method of raking in (crypto-)cash!

------
fromdoon
I have always wondered that why we cannot make intangibles like happiness,
emotions as a currency. Even though they are more often than not treated as
the real wealth a person can have, we have never ever been able to count these
intangibles and store them.

Of course this seems to be an absurd idea at first. But, lets try to think
about it, doesn't matter how ridiculous or implausible this might sound.

My mind goes back to the movie "In Time", where time was treated as currency,
something on which your life depended, literally.

Can't the smartest people on this planet, think of some thing absolutely
fascinating, that may let us, mortal people gather our happiness and maybe
able to trade it.

Consider for example that someone who helps people out, people who may not
have enough money, but who have the intention to bless that person. Can't that
person count/take the blessings and become rich in process.

If this is possible, their might a big motivation for everyone to do good,
help people out, get their genuine blessings ...

I know this all sounds really crazy!! Just wanted to dish my thoughts out :)

~~~
ttctciyf
I think we need a thin client on your Google Glass that feeds your personal
interactions continuously to an AI engine in the cloud.

Having established that you were the recipient of a well-merited compliment
that significantly pleased you, the identity of the complimenter, and the fact
that your benefactor is HappyCoin(tm)-enabled, the engine would automatically
calculate the exact monetary value of your happiness and create a
microtransaction as payment, which you would then hopefully approve while
still uplifted.

~~~
waterlesscloud
There's a Bruce Sterling story, "Maneki Neko", that's always fascinated me as
model for a potential future. In it, a master computer tells people to perform
certain actions it knows will fulfill other people's needs. The more you put
in, the more you're eligible to get out. It is, in essence, a gift economy
organized by the cloud.

It's the sort of idea that seems tantalizingly plausible with smartphones and
the cloud, but is hard to actually put into practice. It's definitely the kind
of thing that could drive a host of startup ideas, though.

Here's the full story online:
[http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/maneki-
neko/](http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/maneki-neko/)

------
mschuster91
Does everyone and their dog(e) have to start his/her own cryptocurrency?!

I wonder when we'll see such inventions as MaruCoin, GrumpyCoin or, for what
it's worth, FlappyCoin.

Such currency. Much chaos. Very wow.

edit: please, do not start these altcoins, we've got too much of 'em
already...

~~~
lukifer
We've had FlappyCoin for weeks now:
[http://reddit.com/r/flappycoin](http://reddit.com/r/flappycoin)

------
iancarroll
I'm mining this right now on a linode VPS with around 10khashs. It's nothing
at all but hey, why not

~~~
herokusaki
Isn't that against the TOS?

~~~
iancarroll
You saw nothing.

------
Kabacaru
I'm holding out for Kriegerands.

------
gchfjfjfj
I am not sure that an Arse-coin sounds that cool, rather it hits a bum note,
has a whiff of suspicion, people might get wind of it, and what happens if it
gets wiped (out)?

~~~
KHPatel
Thank you for this.

