
Cryptoeconomics: Paving the Future of Blockchain Technology - doener
https://hackernoon.com/cryptoeconomics-paving-the-future-of-blockchain-technology-13b04dab971
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pedrocr
Before modelling cryptoeconomics maybe someone should apply some sound basic
economics to the existing blockchain. Having a cryptocurrency where the
founder owns 5% of all the currency that will ever exist and deflation is
builtin and fixed seems like it fails some fairly basic things we know about
standard economics before we need to start modelling the impacts of
cryptoeconomics. Just had an interesting discussion about this on reddit:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6okg5v/a_hacke...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6okg5v/a_hacker_stole_31m_of_etherhow_it_happened_and/dkj8ms4/)

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solotronics
no one has actually convinced me this is bad. when you save instead of spend
shouldn't your stored potential increase instead of decrease? this makes sense
to me and would encourage frugality and a break from the consumerism race to
the bottom. If you give someone your food it would make sense to get more food
the farther you have to wait instead of less food the longer you wait. Of
course the current corporate system does not want this they want you to spend
all you have and be a debt slave. Think.

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roenxi
Very much agreeing with you in principle that punishing savers is a terrible
idea.

That being said, if bitcoin:

* Isn't backed by government (participation is voluntary)

* Is inherently delationary & encourages hoarding

* Loses coins from the system due to accident (eg, people losing passwords)

Then it follows that at some point we expect, say, plumbers to do actual work
for someone who's contribution was that they were there buying bitcoin in
2015. It might be troublesome to get the plumbers buy-in to bitcoin
specifically vs a new competitor where all participants are pulling their
weight in the real world.

Basically, deflation + a long memory makes a monetary system unattractive for
people to buy into.

EDIT: I'll point out that _so far_ bitcoin has been an inflationary currency
from the point of view of number-of-coins created. That will change.

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EGreg
My main question is:

Has anyone found how to solve the double-spend problem WITHOUT global
consensus?

The original Ripple idea used trustlines. The nice thing about those is that
you don't _have_ the double-spend problem. Each entity issues its own
currency, so to spea, making it credit-money rather than value-money. I really
love the absence of a global ledger recording every transaction ever made -
both from a privacy point of view and this one:

[https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/stories/design-challenge-avoid-
ce...](https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/stories/design-challenge-avoid-
centralization-and-singletons.html)

But the problem with trustlines is that it's hard for anyone to pay anyone,
and the bandwidth of trustlines can be pretty small. Plus, you do have to have
the permission of all the intermediaries to make a payment.

I would love to have each community issue its own currency without being able
to control who pays whom, and without the double spend problem, and without a
global ledger of all communities in the world. What are the latest solutioms
to this?

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Torai
Cryptoeconomics: 150% more bs than standard economics and powered by
Blockchain Theology.

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ftlio
What I think a lot of people will initially miss in the critique of money
provided by blockchains (read: Bitcoin) is the topology of the network as
helpful in modeling cryptoeconomics (read: economics).

Any meaningful definition of a blockchain should prove useful in modeling the
systems of money preceded by it. I honestly don't know why people think
bitcoins and dollars need separate economics.

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ThomPete
Agree. All currencies are based on one unifying thing. Trust.

There are currencies with far less trust than Bitcoin yet somehow Bitcoin is
seen as some alien idea.

It's not. It's just a non-fiat currency. It will live and die by the trust of
the network.

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ruleabidinguser
it's also digital, which makes it unique among non fiat currencies.

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dreamdu5t
Terrible article. So many suckers in this mania. 99% of people writing about,
trading with, and investing in cryptocurrencies don't know how blockchain or
bitcoin even works. It's _worse_ than 1999. The hype and ignorance is
astounding.

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deft
It's worse but it hasn't reached its peak yet. And I'm sure the peak will be
even higher than dotcom.... Kind of fun to watch

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fapjacks
Right! So get in on the ground floor of this _amazing_ opportunity! /s

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KirinDave
It really stresses me out how folks have equated PoW algorithms in a chain
with a general Byzantine Fault solution.

They haven't, and Bitcoin essentially lives and dies by the proposition that
it is more valuable to the majority of miners alive than dead. The instant
this is not true, there is a potential for a majority of miners to defraud the
system and extract value until the value of the currency drops to 0.

And of course, the damage to the system just 2-3 colluding miners could do if
they wanted is pretty significant, especially if the goal was DoS instead of
theft.

