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My understanding is that coins must sit idle for a full year before they "evaporate."

If you simply create another wallet, or another wallet address, and move your coins (transact) without buying or selling anything, you fulfill the demurrage requirement and your coins don't evaporate.

If you work with large amounts of digital money and you don't check on it for a year, quite frankly you deserve to lose it! You should have robots executing on arbitrage opportunities and it should be no problem for you to show some activity in the span of a year, if you call yourself an investor. That being said, I don't have any Freicoin and I won't put my money where my mouth is, there are more interesting bits to tune in Bitcoinia, like Terracoin which has shorter block targets and hard-coded limits on the amount of variability and swing that difficulty can have.




"you deserve to lose it"

Your opinion is irrelevant. People will not put money where they need to run some robots just not to lose their funds if they have a better alternative. Freicoin thus will never have any value and therefore no one would use it as a currency.

Terracoin is essentially the same as Bitcoin, but is compatible with Bitcoin ASICs and thus prone to attacks from their part. Litecoin, on the other hand, has incompatible hashing scheme, but no one would invest in mining Litecoin if you can invest in mining Bitcoin. In other words, people want one, most marketable, most popular, most liquid money. If Bitcoin was leaking savings, people would choose Bitcoin 2 which wouldn't and stick with it.


You say "leaking" but it's not leaking. It's demurrage. If you leave it alone for a year, it _all_ goes away. That's not a slow leak, that's making a bad decision and failing hard in a preventable way.

My hat is two sharks, your argument is invalid[1]. Asserting confidently that bitcoin is a transaction network not a value store mechanism, and that "people like you" who have excess value are the ones who attack it, by keeping the bitcoins and speculating that they will be worth more later, rather than executing or transacting with them, just holding them as some kind of "savings."

Terracoin is "susceptible" to attack by ASIC just as Litecoin is "susceptible" to the "millions of GPU-toting gamers" attack vector. Mining is "investing" in the network, and if your only interest is to see yourself on top and the network in shambles, you could probably find a better way to invest.

Then again, some people are anarchists.


[1]: http://alexsegura.tumblr.com/post/8691920116/my-hat-is-two-s...

Think of it this way. If I told you I was keeping my savings in bitcoin, and I've saved hundreds of bitcoins for the last two years, and never converted any of them to cash, and never spent any of them in the last two years, you would probably say "Wow. You've missed at least two great opportunities to cash in on terrible market crashes. You could have had thousands without investing any more real money, you'd be filthy rich and have placed nothing at risk."

Certainly I could have done better if I had made _some_ trades. History tells me I personally will pick the wrong times to trade, and the above strategy is probably best for me, given my strong propensity to buy high and sell low (otherwise I would have those hundreds of bitcoins still.)

But if you've never made a transaction, you have never realized any of the value, and an argument can be made that your entire portfolio is at risk.

Just like buying 50-year bonds, there is a risk you won't live that long. Nobody's going to contact your next-of-kin to alert them to your bitcoin holdings if you die having kept them a secret. That's a real danger to the network, and with a cap on the total number of bitcoins, it causes real harm to everyone when those coins are lost, unaccounted.

At least with someone moving them around from time to time, you will be able to know that the keys have not been erased and "those coins are still alive," you won't spuriously inflate the value of your own and your neighbors' coins on public exchanges, opening yourself to the real dangerous Satoshi attack of "rising from the dead and seizing all of the at-risk cash on everyone's trading accounts." If Satoshi ever comes back, we will likely have made him fabulously rich and all because we didn't think of it first, and people like to jump on bandwagons.

No contract! No fair. Ergo, demurrage is good.


I'm pretty sure you have some savings or belongings that you didn't touch for a year or more. Can I have those?


I have a closet full of crap that you are welcome to mine for good stuff. There are probably some old PS/2 keyboards and non-working motherboards in there, as well as questionable power supplies. I don't have time to look at it.

People even call me a hoarder, luckily I've got it down to just one closet now because of repeated moves. I can promise I don't have savings in excess of the bitcoins I already mentioned, sadly.




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