[118284] in Cypherpunks
Re: A question about b-money...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (BPM Mixmaster Remailer)
Fri Sep 24 05:19:47 1999
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 12:40:03 -0700 (PDT)
Message-Id: <199909231940.MAA03545@acid.bpm.ai>
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: BPM Mixmaster Remailer <remailer@bpm.ai>
Reply-To: BPM Mixmaster Remailer <remailer@bpm.ai>
On 22-9-99 Jim Choate voiced the following thoughts:
--- Begin Jim:
You want to buy a CD at a online vendor. You burn enough cpu resources to
generate a token. You send that token to the CD vendor. At that same time
you've got to pay the electric company for the energy that you used to
generate the original token, meaning yet another token must be burned to pay
for the work done to generate the first token. And so ad infinitum.
Why in hell would anyone buy into a system that has a 200% inflation rate?
----- End Jim
a couple thoughts come to mind:
1) if for the average person the cheapest way to get b-money was to calculate it, why would anyone hold a 'real' job?
2) how much a % of your cpu time cost for your personal machine is the electric bill? pretty small
3) what does the (lack of) ability of a small scale operation to produce a commodity cost effectively have to do with the global 'inflation rate' in that commodity for the entire world?
bottom line:a basic requirement of any money system is that the profit margin on being a mint is small enough that you can still convince people to farm,raise livestock,sell gas, etc instead of starting up their own mints.an important corrolary is that the idle cpu time accessible to the average person must have value arbitrarily close to 0.
suggested reading: Douglas Adams, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. be sure to read the fourth book,which i believe includes a detailed discussion of a woodland society which adopted the leaf as the currency unit.
monger.
