[118293] in Cypherpunks
Re: A question about b-money...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Adam Back)
Fri Sep 24 07:33:55 1999
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 1999 22:39:40 +0100
Message-Id: <199909232139.WAA08145@server.cypherspace.org>
From: Adam Back <adam@cypherspace.org>
To: ravage@einstein.ssz.com
Cc: cypherpunks@einstein.ssz.com
In-reply-to: <199909230543.AAA17737@einstein.ssz.com> (message from Jim Choate
on Thu, 23 Sep 1999 00:43:53 -0500 (CDT))
Reply-To: Adam Back <adam@cypherspace.org>
Jim writes:
> 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,
you pay your electricity bill with something else: cheque, direct
debit, credit card etc. That is how you mint b-money.
> 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.
Gold similarly costs money to produce, you have the cost of digging it
up, etc. Gold has some inherent manufactoring value, b-money doesn't.
The same argument would apply to gold. Presume for the sake of
argument that the value of gold was exactly the cost of digging it up.
If you want to pay for digging gold up by digging gold up clearly you
will be digging gold up forever.
Adam
