[118329] in Cypherpunks
Re: A question about b-money... (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean Roach)
Sat Sep 25 00:11:21 1999
Message-Id: <3.0.6.32.19990925104841.0082e1e0@mail.intplsrv.net>
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 1999 10:48:41 -0500
To: cypherpunks@algebra.com
From: Sean Roach <roach_s@mail.intplsrv.net>
In-Reply-To: <199909250248.EAA09774@mail.replay.com>
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Reply-To: Sean Roach <roach_s@mail.intplsrv.net>
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At 04:48 AM 9/25/99 +0200, Anonymous wrote:
>In a mature b-money system, there is very little cycle burning going
>on and the money supply is stable. The system is set up so that if
>you need more money, you have a choice of going out and earning it
>in the market, or burning cycles. Either way you get the same
>amount of new money.
I suspect that if this system were set up the way it sounds, it would
have about the inflation rate of the novel "Snow Crash".
You would, in effect, be tying the b-money economy directly to the
deflation where computers are concerned. As computers became faster,
more people would want to mint b-money to get thier share. It seems
that it would end up something like the economy in California during
the gold rush. Or, the us dollar on a silver standard had they gone
to it in the early part of this century.
Essentially, as cycles became cheap, people would toss out a few
cycles, probably with their screen saver, to earn a little extra
spending money.
Unless I'm missing something critical here, and I very likely am, I
haven't read anything on b-money but what was mentioned here, the
system could never become stable so long as anyone could run a mint,
as money would constantly be added to the flow at a faster rate as
the technology curve made more and more people able to mint a buck in
under a second.
Of course, as I've mentioned before, I'm not a cryptographer, and
neither am I an economist.
Sean Roach
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