[118334] in Cypherpunks
Re: A question about b-money... (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (lcs Mixmaster Remailer)
Sat Sep 25 05:58:42 1999
Date: 25 Sep 1999 09:40:02 -0000
Message-ID: <19990925094002.25335.qmail@nym.alias.net>
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: lcs Mixmaster Remailer <mix@anon.lcs.mit.edu>
Reply-To: lcs Mixmaster Remailer <mix@anon.lcs.mit.edu>
Sean Roach writes, regarding b-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...
You should read the actual description of b-money creation, from
http://www.eskimo.com/~weidai/bmoney.txt:
: 1. The creation of money. Anyone can create money by broadcasting the
: solution to a previously unsolved computational problem. The only
: conditions are that it must be easy to determine how much computing effort
: it took to solve the problem and the solution must otherwise have no
: value, either practical or intellectual. The number of monetary units
: created is equal to the cost of the computing effort in terms of a
: standard basket of commodities. For example if a problem takes 100 hours
: to solve on the computer that solves it most economically, and it takes 3
: standard baskets to purchase 100 hours of computing time on that computer
: on the open market, then upon the broadcast of the solution to that
: problem everyone credits the broadcaster's account by 3 units.
Sean continues:
> Essentially, as cycles became cheap, people would toss out a few
> cycles, probably with their screen saver, to earn a little extra
> spending money.
You have overlooked the fact that b-money is calibrated in terms
of the cost of computing cycles in terms of a basket of commodities.
This basket allows us to measure the decreasing cost of computing cycles
due to Moore's Law. As computing becomes cheaper, it takes more cycles
to generate an equivalent amount of b-money. The result is that speedups
in computing power do not make b-money easier to mint.
