[118375] in Cypherpunks
Re: A question about b-money... (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Adam Back)
Sun Sep 26 11:45:24 1999
Date: Sun, 26 Sep 1999 16:26:01 +0100
Message-Id: <199909261526.QAA00520@server.cypherspace.org>
From: Adam Back <adam@cypherspace.org>
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Cc: ben@algroup.co.uk
CC: dbs@philodox.com
In-reply-to: <37EDF3CA.79D37F65@algroup.co.uk> (message from Ben Laurie on
Sun, 26 Sep 1999 11:22:02 +0100)
Reply-To: Adam Back <adam@cypherspace.org>
Ben writes:
> > B-money is therefore highly resistant to inflation, and contains
> > mechanisms to automatically adjust the size of the money supply to
> > produce very stable prices over the long term. It would be superior in
> > this regard to virtually any other proposed form of money.
>
> That is, it only goes as fast as processing power increases, which is
> not "highly resistant", IMO, but galloping. Luckily, storage gets
> cheaper about as fast, so at least there won't be a run on hard disks...
I think you are confusing hashcash and Wei's b-money. Hashcash
inflates because processors get faster.
B-money may or not inflate, but the cost of producing b-money is known
to be stable because the cost is fixed at the market value of the
chosen basket of commodities representing a b-money unit.
The fact that a computational cost function is used to mint b-money in
a distributed fashion does not affect this cost, other than that the
cost may vary as some hardware is more efficient.
(The £ cost of minting b-money this month will be the value of the
commodity as near as can be estimated; the cost next year will be the
value of the commodity at that time. You will need bigger collisions
next year because the cost of producing a given collision will have
gone down as processors will have gotten faster per £).
Adam
