VAuroch comments on A proposed inefficiency in the Bitcoin markets - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (138)
My main issue with Bitcoin is a consequence of point 2: How can Bitcoin, in the long term, possibly avoid a deflationary spiral? At a certain point, it can't inflate any more.
My other issue is that the maximum number of tradable units of Bitcoin is 21 million BTC / 10^-8 (smallest fraction trade-able), and 10^15 is not enough currency to run a serious global-scale economy on. But that can be fixed with additional cryptocurrencies more easily than the first problem.
Deflationary spiral is a purported feature; bitcoin is designed to do that. It makes sense under certain economic models. I don't personally think it was a good choice on Satoshi's behalf, but then that's why I co-created Freicoin:
http://freico.in/
There are about 15 trillion U.S. dollars in existence, the closest thing we have to a world currency. Most accounts are denominated in cents. That's only 1.5e14 units, which is very comparable. (Personally I think you will hit scalability problems long before the transaction volume is high enough to make the minimum precision a concern.)
However you definitely don't need additional crypto currencies. Use existing mechanisms to fork the transaction format and extend the precision, if necessary.