No, I wasn't aware of dogecoin, am reading about it now. How is it different from Bitcoins? Specifically, who benefits from the money-creation process? Is there any waste?
Regarding trust: yes, that's one idea. The only problem is that one might want to adjust the coin creation rate in accordance with the increase in use of the currency. Otherwise, the value of the currency might increase rapidly (if the currency became more frequently used), which won't help the poor but rather the existing owners of the currency.
See also Gunnar's interesting ideas about using the legal system to regulate the money creation process. That would, as I write, go some way towards solving the trust issue.
An alternative idea is to try to bind the currency to the dollar, or that it's "central bank"/regulators tried to keep it as close as possible to the dollar. To implement these policies, the central bank would have to mint new money at the same pace that the usage of the money is increased.
I'm all for the website idea!
Dogecoin is just a bitcoin clone, not any better than original except it has a cute dog as a logo, and is basically just a joke. AFAIK, it's currently world's third by capitalization.
I think that some expected deflation may be necessary to get people to use it initially. And if value increases rapidly, that makes it profitable to donate. No doubt a lot of it will end up making some of existing owners virtually rich, but the goal here is not to avoid that, but to direct some percentage towards the poor. edit: and note that the poor are helped irrespective of whenever the whole thing is a bubble or not.
I messaged you in private, would be easier to continue discussion by email.
In the last few years we have seen two interesting revolutionary ideas on how to change the monetary system. The first is Bitcoin: the most well-known peer-to-peer currency. It has been wildly debated recently and I won't go into the detail of allegations of use in criminal activities etc (for one thing, I don't know much about it). My interest is rather in the money creation part. The people who run the Bitcoin software are rewarded for their work with new Bitcoins - a process called mining. Now the pace at which new Bitcoins are mined is limited, which means that Bitcoin creation is a zero-sum game: the more one miner contributes to the Bitcoin software, the less Bitcoins other miners get. Unsurprisingly, this has led to an arms race: miners spend nearly as much on running the software as they get back in form of new Bitcoins.
The second idea is the Chicago Plan, which was debated already in the 30's, after the great crash of 1929, but which recently was resurrected by Michael Kumhof (senior economist at IMF, of all places). The central idea of the Chicago Plan is to abolish fractional reserve banking - the system by which private banks in effect create money out of thin air. Instead of lending out most of the depositors' money, banks would effectively have to let them stay in the bank.
Instead money would be created by the central bank/government, a process that would generate a massive seignorage for the government. According to Kumhof, it would also have other beneficial effects, such as killing off the "boom-and-bust"-cycles which he thinks fractional reserve banking are mostly responsible for, and diminishing the wasteful parts of the financial sector.
Kumhof ideas' have not been well received. Overall, it is remarkable how little reform there has been of the financial and monetary system given that the world had a major financial meltdown 2008 (and was close to an even greater one, in my understanding). Governments won't challenge the financial system radically in the near future, that's for sure.
Instead radical reforms can only come from private hands. Let us now compare the two ideas. In the Bitcoin system money is created by private hands, but in wasteful ways, which effectively means that there is very little seignorage. Under the Chicago plan, money is created by the government in much more efficient ways, which leads to a large seignorage. Now my idea is to take the best part of both of these ideas: let a private player - more exactly, an altruistic organization such as CEA - produce the money centrally, Chicago plan-like, and let the seignorage be used for altruistic purposes. (Of course, there would be some costs of running the system, but if the system was sufficiently large, these would be negligible in relation to the seignorage.)
If the altruistic organization that did this had a sufficiently good reputation, chances are greater that people would trust the system. Of course, it would try to stop the currency from being used to launder money, drug trade etc.
Generally, people would be suspicious of private currencies where the central authority collected a seignorage, but if this seignorage was used for charitable and other altruistic purposes (and people really trusted that that would be the case), this would, I hope, be less of a problem.
What do you think? I'd be happy to get comments from people who know more about the Bitcoin system, since I don't really know it (though I find it interesting). Perhaps there is some info concerning Bitcoins that tells against this proposal; if so, I'd be interested in that.