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Software Developer Creates Personal Cryptocurrency (wired.com)
mirandakatz writes: If you want to pick Evan Prodromou's brain -- as many people often do -- you'll have to pay him. And not just a consulting fee: You'll have to pay him in his own personal cryptocurrency, dubbed Evancoin. Currently, 20 days after his Initial Coin Offering, a single Evancoin is worth $45. As Prodromou tells Scott Rosenberg at Backchannel, "I'm not above a stunt! But in this case I'm really serious about exploring how cryptocurrency is changing what we can do with money and how we think about it. Money is this sort of consensual hallucination, and I wanted to experiment around that." The story goes on to explain what, exactly, goes into creating a personal cryptocurrency, and whether Evancoin could becoming a phenomenon that spreads.
I now take payments in goats and manual labor.
it would be shame if something happened to it.
...all these crypto currencies tour how that are more secure and better than the dollar, but yet they are willing to sell them for...dollars?!?!?
Having a commonly agreed-upon means of exchange, unit of value and store of value does not require "collective hallucination". That just shows his ignorance about monetary theory and the history of money and currencies.
The whole point of currency, whether it's official government currency or cryptocurrency, is that it has an agreed-upon value by everyone who uses it. That seems to be a missing element in this "personal" cryptocurrency.
I suppose there is the fantasy of your time becoming more valuable but then why not just accept fractional coin payments? And by saying "My time is your money" what happens if he has an accident or gets bored and stops the experiment? The value will fall since there will be no growth, unless he is able to cede control to some other organization. It seems to me the calculation is that the sum of the full value of all coins he has made are together an investment he has made in trying to advertise his ability as a consultant and experimentally launch a cryptocurrency that is based on something other than air (in this case, his time). Might be more valuable / get coopted by nefarious types if he asks other developers to join in.
his currency is worthless to me?
This reminds me of how some famous musician (Prince?) supposedly issued stock for his own career. Can't find a citation for that though.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
This is a common practice already, but now with added buzzword-compliance.
For decades, organizations have issued scrips of various kinds. From gift certificates and coupons to the ubiquitous gift cards exchanged today, there's always some new way to get customers to invest in your product before they buy it. This guy now has his own scrip currency, with the gimmick of being a "cryptocurrency" so people can generate their own, essentially paying him in their time and recognition of his brand instead of an actual recognized currency.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Not for most of us.
#DeleteFacebook
Look at that... on my personal cryptocurrency market, SlashAC-CC-eXchange, Evancoin just hit ZERO dollars, and ZERO cents in value.
Well, that was quick.
Where exactly are his coins worth USD$45? Because it's not even listed on coingecko.com, for example.
Would he accept payments in Flappycoins? Because I got a shitload of those...
#DeleteFacebook
Let's just abbreviate that as Ecoin - oh wait ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
They all use the same blockchain, just with a different name, but the name always has Coin at the end of it. You could just copy all the bitcoin numbers and call them a new name and poof you have a new "currency" you can sell to suckers.
It's a fungible commodity used for solving the coincidence of wants problem whereby the lack of a common acceptable abstraction for value in the economy forces people to engage in a lengthy and circuitous sequence of bartering transactions to ultimately receive the goods and services they want to buy, wasting a great deal of time and effort in the process. We all more or less agree to use money because it's far more efficient than the next best alternatives. However, in order to function as "money" a commodity must be capable of performing the following functions in the economy:
1. Store of Value.
2. Unit of Account.
3. Medium of Exchange.
In order to fulfill these three requirements a money should ideally have the following qualities:
1. Not too scarce but also not too abundant.
2. Easily divisible such that it doesn't lose value when broken into small pieces.
3. Easily recombined into larger portions again without losing value.
4. Easily recognizable.
5. Difficult to counterfeit.
6. Portable.
7. Durable such that it doesn't rot, degrade, rust or corrode.
8. Universally (or nearly so) acceptable.
For much of human history, gold and precious metals were used for money because they fulfilled all three essential money requirements and all eight of the moneyish qualities. Today most money is now records in a database somewhere and gold has largely fallen by the wayside but even it still performs some functions admirably and arguably better than our current electronic fiat money, especially the store of value function. Crypto-currencies on the other hand generally have most of these moneyish qualities with the exceptions of the first and last ones and possibly number four as well. However, they tend to fail on essential money requirements 1 and 3 since the short term values frequently fluctuate wildly in a relatively large range while relatively few merchants accept crypto-currency as payment compared with say US dollars. For these reasons, it's probably more accurate to describe crypto-currencies as vehicles for speculation rather than actual currencies at present time.
..this is how PHP was born ..knocking-off CFM to render a developer's resume.
Pssss nobody wants to pick his brain neither his stupid coins.
I've figured out how to efficiently factor large numbers, and next year I'm going to use that knowledge to randomly redistribute all bitcoin wallets with more than 1 bitcoin in them, you've been warned. ;-)
I leave it to the reader as an exercise determine how this breaks the rest of internet security.
Arcades,
Old arcades took tokens, you trade money for tokens, those tokens can only be used at that arcade,
move on nothing to see.
You didn't show up to science class, right? Energy is being USED UP, as we speak. One day all the energy will be spent, and the Universe will be a cold, dark lifeless place.
1. Store of Value.
One hundred years ago, an ounce of gold could purchase a finely tailored suit. Today, the same ounce of gold will still purchase a finely tailored suit.
If fiat currency were a store of value, then the same amount would perform likewise. But it is not. Since it takes more and more fiat currency to purchase the same value of goods, fiat currency leaks value like a recently unplugged capacitor. I have a 5,000,000 dutchmark and a 100,000,000,000,000 Zimbabwe dollar in my collection that are both essentially worthless because of this reason.
Instead, we fool ourselves into thinking that goods rise in value by calling it inflation. Watch a game show from the 1970s and you will see brand new cars selling for $3,000 to $4,000 USD. At the same time, the smart money has been invested in land, resources, and other durable goods.
The reality is that our currency is not based upon anything of value. It is simply numbers printed on worthless pieces of paper. For the creators of any particular currency, Evan in this case, it is a situation where they can deal themselves in without doing any real work. All currencies eventually fail for this reason. That is why the U.S. Constitution expressly forbids fiat currency in Article I, Section 10.
"No State shall... make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts".
So, Schrute Bucks coming to fruition? ...might as well.