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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.
Because the creators can make more, and then they have cryptocurrency *and* dollars.
Also, like stocks and religion, the power of currency is equal to the number of people willing to hold it.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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.
He's a young hip techbro.
He's 49
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
lucm, indeed.
What part of "agreed-upon" is not consensual hallucination?
Money is nonsensical because if it measures value, why is it kept scarce? It's as if each time you measured something, you lost inches and have to buy more inches before you can measure something else. The definition of money as a medium of exchange and store of value is nonsensical. Money is more like points. There are no limit on points and the rules for point allocation are arbitrarily and fickly decided by a select privileged few, with very little regard to supply and demand.
To conclude, your definition of money is quaint and wholly ideological, not observed.
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
It's worthless now, but when the zombies apocalypse starts, Evancoin's value is gonna go to the moon!
#DeleteFacebook
Well, the Internet is sort of like millions of TVs and -
What are TVs?
Well a TV is something that displays moving images and -
Moving images? Images don't move, ya idiot! You get a painting and you hang it on the wall!
Etc.
#DeleteFacebook
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. . . .
Turing wasn't motivated by money. Leonard Kleinrock has explicitly said that economics was not a motivating factor in the invention of the internet; they just wanted to communicate with other universities through the computer. Berners-Lee gave away the world wide web protocols. He wasn't motivated by money. Faraday turned down a knighthood, because he wanted to figure things out, not simply make money.
Capitalism throttles innovation because capitalism wants to control above all else. Money is about power. Quaint old economic theories about money as a store of value and medium of exchange make nice stories but have no relevance to life outside the window.
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.
Nothing has intrinsic store of value. Not USD, not gold, not anything.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I've figured out how to efficiently factor large numbers, and next year I'm going to use that knowledge to randomly redistribute all bitcoin wallets with more than 1 bitcoin in them, you've been warned. ;-)
I leave it to the reader as an exercise determine how this breaks the rest of internet security.
What about energy?
I'd actually go as far as to say that energy is the only true currency in the universe...
Because, like dollars, and any other currency, they have no inherent value, and are just an abstracted medium of exchange and speculation. Far more sellers accept dollars as a currency, and so when you want to buy something sold in dollars, you first have to buy dollars.
It's actually a really common thing to do for those who deal in many different countries. You want to buy widgets from a company that only sells them priced in Deutschmarks? You spend your Dollars, or Yen, or whatever to buy Deutschmarks, which you then trade for the widgets you actually want. If you're paying by credit card or similar that may all happen totally invisibly to you, but at some point the exchange must be made.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Bread. Water. Heat in the winter. Iron when you're making tools. A place to live. An hour of your life.
Plenty of things have inherent value - just not currencies. Their value is only in what real value other people are willing to exchange for it.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"the truth is modern money system was only recently invented"
You're ignorant.
So, Schrute Bucks coming to fruition? ...might as well.
Gold and USD are worth exactly what the market thinks they're worth. Their value is not intrinsic. If it were, the military power behind the USD wouldn't be relevant.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
My point is that there is nothing that is worth the same tomorrow as it does today. The value of anything can only be measured relative to other things that also fluctuate.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
u huh ...
the fed can print a warehouse full of dollars, it has zero added value until they're spent (llow me to translate your words for the sapients lol) ... same thing with cryptostashes, you can also choose to die with a billion in your pocket for instance, how much is it worth ?
nothing, until you spend it, so
there was this guy, i think he went by the name satoshi, who came up with this total alien technology that was a fucking ponzi scheme, and so i thought myself or i would have mined on cpu power back then ... he finished the project and vanished into thin air ... the feds say they know who he is, as honeypot as it gets, a suit and a tie dont make you a genius ... if that was the intention, a guy who actually uses several writing styles in chatlogs (IF he or she was one person) might be a bit too smart to come out crying out loud "BUT NO IT IS I THE REAL POKEMAN!" ... actually i suppose so far having not even spent "the original bitcoins" or the fucking cloud would be all over it ... its not possible to hide anything in the original blockchain so it stands to reason the original bitcoin would belong to the first miner
so what was the motive ? cos now you have banks patenting it and the guy didnt make a fuckin cent ???
if thats not alien or next level then i dont know what is (woooooo-fff topic again shit)
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?