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Comment by namelost | Hacker News Reader

The value of a dollar only changes if some people decide they want a jstanleytoken more than they want a dollar (i.e they start to buy jstanleytokens).

Otherwise the value of a jstanleytoken will remain at 0 and the value of a dollar will be unaffected.

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I don't see why you'd need jstanleytokens to be more desirable. They'd merely need to be desirable in some way.

Let's say that the corner store arbitrarily decides that they'll accept jstanleytokens at 10% the value of a dollar. I can go buy my soda for 20 jstanleytokens, or whatever it would be, instead of $2. That decreases the demand for dollars, and thus the value of a dollar.

But since everybody got both they didn't lose anything: they got some jstanleycoins too (unless you were lending dollars, then you may not get them both back). So the wealth/spending power didn't decrease, there was no inflation.

I'd say there is inflation, just as there would be if everyone got two dollars for each dollar they hold. But the idea that people wouldn't lose anything is true.

I think that "unless you were lending dollars" bit is a really important aspect of this, though. Lending happens a lot. This is true even in the Bitcoin world. We don't normally call it "lending," but that's what people do whenever they store coins on an exchange.

This has been a major problem with these forks, too. You deposit some Bitcoin with an exchange, then there's a fork... do they owe you the forked currency as well, or not? There's no obvious answer to that.

> just as there would be if everyone got two dollars for each dollar they hold.

But that's not what's happening!

It's closer to everyone getting 1 jstanleytoken for each dollar they hold.

Which is what I discussed. All I'm saying with the bit you quoted is that there's inflation in both cases.

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