I feel like a broken record saying this: Demand for the currency will fluctuate. If the supply is fixed, the price will be demand-driven. Which means volatile. Fiat currency has a central bank with active control over the supply, so it is capable of keeping a stable price if the central bank does its job.
http://www.bzarg.com/p/what-bitcoin-shows-us-about-how-money...
* Single trusted feed
* Take the median of the exchange rates from a set of feeds, with that set chosen by vote of holders of the coin (I can personally see this having some conflict-of-interest issues)
* Use what they call a "Decentralized Schelling point scheme" - have coinholders vote on what they think the exchange rate was in a recent time interval, use the median vote, then reward voters who were in the 25th to 75th percentile.
The authors seem to view the third option, with some engineering of the incentives, to be ideal; but I'm skeptical of a system that gives holders of an asset the ability to change the value of that asset. I would honestly prefer the use of a trusted authority - at least that way you have a very clear delineation of what the central authority is supposed to do and can easily audit whether it is doing its job.
I do think cryptocurrencies do satisfy some use cases in a superior way to fiat currency. But there are some serious economic advantages that a currency with a central bank gives you that cryptocurrencies will never have (at least, the way they're currently designed).
Otherwise it has the same volatility as a stock. It can gain or lose half its value in a few hours. Just like a stock the way to take volatility out of it is to diversify.
The volatility has nothing to do in my opinion with the lack of a central authority distributing it. It has to do with heavy speculation of this particular stock. Central banks can only correct for long term price evolutions, not for short term fluctuations.
If you know/believe that supply will generally adjust to cancel demand, then you have much less incentive to speculate.
The problem here though, is that every crypto valuation is linked directly to the value of Bitcoin. It's as if the entire S&P tracked the price of Apple.
The crypto money supply is predetermined, but demand is not, often driven by events outside of the blockchain. Supply needs to actively balance demand if the price is to stay stable.
For a stable price you'd need a crypto that adjusts mining difficulty in response to changes in the amount of demand (or something like that? My understanding of crypto currencies is only surface level).
However, the USD-to-Crypto price is something outside of the blockchain, so as far as my understanding goes you can't really use that as an input because you can't get undisputable information on the price, because the entirety of undisputable information should exist in the blockchain.
I guess you could try to use transaction volume as an input but that seems like a bad metric because it's a) gameable and 2) does not necessarily correlate with external demand for the crypto currency.
Stable with respect to what? Fiat? Which one?
In the limit you will have a cryptocurrency backed by a fiat currency (and I don't consider Tether to be one. Bitfinex will allow you to exchange $1 for 1 tether, but nobody will guarantee you can go the other direction).
No, it isn't. People just have trouble imagining non-crackpot cryptocurrency because they've never seen one.
For a stable price you'd need a crypto that adjusts mining difficulty in response to changes in the amount of demand (or something like that?)
Right, you can adjust the block reward so that the rate of issuance of money tracks the rate of change of demand.
However, the USD-to-Crypto price is something outside of the blockchain, so as far as my understanding goes you can't really use that as an input
There are some projects that use "oracles" to publish price information on the blockchain, but then you get into a bunch of complexity about electing oracles and taking the median price of multiple oracles.
I guess you could try to use transaction volume as an input but that seems like a bad metric because it's a) gameable and 2) does not necessarily correlate with external demand for the crypto currency.
Right. You can also use difficulty as a metric (based on the theory that higher price makes mining more profitable which causes more miners to mine which causes difficulty to increase). https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/11/11/search-stable-cryptocur... Note that some of these techniques don't guarantee stable value, just less volatile value.
It should be possible to have one with reasonably stable value compared to any identifiable external commodity or basket of commodities that is not itself highly volstile, though it would be more complex than existing crpytocurrencies, and may not be completely decentralized.
Stability, decentralization, and trustlessness together...well, you are pretty much asking can you replace an active central bank with an preset, runs-forever algorithm without a trusted source for real world economic data. I'd say probably not.
As long as there are finite-ish supply, I don't think any crypto would be stable.
It wouldn't be too hard to make a inflationary coin, just mint coins proportional to the estimated GH of the network. That would give the coin a price ceiling.
I am not.
Apple pay has all the encryption mechanism that makes it much safer than sending your credit card number over the Internet, which the parent was asking for.
Personally Apple pay is the primary appeal of Apple's ecosystem for me. No other intermediary's incentives are aligned to prioritize the customer in the transaction ahead of data mining opportunities.
Just wait anywhere between 0.5-5 years once enough people get burned and stop acting out of FOMO and you'll get it.
You tell me.