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Comment by foerbert | Hacker News Reader

Not a big crypto person, but my understanding is that a part of the "digital scarcity" problem is addressed by the consensus mechanism. You can go create a fork, but (without sufficient processing power) that fork won't be able to be the longest chain, and the consensus mechanism is that the longest chain is the _real_ chain.

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Two point: the consensus is that the 'most difficult' (not longest) chain which follows the agreed consensus rules is the 'real chain'. This is not necessarily the one with the most computing power associated with it, especially in the case of a fork, where two different sets of consensus rules diverge. The main issue with being the smaller side of the fork is that if you are still using the same proof of work mechanism then you are vulnerable to 51% attacks from the larger fork, which tends to lower prices and so discourage mining which makes the situation worse (and this has happened to multiple bitcoin forks, including 51% attacks). This may in principle be less of a concern with PoS, because the 'mining resource' also splits with the fork and stakers can continue to stake both sides, reducing the strength of the positive feedback loop (though not completely, since the less popular and lower priced coin is more vulnerable to someone trying to buy enough of it to execute a 51% stake attack).

Yes, my point is, that applies for a single coin. The conceptual shift I'm talking about here is that (my definition of fork here is) /another/ coin. Another coin (like ethereum, doge, whatever) is just another "fork" of "cryptocoin-coin". People in need of cryptocoins, if only one existed, would acquire, buy, mine that one. But now that they have multiple options, it is split between all, to varying degrees. As long as they are interchangeable, they are the same thing pretty much. In a fully cryptocoin future world, when a dogecoin is minted, it affects the value of bitcoin. So any x-coin does not live in a vacuum, and can only be scarce in its own network.

> As long as they are interchangeable, they are the same thing pretty much

You keep asserting this as true but I think you are just confused.

If the problem of secure, non-wasteful, convenient, easy to use, programmable and distributed ledger problem is solved once ... how will coin X be different from coin Y? Especially if you can exchange X for Y and Y for X... They will all increase the usable "coin" supply without any singular chain having the means to do anything about it. From there, the scarcity argument goes out the window and becomes an academic exercise (...if we had an isolated single blockchain, this would apply type arguments).

I'm not sure I follow. If a dogecoin is minted, so what? I don't know why bitcoin or other crypto in particular would care so much more than anything else in the world. They work differently, record different information, and are about as interchangeable as any two different physical things.

I'm not sure why it would matter that a coin is only scarce in it's own network. That's the only context it can ever exist in. You can't yank a dogecoin out of the doge network and stuff it into the bitcoin network.

"I want to buy <<whatever>> and pay with ZCoin, not XCoin." Either the seller accepts ZCoin, or they lose a sale. So sellers need to accept multiple coins; buyers can acquire and pay with different coins.

Different coins compete with each other.

(Or rather, they would -- if they were actual currencies and not just elaborate technological Ponzi schemes.)

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