The only thing I don't like about bitcoin is that the mining reward goes to 0. Sure, there will be fees, but fees reduce the usefulness of a currency. And if people don't mine, bitcoin dies. Perhaps something else will take its place?
It's like being upset that the original miners could get a block reward of 50 BTC for mining on a CPU but today you have to use specialized hardware for less BTC. But as competition increased (and difficulty increased), the BTC is worth way more than it was and is less risky (although, still risky).
Profit is profit and some people/organizations will still have incentives to mine. Of course, there are problems that need to be sorted out before then though, like having more transactions included in each block to make it worth while for miners and cheap for users.
There is no such thing as "transactional currency".
If you simply create another wallet, or another wallet address, and move your coins (transact) without buying or selling anything, you fulfill the demurrage requirement and your coins don't evaporate.
If you work with large amounts of digital money and you don't check on it for a year, quite frankly you deserve to lose it! You should have robots executing on arbitrage opportunities and it should be no problem for you to show some activity in the span of a year, if you call yourself an investor. That being said, I don't have any Freicoin and I won't put my money where my mouth is, there are more interesting bits to tune in Bitcoinia, like Terracoin which has shorter block targets and hard-coded limits on the amount of variability and swing that difficulty can have.
People even call me a hoarder, luckily I've got it down to just one closet now because of repeated moves. I can promise I don't have savings in excess of the bitcoins I already mentioned, sadly.
Your opinion is irrelevant. People will not put money where they need to run some robots just not to lose their funds if they have a better alternative. Freicoin thus will never have any value and therefore no one would use it as a currency.
Terracoin is essentially the same as Bitcoin, but is compatible with Bitcoin ASICs and thus prone to attacks from their part. Litecoin, on the other hand, has incompatible hashing scheme, but no one would invest in mining Litecoin if you can invest in mining Bitcoin. In other words, people want one, most marketable, most popular, most liquid money. If Bitcoin was leaking savings, people would choose Bitcoin 2 which wouldn't and stick with it.
My hat is two sharks, your argument is invalid[1]. Asserting confidently that bitcoin is a transaction network not a value store mechanism, and that "people like you" who have excess value are the ones who attack it, by keeping the bitcoins and speculating that they will be worth more later, rather than executing or transacting with them, just holding them as some kind of "savings."
Terracoin is "susceptible" to attack by ASIC just as Litecoin is "susceptible" to the "millions of GPU-toting gamers" attack vector. Mining is "investing" in the network, and if your only interest is to see yourself on top and the network in shambles, you could probably find a better way to invest.
Then again, some people are anarchists.
Think of it this way. If I told you I was keeping my savings in bitcoin, and I've saved hundreds of bitcoins for the last two years, and never converted any of them to cash, and never spent any of them in the last two years, you would probably say "Wow. You've missed at least two great opportunities to cash in on terrible market crashes. You could have had thousands without investing any more real money, you'd be filthy rich and have placed nothing at risk."
Certainly I could have done better if I had made _some_ trades. History tells me I personally will pick the wrong times to trade, and the above strategy is probably best for me, given my strong propensity to buy high and sell low (otherwise I would have those hundreds of bitcoins still.)
But if you've never made a transaction, you have never realized any of the value, and an argument can be made that your entire portfolio is at risk.
Just like buying 50-year bonds, there is a risk you won't live that long. Nobody's going to contact your next-of-kin to alert them to your bitcoin holdings if you die having kept them a secret. That's a real danger to the network, and with a cap on the total number of bitcoins, it causes real harm to everyone when those coins are lost, unaccounted.
At least with someone moving them around from time to time, you will be able to know that the keys have not been erased and "those coins are still alive," you won't spuriously inflate the value of your own and your neighbors' coins on public exchanges, opening yourself to the real dangerous Satoshi attack of "rising from the dead and seizing all of the at-risk cash on everyone's trading accounts." If Satoshi ever comes back, we will likely have made him fabulously rich and all because we didn't think of it first, and people like to jump on bandwagons.
No contract! No fair. Ergo, demurrage is good.
What is the acceptable user experience for maximum verification time of a transaction? At that max 'verification time' difficulty level, how long would it take to generate all remaining coins?
The bitcoin payout (which goes to the miner of a block) gets predictably smaller over time.
So no, this affect does not increase expected transaction time.
The difficulty is designed to be at a rate that will see a block mined every 10 minutes. So the ideal max verification time should be about 60 minutes (6 blocks) on average, although you should see your transaction included in the next block mined (in 10 minutes-ish, assuming the miner included your transaction, which they have an incentive to do if you included a fee) but to stop a double spending attack, it would be unwise to consider a transaction verified after 1 block, 6 blocks makes sure your transaction is not lost in a blockchain fork or part of a double spending attack. Some people consider 3 blocks to be enough verification time, it depends on how much money you are dealing with but the recommended amount of 6 blocks is in the original paper.
The last block to generate BTC that will be mined should happen in around 2140 (with the reward halving every 4 years) and then there will be a maximum of 20999999.9769 BTC in existence.
Interestingly enough, if you flooded the network right now with your own transactions and included a higher than normal transaction fee on those transactions, you could conceivably block other transactions from being included in the blockchain, at least for a while. Last time I calculated the cost of such a scheme it was about 72BTC per hour, so even without fixing the scaling issues of transaction volume in BitCoin, the rise in price makes this sort of attack less likely (still theoretically possible).