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Comment by swalsh | Hacker News Reader

I proposed a way of tying the difficulty level to the quantity theory of money a while ago on economics and alt currency forums of bitcoin talk.

I think if you're going to be successful, you'll have to find a different set of early adopters. Bitcoin is as much ideological as anything, and while some people don't want to see another alt currency because of their level of investment, others just generally don't believe there's anything wrong with the system today.

Anyways, i'd love to actually develop the idea... but I didn't want to spend time on "just another altcoin" unless I had faith it might get some adoption.

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I did toss out a less thought-out version of the idea on bitcointalk and /r/bitcoin a while back, and you're right, they were not interested. Those communities seemed to think that a non-predetermined amount of coins meant the same thing as a fiat currency. But maybe if something like this is actually built, people that believe in more mainstream economic ideas would get attracted to it and start to use it?

Once you acknowledge mainstream economic thought (or at least mainstream academic economic thought) might actually be a useful field of study, you've pretty much defeated the point of running Bitcoin with a non-central bank model.

Bitcoin appeals to people who have decided it's outrageous they have to invest their money in productive enterprise to get more of it, and it specifically appeals to greed which says "get in early and get rich easily!"

> Once you acknowledge mainstream economic thought (or at least mainstream academic economic thought) might actually be a useful field of study, you've pretty much defeated the point of running Bitcoin with a non-central bank model.

Perhaps the specific non-central bank model used by Bitcoin, but there could be alternatives to a traditional central bank that might be used in an alternative currency that wouldn't have the same problem, so I wouldn't rush to say that that acknowledgement rules out non-central bank models generally.

A protocol that automatically grows the monetary base in response to demand and shrinks it when demand declines kinda is a central bank.

Doesn't Peercoin behave this way to some degree?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPCoin#Money_supply

This doesn't sound much more stable than Bitcoin. If demand increases, say, 10x in one year the money supply cannot increase correspondingly.

Can you share a link to the forum post? I think this is a really interesting idea, and I'd like to see what you proposed and bounce some ideas around, as well as see the altcoin community's objections.

I wonder if there is another community that would be more interested in such a currency's adoption.

Can you please link to your solution ?

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