Comment by gus_massa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gus_massa | Hacker News Reader

There are many problems. I’ll try to explain two:

> The Universal Account (TUA):

> [...]

> TUA can make a payment only in the following situations:

> [...]

> X's account balance = 0 at t. Any additional transactions outgoing from X at t are drawn from TUA.

When your wallet is empty, you can continue to make payments! Perhaps you can’t make payments directly, but pay indirectly with the other type of transactions. I suppose this works unless TUA is empty, but in this case TUA will be empty all the time. And there will be a lot of bots trying to empty it just in case.

Most of the transactions can be implemented as a strange Bitcoin/AltCoin wallet: Payment is easy. Support, Endorsement and Coupling are just a matter of sending the correct amount at the correct time. Even the balance cap can be implemented as a voluntary automatic payment. The strange part is the Inhibition transaction.

> Inhibition is a two-sided transaction over some duration t. If X inhibits Y over t, then X reduces the income or expenses of Y over t by some proportion i. By inhibiting Y, X effectively reduces the impact that Y has on the Strangecoin network by i over t by forfeiting that proportion of income and expense. To initiate the transaction, X specifies Y, t, and i, which must be approved by Y.

If Y has to approve it, I don’t understand why is there an X there. It can be a 1 side transaction where Y inhibits itself. In Inhibition is bad for Y, then it’s easier to implement using NOP, because nobody would use it.

Good comment.

1) You are correct that the system is designed so that users can make payments and conduct transactions even in the absence of an account balance, without incurring debt. Strangecoin allows users to act as if they have effectively unlimited wealth in terms of access to coin. Nevertheless, Strangecoin allows users to judge differences in influence on the network, so they might evaluate who they want to engage in transactions with, regardless of the account balance each has. So X might want to trade with Y instead of Z, even though both are able to pay the same number of coin individually, because Y's network amplifies the transaction more than Z's, and the better overall support for Y makes the transaction more attractive.

2) You are right that a fundamental constraint on the system is that TUA has an available balance. As I mention in the document, the most important constraint on all users (including TUA) is that their balance remains stable; users want to engage in transactions that will stabilize their overall impact on the network. TUA can adjust certain parameters to ensure a stable, nonzero balance: the basic income most importantly, but perhaps TUA can also adjust individual account caps and set limits on the allowable parameters of other transactions to ensure it has a constant, nonzero balance.

This is how I was imagining TUA being a universal indicator of economic prosperity of the network. If I see my TUA income go down, for instance, I know that means a drop in the overall available funds in TUA, which means the economy overall is offbalance, with more expenses than income. And I see that global property of the network directly in my account balance, and I can use that to act accordingly. Specifically, I know that if I increase my own income (or even hit the balance cap), I'll be helping the overall economy by contributing to the TUA balance.

3) Inhibition seems to be giving people trouble. Being "too rich" isn't normally a problem for people outside of hiphop, which I think is a source of the confusion. But being too rich in Strangecoin could be a bad thing, so I included the transaction type to provide a mechanism for negative feedback. This would be useful for some situations where users are finding it difficult to maintain an stable account, and where scaling back it's overall influence on the network might help promote stability. If I'm making more Strangecoin than I know what to do with, this could be a bad thing for me financially because of the penalties that might accrue, so I might want to enter into inhibiting relationships to ease the pressure of those penalties.

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