From: "Adam Back" <adam@cypherspace.org>
So this would be the argument for a closed supply of money in the system, like the digicash betabucks where they stated up from that they would only issue 1,000,000 betabucks. People trade them based on supply and demand.
Perhaps. Though at the time Wei Dai had some arguments at the time that if they were popular, they would be a good investment and people would have an incentive to hold on to them which would make them difficult to obtain, highly inflationary, and hard to use.
I have missed that one; however, it is wrong - if people hold them, then they become MORE valuable, and thus you have high deflation - the purchasing power of money grows - which is great. And if their value gets so big that subdivisions start to become necessary, one can always convert them to "new betabucks", each old one being worth a million new ones. End of problem. Mark