Ian G wrote:

The way to do this is a /contract/ which is a defined format of promise to deliver, date, consideration, etc. You write that down in boring ascii:

To your point, each issued BitCoin is a contract -- well, the completion of one, anyway. The contract states as follows: "I have performed a task you have asked me (among many others) to perform. That task is to certify the transaction log of BitCoin exchanges. Here is my proof of work; now pay me." If you were to argue that that task is currently overpaid, I would agree with you; it has been heavily subsidized, to the tune of 50 bitcoins generated by agreement that they have been issued. In spite of this overpayment, the currency appears to be rising in value over the long term. Fortunately, this subsidy wanes. It drops to 25 bitcoins, and then again, and then again, until it drops to nothing. Signing the transaction log is worth only what transactors voluntary choose to pay for the privilege of having their transactions signed. Is that signature worth paying for? Well, it prevents double spending, so probably, yes. So a monetary authority is printing BitCoins and spending them on fiscal stimulus. In spite of that, money is entering the economy because as stores of value go, the alternatives aren't that great either. Reminds me of the US dollar. I wonder whether BitCoin would have been nearly as successful if a demand for stores of stable value did not happen to be higher than they have been in a decade. If we were all rich on housing appreciation and stock speculation, BitCoin would be like the passbook savings account at the local bank paying a whopping 0.65%. But the only part of that that's about crypto is: crypto is hard, and you can get people to perform it on their computers if you pay them. Surprise, surprise. Bet you wish you'd thought of something *you* wanted people to employ thousands of computers to do that paid them money that doesn't even come out of your pocket. I don't know if Satoshi is rich from BitCoins, but if he made a bar bet that he could convince people to run billions of SHA256 hashes a second without paying them even a nickel, he won himself a beer. n _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE