At 05:43 PM 11/25/2013, David Vorick wrote:
Bitcoin has a lot of problems. Andy, the problem isn't the denomination, the problem is that Satioshi has 5% of all the currency, and the Winklevoss twins have another 0.5%. If bitcoin becomes worth 100 trillion dollars, they've got a solid 500 billion for being nobody and doing nothing. That's a problem to me.
Satoshi gave us the technology and got people to start using it. If he gets fabulously wealthy by owning 5% of it, I'm not jealous (well, ok, a bit jealous, but I'm not going to contend that he shouldn't have it just because of jealously.) The Winklevossen are just speculators; I don't particularly like using a currency whose value is mostly from speculation, but experimentation is a critical part of rolling out something like a new type of currency, so whatever. At least they pumped some cash into the system early on. And that guy in Norway who was an early experimenter, then kind of forgot about his bitcoins until he suddenly noticed they were worth $800K? Cool, good for him! It wouldn't be surprising if the first people to do GPU-based mining also got a large pile of bitcoins compared to the CPU-based miners.
I'm working on one right now. It's not built but the idea is to use proof-of-contribution instead of proof-of-work, where contribution is disk storage contributed to a distributed network.
I think "proof of useful contribution" is a much better thing than "proof of wasted electricity"; good luck getting it off the ground. I'd recommend reading all of Zooko's Tahoe-LAFS work for getting some ideas about privacy and reliability issues, both of which are harder than they look. The other catch is that storage costs do keep decreasing, and storage in a cloud is always a lot slower than local storage, so you'll have to think hard about business models. One of the cool things Bitcoin did was created a way to have the proof-of-work turn into currency without needing a banker in the middle; that means that users and miners don't have to worry (much) about the creator absconding with the value or being shut down, and there's built-in protection against hyperinflation, unlike some of the dotcom silly currencies like Beenz and Flooz that appeared and vanished along with the dogfood-on-line dotcoms. It's been interesting to watch Bitcoin's value surviving after the loss of the Silk Road site (which got around the "Nothing To Buy With It" hurdle that helped kill the original Chaumian Digicash.)