Soon there will be a "make your own crypturrency" kit and every little retailer will offer them like giftcards. It's almost like the rise of money all over again, expect this time instead of nationstates, it will be large multinational corporations likely to dominate. What's the Target/Walmart rate today on the forex?
I'd be surprised if Paypal (or the people likely to kill them) aren't secretly chewing on this as we speak.
Which will be kind of like the olden days of a hundred or two hundred years ago, when every state issued its own currency, or every bank, or every goldsmith.
Which is to say that it will fly in the face of the general trend of development of these things, which has been towards fewer currencies, not more. More currencies means more friction in trade and commerce, since it makes price comparisons harder and forces buyer and seller to constantly be making conversions; this in turn means less commerce happens, which makes everyone poorer. That's a bad thing, not a good thing.
If only there was some sort of device that could automate the conversion process, perhaps to the extent that humans never have to worry about any friction on their level at all.
"Just give me a few minutes to upload my XCoins from my XWallet to XY-Exchange, convert them to YCoins, and a few more minutes to transfer my YCoins to my YWallet".
Either that or you keep all your coins sitting in said exchange so you can instantaneously convert them and pay out. And then lose them all permanently when the exchange has a security flaw.
I provided the convenient option. It's just that it leaves your funds massively exposed. The relatively lengthy transaction times built into *-coin transfers are going to make most conversions 'clumsy'. What alternative would you recommend?
One possible option that required 10 seconds of thought to come up with- multicoin wallets on both ends of the transaction.
Why can't people (on this site of all places) spend just a little bit of time thinking about how things could work well instead of merely pointing out problems?
Not sure that's a good idea, as it lets people create their own giftcards by mining coins. If a company make a cryptocurrency that isn't accepted anywhere else, they essentially end up giving away free stuff.
Getting paid for a good or service with USD is useful because you can spend it to cover your expenses. If Overstock made OverstockCoins instead of accepting bitcoins, how do they pay their suppliers?
I guess that's more or less what Ars is doing, but I don't see how it makes any sense.
Would they really want an easily tradable currency to replace giftcards? I don't know what the redemption rate of gift cards is, but I imagine it's much less than 100%, which is pure profit.
Also, people have an incentive to concentrate on the strongest currency. The one with the most mining is most secure against 51% attacks, and the one with the most users is most useful.
> The one with the most mining is most secure against 51% attacks
Do you mean: A. an attack by the rest of the earth's computing power (e.g. you try to have miners control 51% of the earth's computing power - highly doubtful) or B. an attack by colluding mining pools?
It seems like the B (collusion) attack is simply a matter of the number of pools which have to collude, and not actually related to the absolute value of CPU power. And for A, I'm struggling to see how much [non-colluded] miner power you'd need to fight off an external attack.
I'd be surprised if Paypal (or the people likely to kill them) aren't secretly chewing on this as we speak.