For bitcoin ... when no new coins are mined, the idea is the transaction fees pick up the slack to incentivize miners. But you're right, there is no reason a consensus couldn't emerge to increase the # of coins. However, that would possibly upset enough people to have a serious hard fork because it violates a foundational principle for store of value.
I believe many of the tokens are completely based on trust and have zero correlation to the success of the company (as they would with stocks). Ripple is one good example -- the XRP token is essentially a legacy piece that is not part of the core protocol -- so banks can use Ripple without using XRP (and probably would). Ripple, Inc can succeed as a company and that has zero bearing on XRP price, except that buyers will make the faulty correlation of good news for Ripple, Inc = good news for XRP. So it is absolutely trust. But I cannot think of any reason Ripple, Inc would share any of their winnings with XRP holders -- what's the incentive. How would they even do that? The only way I can think of offhand is to publicly burn some of their XRP to make it more scarce.
I don't know enough about TRON -- does the token have any usage on the network (like ETH that is burned anytime you move around ERC-20 tokens)? If it's not used on the network and it's not stock in the company (making it a security) -- then it's nothing but but a crowdfunding campaign. But with Kickstarter, you know you're not getting much in return.
Of course, the same could be said for bitcoin or gold. In bitcoin, the value seems to come from energy spent by miners to secure the network, plus the network effects Bitcoin currently enjoys over other cryptos. But, yeah, in the end if there's no trust, there's no value. At least, Bitcoin makes no claim to tie a company's success to the token when that success doesn't directly relate to increase token usage.
Yes, and it's spot-on you mention hardforking, bc that's exactly what's been happening, right? Bitcoin Cash is effectively an increase in tokens, DOUBLE.
So in effect, we've already violated the 21mm limit a few times. Of course, we're still not counting the future when miners vote in their own best interests.
It's probably true on Ripple, and then extrapolate that to MOST all of cryptocurrencies/tokens/entities. Unless stated and unchangeable in the code, one must be wary of tokens which don't pay anything out.
We DO however think there will be tokens which act more like shares, but that's another legal bugaboo itself.
The difference with gold, is that it's hard to lose it, and humans have been using it for the longest of any commodity-backed "money". that counts. Bitcoin is not even a decade old. Even the now-crappy dollar is over 200 years old, and has at least been backed by gold for most of its lifetime. In fact, the dollar's main problem came about bc Nixon dropped the gold-standard. That should tell you something about gold right there.
gold also has some uses, in addition to being rare. If it weren't rare, it'd probably replace copper in wiring (in nuclear weaponry circuits, it DOES replace copper).
We know people argue against this feature, but honestly, bitcoin has zero value even esthetically. Its private keys can be written on a strip of paper and swallowed by mice. Mice don't eat gold, if you hide it inside some cinder blocks in your basement, even if you die without telling anyone it's there, there's still a chance your grandkids might find it before the demolition company does.
Spot on! Great points. I really like the idea of some coins actually functioning more like shares. The thought that one day we could have decentralized versions of the NYSE is fascinating.
One a sidenote with the hardforks -- one feature I like about them is it allows kids to take their new game with new rules to a different playground. This allows the other kids to figure out which game they like more, and in which cases they like it more. It's much better than the endless Ford vs Chevy or Mac vs PC debates (like block size). There is no single version of the truth about what's best right now, it's too early. So hard fork it. Put your code where your mouth is & stop talking trash. Run the experiment. Learn from the experiment. Adapt. Move forward.
The value will sort itself out later. I'm not sure it ultimately changes the scarcity aspect so much. Time will tell how that plays out. In the end, there's room for more than one winner.
Looking back to the teachings of Plato, we'd see that anarchy is not just bliss, but VERY SHORT in time vs the other forms of government (and by government we REALLY mean societal structure). So while we agree the world WOULD SHOULD and WILL go 100% de-centralized, it won't last bc wicked men with big stakes in competitive concepts to the freedom of decentralization wont' allow it. Just look at the dollar itself, if you held billions of the stuff, you wouldn't let some artificial digital currency cause it's value to plummet, you'd hire mercenaries and pay off politicians before you let that happen. So expect a battle in the future, and expect crypto to be made illegal to own. It's one thing to SAY you can hold a hidden decentralized coin, but it's another thing to risk jailtime to do so. Not many of us are criminals at heart, humans generally obey authority MOST of the time. And if the majority of humans obey the law, they don't take kindly to those who don't, it's like cheating. It doesn't matter if the cheater feels justified, what matters is the majority of people do NOT agree with him out of sheer "jealousy" but really it's just that "unfair" gene we all have-- the one that drive's all those psych experiments like "Prisoner's Dilemma" etc...
At some point in the future, when the powers make it all illegal, one will have to decide whether to join the dark side or the light side of the force. Ironically, the "dark side" is probably the moral superior to the light side, but that doesn't mean good honest hard working people will choose the dark side.
In theory the forking makes total sense. In practise, well, that's another matter. Most votes will be cast in self-interest, not for the "better product" or "better game". This is why many times a benign dictator is far superior than a democracy. Democracies, in the purest form, quite frankly are dark dark things, similar to how people VIEW anarchy. Ironic, but true. Benign dictatorship is the thing of Solomon and David in the Bible, whereas democracy is the thing of mob rule and the crucifixtion. Not getting religious here, just referencing stories most everyone knows due to Bible being one of the oldest books. We'd use Beowulf but the story just isn't as broad, eh?
Our big question is, how flawed is bitcoin, and will this lead to a Google vs AltaVista moment in the history of this stuff. If bitcoin is AltaVista, then what is the next Google? That's what we should be researching. Which lead's us into the next article planned-- Raiblocks. They may have arrived at something even Satoshi and Szabo didn't vet.
your last statement is true, so long as the bad fork goes to zero value. But in say Bitcoin Cash, it's not, and in fact it's been gaining in Bitcoin since inception. So effectively it's been acting like a doubling of the 21mm bc indeed, there MIGHT be room for both, as you say.
I guess I put the possibility at zero that the right arrangement or rollout happens for any project/coin/platform/protocol/consensus. So the ideas will need to evolve. Without running the experiments and seeing which ones work as they scale, we will be stuck in endless debate. Technology doesn't wait for endless debate -- it moves on without us.
I agree that the best technology may not win out, but I think that will have to do with how a given platform combines a series of variables and ultimately how they help people get from A to B (transferring money, data, identify, etc...). In the end, there will not be a single winner, but a series of winners who best address their respective problems. And the variables at play include the tech, transaction fees, open vs closed source, game theory, economic incentives for all participants, and many more... The bigger a platform gets, the more people/businesses have serious money tied up in it, the more likely a community is to fracture over how these variables combine.
No one knows how their platform will work in the wild any more than a poet knows how readers will interpret the poem.Dan Larimer found easier to move onto new projects to refine his ideas than change the existing projects -- and so he forked himself from BitShares to Steem to EOS.
So you're right ... we need to keep an eye out for the next thing. And you're also right -- the next thing might already be here now.
Exciting times, huh?
If history is any judge, typically only a handful survive. Internets of 1999 now boiled down to VERY few long term winners: Netflix, Amazon, Expedia, and maybe ebay yahoo and aol depending on how you view long term success. same should be true of crypto, only we'd argue there's less technology in crypto, so possibly even less than a handful of winners.
Last comment ... need to see how far we can push the boundaries on the right side of this page ... 👉👉👉
I wonder if it will be difficult to tell how many companies emerge as successful. Could a bunch of decentralized platforms emerge that allow for a wide spectrum of companies successfully innovating on top. There will certainly be some huge winners, but there may be a long tail of smaller businesses making a run of it, too. That's my hope, anyway.