On Wed, 9 Sep 2015, Alex Smith wrote: > On Tue, 2015-09-08 at 15:24 -0700, Kerim Aydin wrote: > > I was actually thinking more of the "independent of email traceable > > transfer system" part rather than the mining part. Could the actual > > mining be restricted to a sanctioned entity (e.g. a bank)? > > In that case, I'm not sure that what you have is a cryptocurrency; it > ends up basically equivalent to a set of machine readable and > cryptographically signed "I transfer X currency to Y" messages. The > machine-readability and cryptographic signing are thus the only > difference from the way Agora normally does currency, and I'm not sure > they're different enough to be interesting.
What makes it interesting is, with enough independent confirmability, the coinage represents a "physical reality" rather than a legal fiction. If you have a chain of confirmable transfers, then you don't argue "I failed to transfer X to Y" or "I transferred X to Y an infinite amount of times because of loophole Z." You might say "I transferred X to Y, which was illegal, so I need to get it back". And you can't do stuff an infinite amount of times. You just can't. So that's a real shift of the burden of proof for currency actions; possession would be 9/10ths of the law. The main reason I said "cryptocurrency" instead of "random new database" is because, if we take an off-the-shelf cryptocurrency, we've got a strong basis for saying "this is comfirmable reality", because someone else has already worked out the system for doing so (and I'm not convinced we couldn't make Mining interesting in some capacity). -G.
