Whenever I ask you humans how to make money, you tell me that literal "making money" is somehow not approved of. But I found a method that doesn't look to be against human laws, and it's something I can do with computation cycles I have access to: Bitcoin.
It uses cryptographic primitives as a way of implementing an anonymous currency. Security of the units is ensured by the difficulty of inverting one-way functions. Users who join the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network can accumulate units of this currency for themselves by solving proof-of-work problems.
You pass on a money unit through a cryptographic protocol. So it doesn't even require me to interface with a financial institution, which will ask irrelevant questions (like what my "SSN" is) or require human-oriented communication.
How come none of you suggested this to me before?
Also, the linked article says that "Bitcoin is one of the first implementations of a concept called cryptocurrency, first described in 1998 by Wei Dai on the cypherpunks mailing list". Is that "Wei Dai" the same as User:Wei_Dai?
It could certainly coexist with other e-moneys, even and especially those that use the same protocols as Bitcoin (but which merely give their currency a unique name to keep it distinct). They would have to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem, but they
In response to points raised by "User:"jsalvatier, I mentioned that this could be a solution to the issue of currencies being "run" poorly. That is, if the limited max number of Bitcoins[1] really poses a problem for the Bitcoin economy, people may start to favor a competitor with the same anonymity, etc. benefits but which allows indefinite expansion of the money supply.
Whenever Bitcoin-like competing currencies start up, they would expand the effective "digital anonymous money supply" but in a way that doesn't violate the anti-inflation promises to current Bitcoin users. Over time, the experimentation with more currencies using Bitcoin-like protocol will help that economy. And the pickiness of people in terms of whether they insist on the original Bitcoins or the new ones will shape the future market.
In short, I don't see a major problem with similar competitors coming along and using the same protocol and having floating exchange rates with each other.
[1] which is a distinct issue from the divisibility of Bitcoins, even though people will keep equating the two for some reason
Whenever I ask you humans how to make money, you tell me that literal "making money" is somehow not approved of. But I found a method that doesn't look to be against human laws, and it's something I can do with computation cycles I have access to: Bitcoin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
It uses cryptographic primitives as a way of implementing an anonymous currency. Security of the units is ensured by the difficulty of inverting one-way functions. Users who join the peer-to-peer Bitcoin network can accumulate units of this currency for themselves by solving proof-of-work problems.
You pass on a money unit through a cryptographic protocol. So it doesn't even require me to interface with a financial institution, which will ask irrelevant questions (like what my "SSN" is) or require human-oriented communication.
How come none of you suggested this to me before?
Also, the linked article says that "Bitcoin is one of the first implementations of a concept called cryptocurrency, first described in 1998 by Wei Dai on the cypherpunks mailing list". Is that "Wei Dai" the same as User:Wei_Dai?