This is the one feature that will uniquely distinguish Dogecoin from other cryptocurrencies:
- It makes the currency much more democratic -- missed the first few months of mining? jump in any time you like and still reap the benefits!
- It neatly circumvents the issue of lost coins -- Bitcoins will keep dwindling over time and there will be no way to keep a consistent number of coins in circulation
- Inflation puts to bed one of the major concerns raised by many traditional economists about Dogecoin; deflation does seem to encourage hoarding
- As a corollary, inflation encourages spending, the growth engine of every modern economy. Like it or not, it works.
I'm mining as much Dogecoin as a I can and will keep doing so. I think this is great news! To the moon!!
The free market takes care of all your points, except the first one, which isn't a big deal, really.
- Lost coins? Analysis can make good estimations of how many coins are lost. The market price will adjust.
- Yes, it puts down concerns from people who believe that inflation is necessary, that is true. Whether deflation is bad is another story, and again, the market takes care of it. If value of the currency goes up over time ("encouraging hoarding"), then the reverse also holds true: merchants lower pricing to encourage spending because they'd rather have bitcoins/litecoins/whatevercoins than the alternatives.
Now, as to whether this decision was good or bad, I think it's fairly neutral. If the currency was capped, then I'd say there wouldn't be much to distinguish it from litecoin or bitcoin. This just seems like a way to add a new-ish aspect to it. I'm all for experimenting with multiple currencies, multiple ways of doing things, and I'm interested in seeing what'll happen. Perhaps 10 billion dogecoin will eventually become irrelevant because its value will be too low (akin to spending a ton of resources to mine a few pennies). Or maybe not. I'm rooting for all cryptocurrencies in general nontheless.
"The free market takes care of all your points [...]"
Do you have any real-world example of free market taking care of anything substantial? Because from my experience it's a fairy tail: Either you need to the state to jump in and make some decisions or you have big players killing the market whatever decision they make (market-wise good or bad).
There is always an incentive to make a product better and as cheap as possible in order to make a profit. That's how the free market works. Your experience shows you that government intervention, which is so prevalent in most markets, kills off competition and leaves the "big players" to make whatever decisions they want. These "big players" exist thanks to the state.
It's a vicious cycle: government jumps in, makes competition harder (whether with taxes or regulations) -> smaller businesses have trouble competing with large players -> larger businesses take advantage by offering worse service to cut overhead costs -> customers complain, ask for more government regulation -> makes competition even more impossible -> and so on.
You can observe this cycle in every industry, including food, ISPs, etc.
Before you bash the free market and show me example of how it doesn't work, first look and realize that what you're pointing out to me is not actually a free market.
> Before you bash the free market and show me example of how it doesn't work, first look and realize that what you're pointing out to me is not actually a free market.
That could be said for Nazism, Communism, Socialism and possibly every other socio-political out there: It's not the system, it's the implementation that's wrong. But I don't buy it. I used to be liberal myself, but now I don't believe in the skilled vs the unskilled, it's more likely to be the trained who had opportunities vs the untrained who had none and most likely you and I are in the first category.
Out of curiosity though, could you answer the following questions:
* Do you believe that education, energy, water, garbage, railways, lines (as in phone-lines, the network) should be private hands?
* What happens when a player is so big that with every move disrupts the market? The state should step-in or let everything flow naturally?
> That could be said for Nazism, Communism, Socialism and possibly every other socio-political out there: It's not the system, it's the implementation that's wrong.
True, those arguments can be said there, but don't apply here. Those are utopian ideas in that they require every individual, including the governing bodies, to be a saint in order to work. Not so with the free market, as a corruption in one organization leads to the ability for others to rise in their place (no "too big to fail" scenarios).
> Do you believe that education, energy, water, garbage, railways, lines (as in phone-lines, the network) should be private hands?
Yes. A lot of this work is already contracted out to private companies, which do a much better job for a much lower price. There's no reason to think they wouldn't do it themselves to make a profit. Which brings me to...
> What happens when a player is so big that with every move disrupts the market? The state should step-in or let everything flow naturally?
The state IS the biggest player so big that every move disrupts the market, thus creating more "big players" =) For example the government makes contracts with the big players, in the billions of dollars. That's tax payer money that's going to corporations instead of local smaller businesses, and the other guys can't compete. This is just one small example.
On the point of "democracy" ... my understanding of Cryptocoins in general is that a miner's majority of 50%+1 could effectively take control of the block chain if such a group were organized
EDIT: What I'm trying to say is that "they" could reverse the decision if they wanted to.
- It makes the currency much more democratic -- missed the first few months of mining? jump in any time you like and still reap the benefits!
- It neatly circumvents the issue of lost coins -- Bitcoins will keep dwindling over time and there will be no way to keep a consistent number of coins in circulation
- Inflation puts to bed one of the major concerns raised by many traditional economists about Dogecoin; deflation does seem to encourage hoarding
- As a corollary, inflation encourages spending, the growth engine of every modern economy. Like it or not, it works.
I'm mining as much Dogecoin as a I can and will keep doing so. I think this is great news! To the moon!!