distributed immutable namespace

Peter Todd retep@penguinpowered.com
Wed, 7 Mar 2001 22:46:09 -0500



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On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 07:13:01PM -0800, hal@finney.org wrote:
> Hashcash at this scale makes me wince; all those wasted cycles...

You know I heard a estimites that Seti@Home burns 18tons of fossile
fuel a *minute* Hashcash would do the same thing.

> Verisign bought Network Solutions for 21 BILLION dollars.  That gave
> them a big chunk of .com, .org and .net.  Can you imagine burning
> through that much hashcash?
>=20
> Hashcash is rent dissipation in action.  It doesn't make economic sense
> to sell assets for hashcash.

What do you mean by "rent dissipation in action"?

The big problem is hashcash is inflation. Mores law plus vastly
increasing supply. We'll end up with insanely high inflation rates if
we're not carefull, at least 100% every 18 months. (mores law)
Probably a few hundred times higher in practice.

Inflation causes another problem. Everything dealing with hashcash
must be able to automaticly adjust prices in realtime. If we end up
with 10% a day inflation rates, not impossible by any means, we're
going to have to do that.

And finally inflation may become such a problem that we outgrow the
storage space available to store all this hashcash Compound interest
is a wonderfull thing you know...

> Better to set up some kind of global fund and let buyers pay real money,
> then distribute the proceeds to everyone on earth.  Or maybe use the
> money to reduce global warming, or to save the whales.  Anything is better
> than flushing the money down the toilet, which is what hashcash does.

But hashcash doesn't need any centralized authority to work. Find
something else that doesn't.

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