I've been thinking about this for a while, particularly with bandwidth as the scarce resource. I don't <i>quite</i> grok the connections between the crypto aspect, the stock aspect and the currency aspect.<p>The problem is that (the way Naval treats them) each of the main variables <i>seem</i> arbitrary, but could easily determine whether the economy you create is viable.<p>> <i>Pre-mine or early-mine Appcoins and keep some non-threatening amount.</i><p>In Bitcoin, though the system itself is "trustless", participants <i>trust</i> that they are all treated equally according to the protocol & open source code.<p>In the case of a startup raising funds, you wouldn't get the same sense of altruism. The incentives are not aligned for the major players: the startup founders, the protocol developers, the other coin owners/shareholders and the miners.<p>Should an arbitrary pre-mined amount be set (as the founders' equity), and simultaneously be <i>non-threatening</i>, what is to stop the network from invalidating the pre-mined amount at will?<p>If it were instead <i>threatening</i>, why would miners be interested in spending compute power?<p>Naval also writes of supporting the open source developers with transaction fees. Unlike the commodity on which the coins are based, these are not easy values to calculate.<p>Certainly there are a lot of possible new models, and autonomous corporations are very exciting. I just don't see how you can <i>add</i> a founder-controlled, for-profit startup to the other players in a crypto currency ecosystem (the miners, the non-profit developer foundation and the coin owners) and get something that works.
This idea in this blog post is not novel...it is actually an idea called "Distributed Anonymous Corporation" which was described in this blog post last september: <a href="http://letstalkbitcoin.com/bitcoin-and-the-three-laws-of-robotics/" rel="nofollow">http://letstalkbitcoin.com/bitcoin-and-the-three-laws-of-rob...</a>
That's how Ethereum will be launched, too, and once it's launched thousands of others can do the same on top of Ethereum, without having to reinvent their own "coin" from scratch. Building their own DAO's will also be much easier.<p><a href="https://www.ethereum.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ethereum.org/</a>
Exactly what I've been thinking over the past week as I've watched some cause-themed coins start to take off.<p>Most people try to squeeze their mental model of what cryptocoins are into something like a currency, but there are really interesting equity / p2p database aspects too.
This is exactly what I'm trying to do with Coinpunk (in addition to doing a classic crowdfund): <a href="http://igg.me/at/coinpunk" rel="nofollow">http://igg.me/at/coinpunk</a>
If this is used for proprietary business models, that's completely backwards. The future involves recognizing that digital works are NOT scarce, only development time or server bandwidth is.<p>Paying this way for server bandwidth is fine. Otherwise, this is about <i>excluding</i> poorer people from accessing resources, just like the traditional broken proprietary business model.<p>I hope this idea dies quickly. We don't need anything that further extends proprietization, we need systems to fund Open projects.
You're still paying for the service. Basically this is talking about making free services non-free to support the creation and growth of the service.
He mentions FastCoin as a fast-clearing currency. Bitcoin's confirmations are slow for the sake of security. There's a new method that makes it possible to get fast confirmations with good security, but I don't see any indication that FastCoin is using it. For details and a link to the academic paper, see here: <a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=359582.0" rel="nofollow">https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=359582.0</a><p>Ethereum is the only new coin I know of that's planning to use this protocol, though I'm sure there are others.
Naval's model isn't a million miles away from ASICMiner's "corporate" structure. It's also a step in the general direction of a commodity future-like cryptocurrency, with computing services as the underlying commodity.<p>A crytocurrency can't succeed, in my opinion, unless it has intrinsic value or exists as a means of exchanging value within a closed ecosystem where fiat currencies are impractical for whatever reason.
As long as the entire internet isn't tolled because it is a new way to tax. Crypto coins have been branded for all types of needs, pay it forward is a big part of many coins. What would suck is if it became pay to use everywhere if biz runs away with it. We might be entering a bad era of tolls and tiers if we aren't smart.