Entries tagged with this topic. Spans across types and sources — explore connections between people, events, and themes.
17 entries
Dogecoin has no whitepaper, no company, and no cap on its supply — a decade-old test of whether Bitcoin's scarcity is what a market actually pays for.
No supply cap, a fee burn that can push issuance negative, and a 2022 switch from mining to staking — Ethereum's own design documents, read against Bitcoin's fixed 21 million.
Monero forked away from a currency whose founders had quietly mined 82 percent of its supply, then built a ledger that hides what Bitcoin's discloses and an emission with no final block.
A fiat-collateralized design CENTRE named as a trade-off in its own whitepaper, a reserve that broke the dollar peg for two days in 2023, and a governing consortium later folded into one company.
A relay chain coordinating parachains, nominated proof-of-stake, and the 2025 vote that capped a decade of roughly-10-percent issuance -- Polkadot's design, read against Bitcoin's fixed 21 million.
The whitepaper's title names a payment system; section 6's gold is an issuance analogy. Satoshi designed one thing — hard issuance, cash use — whose scarcity later tilted it toward digital gold.
Adam Back's reply enumerating seven monetary-design issues in b-money and proposing Hashcash as its minting mechanism: "to create value you burn CPU time, just like with hashcash."
Hayek's 1976 competing-currencies case, the 1995 Extropian 'Hayeks' thought-experiment, and Bitcoin's 2009 non-state issuance — one ideological lineage with bounded direct-influence claims.
Bitcoin's 'digital gold' status rests on two layers of decentralization — system and people/organization — and six structural features no later cryptocurrency combines to the same degree.
How Bitcoin's 21 million cap emerges from a geometric halving series, how block rewards transition from subsidy to fees, and how the incentive model sustains honest mining.
Bitcoin chose a hard 21M cap; b-money (1998) proposed elastic supply; fiat runs central-bank discretion. The cypherpunk debate, Wei Dai's 2013 regret, and 15 years of cryptocurrency variants.
Sepp Hasslberger asks whether there is a formula to decide the total amount of tokens in Bitcoin, raising concerns about the fixed supply limit being adjustable as user adoption grows.
What Satoshi's design assumed about a fee-only future, and the documented debate over whether transaction fees alone can sustain proof-of-work security after the block subsidy ends around 2140.
Adam Back announces Hashcash to the Cypherpunks list — a proof-of-work postage scheme against spam, framed within the digital-cash discourse as a stop-gap or fallback for digicash.
Adam Back replies to Wei Dai on Cypherpunks, identifying seven monetary-design issues in b-money and proposing Hashcash as the minting mechanism — a substantive analysis ten years before Bitcoin.
Wei Dai replies to Adam Back on Cypherpunks, conceding b-money would be at most a niche mechanism and revealing his shift toward viewing the government monopoly of force as a net benefit.
Wei Dai LessWrong comments: Bitcoin's monetary policy has failed due to volatility, and he never replied to Satoshi's 2008 review email — regretting he could have dissuaded the fixed-supply choice.