mimblewimble team mailing list archive

[Ignotus Peverell <igno.peverell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I'm not really open to changing the reward schedule at this point, sorry. We can find a number of very valid arguments for a limited supply, as well as a number of very valid arguments for an infinite tail emission. Both set of arguments will be equally convincing.

My current position is the following: let's talk about this again in 3 years. And I could provide a number of very valid arguments for why that makes sense :-)

Now going back to the original topic of emission in the first few hours or days, while I empathize with the intent to have everyone start with as little stress as possible, it gets too messy for too little reward (pun intended). Zero outputs and fees would require special rules that would have to stay in forever. They would also necessitate special handling to prevent free spamming right from the start. Starting a new chain is complex enough as it is, let's not add more complexity around it. The absence of bad surprises is the best way to have a relatively serene start.

If a miner or pool messes up in the first day, there will be plenty of time to catch up.

- Igno

P.S. Still, thanks to everyone who chimed in!

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: [Mimblewimble] On block rewards
> Local Time: October 2, 2017 5:09 PM
> UTC Time: October 2, 2017 5:09 PM
> From: john.tromp@xxxxxxxxx
> To: Alessandro Viganò <alvistar@xxxxxxxxx>
> mimblewimble@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mimblewimble@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 8:53 AM, Alessandro Viganò <alvistar@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Right now is important to design a good monetary policy but not a perfect
>> one. I believe it’s impossible to foresee what is coming in years. So some
>> flexibility is needed, and, in any case, the ultimate flexibility is called
>> forking.
>
> A finite supply is considered part of bitcoins "social contract" and any fork
> with a tail emission will likely be shortlived.
>
>> If the world would need a change in 10 years, nothing is really immutable,
>> and we could be dealt later.
>
> In theory emission schedules could be changed. But in practice no
> radical change will be accepted.
>
>> Il giorno lun 2 ott 2017 alle 01:38 Gold Goblin <goldgoblin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> ha scritto:
>
>>> I have been following MW, Grin and this mailing list for a while, and this
>>> is my very first post.
>>>
>>> It seems that in discussions of Grin"s future issuance schedule, the
>>> favoured option for now has been a linear-issue schedule (resulting in an
>>> infinite supply and an inflation rate tending towards zero without ever
>>> reaching it). This contrasts with the fixed supply model of many other
>>> currencies such as Bitcoin or Monero. This choice has been defended as a way
>>> to incentivise miners to go on mining and making the chain more secure in
>>> the very long run.
>
> I prefer a linear supply curve for having better prospects of yielding an
> equitable wealth distribution. A Hacker News thread today
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15382009 mentions:
>
> In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure
> of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to
> determine for Bitcoin, as it"s not quiet a "society" in
> the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and
> many addresses have been used only once or a few times.
> (The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small
> exchange in 2011.) However, a Citigroup analysis from
> early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent,
> another 900 a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about
> 25% and another million about 20%"; and distribution
> "looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea
> and makes China"s and even the US" wealth distribution
> look like that of a workers" paradise
>
> Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir found in a 2012 study that only
> 22% of then-existing Bitcoins were in circulation at all,
> there were a total of 75 active users or businesses with
> any kind of volume, one (unidentified) user owned a
> quarter of all Bitcoins in existence, and one large owner
> was trying to hide their pile by moving it around in
> thousands of smaller transactions. (Shamir is one of the
> most renowned cryptographers in the world and the "S" in
> "RSA encryption")"
>
>>> I think that it would be mistaken to start out with a monetary policy that
>>> doesn’t encourage early adopters and investors, but instead has been chosen
>>> as a way to deal with issues that may or may not arise decades from now.
>
> It could also be mistaken to set a policy that puts later generations at
> significant disadvantage, discouraging them from adopting a currency
> that they deem less equitable.
>
>>> A currency"s use as a medium of exchange is directly related to it having
>>> network effect to begin with. The best way to bootstrap this network effect
>>> would be to incentivise early adopters to invest in the coin, by making it
>>> as investor-friendly as possible (i.e. with a finite supply). Grin has great
>>> qualities (strong privacy, ASIC-resistant proof of work) that lack in
>>> Bitcoin, and that many Bitcoin investors would want to invest in; but an
>>> infinite supply would be a deal breaker to many.
>
> Grin"s qualities of privacy, fungibility and scalability are better
> geared toward use as currency than as store-of-value for investors.
>
> regards,
> -John
>
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