I read most of what Martin Armstrong posts on his blog, and find this an interesting change in tone. Normally he’s simply dismissive whenever somebody mentions bitcoin, but here his response is more thoughtful, and I think what he says about bitcoin needing more stability before it can be a store of value bodes well for Safecoin which I anticipate will be far more stable because it is backed by a very large and valuable real world resource (long term low cost storage of humanity’s data/knowledge).
Their code is open source. That means no one can use them to steal by creating more of them after they have value. Fiat currencies all have a sponsor who can create more at will. That eventually destroys the currency.
Cryptocurrencies are private. In an era when governments are getting more and more access to our financial records, and financial privacy is disappearing, this is becoming important.
Cryptocurrencies have open exchanges that anyone can trade at without a middleman. Also, anyone can create a crypto exchange. Stock, bond, and other markets are not accessible in this way. In other markets your trade can be front-run. And they are heavily regulated which always favors the regulators.
Yes, there’s a lot of talk about Bitcoin being a digital store of value, but in my view it’s so far merely a candidate digital store of value. And a lot of the current investment in it is speculation of it actually becoming one. An asset should only be considered a store of value after it has a lengthy trackrecord. Though I don’t agree with Armstrong that Bitcoin has to “change its structure”, it can grow into a store of value gradually. Volatility that has a long term upwards price trend doesn’t detract from potential store of value status.
You’re probably right that SafeCoin will be more stable than Bitcoin. On the other hand, Bitcoin has a far higher degree of duplication of its state, so it may be more resilient to major disasters, or at least appear as such. I think the core value proposition of SAFE is the “serverless” internet, and it’ll do fine regardless of SafeCoin having prime store of value status or not.
This is a growing concern of mine. If SAFEnet & coin are successful in achieving what is promised, then SAFEcoin will have a lot more value and hence uptake than other crypto’s - the ability to use it as a store of value and also as a day to day currency would be incredible - something bitcoin lacks with it’s poor transaction times and scaling problems. However, as @Seneca points out - it seems SAFEnet will not be nearly as redundant as Bitcoin or other blockchain-based currencies. My fear is that we will eventually have another “Carrington event” (the great 1859 solar flare) that could shut down/collapse global networks … with redundancy like bitcoin, I expect some copies of it’s blockchain will survive and not too much would ultimately be lost - although a weeks worth of downtime would certainly be pricey to the global economy. SAFEcoin may be another game entirely - could the network keep track of what people own when it’s largely offline? Such massive solar flares are relatively rare, so it could be a hundred years before we see one again … or fifty or twenty … but if SAFEcoin is successful, it seems possible that a large percentage of the global economy could become dependent on it. I hope that these sort of scenario’s are taken seriously enough that counter-measures are put into place sooner rather than later.
Note that the Carrington flare isn’t uncommon in it’s magnitude - it is uncommon however for a flare to both be huge and to be pointing at Earth and to have had a previous flare just beforehand clearing a path for the later flare …
Sorry in advance to @happybeing if I’ve hijacked the thread.
Data republish is meant to solve this so that massive outages only mean a temporary loss of data and as vaults come back online their previous store is validated and enabled to continue as before.
I wonder what the optimum number of copies is, in order to be highly fault tolerant, while economical? It would be interesting to get some mathematicians on the case there.
Blockchains have a full copy of everything at every full node, which seems over the top. It has also meant fewer full nodes, as it isn’t economical for most folk.
As we can choose how many duplicates exist on safe net, I wonder where that sweet spot is?
Exactly, good catch @MerkleTree . There are other factors that play into bitcoins / safecoin / altcoins efforts to satisfy those monitoring its ability to mimic the vital characteristics of money. The factors include government regulation, but it’s really a confidence game. The rules that insure a level playing field in securities, forex markets, etc. are absent in crypto and - as evidenced in our very own maidsafecoin - price discovery is dominated by the “whales”.
And who knows if/when Satoshi’s 1 million coins will hit - all at once? Never? Doesnt matter, they can.
No one can trust that crypto market manipulation will not continue to pervade. The mere fact that anyone can offer up nothing more than a fancy looking crypto-buzzword-website as a legitimate prospectus and actually create an asset - bringing great wealth to the creators - who then become whales and instantly exchange - at any price, because there was no cost - for another more mature asset- rinse, repeat. This is example of how far away we are from maidsafe or any coin being a solid store-of-value.
The efforts the Winklevoss boys have put into (still trying) to satisfying the SEC for their ETF are an example of hoop jumping necessary.
