> How people trade before central banks existed then?
Using barter, gift economics, precious metals and stones.
Good, precious metals are currencies without managing authorities.
> Who used to print gold and buy assets with it?
Gold has a relatively uniform geographic distribution, and throughout the human history the available supply matched the economic growth pretty nicely, if only slightly deflationary.
Ok, so we need a managing authority for money now but the people of the past didn't because they were very lucky in how the metals were put in the planet.
It has the same problems as Bitcoin in that the value of one monetary unit is bounded by the work required to produce it, which in turn leads society to resource expenditures to extract gold out of the ground, only to store it in some other underground vault. Since easy available resources are depleted, the current method of gold extraction consists of chopping a mountain known to contain trace amounts of gold (grams/ton) and transforming in it a lake of
toxic cyanide mud. This is the basis of calling gold a "barbaric relic" and the same is true for modern proof-of-work proposals which if widely adopted would lead to similar ecological disasters.
There is a better way.
The current monetary system has costs too. You have to pay (with resources) bankers, printing, derivatives,
banks security...Can you prove that all that is cheaper than bitcoin?
Anyway, that has nothing to do with this proposal.
> Not useless problems, it's security.
That's how the mantra goes, but it's false. The amount of work used for bitcoin mining has no relation to the security needs of the system (it could be to small leading to vulnerability, much or too large, effectively wasting the excess). Miners only care about is bitcoins and the resulting security of the network is well correlated with the block bonus and the price of BTC. See the recent thread about how mining for a fee is unsustainable in the absence of unionisation of the miners.
It's also conceptually possible to create a bitcoin-like system that achieves the same level of security wasting much less energy. No, I don't have the source.
So now is not useless problems but to much computer work.
How can we know what is the "correct" level of security?
If we knew, how to make a decentralized system that reaches that level but no more (and, very important, not less).
Back to topic, I think the problem you see in bitcoin is not price stability but potential lack of liquidity.
First, with competing block-chain currencies merchants would just have to accept currencies that are not as deflationary as bitcoin. That would make bitcoin less deflationary since it losses value as a medium of exchange. If we "need to print more", we would just create more chains.
Another way (different from printing) to preserve liquidity is demurrage. What do you think about that?
Maybe someone else (not just me) likes freicoin after all.
I could code it, but...
1) I don't have the time right now.
2) I probably would prefer to help with distributed ripple coding first.
3) The "sharing work between different chains" thing is not implemented yet (and I'm not sure I can code that).
4) It would be better to launch freicoin when a lot of people know and is used to bitcoin.
5) As far as I know, nobody wants it in the world but me.
