LOL. let me know when I can exchange my forkcoins for BTC :-)

Pegs are only possible under very special circumstances, none of which will ever apply to bitcoin.  Ever.

Situation 1 is where you can create at least one of the two currencies in unbounded quantities.  Really, you need to be able to do both, but if you can do just one, you can keep the game rolling for a long time.

Situation 2 is where the two currencies are identical, which makes the peg (and the new currency) pointless.  By identical, I mean created at the same time and in the same amounts, and totally identical supply and demand.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say peg!  I only meant that the central bank would guarantee the one-to-one exchange rate...

Whoa, brain fart.  I had it right the first time.  Your sig must have shaken my confidence  

The whole idea is to have value transferring seamlessly from bitcoins to forkcoins in such a way as to not disrupt prices denominated in bitcoins.  For every bitcoin's worth of value that leaves the Bitcoin economy for Forkcoin's, a bitcoin leaves the Bitcoin economy too - via the owner of that value.  And so bitcoin denominated prices will be completely unaffected by the introduction and existence of Forkcoin!  And vice-versa.  And if Forkcoin is at all utilized, then it adds to the value of a bitcoin by providing more utility to it than it otherwise would have had.  This way you don't need to leave the forkcoin valuation, and the bitcoin revaluation up to the speculators, who would no doubt flail wildly.  And if Forkcoin is at all successful, then you don't end up screwing the people that didn't move enough of their bitcoin into forkcoins at the right times.  You draw people to use forkcoin based purely on its merit, and untainted by their fear or greed.

In the extreme case where Forkcoin completely dominates Bitcoin, you'd actually see bitcoins totally disappear from circulation forever.

If the both end up living side by side, then they do so symbiotically instead of rivalrously (at least until the central bank dissolves itself).

And notice that there is always an equal number of forkcoins in existence as there are bitcoins when you include the central bank reserves, provided the central bank gets all newly mined forkcoins while it exists, or it starts out with the current total bitcoin supply plus what will be mined while it exists.  The central bank can always make good on its promise.

I really think this proposal achieves just that.  Users are voting by deciding which one to hold on to.  And in a non-disruptive way.

If forkcoin transaction fees to be earned, miners would no doubt mine, as doing so doesn't impose much extra cost to them because mining is merged.  And if forkcoin users demand more miners to come on board, then all they have to do is up their transaction fees.

Haven't read these two links just yet, but thanks for all the ones you've been posting for me, they're always very enlightening.

Provided this isn't all one giant brain fart, I believe this solves the problem of investment uncertainty created by the expected introduction of newer, better crypto-currencies supplanting the old ones.  Well, that is if people all agree that this is the best way to roll new ones out  

This implies there is a finite amount of value in BTC, and that any fork will neccesarily draw that value away from BTC into the fork. 

any fork will get value the same way BTC did - People buying into it with an existing currency.  That will most likely be USD.

This is only a problem because there are problems funding with USD right now.

As far as relative valuations go, whats the point of having a fork if they trade for exactly the same value?  If you want something to be priced exactly the same as BTC I recommend.... BTC.....

lol

Unless the point here is to create a new "early adopter" gold rush while also guaranteeing against non-adoption (the peg), this is a non-starter

Like I said, trust in the central bank can be distributed among arbitrarily many individuals and organizations using the CHECKMULTISIG opcode.  And it only has to function securely, temporarily.

It can't destroy any bitcoins until it dissolves, since there might be an exodus from the new currency at some point.  It can eventually destroy them, and any remaining forkcoins it has, by sending them to some eater address(es) for which obviously nobody holds the key.  There was a funny one in the block explorer that I can't find now.  Something like 1BitCoinEaterAddressDontSend.

At any time it can prove its reserves by signing messages with its private keys.

As it seems to be Bitcoin that is the one speculators flock to, I guess "speculatorcoin" here means Bitcoin, and, yes, it therefore is the case that "speculatorcoin" developed the software that some "stablecoin" or other might choose to use.

I find the idea of destroying bitcoins that are spent to buy "stablecoins" very weird though, because I imagine that being able to "back" one's newfangled "stablecoins" with Bitcoins might be rather useful.

It is rather a pity that it is Bitcoin that has so far filled the role of being a "speculatorcoin", I wonder if it is almost inevitable that whichever coin "the masses" are most aware of will fall into that role? I had often imagined that real bitcoins might be or become far more valuable than the various pocket-change coins used by kids for pocketmoney and by consumers for day to day out of pocket spending. It even seemed that the more "complicated" and "mysterious" real bitcoins are the more the common masses would drift away to pocket change coins of various kinds, leaving the truly valuable "actual bitcoins" to the major pillars of the financial world, the big edifices that "back" the various pocketmoney systems.

If the people who had hundreds of thousands, or millions, of Bitcoins choose to "cash out" to fiat and walk away, they would basically be treating the whole system as a ponzi scheme instead of truly demonstrating by their own actions of "backing" it using such fiat that they are able to get for it that they were and are serious about supporting it as a real currency, the currency of the people who minted it, sold it for fiat, and thus now have huge hoards of fiat with which to "back" it.

Alternatives would seem to me to look a little more serious if they retained any bitcoin they aquired to hold in trust as "backing" for their new coin than if they destroyed bitcoins they aquired.

Most of the players who seem serious about the various new currencies they have had me working on for them seem to agree that they want to aquire plenty of any blockchain based coins they can, so as to have a nicely variegated treasury with which to "back" their favourite type(s) of coin.

Indeed part of why they do not like the types of markets that Bitcoin seems to regard as standard or normal is such markets deprive them of the ability to choose who they buy from or sell to. Not just for prejudices along the lines of "We are the Elves, Orcs are enemies, therefore we will not sell Elfincoin to Orcs nor trade Elfcoin for Orccoin" but also things like "we see no evidence that you have been retaining the fiat you have been aquiring and putting it back into the system therefore we do not want to sell you any more fiat".

-MarkM-

Neither of these are problems:

(1) Coins can be verifiably "destroyed" by creating a transaction script that can't ever evaluate to true.  This transaction enters the network and becomes public.  Everyone can see it, and see that the PkScript is impossible to satisfy, ever.  That's pretty good "proof".   And since it's a custom script anyway, they could even include a message in the script which explains exactly the source and purpose (and signature) so that there is no confusion about whose coins were destroyed and why.

(2)  If the new currency is anything like BTC, then similarly, the currency is all public information.  Unless we're talking about non-decentralized currencies... all units of the currency should be traceable, both in time and quantity.  If it's not, I don't see how this currency can really "compete" with BTC, since centralization and closed-ness would pretty much make the "fork" a non-fork.