We discussed starting with lower demurrage rates before launch and we choose to have it constant from the beginning:

http://freicoin.freeforums.org/initial-proposals-f2.html

Now it would be a very polemic hard-fork and the plan is to only have one more with merged mining and freimarkets, once it is developed.

No, (2^-20) % each 10 minutes is around 5% yearly demurrage.
So if you have 100 FRC today and don't use them in 20 years, in 20 years you will approximately have:

100 * (0.95^20) = 35.8485922409

For them to completely disappear...I don't know, with 2 decimals is more than 175 years, with 8 decimals...I don't want to calculate.
I'm not even doing the real calculations, just approximations, but your math was terribly bad.

Yes, approximately.

We decide to add Freicoin in our wiki. And now has it's own page on http://coinwik.org. This is a wikipedia listing all the alt coins to help everyone quickly find facts and links about thier favorite coin.

http://coinwik.org/Freicoin

If you know of other facts and links that can be added to the page, please feel free to update the page.

Freicoin is about to drop out of the top-100 cryptocurrencies list.

May it stay out.

There's no good explaination. Trying to force people into spending their coins is always a bad idea. No one wants a deprecating asset.

There's value in an inflating currency if the inflation pays for the network security, allowing cheap transactions on a secure network. A sidechain like freicoin which people occasionally moved small amounts of coins to would be useful.


You've described one way in which demurrage is no worse than inflation. My question is why people think demurrage is BETTER than inflation.

Obviously they're equally inflexible. It seems the following is true:

(1) The actual monetary effects demurrage vs. a constant fixed inflation rate are identical.
(2) Most people understand inflation, but are unfamiliar with demurrage.
(3) It's harder to know your exact purchasing power with demurrage, because to find that out you need to do a calculation using the age of all your coins. (Obviously wallet software would do this automatically).

The only potential benefit I can think of is that maybe demurrage is somehow easier to implement technically on a side-chain. Maybe not.

Can anyone point to any advantage of demurrage over inflation?

Are you talking about some sort of "variable demurrage"? Obviously inflation as it happens with USD requires a central issuer, but no fixed inflation rule (like 5% inflation per year forever) requires a central issuer. My understanding of freicoin is that the demurrage rule is fixed, and roughly equivalent to 5% per year. So neither fixed inflation nor fixed demurrage require a central issuer.

Are you claiming that demmurage can be more variable than inflation, without needing a central organization? If so, how? If not, then what is the point of demurrage as opposed to inflation?

The point of demurrage is to impose a 'storage fee' on holding value in the currency, as if you were keeping gold inside a rented vault.  Inflation functions more like a tax.  The difference being is that demurrage is supposed to be something that can be avoided within the context of the currency regime that demurrage applies to.  For example, while a gold owner can rent a vault, he can also buy one.  Proper demurrage in a cryptocurrency context would be like losing some small portion of your savings value for not moving your cold storage funds around the blockchain; but this fee could be avoided if the funds were moved periodicly (invoking a transaction fee) or by sponsoring a mining rig (owning your own vault).  However, inflation effects all user relative to the numerical value that they possess, and is practically unavoidable no matter the actions of the user.  If demurrage is set up so that it's unavoidable, then there is no practical difference between inflation and demurrage as measured in the purchasing power of the user's holdings.

It's Freicoin dead by now, along with the rest of altcoins? I mean no disrespect but just being realistic.