Proposal - Decaying/Expiring coins

I’ve had an idea for my own coin for sometime, with various features, some I’m not even sure are possible. I lack the technical knowledge to develop one myself and there is practically a new alt-coin every day now (raining lolcats and doges). Peercoin is pretty much the closest coin to my personal idea and philosophy so thought I’d try and contribute to it instead.

Anyway, one of the many ideas I had was coin decay. The key principle being that after no use (either transactions or PoS) for a certain period (say 6 or 12 months), the coins expire and are then recycled into the next block (or even destroyed completely). I personally see several advantages:

[ul][li]It encourages the coin to be used, either through transactions or through PoS to secure the network.[/li]
[li]Reduces artificial scarcity and price inflation due to lost wallets.[/li]
[li]It will make “seizures” useless as the coins will eventually expire and return to the community, providing the wallets aren’t compromised.[/li][/ul]

I can understand how some people may frown upon such a system, but in my opinion it would promote more use as an actual currency rather than a commodity as many coins are currently treated.

Thoughts?

Not so dissimilar to freicoin with demurge where u lost a % of ur coins per block by holding them in ur wallet, I believe the coins went back to the devs but u can specify where they should go so into next block should be possible
Fuzzybear

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Peercoin is supposed to be a backbone currency used as a long-term store of value, so wouldn’t this contradict that? What if I saved my coins as a retirement fund in paper wallets and when I finally needed them they were all gone because I didn’t use them enough? Wouldn’t this discourage saving?

I have a very similar thought process around a backbone currency.

I didn’t see anything in the whitepaper about Peercoin being intended as a backbone currency and I’ll admit I’m still fairly new to the coin. If it is intended as such then my suggestion would likely go against the purpose of Peercoin. However I see it as another incentive to both encourage use of the coin as a currency (instead of a stock/bond/commodity) as well as an incentive for people to mint and secure the network.

Could even pave the way for commercial opportunities where others do the minting for you, so you don’t have to worry about your coins disappearing from age. This of course is subject to the “trust” issue which currently plagues cryptocurrencies.

When crypto leave pure hardware-software node network environment and become part of human relationships - there is no real trustless solution I guess.

Read the beginning of this interview with Sunny King…

[b]http://www.reddit.com/r/peercoin/comments/1ps11t/in_case_you_havent_read_the_2nd_community/[/b]

Read the beginning of this interview with Sunny King…

[b]http://www.reddit.com/r/peercoin/comments/1ps11t/in_case_you_havent_read_the_2nd_community/[/b][/quote]

Thanks, I see what you mean. Not everyone reads/uses Reddit though, would be useful for something so fundamental about the coin to be on the main site/s I think. Unless Reddit is the primary source?

Anyway, seems my idea would be counter to Sunny King’s intention for Peercoin.

They’ve been redesigning the website. Once that’s done we should probably be able to put the interviews and articles up.