Is BCH a multipurpose blockchain or is it the best "money" blockchain - and what does that mean? by jessquit at reddit
28 comments
The entire reddit post:
As a long time maximalist I want to share my point of view, and some questions I have about that point of view.
It is my strong opinion that - provided I can always exchange my MoneyCoins (MC) for an ApplicationSpecificCoin (ASC) nearly instantly and nearly for free, then the best MC is the dumbest possible token that still fully fulfills the role of "being money" and all other use cases are pushed to other tokens.
This is an old opinion and maybe I should revisit it if my assumptions have gone stale, but I still believe it's the right conceptual approach.
In general, my knee jerk reaction is that I want my money to be stupid and useless for all other purposes than being money. This comes from economics where the problem of precious metal backing has been studied. Bad things happen if your currency is tied to gold (which has industrial uses) and suddenly a new high demand industrial use is found. Prices for all goods and services start fluctuating based on this non monetary use of the gold. I have held this view as a maximalist for many years now.
But considering my analogy, while industrial gold uses may harm monetary gold uses, I can understand the allure for the gold miners, because the value of their product is greater when these industrial uses are found.
Which leads to some doubts about my beliefs.
Another reason for wanting dumb money is security. It is simply a fact that the more complexity that is introduced into the network, the greater the possibility of failure. "Let the not-money tokens be the failure-prone tokens."
So these are some of my historical reasons for taking the side of dumb tokens. I've already pointed out one problem with my rationale (what's good for "money" might not be what's best for miners). Here's another: to perform a cross chain atomic swap requires onchain transactions on two blockchains, and it's quite possible that the additional friction of exiting the "money token" outweighs any security advantage of pushing nonmonetary features onto other tokens. Remember my initial assumption was that we can exchange money tokens for ApplicationSpecificCoins nearly instantly and nearly for free. What if that assumption doesn't hold? Atomic swaps can't be safely performed as 0confs AFAIK so there may always be friction and delay at the moment of conversion.
If this conversion step can be eliminated by the inclusion of features (opcodes) without incurring undue risk, then enabling such features on the "money coin" may prove to be optimal. With the side benefit that now, what's good for the "money token" is also good for the miners because they can maximize multiple use cases of their token.
Let's discuss please.
Read post at reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7 ... is_it_the/
