Link to "original whitepaper" in README.md is broken.

[deedf]

The link to "original whitepaper" in README.md ( https://freicoincore.in.freico.pdf/ ) is broken. I could not find the paper anywhere else so it's pretty hard to get an overview of the project.

[maaku]

Thank you for the report. So what's actually going on is that is a link to the original bitcoin white paper, which was mangled by a mechanical search/replace of "bitcoin" names and domains with "freicoin." A proper freicoin/tradecraft README and documentation has yet to be written, and there never was a white paper.

You can read about Freicoin either at its website or this old Coindesk article. Note however that the linked information is very, very dated. Freicoin is in the midst of a transition into "Tradecraft", a platform for confidential smart contracts with user-issued assets. Although we have a clear goal we're working towards, it hasn't been properly documented yet nor is there a website or white paper to point towards. We're trying to get a minimum amount of functionality written first.

If you'd like to interact more with this project, there's a mailing list and a Mattermost discussion server, although both are very inactive at the moment.

I'm going to keep this issue open to track the issue that the search/replace scripts are mangling this white paper link, and the larger issue that the README doesn't reflect the current project at all. I've assigned this to the 0.14 rebase milestone as that's the next time at which those scripts will be revisited.

[deedf]

Thanks for the detailed reply.

To give you some background, the reason for my interest is that I have been fascinated by the work of Silvio Gesell for years, it is by far the most fascinating economic system I have ever seen.

I naturally thought about applying cryptocurrency technology to implement his freemoney idea. I also thought to myself that someone must have had this idea before, and that's how I found about Freicoin.

However, I am not sure if the transition to Tradecraft means shifting the focus away from freemoney and onto something else.

Also, to be brutally honest, I am convinced BTC veered totally off track with the block size debate, and that stuff like Segwit and the Lightning Notwork are complete nonsense.

So I lost a bit of interest when I saw that those were being carried over to Tradecraft. IMO it should be possible to implement crypto-freemoney as a token of sorts on top of an existing cryptocurrency platform (like ETH2 or BCH) without going to the lengths of reimplementing a complete platform (even though this approach would also have drawbacks).

But I have far less expertise in the area than you do so who am I to judge.

[maaku]

In the nearly 10 years that I have been working on this, I can count on one hand the number of people I've met who have Gesell's free-money explained to them and respond with "oh, that's a good idea!" The problem is people don't want to think about the nature of money. They just want to buy things, preferably more things. And money that loses value does not, on the surface, appear to meet that need.

I'm not working on this project to cater to people's expressed wants: bitcoin's Hayek-money does that quite well. But if we want a currency that people actually use, then we DO need to market it to them in a package they they actually want.

One of bitcoin's mistakes, other than monetary philosophy, is the projects scope of being a currency only. There's no supported representation of the things you actually trade or exchange. This means that although bitcoin supports a really powerful and scalable smart contracting architecture, it can only be used to develop smart contracts about transfers of money (e.g. Lightning), with no native interface to the wider economy.

There's an opportunity to fix this lack of capability by enabling asset issuance and extra smart contracting capability, to give people a platform to do the sorts of things that are being done in the greater cryptocurrency ecosystem on a bitcoin-like platform. This scratches an itch. The fact that the underlying fee and settlement currency is freicoin, not bitcoin, is an implementation detail.. but importantly it gets people using freicoin for a reason other than the entirely unmarketable reasons of monetary policy.

[raymaker]

Gesell's free-money is a theoretical concept underlying the idea of one single currency. It doesn't work in coexistence with alternatives forms of value. People will always avoid the demurrage fee, as people always care about their own benefits or losses. What is economically quite natural and nothing a single theory (from many other monetary theories) will solve. If a theory doesn't work in real life, then it should stay theory until further notice. Marc has highlighted very nice facts of tradecraft, and I am a holder of Freicoin and hope if this all Idea of Demurrage/Punishment is abandoned as soon as possible

[deedf]

The whole point of demurrage is to lessen the advantage of money as a store of value. It perfectly coexists with physical assets as store of value, as physical assets also have a storage cost. Of course it's never going to be willingly exchanged for a non-demurred money. That's why in Gesell's system this money is mandated for any financial interaction with the state (state expenses are paid in it and taxes have to be paid in it). But it has the side effect of negating some of the advantage that financial speculation has over actual value production, which in the current conditions might be something many people would want. Of course it's only a theory, just like our current forms of money, political systems, etc. were theorized before being implemented. This also begs the question of what the actual value proposition for tradecraft compared to other existing platforms is.