Freicoin is the only cryptotoken I know of, that uses Demurrage.
de·mur·rage :
a charge payable to the owner of a chartered
ship in respect of failure to load or discharge
the ship within the time agreed.
- What does that mean in the token(shares of a crypto-network) sense?
Having tokens in a given cryptographic address for too long will force a fee by the network on that address.
Wikipedia Says:
While demurrage is a natural feature of private commodity money,
it has at various times been deliberately incorporated
into currency systems as a disincentive to hoard money
and to achieve other perceived benefits.
- So what about the exchanges, wouldn't it be hard to explain to buyers(and maybe depositors) why they loose tokens while they hold Freicoin?
Well, I think the fact Freicoin is only supported by the FreiExchange and no other market, sure says a lot about that. Clearly no capitalistic market has any desire to hold an object that is guaranteed to decline in its own relative value.
Whatever is going on; Demurrage idealism stands in stark contrast to Proof of Stake(PoS) idealism.
This makes me desire the attraction of opposites...
- What if...
a blockchain could have both Demurrage and Proof of Stake methods build in. If one is not contributing some form of forging, mining, staking, importance or capacity the network will automatically charge the account; down to a minimal account value.
The appropriate historical reference is not to shipping but rather to Silio Gisell, Worgle, and FDR's StampScript. Also, the difficulty with exchanges is simply that they could not do the demurrage accounting. Demurrage can be looked in a number of ways: