Author: Jeff Garzik 2013-03-11 17:18:41
Published on: 2013-03-11T17:18:41+00:00
In 2013, Gavin Andresen and Jeff Garzik exchanged emails about the possibility of demurrage, a fee for holding bitcoins or any cryptocurrency. While Andresen believed that demurrage would never happen due to negative publicity, Garzik suggested the idea of a well-done coin that is not Bitcoin. He called it "tempcoin" and suggested that it could have a finite lifespan. For instance, miners could reclaim any coin older than (144 x 365 x 4) blocks. Although many alt-coins have been pre-mined scams, Garzik believed that the concept of alt-coins is great for experimenting. If the idea could be proven in the field without modifying mainnet bitcoind, then perhaps it should go onto the mainnet hard fork wishlist, many years in the future. According to Garzik, open source allows people to experiment with these ideas, and bitcoin.git need not change at all.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T10:32:32.618458+00:00