Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] libzerocoin released, what about a zerocoin-only alt-coin with either-or mining

From: John Dillon <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 19:22:10 +0000

On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 11:18 AM, Jorge Timón <[email-masked]> wrote:
> All the arguments in favor of this pegging use zerocoin's point of
> view. Sure it would be much better for it, but are additional costs to
> the bitcoin network and you cannot do it with every chain.

Seems that Peter is describing a system that requires no changes at all to the
Bitcoin codebase and thus there are no costs whatsoever.

Peter: I'm a bit confused by this concept of "bi-directional sacrifice" though,
I assume there exists only a sacrifice in one direction right? Wouldn't selling
a zerocoin be just a matter of giving zerocoin a rule so that the zerocoin tx
moving it to the new owner only happens if a specific form of bitcoin tx
happens too?

> Merged mining is not mining the coin for free. The total reward (ie
> btc + frc + nmc + dvc) should tend to equal the mining costs. But the
> value comes from demand, not costs. So if people demand it more it
> price will rise no matter how is mined. And if the price rises it will
> make sense to spend more on mining.
> "Bitcoins are worth because it costs to mine them" is a Marxian labor
> thory of value argument.
> It's the other way arround as Menger taught us.

Merge mining is very much mining a coin for free. Ask not what the total reward
is, ask that the marginal cost of merge mining an additional coin is. The issue
is that unless there is a cost to mining a *invalid* block the merge mined coin
has little protection from miners who mine invalid blocks, either maliciously
or through negligence. If the coin isn't worth much, either because it's market
value is low or the worth is negative to the malicious miner, your theories of
value have nothing to do with the issue.

Gregory Maxwell has written about this issue before on the #bitcoin-dev IRC
channel and on bitcointalk as well if memory serves. I advise you to look up
his description of the problem, almost everything he writes on the topic of
crypto-coin theory is spot-on correct.