[kem]

Blockchain-based contracts seem like a useful thing in the abstract, but I've always had two questions that no one has really been able to satisfactorily answer. These might have been answered, though, because it's been awhile since I looked into it:

1. What about blockchain length? The article kind of alludes to this, but there seems to be this "we'll deal with that problem later" idea, even though it seems critical. The answer I always got that chains would fork or be stored distributively but then that suggested the primary use would be in small networks, or that there would be critical problems to solve sooner rather than later.

2. Isn't a guaranteed decrease in monetary supply a problem? I was kind of under the impression that ideally a currency experiences a small amount of increase monetary supply, to avoid things becoming prohibitively expensive. The process of generating coin seems kind of backward to me in many ways, although I'm not an expert in the area.

[QML]

1. Not sure what your question with. I'm assuming you're thinking the blockchain length could get long enough that it's hard to store or verify completely? The size of Bitcoin's blockchain is currently around 115 GBs. Unless you're a miner or working with a sensitive transaction, you don't need the whole blockchain to operate. If I remember correctly, you could just 'ask' several reliable parties of whether or not your partial copy of the ledger is legitimate [1].

2. No, as the cost of the token or cryptocurrency goes up, the nominal price of service goes down. For example, Siacoin is currently around $0.015; let's assume it costs a dollar a month to store 1 TB. You would pay around 67 siacoin. However, as the value of siacoin goes up to $.02, you would only need to pay 50 siacoins instead (assuming the cost of storage is constant).

[1] https://www.stellar.org/stories/adventures-in-galactic-conse...