So - the currency is entirely "mined" and distributed already?
And that period is over? So is a small handful of a few developers/early-adopters that are trying to sell off a currency that they already own in its entirety?
The only people who would have solved the captcha faucet to get coins at virtually next to nothing value at that time would be the ones who believed in the project right from the start which to me is a fair distribution scheme. ICO based distribution is usually more greed driven. In this case the developers and team were more motivated in building a new innovative blockchain protocol as opposed to raising money by simply issuing ERC20 tokens. Speaks a lot about the project in itself. And the team has even succeeded in building a beautiful, disruptive scalable protocol and currency with no transaction fee. I've tried RaiBlocks and so far have been impressed.
Which in itself is a mechanism that just spreads the incentive to hype and post to all social media channels trying to pump a coin amongst a larger pool of individuals, many of whom are desperate enough to get rich that they are willing to sit and click through captchas for pennies.
Or in other words, just gets you a larger initial pool of astroturfers online.
It's not about 'inflation' it's about hyperinflation. Nobody is treating crypto-currencies as currencies, they're treating them as investment vehicles so the current trend is to create a hyper-deflationary 'currency' so you can tell your original investors that they're 'in on the ground floor' and they have a reason to believe it. You get those guys in, they're incentivized to spread the word, they do so and boom we get what we keep seeing, the fear of missing out and greater fools driving speculation bubbles.
fine is relative. There was a tremendous amount of lost productivity due to the rising cost of gold. Also gold is traditionally a commodity, not a currency. If the value of your thing is that it functions as a transfer medium, and everyone is incentivized not to transfer it, it certainly sounds like it's bad at what it does.
You think that people were sitting and doing nothing, because everyone was hording gold, because it would be worth 1% more in year? Really?
The main function of money is not transferring value. It's keeping track what society as a whole ows to whom. Transferring is just a secondary job. And there's absolutely no need to incentivize it. That's why some cultures used stuff like big rocks as money.
Money is a good money, when you don't want to part with it. And its crappy money, if everybody are just looking for a way to get rid of it.
All the speculative bubbles that we're seeing are caused by lack of real-money. People are trying to get rid of their fiat, and park the value anywhere else.
And it's not very productive when young famillies can't afford to live anywhere, because the houses are used as speculative investment and essentially.. money. It was actually much better when otherwise useless pet rock was taking a function of keeping track of debt in the society and inflated and deflated according to real market conditions.
Well you can't eat it and it doesn't keep you warm. At some point you'll have to spend it. I don't think people spend money because they are aware of inflation anyway. They spend it because they want something. If people are encouraged to think twice about what they need or want, is that really such a bad thing?