RE: How should one distribute a $1 trillion dollar treasure?
Hey Fuzzy, very nice question indeed.
Firstly, let's calculate the percentage this asteroid represents in Gold on Earth.
1 Kg of gold is worth $40712.49 at today's valuation.
1 trillion / $40712.49 = 24 562 486 kg of gold
This asteroid would introduce 24 562 486 Kg of Gold which is basically 24562.486 Tonnes.
There is rougly 170,000 tonnes of Gold on Earth.
(170 000 / 24562.486) * 100 = 6%
This asteroid would increase the supply by 6%.
Selling everything at once would dramastically increase the supply of gold and therefore dramastically reduce the price of this asteroid in gold. As we all know, scarcity is what drives value. In 2015, The supply of USD increased by 4% in 2014 in one year.
You all known the law of supply and demand : Distributing this gold to everyone would at the same time reduce the demand for Gold but also increase the supply also killing the Gold price.
In either cases, selling it as gold is going to dramastically dump the gold price .. so what not try to sell it as something else? Something that only this asteroid has?
Selling it as Asteroid Gold
It's 14%, not 6%.
exactly correct @linouxis9, and the economy would probably collapse as well, especially if large reserves of gold are still held by banks as reserves or other critically established "too big too fail" entities.
what if a new use case for gold drives demand for more of it? what if gold is found to have unique properties that enable massive amounts of data to be spread between holders based on the amount of gold that individual/group/organization/institution has?
and what if the demand for this data was set to increase by orders of magnitude over the years?
@officialfuzzy @alexpmorris This is literally why i have a head ache and I have been catching up on steemit for weeeeeeeeeeeeks this is what i think about ... owie bedtime soon
BTW, getting back on track with EOS, and regarding this point:
It would be nice to be able to set a limit price with each bid, and it does seem possible to add a sort() function in solidity, as I described in a comment on @biophil's post.
Link: The first 5 days of the EOS token sale will be unfair. Here's how to fix it.
This example by Vitalik Buterin is from 2014, but he does show an implementation of a generic quicksort algorithm that can sort object pairs. Now, I'm not sure of the "gas constraints" involved, but with a sorted object pair it should be relatively straightforward to sort by "limit price", "database ID".
Link: Advanced Contract Programming Example: SchellingCoin
Link: GitHub SchellingCoin implementation from Ethereum Repo
I admit I'm not well-versed in EC20 contracts or serpent/solidity, but technically, shouldn't we also be able to see all the current bidders and make an outside calculation of what the expected price would be before the window closes? If so, even better if someone could "cancel their order" before the window closes if they are displeased with the expected closing price.
but now you're changing the scope of the question. so, perhaps here's a better way to answer...
I just discovered a super-computer on an asteroid with the capability of performing 1 TRILLION Gigahashes/second. How might that effect the current crypto ecosystem? Should I dump the processing power on "the market" all at once, or should I try slowly trickling it out at a rate that the current market can adjust to and absorb in a more controlled and balanced fashion?
Of course, the even bigger issue with that much "power" might be... 51% ain't even an issue no more!
I disagree. This gold analogy hits at the underlying situation pretty well. Though if you look in here you will see that i am certainly making some analogies in this direction. Because the properties of gold are different than those of data transmission although both are highly valuable.
This is why i use the analogy that gold has a special property we didnt know about until now and that holding gold enables you to transfer data between yourself and others.
You could announce a "hard fork" of gold where everyone who owns some gold would get some more free of charge. That way there would be a rush to buy gold to get the free stuff, allowing you to offload your excess supply at inflated prices.