https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=6964.0About 8 months ago we started the +5 meme on this forum when we planned to offer BitAssets that paid interest. We decided to post-pone the 5% interest plan to simplify implementation and make things easier for the market to price.
Today I am happy to announce the good news that we can provide 5% on BitUSD with BitShares X today (or once the hard fork takes over) without having to implement any code changes what so ever.
Vatalik and I were discussing BitAssets today over dinner and he proposed a hypothetical BitAsset that had its price defined as a mathematical function of time and suggested that it would be unstable. We debated the issue for a while and then I realized exactly what that would be... that would be a BitAsset where the shorts paid the longs X% interest.
So we can define a new asset BitUSD5 that has a market valued defined by the continuously compounded 5% ROI on a dollar starting the day it launched. Holding this asset would appreciate at 5% based upon consensus alone and shorts would only short if they expected the price of USD to fall faster than 5%.
In other words, we can do through market consensus what we had originally planned to implement in code. If the theory of BitAssets holds true, then this process should work.
The question remains is how much market demand is there for such an asset. The crazy thing is we could peg to any interest rate or even the inflation rate + X%.