There are two key differences between Casper's schelling game and a schelling game for something like a price feed that make the price feed case more difficult:

1. In a consensus schelling game, all that really matters is that you come to consensus on **something**. If someone pulls off a P+epsilon attack, and makes it confirm 0 instead of 1, that's fine; as long as it doesn't flip-flip forever and as long as it converges to 1 at least some of the time. In the price feed case, converging on the wrong price even once is BAD.
2. A price feed has a few failure modes that don't exist in the consensus case. Particularly, (i) there is a centralization incentive for the feed to converge on the feed of one single exchange, and (ii) if that exchange pulls a MtGox then it's hard to tell if the feed will actually be able to coordinate on decoupling itself from the exchange in time.

That said, I think that it should be possible to overcome both of these issues, for (2) there are a few multi-level antifragility tricks that I think could do the job; essentially you would have a second-level schelling game that only gets called very rarely, the theory being that it's called too rarely for it to be worth automating, and that game, if called, is what determines the rewards for the first round; this incentivizes the first round to do not what people think the first round will do, but rather what people think the second round will do, at last in extreme cases.

Somebody starts a poll to impose a boycott on factories that do not provide transparent audited evidence of non-pollution, and to give business to those that do provide this evidence. No action is taken until the poll builds up enough critical mass to be effectively punitive and rewarding to successfully affect the behaviour of the factories involved. In this way, there is no immediate cost to any consumer in electing to participate, until such time as their participation is guaranteed to be meaningful. As the numbers participating build, and the probability of an action builds, this changes the cost/benefit outcome for factories, and more and more will begin to non-pullute and provide evidence of such. If all the factories do so, its possible there may even be no action required in the end, but if there is, it should be guaranteed effective. So I think this process can work with public goods also.

So, the crux of the matter is this:

until such time as their participation is guaranteed to be meaningful

The problem is that an individual's participation is nearly meaningless if no one else participates, because the boycott fails either way, and it's nearly meaningless if many others participate, because the boycott succeeds either way. The probability of an individual actually being in that tiny sliver where they are pivotal is very very tiny.

Now, what you can do is make a recursive boycott, where if a boycott is large enough you also boycott non-participants (or, as a softer version, agree to pay a 50% "vountary tariff" that gets donated to charity, so that companies that really really depend on specific providers are not hurt too bad). Such schemes theoretically can work; it's just a matter of whether they're easier or harder than just having the government coordinate mandatory "boycotts" instead.

Why should the MoE and the UoA be screwed (what does "screwed" mean here?) in case of a recession. I assume by recession you mean that the productivity goes down and everyone tries to get hold of the SoV (SoV as Dan described it). Do you mean that the deflation would change prices too much so that the SoV would not fulfill its function as a MoE and a UoA anymore?

By "screwed" I mean the following chain of events:

1. Recession hits. People get scared of business, pile into "safe" assets, ie. the SoV
2. SoV price goes up
3. MoE/UoA price goes up at the same time as a consequence, leading to expensive consequences like having to renegotiate wages, prices being out of whack for a time, debts becoming unexpectedly unsustainable, etc.

So basically yes.

http://www.raikoth.net/libertarian.html

http://bytemaster.bitshares.org/article/2014/12/31/Stable-Crypto-Currencies-are-Impossible/

Okay, so...

It is also widely accepted among many crypto-currency fans that the FED has failed at their mandate because of persistent rise in prices resulting in the dollar losing 99% of its purchasing power since the FED was founded in 1913

Okay fine, create a currency pegged to the consumer price index.

The goal of price stability at its heart is the same as Price Fixing and this is a well known economic fallacy that crypto-currencies should avoid.

The reason why price fixing is an economic fallacy is that in the real world you do not have a magic lever to increase the supply or demand for a product. If the natural market rent is $4000 and you set a legal rent ceiling at $2500, then due to decreasing supply and increasing demand you will have a shortage of rent, and there's nothing you can do to force extra supply to emerge at that price. However, this argument specifically does not apply for currencies. With currencies, you control the supply. Hence, assuming a simplified formula price ~= supply/demand, if you fix the price then all you need to do is constantly adjust supply to equal demand. Robert Sams' seignorage shares shows how to do this just fine.

Governments around the world are constantly changing how they calculate the basket and what items are included. They will do things like exclude food and energy along with stocks and real estate. John Williams maintains a website called “Shadow Government Statistics”

Ahh, shadowstats. I think it gets pretty nicely debunked here: http://azizonomics.com/2013/06/01/the-trouble-with-shadowstats/

The idea that any currency could exist and maintain stable purchasing power through a nuclear war is insane.

Agree. But I don't see why such a high threshold needs to be a requirement.

From the perspective of someone holding a coin, positive and negative interest rate changes are identical to price volatility.

The key difference is that positive and negative interest in SchellingDollar exists in small quantities and only for as long as needed until traders reallocate their holdings to make profit via arbitrage. One can literally set a maximum and minimum interest rate of +/-10% annually, and the scheme would still work fine. The reason why this is possible is that the stable coin is a zero-total-supply asset, and so any level of cash holding preferences is compatible with any price level; in a finite supply asset, on the other hand, price is proportional to cash holding preferences.

Any approach that provides unlimited liquidity at a fixed price is vulnerable to market manipulation attacks.

Sure, so if those kinds of attacks prove to be a problem, then provide liquidity on an increasing fee schedule. No big deal. Or we could just go back to Robert Sams' auctioning approach.

Predictable vs Stable... It seems to me that what people really want from a “stable” crypto-currency is reduced volatility.

Well yes, that's exactly what I mean by "stable" and why I think stability is useful to people. What else did you think I meant?

If we think about the “ideal money” it would be widely accepted with 0% growth in supply.

I think you'll find most economists would disagree on you on that point. Particularly non-Austrian economists

In my opinion, gold and silver, should be physical money and a crypto-currency should attempt to peg to gold and silver. In this way we can free all of society from the centralized control of fiat currency issuers and keep inflation limited to what gold and silver miners can produce.

Please dear god no, gold is an environmental tragedy that uses proof-of-waste for its supply expansion algorithm. I would rather have BTS be the universal money than subsidize gold's price a single dollar more.

Also, as a final comment, all of the attacks against the US government in that post are irrelevant. Neither bitassets nor schellingdollar nor any other proposed mechanism is (1) controlled by any kind of Fed, (2) necessarily needs to be imbued with the explicit goal of 2-4% inflation, as opposed to a non-inflationary strategy like CPI pegging or heck even shadowstats pegging, and (3) has profits somehow leaking into a shadowy financial elite - everyone can own shares/volcoins and take part in any profits that the scheme may end up generating. It is wrong to extend criticism of existing centralized monetary policy into criticism of the very concept of monetary policy at all.

Could someone do some research for me:

1) What consensus algorithm are they using?
2) How is their genesis allocation specified?
3) When are they launching?

Here are my thoughts: 
With a small amount of work we can make an ethereum side chain that honors BTS and allows people to move funds between the two chains easily.

You know that you can send me an email, right, Dan?

1. A modified version of hashimoto PoW for 1.0, plans to move to slasher PoS for 1.1
2. 60102216 ETH to purchasers, 5950119 ETH early contributor premine, 5950119 ETH foundation endowment. A json or other doc will probably be released at some point in the next few months before launch showing the addr:balance combinations.
3. Plan is March 20.

Quote from: vbuterin on December 29, 2014, 06:41:37 pm

Quote from: Rune on December 29, 2014, 04:00:50 pm

If the block producers of all bitshares sidechains are paid in BTS and voted in with BTS on the primary bitshares blockchain

So, there are fragility risks that you have to keep in mind here. Particularly, if you allow anyone to apply to specifically become a delegate of any blockchain, then an attacker can take over 80 delegates on sidechain #173, then repeatedly move BTS from that sidechain to other sidechains and double-spend themselves, all before getting voted out.

Additionally, there's the issue that after the fact the only way to tell which history actually came first after the fact is by looking at centralized providers (blockchain.info, etc), so you're actually implicitly moving back to a fully subjective Ripple consensus model. Of course, your ideology may be that Ripple-level subjectivity (which is much greater than traditional PoS weak subjectivity) is fine, but you should be aware of this.

Now, if you require people to apply only to be a delegate generally, and then randomly assign delegates to sidechains, and add cross-channels between individual sidechains so that cross-sidechain transactions don't need to all go through the master chain, then you've actually basically reinvented https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/10/21/scalability-part-2-hypercubes/

My side change approach has exactly 101 delegates that handle ALL chains.   You only have one set of trusted individuals that come to a common consensus.  The only purpose of side chains is to allow parallel processing of transactions which cannot possible invalidate each other.

Right so I dislike that because it requires there to be 101 nodes that process all transactions, and that leads to rather high levels of centralization and eventually croaks if the blockchain architecture gets popular enough that you simply can't do everything that people want to do on a single server or data center. Also note that if a new delegate gets elected, downloading the database is going to take them a long time. That's why I strongly prefer, as Dominic Williams puts it, "scaling out, not up".

Sidechains also solve higher fees. You can have more centralized and highly liquid sidechains with low fees, and highly decentralized chains with high fees. This can still all be done with the same basic token.

I think you're making the same type-theory error that just about every Bitcoin maximalist does: conflating blockchains and currencies. The questions of:

1. Should all crypto be done on one blockchain?
2. Should all crypto be done on one currency?

are completely separable. Sidechains are a way of using one currency but using multiple blockchains; hence if we go the BTS/ETH/whatever sidechain route then we are still going the multi-blockchain route, just not a multi-token route. Metacoins, and some versions of Ethereum contracts, are a way of using many currencies but still being on one blockchain.

Sidechains by themselves are not magically secure. If a sidechain as currently described is only used by a few people, then it will be easy to double-spend. The challenge of scalability is not how to split up the applications - that's easy - it's how to split things up while maintaining a high degree of security for each piece. Sidechains do nothing in advancing this frontier, because they are a currency innovation and not a blockchain innovation.

Why would someone run a non-financial service on a decentralized computer? Seems highly inefficient for everything that doesn't require absolute security and trust.

Name registries for one. Tracking ownership of smart property devices as well. If they become really cheap, we could even start talking about decentralized forums and the like. People already write such software in python, which is a >1000x efficiency hit over assembly, so it's not at all unreasonable that people will value decentralization enough to take a ~200x hit in efficiency for them, particularly since the blockchain only needs to store a small business-logic core.