I’d like a cryptocurrency where line goes down.

Bitcoin was one of an alarming number of important events where I was sort of nearby and aware but just fucking barely involved. And I figured it’d grow to be a fantastic tool for weird art sites and other places where PayPal was the fucking devil. Basically a non-joke version of Beenz, which I absolutely signed up for when that was a thing. But what happened instead is that finance bros treated the randomized incentive to participate as an exploitable goal that turned electricity into money. And here we are.

So any inflationary “cryptocurrency” is probably better-off being centralized… like Beenz. It’s not like security is super duper important when the whole idea is to constantly lose value. That goal also underlines a much simpler way to grow and encourage participation: you can just give people money. It’s a fiat currency. And if we’re deliberately expecting the value to halve, every single year, it means we can give away as many arbitrary units are are currently in circulation.

Hyperinflation in real-world currencies is ruinous because all of the new money goes to a few assholes who already have all of the money. The state prints Marks or Lira or whatever and shovels them at a few buddy-buddy business owners. But if it was distributed to everyone who had some money… nothing would change. A hamburger would cost twice as much, but there’s suddenly twice as much in your wallet, so, okay. And a flat distribution that gives everyone the same constant stipend would gradually even out the very rich and the very poor toward a shared average.

As a real printed currency, this would be dumb. But as a secondary, global, internet-centric joke, obviously you’d just get in and out as quickly as possible. Nobody would bother hoarding these things as they shrink while you look at them. So liquidity should be great just because there’s no point staying in. Hard questions about deceased users’ password would slowly cease to matter.

This means the value represented would be real. It sounds paradoxical, right? But actual crypto keeps going up up up despite being less useful every day. It represents no economic activity besides trading the digital tulip-bulbs. It is raw speculation. Meanwhile, line-goes-down-coin encourages people to throw it at weird fetish art or ridiculous craft projects, or just give it away as soon as possible, while it still matters. So people finding themselves with an abundance, far beyond the current shared average, are directly rewarded for whatever it is they do for the fake money. And then if they’re smart they’ll trade it for real money, toot sweet.