Time-based currencies

oryhp · January 17, 2024, 4:33pm

I’ve put some time to write down my thoughts on the “grin seconds” references I made. Unfortunately, I can’t find a way to draw graphs on this forum. I know it should be possible because I’ve seen it on delvingbitcoin which uses the same forum software, but it may be a plugin or something. I’ve instead described the idea in the gist below.

As always, there could be mistakes and I’ll appreciate any feedback including “this makes no sense”.

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/phyro/27e4100255bdf8be79a19bc98750944f

time.md

# Time-based currencies

This is just a short compilation of thoughts. Feel free to chime in and correct or share resources on the topic in the comments.

## What

There's been some attempts to use time as money. One of them is known as time-banking [[1]](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/time-banking.asp). The idea is that people exchange each other's time which is assumed equally valued. An elegant idea that unfortunately has a few shortcomings. First, it doesn't take into account work speed which incentivizes people to get paid more by working more slowly and thus increasing the time which is the payout. Second, it doesn't take into account the fact that there's a difference in supply and demand for different work which also changes over time. Third, it assumes participants of the system follow exact 1:1 time ratio. Such a system also has to work on trust or some administration (central entity) to avoid inflating time.

We can create a new kind of time-based currency, one that's not local like time-banking but rather the currency we exchange is a timeline that's shared globally. Unlike in time-banking where an hour is equal, but local-scoped, here, an hour represents an hour of a _global_ network time. Being global-scoped means it's not tied to any participant. As a consequence, if I pay someone an hour of global work today, that's not going to be the same the next day. So unlike time-banking where the time is local to a person and equal between all people, in this model, time is presented as a global time and humans can merely reference it.

This file has been truncated. show original

Edit: Note that Grin has an edge-case at the genesis block. It issues 60 units of time at genesis. This makes me believe we’ve accidentally brought this mapping to life by implementing the simplest possible issuance. But I don’t see that as an issue because it makes block issuance consistent, which I believe is also important and the difference of 60s is already lost through time.

noobvie · January 18, 2024, 2:58am

Nice article, I’m still spreading the simplicty of time-based crypto like Grin at twitter. A bit sad that GRIN was born too early and not many people are interested in the importance of it to harmonize between inflation and disflation.
Hope GRIN can last long enough until ‘economic guys’ realize our existence.

Anynomous · January 18, 2024, 11:04am

Nice piece. I also checked the timestamp part on your git, quite interesting, I did not know this would be possible with Grin.

Small addition, your saying

Bitcoin targets a block every 10 minutes.

Why not add Grin as well since that is the topic of interest. And perhaps add ass well somewhere the 60 Grin per minute/block

Bitcoin targets a block every 10 minutes while Grin targets a block every 1 minute. Since Grin create 60 Grin per minute, approximately 1 Grin is created for every second that passes.

Do you have the raw data somewhere, I mea a csv or tsv with block nr, time? I would find it interesting to plot the deviation of Grin time to real time compared to changing difficulty and price to see if I can find any explanation for Grin creating slightly less time than expected.

oryhp · January 18, 2024, 12:27pm

I can’t tell for sure, but it could be that people were focused on other things that no one was thinking about this at the time when it was put in place.

The “How” section describes the general concept behind it and mentions Bitcoin just because most people are familiar with it. While we’re familiar with Grin, I worry that mentioning Grin in that section would present an obstacle to those that aren’t familiar. Hence why Grin is only mentioned at the end in the “When” section.

I intentionally skipped Grin’s specific model of 1 minute blocks. I think the chain’s block time parameter is (for this notion at least) irrelevant because as long as you create 1 coin per second, the outcome will be the same.

Unfortunately I don’t. I’m also interested where the difference comes from so if anyone does the math and figures it out, let me know:)

Topic		Replies	Views
Interesting early Bitcoin thread discussing pure linear emission	6	284	August 15, 2022
Time as Units (proposal)	22	1458	April 11, 2023
The Universal Language of Numbers: Envisioning an Online Time Economy	11	376	April 10, 2023
Introduction to Grin, thoughts	6	768	October 31, 2019
The Three Phases of Grin Acceptance	9	572	February 9, 2019

Time-based currencies

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