That flaw is mostly a non-issue with cash because printing it is difficult. Who prints Kong? I imagine prevalence of counterfeiting is more or less directly proportional to the ease of printing.
> And it is most certainly not 'mostly a non-issue'. Counterfeiting happens all the time.
How often have you had any real-life issues with counterfeit money? How often has anyone you know? How often have you even heard of it happening, relative to how often you see and hear of cash being used? A sibling comment provided a source that said that only 1% of 1% of cash is counterfeit.
> Nobody. Kong is printed algorithmically, like any other cryptocurrency.
What? Notes and coins are a human-made physical items. They’re manufactured by someone.
> How often have you had any real-life issues with counterfeit money? How often has anyone you know? How often have you even heard of it happening, relative to how often you see and hear of cash being used? A sibling comment provided a source that said that only 1% of 1% of cash is counterfeit.
Stores have issues with it all the time. That's why they don't often take large bills. I and my personal acquaintances don't accept a lot of cash in exchange for goods and services.
You think 1% of cash being counterfeit is not a problem? That sounds like a huge problem to me.
> What? Notes and coins are a human-made physical items. They’re manufactured by someone.
Sure, the physical objects are made by someone. But the digital tokens to which they refer are produced algorithmically, and the digital tokens are the source of truth here.
1% of 1% (so .01%). Is refusing large bills an effective countermeasure? If so, then yeah — not really an issue. Our economy somehow grinds along just fine.
> Sure, the physical objects are made by someone. But the digital tokens to which they refer are produced algorithmically, and the digital tokens are the source of truth here.
In what sense? The whole idea here is that I can exchange a physical note to transact with someone.
> 1% of 1% (so .01%). Is refusing large bills an effective countermeasure? If so, then yeah — not really an issue. Our economy somehow grinds along just fine.
So refuse large Kong notes. Why would you assume the economy finds workarounds for cash but not this?
> In what sense? The whole idea here is that I can exchange a physical note to transact with someone.
Ya, and for most transactions you will. If you're suspicious, you can validate the physical devices using your phone. But for simple transactions with a moderate level of trust, you can accept cash. The same way you accept a $20 from a friend without buying a counterfeit detector pen to check it.
Why do you assume only large Kong notes will be easily falsified? The scenario I foresee is if printing notes becomes decentralized, a malicious printer makes any note likely to be duplicated.
Re: finding workarounds, we’re talking about money — we shouldn’t be “testing in production”, so to speak. IMO the government should come down hard on this.
The other thing to consider is the pragmatic aspect. A US bill costs an average of 10.3c to print [1]. A US $1 bill is 2.61 by 6.14 inches (16 square inches). I don't have bulk flex PCB costs on hand, but bulk FR4 rigid is $0.05c/sqin and flex is definitely more. That prices you at minimum $0.80 in PCB. An NFC antenna is a specialized piece of kit that adds cost, tuning, etc. A Dual-Interface NFC/EMV card costs $2. Adding all that flex means we're talking $3.
Now your bills cost over 30X what a traditional bill costs. Since counterfeiting is only 0.01% of US bills, to stop that, you're proposing we pay a 30X premium on the manufacture of those bills?
The treasury prints 38M notes per year, totaling $541M dollars. That's a material cost of $3.9M. If 0.01% of that $541M is counterfeit, that's an additional cost of just $54,000, bringing our total just under $4M. Even if you chose to include "2% inflation" as a cost (and to be clear, you shouldn't) that's still just $10.82M.
To print the same 38M notes in Kong we'd be paying $106M. That means to eliminate $4M in printing and counterfeiting costs we'd have to pay $106M. You're proposing we pay 10-27X as much per year to manage our currency. [2] Not to mention the sheer electricity cost of creating and locking up the value on the Ethereum blockchain. Then, mechanical stress/strain and failure of the secure elements over time takes value out of both the Kong real-world supply and also out of Ethereum, which is already subject to massive breakage.
This is basically why we don't verify signatures on checks. It's cheaper to eat the fraud cost.
