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From: Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@bitpay.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 10:21:46 -0400
Message-ID: <CAJHLa0Omiz+UhGjSKgYU7+b2YY7aN23w7o8CQntqMePFs7LkjA@mail.gmail.com>
To: Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>
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Cc: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Proposed BIP 70 extension
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On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 9:27 AM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:
> Wallets would then be able to persist this data to disk and compete on cool visualisations for how much money you saved over time.

heh, this is a cool idea.

It also seems like it would be subject to instant inflation, as it's
unprovable, and a rational economic actor may choose to exaggerate
such numbers.  It also seems collectively rational by some points of
view for all bitcoin actors to inflate this number.

At a minimum, I would either add "marketing_" to the field name
itself, or include additional comment caveats noting in BOLD language
that this field is informational, and should not be relied upon for
accounting/auditing purposes.

It just seems like a statistic that everyone has an incentive to exaggerate.

-- 
Jeff Garzik
Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist
BitPay, Inc.      https://bitpay.com/