SoV0: a fixed-supply zero-fee cryptocurrency

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SoV0: a fixed-supply zero-fee cryptocurrency

Hey, we (a team with past experience at the Facebook Libra project and MIT) are unveiling SoV0 into public test today. Our motivation for SoV0 is to achieve the platonic ideal of a pure coordinated store-of-value asset. As in, take the value prop underlying gold, and push it to its logical conclusion: - Value is fundamentally a coordination game, and gold is valuable because it's a natural coordination point, owing to: [1] limited supply growth (i.e. scarce) [2] persistent (i.e. doesn't decay much), and [3] compellingly due to... being shiny. - Similarly, SoV0 aims to be an even more natural coordination point by satisfying all of these properties to the maximum extent possible: [1] fixed supply [2] zero fees (basically fees = decay), and [3] compelling elegance of being the simplest possible thing that can satisfy fixed supply & zero fees. In terms of design, SoV0 is about as basic as a blockchain can be: just a text document detailing who owns how much of the asset, plus some basic support for sending & receiving assets. The main challenge here (and SoV0's core novelty) is how to enforce proper operation of such a system without monetary incentives. This requires that SoV0 be intentionally limited in functionality (e.g. slow, no smart contract support, too coarse to be a currency). As a result, there's no need for fees to regulate the system, and consensus can be directly maintained by users rather than explicitly paid for (as in rewards in proof of work / stake). More details in the whitepaper: https://github.com/sov0/sov0 . More broadly: Our interest in the blockchain space is strongly motivated by an aesthetic preference for building 'ideal' institutions that can eventually exist in a fixed form forever, and thus feel more like fundamental aspects of the world than typical human constructs (so, more like Bitcoin, less like the Ethereum or other modern general-purpose L1 blockchains). SoV0 is our first attempt at applying this approach to the simplest possible case: a pure store coordinated value store. I'll do my best to answer any questions here. Thanks!