Does Mintcoin need a change to encourage spending?

A recurring discussion within the Mintcoin community recently has been whether or not the 20 day minting period could be hurting the coin by discouraging spending.

The reason this is coming up is that to receive your ‘Proof of Stake’ rewards you are required to hold your coins for 20 days, spending some will reset the timer. Meaning people have resorted to using multiple wallets; one for spending, one for saving.

Obviously a lot of general users aren’t going to go through all of that, and therefore this discussion arises. Should something be changed in order to make spending coins less of a value-proposition?

What could be done?

If the developers were to decide to implement some sort of change to address this point, there appears to be two ways they could go about it. Either by adjusting the coin itself, or by making a different wallet for users.

Making the minting time shorter:

This seems to be the most obvious way to make a difference. If you reduce the 20 day period to a shorter one, it’s not going to be such a dilemma when you decide you want to spend some of your coins. How short this period should be is going to be a very difficult decision to make, though. Other coins have a PoS reward time of just hours, so how small do you go?

Creating an extra wallet feature:

Keep the 20 day period, and introduce a wallet feature where coins can be split into two separate pools. One pool is your savings and will mint new coins every 20 days, the other can be used for spending without affecting the first. If a change ever happened, I personally feel this is the better option, and would give Mintcoin value over competing coins with this extra feature.

Does a change need to happen?

I can’t say whether or not it does, it’s something that the developers may one day decide to address if the community seems to want it bad enough. However, I do think that the idea of a new wallet feature for saving coins could please everybody without having to go into a deep debate over a change to Mintcoin’s fundamentals.

I know I was a little annoyed when I first realised that sending a small amount had reset my timer, so to speak. So I’d have welcomed some way to overcome this within the wallet for sure.

Update: A Reddit user has posted an image that shows coins still being minted, despite having spent in the 20 day period.