The "treasuries" system could be that silver bullet IF continued minting of new DeVCoins doesn't get used as simply a way to basically just try to "drain the treasury" by cashing out new DeVCoins constantly for stuff from the "treasury".

The "treasury" account being used to compute a value per coin for DeVCoins is NHZ-YC2W-ZDCP-NS4G-4CEGK on the HORIZON platform.

The "Latest Rates" include file ( http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc ) is denominated in DeVCoins.

From that we can work backward to figure out what that might mean we could get for some DeVCoins by using the conversion rates of things we know we can sell on "exchanges":

For example in the file we see:

I0Crate=468.38334724
IXCrate=461.30183912

That tells us 468.38334724 DeVCoins should be worth whatever one I0Coin is worth and 461.30183912 DeVCoins should be worth whatever one IXCoin is worth.

We can look on FreiExchange to find one possible current value for I0Coins in terms of BitCoins, and for IXCoins we can look not only on FreiExchange but also on Yobit and maybe elsewhere too, those are the two exchanges I am currently working on building up buy-sides.

So you can divide 468.38334724 by whatever you think I0Coins are supposedly worth, or divide 461.30183912 by whatever you think IXCoins are supposedly worth to figure out how much DeVCoins supposedly ought to be worth according to this system.

Whether that much value can be sustained seems to depend largely upon how wisely minted DeVCoins are allocated, as in are they allocated to folks who just run out and dump them or on folks who actively work toward building up their buy-sides (since the buy-side is basically what reporting sites and aggregation sites and so on look at to decide value).

It would probably be very helpful to avoid thinking of the coins as some kind of money or thing-with-intrinsic-value and instead think of them as IOU tokens. When you hold them you are simply holding a stockpile of tokens you can issue as IOUs to other people; when you get them back they are just blank tokens again, useful to you only as tokens you can use again if you choose to represent another IOU.

I get the impression you keep trying to think of them as something of actual value, and of course just like blank disks of metal or paper or wood or whatever if they are useful to you as tokens, like poker chips or whatever, then ok there is maybe some intrinsic value in that, a box of poker chips is not free at the dollar-store or wherever, but they are just a tool for accounting. Think of every DeVCoin you do not have safely buried in concrete under the swimming-pool or whatever as a debt we need to buy back, and make sure if you do dig any up and hand them out that you do so in return for something that you can somehow make use of to redeem those debts or to put into the "treasury" or use on a buy-side to bolster the perceived value of the coin or somesuch.

Presumably the theory behind issuing them to developers of free open source software was presumably at least in part the idea that such software could, and hopefully even would, be used to "create value" in some way. So maybe it might still make sense to issue shares for running nodes of coins that have "too few" nodes, and bounties for updating the code of coins whose code is considered "too dated".

Apparently there is also a "Slush Fund" associated with that "treasury" too, we maintain "Slush Funds" alongside the treasuries as a place to keep any on hand of the coin the "treasury" is for so as not to have in a "treasury" any of the coin the "treasury" is for; but there are currently no DVC tokens in the "Slush Fund" just a thousand shares of DeVCorp.

DeVCorp is shown in the Latest Rates include-file currently as:

sDVCrate=938408.81116320

That shows how many DeVCoins one share of DeVCorp is currently computed to be worth.

So presumably the idea for that "Slush Fund" is to try to sell those DeVCorp shares to raise HZ with which to eventually probably buy-back DVC tokens.

You might notice that HZ is not listed in the "Latest Rates" file. That is because HZ is not on any "exchanges" yet nor has it been set up with a "treasury" yet from which to compute a value for it.

Lately it has been being used in the buying and selling of assets on the HORIZON platform as if it were worth one cent Canadian but realistically it probably needs to be worth a lot more than that OR all the assets need to be worth a whole lot less than they are being computed to be worth if there are realistically to be enough HZ to buy any large fraction of all the assets.

It looks like the "Slush Fund" needs to cancel some of its sell offers though, I see it is currently offering to sell DeVCorp shares at well below the computed value.

(Presumably when the offers were posted though they would have been above the value computed back then.)

-MarkM-

The game is all-encompassing, Earth is just a mythical planet that has usually been thought to even be impossible and definitely improbable, because tales about the planet known as Earth often seem to say or imply that there are more different civilisations on that one planet than any actual known planet has ever been known to have.

FreeCiv only supports a maximum number of civilisations in play at once, and until quite-recent versions the limit was much lower than the present number of 127 or so; thus for most of FreeCiv's history it has not been possible to represent in FreeCiv the actual state of affairs on Earth. Since the peoples of the FreeCiv-based planets have only ever actually encountered planets with far far less civilisations than that on them, the whole idea of an "origin of humanity" planet that has had many many different civilisations all living on it at once without even yet supposedly having been taken over by one of them seems rather unlikely, thus probably apocryphal, mythical, fictional.

Nonetheless some ideas that some have associated with that mythical planet are widespread through the galaxy or galaxies as it is an enduring and large body of mythology; there are even entire ouvres of literature attributed to authors who purportedly were or are Earthlings.

One thing you might have noticed in stories about money as it is used on Earth is that it is heavily debt-based. In fact it is often described as basically coming into existence in the form of debt in the first place. Banks loan out funds they do not necessarily even have, and thus new money comes into existence.

Debt also is an economic driver, in that it creates demand for the currency.

Then too, most free open source multiplayer online games basically give stuff out for nothing to starting players, so that it is possible to flood the game with free stuff out of no-where just by creating new player-accounts so as to get all the stuff each new player gets given at their start of play, which can be a nasty hole in the entire economy, especially if what players start with is something that ought to be quite expensive such as an entire colony ship just arriving at a planet for it to colonise.

Thus it is necessary when adding a game into the larger multiverse to somehow account for where the starting gear for the new game came from in terms of the already running games.

In the case of the intergalactic colony ships creating mining colonies in galaxies far far away the question naturally arises who built them, who paid for them, how did they even get to those far away galaxies, who authorised the new player to take control of the new colony and why and how and where did they come up with whatever resources were involved in getting to that point?

So, each new player-account in the Galaxies Online game came with a back-story that it had borrowed from General Mining Corp (GMC) and General Retirement Funds (GRF) Corps in order to finance the sending of the colony ship that was just now as they started play landing on a planet in a far-away galaxy to start building a mining-colony.

This also gave them a built-in market for the DEUterium they came there to mine, since both GMC and GRF were building depot colonies out there to which the DEUterium could be delivered in return for currency.

Thus it should have all been really rather simple; people would start play, build colonies, mine DEUterium, ship it to depots and thereby pay off those debts.

Where it got more complicated was when it emerged that most players simply registered, got given a colony, and never came back.

That led eventually to some very large debts, so the ability to register as a new player was closed and "repossession Corps" were set up to "repossess" the abandoned colonies since the entire project of setting up these colonies is considered essential to the security of the civilised galaxies, that is, to the civilisations based on FreeCiv.

So now there are about forty-something intergalactic mining Corps still but most of them are "repo Corps", Corps that took over colonies that had been abandoned for more than an entire planet-Earth year, which should be about twelve game-years if FreeCiv one-year game-turns are given a whole month each to play out.

Of those only a few are "free and clear" having long ago paid off their startup loans; most of them still owe huge amounts, some so much that it might make more sense to think of them as owned by the Corps they owe their debts to.

If you follow up the entire many-years-now back-story of the whole thing you will see that there was a period around the whole repossession period in which various governments decided that they were not all that eager to let GMC and GRF be the only lenders raking in the nice amounts of interest the mining Corps were paying on their loans. Thus a bunch of alternative financing schemes were created and for a while their representatives on the Galactic Diplomacy Planet were running around actively competing with one-another to re-finance the miners with loans denominated in their own currencies.

If you search bitcointalk you should still be able to find threads where you can see General Financial Corp being created as a Corp with one million shares, various entities giving it startup funds, the calculation of its initial value per share fo9und by dividing the total initial funds by the one million shares to find it started at 20 DVC per share.

Only a few months later you can see its shares had gone up massively thanks to their officers' cleverness in arranging to borrow MBC from the Martians at a lower interest rate than other governments were asking, so low that GFC was able to offer the miners interest rates competetive with what the various governments were asking.

Thus GFC ended up with probably more of the miners on its books than any of the other lenders ended up with.

Way back then miners liked their debts to be denominated in DVC rather than GMC, GRF, MBC, UKB, CAD or UNS because those other currencies were trending up in value so fast their was a real worry that debts denominated in those currencies might end up being impossible to ever pay. DVC was not climbing anywhere near as fast, which made it an attractive option at the time.

Later there came a period, while we were still calculating the value of DeVCoin by looking at the prices prevailing on the usual web-based "exchanges" folk here on bitcointalk are used to, when DeVCoin's value plummeted so low that a few Corps who noticed in time managed to completely pay off their DeVCoin-denominated loans and some others at least managed to make a big dent in their debt.

Already at that time though there were so few DeVCoins on the platform that it was not practical to expect them to actually get hold of DeVCoins with which to pay; they would have paid using other currencies, using the "Latest Rates include-file" conversion-rates. Because even that many years ago the DeVCoin project was not allocating many if any DeVCoins toward any projects that formed any part of this whole huge multiverse of intertwinded economies created for the purpose of both providing value to the coins and making use of free open source software that presumably was most of the whole point of DeVCoin's mandate.

For whatever reason none of the coins, even those merged-mined right alongside DeVCoin, were not getting any DVC shares for running their nodes, nor bounties to upgrade their software to keep it current; none of the FreeCiv nations were getting any shares for forming entire civilisations of backdrop for DeVCoins to operate in, nothing. Basically pretty much the only DeVCoins going onto the platform were the half of my own coins that I was free to tokenise given I only tokenise half of what I have of a coin in order that I still have the other half to redeem the tokens with without having to go dig up the coins I actually tokenised.

Plus of course I have lost well over a billion DVC on those "normal web-based exchanges" over the years as they flow-by-night. Again with no shares for running those market-making operations over those years.

All of this should have been learned by hanging out on the Galactic Diplomacy Planet all these years, or by Devtome-wiki posts about it all by players who did thusly hang out with the other diplomats and reps and such keeping track of it all and probably also becoming influential political figures helping to steer the whole thing; instead people were being paid for Devtome postings that did not seem to relate whatsoever to any part of any project that was actually working on building up entire universe of backdrop and economy behind DeVCoins and its sibling coins that are mined right alongside it using merged mining.

Right now coins like GRouPcoin, CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld, three of the merged-mined coins, hardly even have any nodes left online, and other coins that are not merged-mined, such as the two original scrypt-based coins that pre-dated litecoin (Tenebrix and Fairbrix) are in similar straits. Some coins are so low in difficulty by now that you can mine them with just one CPU core. That is the time to be mining them, to build up a bit of a stash before someone with a GPU or some ASICs comes along and drives their difficulty back up. Thanks to my policy of not minting-and-destroying tokens on-demand, a low difficulty on-chain does not really affect the security of coins traded on the platforms because the actual on-blockchain coins backing the tokens do not keep changing as people cash in and out; once a coin has been tokenised, mostly years ago, I use the other half of my coins to cash out to the blockchain anyone who wants to thusly cash out, so the coins actually backing the tokens stay year after year unmoving on the blockchain racking up year after year of confirmations.

-MarkM-

The idea of burning coins to back a token based on them seems a bit weird compared to actually having the coins on hand to redeem the tokens for real coins.

Kind of hard to figure how the token is supposed to be worth anything when the coins it supposedly represents have been burned.

At least with the existing tokens I can redeem them for actual on the blockchain coins.

Also, we definitely DO need more DeVCoin tokens, as I have written before.

There simply are not enough of them on the platform(s) to make it reasonable to require people paying DeVCoin-denominated debts to pay them IN DEVCOIN.

Just looking at the last two payments made to GFC against loans I see 123+ million and 138+ million devcoins of debt paid respectively, but no way was there that many actual DeVCoins available for the debtor to have been able to buy actual DeVCoins to make those payments with; they were made with General Retirement Funds (GRF) scrip if I recall correctly. Ideally the debtor should have been able to buy that many DeVCoins using the GRF scrip or whatever other currencies they have been using then pay actual DVC to GFC. Those two payments were not even unusually large.

If it were practical for GFC to insist on being paid IN DEVCOINS, it would soak up huge numbers of DeVCoins quite rapidly I expect, to the point where it would maybe have to become the primary seller of them just to enable the debtors to be able to obtain enough of them to make their payments with. So possibly just GFC alone could solve the whole "DVC has no value" conundrum provided there were in fact plenty of DeVCoins in play. Basically DeVCoin has pretty much killed all its own value by throwing all its coins to pretty much any useless thing other than the game which was created and developed over all these years specifically for the purpose of giving DeVCoins value.

-MarkM-

The problem is what are the actual dollars you are going to use to buy back the devdollars?

I have seen a number of schemes whereby they attempt to use their coin as collateral to somehow create supposed stablecoins, but they are not really anywhere near as stable as their whitepapers make them sound.

I still think what we need to do is keep building the buy sides as strong as possible, the approach I have described before has worked over and over and over again not only tending the value up and up and up but also yielding more and more of the coin back again to bury in the backyard or wherever; that is, it takes more and more of the coin out of circulation while growing the value per coin of those still piled up on the exchanges as huge buy side and sell side columns of offers.

Unless you are going to have an actual "treasury" of dollars with which to "back" coins as dollar-tokens it is hard to really assert your coin is fixed at a dollar, but you can always keep building the buy-side stronger (denser) than the sell-side and strive toward eventually having a buy-side large enough and deep enough that all the outstanding coins (those not yet buried in the back yard as it were) can eventually be sold to it.

Also your idea seems to isolate DeVCoin, trying to have it stand alone instead of being a part of a rich tapestry of inter-related assets that all support one another and provide a hopefully ever-growing number of routes out to fiat or other various economies (though mostly fiat, realistically, since most users do tend to be from "the planet known as Earth" so have that bias of in the long run tending to want to ship their gains back to Earth).

If you want to have dollars why not simply use one of the actually-backed-by-real-dollars stablecoins as the dollar side and build up your buy-side of those stronger and stronger until you can buy back all outstanding DeVCoins with those at whatever dollar value per DeVCoin you are targetting or are able to actually achieve given the size of your dollars buy-side column of offers?

Right now we are having a snag in building up our buy-side due to DVC being paired against bitcoin; however we have several other coins, and not only ones that are mined right alongside DeVCoins, in which it is still reasonable and feasible to build up their buy-sides, which to my mind shows one of the strengths of using many coins. When one or more of them, in this case DeVCoin, hits a snag due to the vagaries of "exchanges", no problem we can simply continue along by using any or all of our other coins that are also on exchanges.

That is also why I have all along suggested that the other coins should be among the free open source projects that we support. We should be trying to keep them all up to date and keep them all having enough nodes to function and so on. We should not be competing against our other coins but, rather, co-operating with them.

We can build up buy-sides of everything in Lumens, sure, I in fact already started doing that some time ago, although now that Lumens have gone up in value I am looking at having to get back in there and check all my offers since it is possible Lumens might be going up in value faster than the other side of the pairs so my offers might suddenly be looking more generous than I can afford if I do not keep an eye on them.

You can already right now start helping build the XLM buy-side against DeVCoin and a bunch of our other assets on the STELLAR platform, see http://makemoney.knotwork.com/stellar/

A big advantage of the STELLAR platform is we can also build all the pairs, everything against everything, if we choose, as Lumens do not insinuate themselves into every trade like HZs do on the HORIZON platform.

-MarkM-

GFC can act as a way of "earning" DVC because of the fact that its value is mostly based upon its portfolio of DVC-based debts that are owed to it.

These debts are "secured" by the various FreeCiv-based nations that are actively working toward building defensive shells around the galaxy or galaxies in which the FreeCiv-based planets are located.

This effort is spearheaded by the (galactic) United Nations, whose most powerful constituents so far are the Brits, the Canucks and the Martians.

Thus right there you see there are at least four of the most significant galactic currencies basically aligned behind it all: United Nations Script (UNS), United Kingdom Britcoin (UKB), Canadian Digital Notes (CDN) and Martian BotCoin (MBC), in addition to DeVCoins themselves (which, by the way, have all along been considered one of the "big seven" Galactic currencies).

Admittedly the loans got off to a rocky start by being given out to random internet passers-by who chose to participate in mining galaxies far far away, with most of those passers-by vanishing after doing mostly nothing whatsoever with their newly created mining colonies.

However after about a "Planet Known as Earth" year (corresponding to about twelve game-years presumably) the powers that be (aka the United Nations and its main constituents) decided it was time to "repo" all the colony Corps that had not been logged into for at least a year, and they proceeded to recruit "Galactic Repo Corps" to take on those debts and run those colonies and continue to make payment on those loans.

So although a lot of those loans grew huge during that initial year, they have all been back to receiving payments for Earth-years (not game years) now.

The governments of the civilised planets are committed to this massive defense project because the existence of O-game and so called O-game clones shows us that the multiverse is indeed full of extremely hostile things out there somewhere, so rings of O-game clone implemented galaxies are being fortified around the "home galaxy" or "home galaxies" to defend against any eventual incursions from O-games far far away.

Because there are typically about twelve game-years to a "real" (non-game) year, the interest rates might seem a little high to Earthlings (players), but in game time terms they are of course twelve times less so maybe not really "unreasonably high" in their actual (which is to say, in-game) context.

I believe they are basically about a quarter of a percent per actual non-game calendar day, calculated as hourly compounding with any fraction of an hour accounted as a full hour.

Hourly was chosen in case the same processes end up being used to deal with leverage style loans / moneymarket-accounts types of thing where someone might for example want to borrow something for a few hours to short it or something like that.

Obviously of course this is all within a game, the Galactic Milieu; if it all turns out to work well gosh knows what paperwork would be needed to proceed from this in-game prototyping to some kind of real-world similar set of constructs.

So the upshot of all this is that you can buy GFC shares and list them for sale at a higher price, and wait for someone to come along and buy them at that higher price, fully expecting that at least in DeVCoins the value will indeed be higher since the debts it is collecting on are denominated in DeVCoins.

It is partly to facilitate the continued and hopefully regular presence of buyers that I have suggested the "DVC Foundation" proposed as recipient of the lion's share of minted DeVCoins take up regular buying of GFC shares. However even if that ends up not happening presumably there should always be bargain-hunters "out there" willing to snap up the shares as and when the sell offer prices get caught up to and exceeded by the value of the shares.

I regret in fact that I have so little time myself to keep scouring the markets looking for bargains after each new "Latest Rates" include-file is published. I have noticed in passing some pretty extreme bargains building up through the last few generations of the "Latest Rates".


-MarkM-

We already have dDVC (digi-DeVCoin) "tokens" on HORIZON and STELLAR networks, based originally on the dDVC on the Digitalis Open Transactions server.

Furthermore a "DVC Holdings" aka "DVC Treasury" account already exists on HORIZON holding assets whose total supposed value can be added up and that total divided by the number of DeVCoins minted to arrive at a supposed value per DeVCoin.

A problem generically across all of the various assets used in such "treasuries" and more assets whose value is computed from them but tht are not themselves used in such "treasuries" is that very few of the assets have lately been listed on any of the usual public website-based "exchanges" the crypto community is used to.

This has resulted in skewing of prices, and thus arbitrage oppotunities, caused by the players who want to "cash out" to "Planet Known As Earth" fiat currencies having very few routes toward such "cashing-out" and thus driving up the actual "spot prices" on these platforms of the assets that are listed on the familiar type of "exchanges" and, on those exchanges, a driving down of the actual "spot prices" of those actual coins on those familiar exchanges.

This is a large part of why it is good to have more of our coins listed on such exchanges.

The more coins any "cashing out" activity can be spread amongst, the lower the impact "cashing out" ought to be able to have on any one such coin.

Right now for example I know off-hand that DVC, IXC, I0C, USF (aka SCIFI), KED, GPL2, AXIOM and QBT are all listed on one or more of the usual familiar website-type public "exchanges", thus all of them are possible routes toward "cashing out", so I would expect their "spot prices" on HORIZON and STELLAR platforms to be inflated as players compete to be first/cheapest to "cash out", and their "spot prices" on the "exchanges" to be somewhat suppressed by that same "cashing out" activity.

This in turn means that folks who are aiming at "cashing out" into "Planet Known As Earth" funds tend to be seeing actual cashed-out values of all these assets end up at End Of Day to be substantially lower than the computed relative-values calculated for these assets based on the "treasuries" system.

For example, the computed supposed value of IXC based on its "treasury" is about 21.5 cents Canadian or so, but on FreiExchange its highest recent value was someone buying it up to 650 satoshis, and subsequent filling back up of buy and sell sides has its lowest sell price current at 570 satoshis and highest buy offer at 520 satoshis, which is bitcoin was worth 10,000 dollars each would come to 5.7 cents (of whichever kind of dollars bitcoin was worth 10,000 of) and 5.2 cents repsectively.

So we can see that for someone thinking of "cashing out" by way of IXC, they would see all the computed relative values (e.g. the "Latest Rates" file and all the tables and plots based on it) as being too high by a factor of four or five or six or so, that is, that if they tried to actually cash out, by way of IXC, they could only expect to yield a quarter to a sixth or so of the value indicated in those files and tables and plots and such.

The more we strengthen the buy-sides on those usual website-type public "exchanges", and the more of our coins we do so for, the better the cashing-out picture should eventually look. I have gotten IoC and IXC up to a dollar a coin at least twice maybe more times, it is just a matter of time but then typically a hack or a fly-by-night exchange blows it and I have to start from scratch all over again.

With IXC and I0C I am helped by the fact that they do not mint a lot of new coins constantly.

With DVC the sheer number of new DVC being minted constantly undermines the prices seen on exchanges.

The Corp whose mandate is specifically to support and strengthen the value of DVC is "DeVCorp".

The Corp, created by DeVCorp, that seems to be actually accomplishing the most is General Financial Corp, GFC; it holds a huge amount of DVC-denominated debt.

It seems to me that shares of those two Corps could make a lot of sense as something the "DVC Foundation" could buy to "lock up" DeVCoins.

If almost all shares of DVC minted went to buying such shares, that would keep DVC off the market while still rewarding supporters of the coin. You can see historical calculated-values of both shares of DeVCorp (sDVC) and shares of General Financial Corp (sGFC) at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/sharesindvc.html

The Foundation could also list the shares back on the sell side as it acquires them, building stacks of sell offers higher and higher ready to get bought when (or if) the prices climb.

So in short, we already have tokens and we already have stuff set up for binding coins into Corps to keep them off the market, you-lot just haven't been fully utilising them.

-MarkM-

LFM.knotwork.com aka DVCstable01.dvcnode.org

It will know of others presumably.

It runs all my coins so should have the other related coins too.

-MarkM-

It seems the dvdnode.org domain somehow got renewed for anoher year, I think maybe I was automatically billed for it or something and my bank account happened to actually have money in it at that moment.

Or maybe some third party anonymously paid the renewal fee, I don't know what exactly happened but WHOIS evidently shows I have it for another year.

So presumably the hostnames at dvcnode.org should keep working for another year yet.

-MarkM-

My server that was known as dvcstable01.dvcnode.org is still running and is also known as LFM.knotwork.com, and still runs all the many and various coins it has been running all along.

Existing nodes should work as they will have it in their peers lists, some coins let you add peers while they are running others need them on the command-line when you start them or in their config file if you use the config files.

-MarkM-

Bitcoin stil doesn't have smart contracts I think, and it certainly didn't back when IXCoin was created from it.

However, if counterparty or suchlike still works, and doesn't now require some fix that bitcoin has and IXCoin doesn't yet have, maybe a version of Counterparty or the like can work on IXCoin?

-MarkM-

I am pretty sure I have successfully brought coins home from Yobit before.

I sent some successfully to Freiexchange too but haven't tried bringing any back from there.

-MarkM-

The answer to the question about the consequences of not paying the in-game loans is similar to any "secured" loan: the borrower had collateral, and loses that collateral if they fail to pay the loan.

That is in fact what already happened in by far the majority of cases: the original borrowers tended to be random passers-by on the internet who created an account in an intergalactic-mining game, a so-called "O-game clone", and basically never came back. A lot of them did not even bother starting their newly-automatically-created mining colony building anything.

This is also why there are not a lot of "free as in beer" methods of starting into the games: we learned from experience that if players are not putting up any collateral in entering the game, the folks already in the game end up having to do all the work of "playing" the new roles that were being brought into play for the supposed new players.

Evidently it really helps to have the players have "skin in the game" as some call it, that is, to have collateral, to have something against which they can borrow.

A planet-known-as-Earth year or more down the line, we had to start forming "Galactic Reposession Corps" to "repossess" intergalactic mining operations that had not been logged-into for a whole year or more.

"Reposessing" them rather than, for instance, "writing them off" as "bankrupt" was necessary because of the whole intergalactic politics behind it all, the fact that all the civilised worlds needed these mining operations to be "out there" as a first step toward creating a defensive shell around the civilised galaxies against the reasonably-to-be-anticipated eventual advent of nasty fleets of aggressors from other "O-game clones" far far way.

That is, we know from observing O-game clones all over the net the kind of behavior to be expected from denizens of distant galaxies, so we need to prepare our civilised galaxies against such potential opponents.

So rather than "write off" the colonies, the intergalactic United Nations created Galactic Repo Corps, one per abandoned mining operation, to assume the operation's debt and put the mines to work.

The collateral was the colonies each operation controlled.

Having seen that random passers-by who got to join the game for free almost all never actually built up or managed the mining operation they had signed up to manage, we no longer bother letting people start play that way. Nowadays if they wanted some kind of loans they would have to find them privately from some other players or something; or start in the one remaining free rabbit-hole where they get to start one individual person on an individual-character scale of play such as on the galactic diplomacy planet via the "CrossCiv" server.


As to the "bridge", I think in a lot of people's minds cryptocoins, and maybe even the whole concept of money itself, keeps being thought of as some kind of commodity; which to a small extend maybe cryptocoins are or can be but that aspect of them is more like the actual value of the metal a penny or nickel or dome or quarter or loonie is made of than like the face value such as being worth a cent or being worth five cents or being worth twenty-five cents or being worth on dollar.

Yes if you want a token people can conveniently and durably pass around from person to person and which you want to use as a token representing value such as "this token can buy flour salt and yeast and bread at my bakery business" or whatever, the tokens can have some small value to you because of their usefulness to you as something to use to represent the buying-power you want to issue to your suppliers and customers, so that when a farmer drops off sacks of flour to your warehouse you have something durable to issue him or her so they can later come back and use those tokens to buy back some of the flour they in effect stored in your warehouse, or buy some bread you baked from it or whatever.

But the point is that money is really basically a kind of I.O.U, to its issuer, or at any rate it SHOULD be.

Yes you might like to buy up every last one of some cheap cryptocoin or other so that when you issue them back out to folks you know how many are out there thus how much of the flour, yeast, salt and bread in your shop is "accounted for" by the coins that are in other people's hands, but, their value as counters you bought to put to some such use is probably trivial compared to their value IN USE AS YOUR I.O.U.s.

We have a few times now had the value of an IXC coin and the value of an I0C coin up to a dollar or so and that was not because that is how much they are "intrinsically" worth it is because we had managed to hoard or destroy enough of them that we could afford to use them as "dollar tokens" because seemingly at the time there were not enough out in the wild that folks were dumping too many of them to our "I will buy 100 of them at a dollar each, another 100 at 99 cents each, another 100 at 98 cents each, another 100 at 97 cents each" and so on offers.

Ideally we would have first bought or minted every last one of them, so that the only way anyone else had any was because we had given them some in token that we owed them something, even if that something was just "99% of what you gave me for them" or "90% of what you gave me for them" or suchlike. Then we would have been more secure against suddely finding someone out there had a million of them that we had not stockpiled enough gooods or services or dollars or whatever to be able to "redeem" at what we had been seeing as the current value each one was managing to represent.

You might notice if you look at the historical tables of values that the coins that minted 21 million, or in the case of bitNicKeLs 420 million, coins up front and did noy have random third parties minting more of them that those coins did very well compared to BiTCoin the first few years BECAUSE all kinds of folks all over the world, a lot of whom had no intention of buying back from customers the bitcoins they sold them, were minting bitcoins. Basically bitcoins were being minted by min ters who were not really putting their full faith and credit behind them, they were selling them off as if they were simple blank rounds of metal other people might choose to use as coinage rather than issuing them as their own coinage they stood ready to buy back for some substantial fraction of what they sold them for.

So you really have to keep in mind that money is I.O.U.s.

Robert A. Heinlein illustrated this in at least one of his "Lazarus Long" stories, Lazarus sets up a general store on a colony planet, issues "money" to his suppliers in return for the inventory he stocks the store with, and the colonists can then use that "money" to buy stuff in his store. Some colonist child or something sees him burning that money when it came back into his possession and thinks it weird that he is burning "money", but as he points out, those are his I.O.U.s and once he has redeemed them they are worthless to him except maybe, if they were durable and still in good shape, maybe as tokens he could re-use for the same purpose of representing him owing something to the bearer.

So as issuers of DeVCoins we need to bear in mind that we have chosen a relatively cheap, as these things currently go, token to use to represent our I.O.U.s but that they are our I.O.U.s and ultimately their value lies in the fact that we stand ready to "back" the, aka to "redeem" them, hopefully with "the full faith and credit of the DeV nation" or somesuch thing.

We need to have a whole bunch of OTHER coins, assets, currencies and so on partly because we need something to back our coins WITH, something people can redeem them FOR, and partly because even if we are very careful who we give out 9/10ths of the coins to we still are faced with the fact that random "miners" all over the world are able to "mint" OUR coin, and a lot of them do NOT think of them as their own I.O.U.s they are issuing and that they are expected to redeem; to the contrary, to many of them every block's 5000 coins that they get it 5000 more of OUR I.O.U.'s that we are giving them for their service of securing our blockchain or at least of keeping the blocks moving, and ultimately we have to "back" aka "redeem" those coins too.

Coins like IXCoin and I0Coin are "minting" far far fewer new coins, so they can be in some ways more useful than DeVCoins for use as yet more I.O.U.s we can "back" and "honour" because in using them we are not looking at a huge minting of more of them every day so they are potentially easier for us to keep on backing and ultimately hope to have almost all of them buried someplace to that those still out there waiting for us to redeem them become less and less in number and thus are practical maybe to use as I.O.U.s representing more and more value per coin of them.

-MarkM-

I think the relative values of all the treasuries-based coins and assets do make sense, the problems arise in trying to integrate with the values of things that use just the next price or the last price that someone is about to get (top of buy side offers) or did just get (last actual trade) on some exchange or other as their supposed value.

So for example maybe for anything on the Latest Rates table that does have a pair on an exchange somewhere, compare how much it is/was on exchanges to what it is/was according to the Latest Rates list to figure out about how far out the exchanges are from the computed values on the rates table.

Maybe hopefully doing that for a number of things we'll find some consistency that they are all about half the price on exchanges than we computed, or one fifth, or whatever.

If the ratios are wildly inconsistent though I dunno, maybe try to average them?

Things that changed a lot on exchanges since last time Latest Rates was computed will tend to cause that I guess if the others do not also change right along with them. Like if Bitcoin doubles but litecoin goes down, XRP doesn't move much and Stellar moves a little more.

So maybe try using things that are not very volatile on exchanges. I0C and IXC havent moved much for a while on exchanges, so maybe look how much exchanges claim they are worth and ratio that to what the Rates table says they are worth to come up hopefully with a ratio you can blanket apply across all the Rates, like "recent Latest Rates seem to value everything at X times what exchanges have been saying" or something like that?

A goal then would be to work on building the I0C and IXC buy-sides on the exchanges to bring them up to the levels the Latest Rates file says they ought to be. It maybe ought to be a matter of "apparently arbitragers are not efficiently carrying the values across from platform to platform" or something like that?

-MarkM-

There is a whole ecosystem that was built to make DeVCoin a centrepiece, to weave DeVCoin into an ever-growing economy of coins and assets and games, to weave it together with its sibling merged-mined coins, to build strong buy-sides for many "orphaned" and under-the-radar coins so they can all work together to strengthen each other and to have more and more liquidity routes so as some of them vanish from some exchanges hopefully others are still on other exchanges and as some get pumped or dumped others hopefully can stay more stable and so on.

There are a bunch of "staking" coins that mint new coins just by being online, too.

Heck some of them, such as Klingon Empire Darsek, (KED), Gold Pressed Latinum Two (GPL2), United Sci-Fi Coin (USF, or on some platforms SCIFI) are even on at least one exchange that purports to pay you some of the stake even while your coins are on the exchange, so you can pile up a good strong sell-side while still collecting much of your staking earnings.

There is General Financial Corp (GFC), which earns interest on an insanely huge amount of DeVCoin-denominated debt, an asset so successful we have to disallow the "DVC Holdings" account from holding it else it would be such a huge gain-loop, being denominated in DeVCoins itself, that it would send the computed value of a DeVCoin, computed by dividing the value of the "DVC Holdings" by the number of DeVCoins minted, into an endless gain-loop.

There is lots going on, but for some reason despite it all having been intended all along as an engine for DeVCoin, actual DeVCoins never seem to get allocated into it.

I have pointed out over and over again that if there were lots of DeVCoins available in the Galactic Milieu players would be able reasonably to use their General Mining Corp (GMC) and General Retirement Funds (GRF) and other Milieu coins (United Kingdom Britcoins, Martian BotCoins, United Nations Scrip and so on and so on, as well as their GeistGeld, FairBriX, TeneBriX, GRouPcoins, CoiLedCoins, AXIOM, AXON, GPL, GPL2, KED, USF, UFC and so on and so on and so on, to buy DeVCoins so that they could pay off their DeVCoin-denominated debts using actual DeVCoins instead of having to use those other things directly via a conversion-rate table.

But how much of the DeVCoin generated each round actually ends up being sold for any at all of all these other currencies? Seems like virtually none.

It almost seems like some other currency should buy up GFC and re-cast all its loans into some other currency or something like that, as all these years of operating as a DeVCoin-denominated financial institution seems to have been kind of pointless.

Nonetheless, despite the evident lack of interest on the part of DeVCoin-thread denizens year after year after year, the Galactic Milieu has kept soldiering on, albeit with DeVCoin, intended to be one of the most important currencies in the Milieu, being more and more left out in the cold.

-MarkM-

I should have almost everything for sale by now, on HORIZON and STELLAR platforms, plus I continue to offer IXC and I0C for sale on exchanges, and even SCI-FI Coin (Referred to as USF, United Scifi Coin, on HORIZON and STELLAR platforms), Gold Pressed Latinum, Qubits nd Klingon Empire Darseks on LiveCoin exchange.

I can sell 100k coins at a time of some coins such as I0Coin, GeistGeld, probably even FairBriX and TeneBriX for anyone looking to establish a decent initial holding in such things.

10k at a time for several others.

Plus of course I am interested in getting more people equipped with HZ so they can play on the HORIZON platform where all trading pairs are vs HZ.

-MarkM-

Well then lets get building its buy-sides on the HORIZON and STELLAR platforms.

I discovered that some of the downloads I have available in my LFM.knotwork.com site are also directly accessible in http://makemoney.knotwork.com/downloads/crypto/

In particular, http://makemoney.knotwork.com/downloads/crypto/hz-v5.4.zip is the last distributed version of HORIZON.

You will need to tell it some still-active nodes in its config file as default nodes or well-knowon nodes for it to be able to find connections.

So tell it LFM.knotwork.com and UFBSH.no-ip.org and hopefully from there it can find more.

However it also requires two more nodes to check its downloaded blocks against, and there are no longer two more more nodes. Heck I might be losing internet entirely soon if I don't manage to sell some kind of coins real soon now for something I can turn into fiat to pay internet and electricity bills with.

So you will have to run at least two nodes so each has not only one to download from but also two more to check the download against; or at least two of you will both have to run one; or you will have to mess wih the config file to over-ride the requirement of having nodes to check against which is what I have been forced to do to keep the thing running at all.

-MarkM-

 I almost never make a GUI of any coin, I run daemons.

I am on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS still, presumably I was able to compile the darmon on that.

I probably never even tried to build the GUI.

-MarkM-

Currently most of the coins and assets of the Galactic Milieu have very few outlets to fiat currencies. I0Coin is one of those few.

Offhand I can think of only two others: IXCoin and Stellar Lumens.

So basically the mere fact that it can still be traded on FreiExchange gives it an advantage compared to most other coins of the Milieu for anyone looking to "cash out" any Milieu assets to fiat.

That in turn should give I0Coin some kind of advantage within the Milieu for acquiring various Milieu assets.

This situation implies of course that a lot of Milieu assets are at present a bit low in liquidity, but some of them seem to have some pretty good appreciation prospects and histories. So maybe there are some good trade-offs to be made by foregoing liquidity to gain appreciation?

It might even be feasible to increase I0Coin's profile within the Milieu massively, maybe making it one of the most commonly used currencies instead of just a fringe currency mostly used only for the purpose of "cashing out" to fiat?

-MarkM-

Currently most of the coins and assets of the Galactic Milieu have very few outlets to fiat currencies. IXCoin is one of those few.

Offhand I can think of only two others: I0Coin and Stellar Lumens.

So basically the mere fact that it can still be traded on Yobit and FreiExchange gives it an advantage compared to most other coins of the Milieu for anyone looking to "cash out" any Milieu assets to fiat.

That in turn should give IXCoin some kind of advantage within the Milieu for acquiring various Milieu assets.

This situation implies of course that a lot of Milieu assets are at present a bit low in liquidity, but some of them seem to have some pretty good appreciation prospects and histories. So maybe there are some good trade-offs to be made by foregoing liquidity to gain appreciation?

It might even be feasible to increase IXCoin's profile within the Milieu massively, maybe making it one of the most commonly used currencies instead of just a fringe currency mostly used only for the purpose of "cashing out" to fiat?

-MarkM-

I too am interested in where and how DeVCoin is being mined. If the blockchain is moving, despite its massively high difficulty, obviously there is a LOT of hashing power pointed at it, so much that it is hard to believe it is not being done by means of merged mining.

Remember that DeVCoin is just one of a whole family of merged-mined coins. It can be merged alongside IXCoin, I0Coin, GRouPcoin, CoiLedCoin and even GeistGeld, all of whose blockchains are also still moving and some of whom are still on exchanges of the "normal" type that people expect. IXCoin and I0Coin for example are both on FreiExchange and IXCoin is also still on Yobit.

There are also a bunch of "Galactic Currencies" that once upon a time used to be blockchains of their own, but which migrated to the Open Transactions platform long long ago leaving GRouPcoin to continue as its own blockchain using merged mining in order to demonstrate to them whether or not it would in fact be practical to secure a blockchain using merged mining. The thinking was that if GRouPcoin showed merged mining to be practical and effective those other currencies could think about migrate back to blockchains of their own, merged mined, if GRouPcoin's life as a merged mined coin seemed so successful that they had reason to think they too could survive that way despite the fact that, unlike GRouPcoin, they did not have a continuing minting of new coins to pay out to miners.

Currently it is still not looking good for GRouPcoin, nor indeed for CoiLedCoin; they are struggling along with difficulties far too high for the amount of hash-power they are receiving; so currently it continues to look like the other "Galactic Currencies" were wise to move away from trying to run on blockchains of their own.

However Open Transactions also did not pan out as hoped, in particular its developers kept refusing to finalise their data format and also would not commit to providing automation for migrating to any new formats they decided to switch to, so now those currencies have migrated to the HORIZON platform and also can be traded using tokens on the STELLAR platform.

Because of the general lack of liquidity so many coins suffer, and the horrible treatment they have received at the hands of various "normal" familiar types of "exchanges", we also came up with the "Treasuries" system to allow us to calculate "relative values" of the coins and Corps (shares). Admittedly those calculated values have been difficult to translate into price-on-exchanges on the "normal" familiar exchanges, but still they can be useful. They at least allow various games to conveniently translate between the various currencies, which is necessary because a fair bit of economic activity does continue to take place within the "Galactic Milieu.

Currently we seem to be left with just three routes out to fiat from the entire panoply of coins and assets: IXCoin, which can be sold at FreiExchange and at Yobit; I0Coin, which can be sold at FreiExchange, and Stellar Lumens, which can be sold at many many places.

A whole lot of the coins should have prices against Stellar Lumens on the Stellar platform, but I expect you will find that most or even all of themsell for far less than our calculated values. So maybe it would be helpful to try to put together some kind of averaged ratio giving us an idea at what fraction of their computed values our coins tend to be  going for there are on Yobit and FreiExchange, and maybe even some attempt could be made to figure out from time to time which route out is offering the best prices from time to time.

There are too many coins involved for me alone to keep up with, my Stellar clients do not even give me any easy way to tell whether someone has bought some of some coin or other thus yielding Stellar Lumens which I can use to build up that coin's Lumen buy-side.

I have been monitoring IXCoin and I0Coin on FreiExchange and Yobit, but so far am a long way from building up their prices there anywhere close to the computed values. In the past however I have found it possible over time to build them up to a dollar or so each. If anyone else had been helping me do that back when my email account got hacked they would maybe still have that kind of value, but no, not a soul was helping so when the hacker dumped all my coins they didn't get dumped on a friend doing the same strategy I was doing, instead they went for almost nothing to who-ever had a few random buy offers down at insanely low prices. We would have been spared that if even just one other person had been bolstering the buy-sides as I was. Having only one person, vulnerable to just one email account hack, doing it was a terrible mistake we should not repeat. We NEED more people keeping up the buy-sides the way I was, so that next time one such person gets hacked it does not destroy the value of all the coins.

As to DeVCoin in particular, in my mind one of the big problems we had with it is not enough DeVCoins were spent into the Galactic Milieu to allow the players to effectively use DeVCoins themselves to pay their DeVCoin-denominated debts. This was actually a large part of why the whole "Treasuries" system was created, since it became necessary for the players to pay those debts using other currencies instead of by buying DeVCoins with their other currencies so as to pay the debts using actual DeVCoins.

Nowadays for example shipments of DEUterium being delivered to General Mining Corp and General Retirement Fund depots have been tending to amount to 25 million to a few hundred million DeVCoins worth of DEUterium at a time. Lately I have noticed that General Mining Corp has been using Canadian Digital Notes (CDN) to pay for such shipments. In the case of deliveries from Corps whose debts is with General Financial Corp and thus denominated in DeVCoins, this has resulted in an accumulation of Canadian Digital Notes in General Financial Corp's "slush fund". This is not ideal for DeVCoin.

Ideally, there would at all times be hundreds of millions of DeVCoins for sale for CDN, and also for GMC and GRF and other commonly used (in the Milieu) currencies, so that General Financial Corp could reasonably as that the debts be paid in actual DeVCoins instead of in "equivalent value" (according to the computed relative values based on the "Treasuries") of CDN, GMC, GRF, UNS, UKB or whatever else the buyer of the DEUterium happens to have conveniently on hand.

Further, this would need to be sustainable. That is, those DeVCoins would need to cycle back around into buying up those other currencies. General Financial Corp can handle that IF it actually starts to accumulate actual DeVCoins into its "slush fund". The problem thus amounts to the fact that far too little of the DeVCoins ever minted ever got allocated into the Galactic Milieu. The total number in circulation within the Milieu is far too small to have been of practical use.

The theory had been that since so many Corps within the Milieu would be needing DeVCoins so as to pay their DeVCoin-denominated debt that there would constantly be a lot of liquidity, with DeVCoins being bought with a whole bunch of other currencies though probably mostly GMC and GRF since it was General Mining Corp and General Retirement Fund that were buying the DEUterium thus presumably would have been expected to often be using their own currencies (GMC and GRF respectively) to do much of the buying.

As it is though, there is so little DeVCoin available to be bought using pretty much any currency, especially those most commonly used within the Milieu, that it simply is not practical to really use DeVCoins at all other than as a "unit of account" for debts that are in practice being paid using other currencies entirely.

A possible side-effect of this seems to have been the lack of issuance of DeVCoin bounties for software modifications useful to the Milieu, the cause-and-effect presumably being that since by withholding DeVCoins from the Milieu the Milieu never really managed to become the great economic engine for DeVCoin it was intended to be, thus never became important enough to the DeVCoin project to seem worth developing using bounties.

I have to agree with a point made by someone earlier, that simply piling up DeVCoins in a "DeVCoin Foundation" kind of entity does not really inspire a lot of confidence that those coins will not hit the markets and drive down the price.

Part of the idea behind the Milieu was precisely to tie up coins so they would not hit the markets, expecially DeVCoin since it was one of the highest-inflation coins; but they were to be tied up into ever more and more and more entities, maybe even buried many layers deep under each-other so it would become ever more unlikely that the coins all the various entities had in their treasuries would ever hit the markets.

For example one idea that has been in the cards for many years is the building of value of virtual real-estate by tying up coins into the real-estate. This would work really nicely if we also had some kind of taxes or suchlike on the real-estate because with some kind of tax we could go beyond simply taking all the money paid for the real-estate and distributing it to non-player-characters standing by to buy back that real-estate; we could constantly increase, using the taxes, the amount of money those non-player-characters have sitting there waiting to buy back the real-estate, thus increasing the value of the real-estate.

Back when we started there were no "smart contract" platforms. Nowadays they are proliferating. Thus nowadays it would also be possible to do things like sink coins into entire planets, bound up with smart-contracts, so that the only way to bring them back into circulation would be to destroy the planet, possibly using a ratio like the 20% we see in CoffeeMUD where when you scrap a thing made from a material you only get back 20% of the material that went into it.

So we could have a doomsday option whereby a death-star or somesuch (probably itself not cheap) could scrap a planet yielding 20% of its backing coins as immiediate salvage and the remaining 80% diffusing into harder and harder to reclaim portions, ultimately maybe to include cosmic dust and gamma rays and other photos and particles and so on that eventually could coalesce into new stars that could form new planets. We could tie up coins for literally centuries or millennia and overall it would be much more interesting that "burning" them.

The large scale view really of thev approach I have been taking is not to accumulate coins in order to dump them, but to accumulate them in order that they can be buried for the foreseeable future, driving up the value of those that remain in circulation.

The whole way I issued tokens onto the Open Transactions platform was part of that: the idea was that once I issued X number of tokens representing, say, DeVCoins, the DeVCoins represented by those tokens could be buried "forever", or at least until my heirs and assigns, or great-great-great-grandchildren or whatever, eventually devided there is no longer any point in trading DeVCoins unsing tokens so the whole operation should be shut down, so they would dig up the coins and use them to honour the tokens.

But as I said, ideally the coins would never need to be dug up. I issued tokens for only half my coins precisely so that I would be able to buy back all the tokens without having to dig up the "buried" coins they represent.

The idea is to make money on the day to day buying and selling, not on the hoard.

-MarkM-