Where is the download link? I don't see one there...

In fact I tihnk the marketing of auction software has gotten so rabid that people spaming all the free software sites with lies, so that people searching using keys like GNU and FREE will keep finding only their commercial packages.  have yet to find any download links, and see the same packages listed with more than one license, both of which might be lies. (PHP license and GNU license for that one, for example.)

-MarkM-

I think about half of the merged mined coins keep generating coins forever. DVC, GRP, CLC and GeistGeld all do, I think.

The latter two are still ridiculously easy to mine too so we could rake in lots of them before all the public merged mining pools get around to adding them if only someone had done the free open source merged mining pool code bounty.

Unfortunately anyone even considering doing that bounty probably figured they would be better off making umpteen times as much money for a fraction as much work by just writing stuff in Devtome.

I still think now and then though about doing some kind of mining company with shares and having it do merged mining, so as to expose more people to the less-well-known merged mined coins.

But with the free open source mining pool software we could have made pools that pay out only the first four or six or so of the merged mined coins the first few months or years or whatever, only starting to give out the CLC and XGG later on once people actually want them enough because they are on enough exchanges and so on that they consider them important enough to be worth coming to a pool that does include them over a pool that does not.

For doing a credit union the Cyclos system might be useful but I heard they were going to stop being free open source on newer versions.

Open Transactions should be very useful as soon as the installer system is set up for it so that people can install it instead of having to compile it themselves.

-MarkM-

Open Transactions provides a lot of stuff and aims to provide more too that is not actually in the code yet but the Lex Cryptographia also wants more such as reputation systems for example of one thing I can think of off the top of my head that Open Transactions does not even have it in mind to provide itself I think.

-MarkM-

As to the risk posed by depositing with a third party at all, maybe a really good pile of bounties to consider would be bounties aimed at making tangible real and functional the Lex Cryptographia concepts: http://bitcoinism.blogspot.ca/2013/12/lex-cryptographia.html

(Which happens to be another thing that Open Transactions is expected to be an important tool for/toward.)

-MarkM-

The risk involved in even depositing one's coins with a third party at all aside, the risks such an entity would itself face can be worked with in various ways.

For example the auctions proposal involves buying a license to a proprietary software package.

The Credit Union entity, being a fully legally incorporated entity, could retain ownership of that license until the loan(s) are paid in full.

For loans in general, they could be secured using collateral.

Long long ago it was realised that often it would be nicer to be able to borrow something other than BiTCoins to use as spending money or for investing in things expected to be on the long term less lucrative than simply holding BiTCoin, and DeVCoin was one of the top candidates for what to borrow. Thus already the practice of using BiTCoins as collateral to borrow DeVCoins is almost traditional in some circles.

Regardless of what borrowers use as collateral, I think that the whole concept of how fractional reserve or frozen-for-some-time deposit accounts work in connection with the making of loans, as a business plan, is quite well researched by this point in history. I do not know what percentage of Credit Union startups succeeded over the centuries or decades or whatever though.

-MarkM-

Since part of the sentiment in this whole auctions thing seems to be some idea that since we are a community and someone in our community really really wants an auction site we the community should somehow make it possible for him to have one, how about this idea:

A DeVCoin Credit Union.

Lets incorporate a credit union whose native currency is DeVCoin.

Those people who choose to join the union - which costs money, which money becomes capital the union can use to do loans - get to decide amongst themselves, using a set of bylaws and probably Roberts Rules of Order or some similar standard operating procedure, who among them deserves a loan of how much.

This would also mean there is a legal entity that can own shares of legal businesses, so it could do financing that includes retaining equity in businesses that it helps to start up.

In order to attract capital for loaning, it could offer deposit accounts that pay interest, that interest being less than the interest it charges on loans.

Then any DeVCoin holders who believe that the members of the union are making wise choices about what/who to loan to aka what/who to invest in can deposit DeVCoins into such interest-paying accounts.

It will be interesting to measure the confidence DeVCoin holders have in the decision making skills of the members of the union by seeing how much they choose to deposit in such accounts.

-MarkM-

It kind of seems like where this is going is if we get very very very lucky and the managers / founders are extremely dedicated and talented/skilled we might end up having yet another quibids type auction site in existence from which we can then keep trying to pry some kind of something that would benefit DeVCoin.

If accepting DeVCoin would make any sense to such sites as a business proposition then creating yet another such site seems redundant, since it would make sense for such sites to support DeVCoin so if they are not themselves idiots - which presumably they are not if the are already succeeding even without DeVCoins having any involvement - they will do the sensible thing and accept DeVCoins.

Meanwhile I foresee us basically ending up having put someone into a business of their own (since there is no legal entity constituting the DeVCoin project that could own shares of the business) who will simply find, like all the other such auction sites, that it makes no sense to bother with DeVCoins.

So bottom line either it makes sense to support DeVCoins in which case we can expect more and more such sites to start accepting them, or it does not so there will be more and more business-case for such sites to free up manpower and capital and general work and pain and stress by saying sorry guys I tried but Quibids was right DeVCoins are not ready for use in this field, gosh gee wilikers ah well no one can say we didn't prematurely and without proper forethought try, meanwhile goodbye and thanks for all the customers.

I doubt we will even get that lucky though. More likely we will simply find the founder was not really qualified to found such a startup.

On the other hand if we create free open source software for doing such sites, maybe hundreds or thousands of people will try to make a go of such sites and maybe - not likely but maybe - among them will turn out to be someone who will somehow make a go of it, and at that point we could approach them hoping they are more sympathetic to the idea of accepting DeVCoins (since DeVCoins made available to them the free open source software that made their business possible) than quibids or other sites using similar models but possibly not using free open source software to do it, let alone free open souce software that is only free and open source thanks to the DeVCoin project.

So we should end up with many many more people trying to make it work thus more chance of one among them being that amazing startup founder that actually makes it really work.

-MarkM-

The idea that we can compete with venture-capital financed startups / businesses on the basis of our larger amount of funding seems to me highly dubious.

Most venture capital comes in chunks much much larger than a mere $24k. Our puny $24k per month or whatever of financing would be trivial compared to real startups as they would tend to be financed in millions rather than thousands.

Heck even Mastercoin, a rather informal startup whipped up on a forum, the funding was in the millions of dollars range.

So I think this idea that our having shares to throw at things means real businesses won't be able to compete with us is silly/unrealistic.

There must be something we could do using free open source stuff that could make a viable business.

This whole focus on what can we find that is not free open source and lets base everything on that seems a bad thing. What proprietary things will be be spending our shares on next? A MacDonalds franchise maybe when our market cap is high enough? At least with a MacDonalds franchise we would be in co-operation with the whole MacDonalds system instead of like this auction idea seems to amount to saying like oh gosh MacDonalds is a sure fire business, lets make a DevDonalds... and not even thinking lets make the whole thing, franchise and all, its more like lets create one little restaurant on the MacDonalds model and call it DevDonalds and try to compete.

-MarkM-

Ok, so lets ask programmers how hard could/would it really be to hack up an existing auction site package to make the currency you bid in be called bids and to display alongside the amount of that currency that has been bid a resulting actual price at which the winning bidder would be able to buy the things being auctioned if no one else bids.

That would be a very minimal first pass "kludge", it would likely confuse people who already know how some other site like quibids or whatever does it, because this currency we call "bids" would not have to actually be a measure of the number of times people have placed bids; it would simply be how much of the site's internal currency/points have been bid on the item.

A step farther would be to limit that currency to integers, so they have to bid whole numbers of this strange stuff known confusingly by the name "bids".

Maybe we could go even farther, and only allow them to bid one so called "bid" at a time. That brings us even closer to the model existing sites use.

So far this sounds almost "trivial". An hour or few. (An hour followed by gosh knows how many hours chasing down all the "got ya"s  that I haven't yet thought of... )

Next though I foresee that some auction site systems, possibly including all the off the shelf free open source ones (I dunno as I have not ever looked at any of them) might use a model where people who place bids have not got a balance already in place on the site with which to bid.

Look at e-bay for example, [I think that] they let people place bids without having first placed into escrow aka deposited onto the e-bay site the amount of whatever that they are bidding.

(Maybe though it might only let you do that if it has your credit card? Or does it let you bid even if paypal does not know your credit card number nor can grab from your bank account nor has a sufficient balance in paypal already that can be held until the end of the auction to ensure you are able to pay if you do win the auction?)

Obviously since we want to sell "bids" up front, so that people cannot bid first then pay for that "bid" later, we need a system that makes people do their bidding only from existing balances they already have on the system.

If none of the existing free open source auction site systems feature such local to the site balances, then it seems to me we have run up against our first bounty: we first need a free open source auctions system that uses site-local balances.

That could be a good and useful mod or module to any free open source auctions system, so maybe before we even worry about hacking in the special handling that our special local currency known as "bids" will need we should secure/cause the existence of a free open source auctions system that uses local to the site balances.

Since rumour had it that there exists more than one free open source auction site package, maybe we could do our usual multiple form of bounty for this mod/module, maybe the number of free open source auction site systems out there should limit how multi we make the bounty.

That is, if for example there turn out to only be two such packages out there, then maybe instead of a six-step bounty where the first six people to do it get so many shares, we should limit it to a two step where the first to do it gets so many and the second to do it gets so many, so that if we are lucky maybe both people who do it will do it to a different one of the existing free open source auction site packages?

Then once at least one free open source auction site package that supports site-local user-balances exists we can go on to look at the matter of how to adapt such a package to make its site-local currency act the way we would like our proposed "currency known as bids" to act?

Next we will probably want users to be able to purchase the site-local currency by means of cryptocoins.

So the next mod/module we would likely want to see in place and working would be the ability to accept cryptocoins in return for the site-local currency. That is, the ability to sell the site-local currency for cryptocoins.

If there already exists a payment gateway for selling the site-local currency to the users, such as a module/page/scrypt that lets people use paypal or suchlike to buy it, then the easiest/quickest way to accept cryptocoins might be to use a similar type of service but one that happens to handle cryptocoins (possibly in addition to other forms of currency).

If not then we'd need to decide whether we want to make the thing depend upon such third party services or prefer to have it do its own accepting of cryptocoins, with all the potential cans of worms that could lead us to open...

...All this just to get us to the point where there exists a free open source auctions site that uses site-local balances and sells users its site-local currency.

Once that is in place, then hacking the site-local currency (aka site-local balances) to act the way we want "bids" to act should seem a relatively minor task.

(Then we would of course proceed onwards to now they can win auctions lets look at having them actually buy the things they won the right to buy, at the price they won the right to buy it at...)

-MarkM-

The concepts for the planned sites were secret because we did not want anyoen to run out and grab all the good domain names.

We have secured a number of the desired domains, possibly even all of them now though so I am not sure why there would be any continued need to keep them secret.

On the other hand with a forum of our own on the horizon maybe this single thread is not the best place, because on our own forum each of the sites could have a thread of its own for example.

So maybe we will be able soon to start saying oh well if you want deeper information about the project join its own forum...

Re the auctions I do not think we should be offering bounties for people to go out and buy closed source software.

I think in the past there has always been free open source software a person seeking a bounty could use, if the bounty was not about actually developing new free open source software.

For example the bounty for a devcoin based business, there are oodles of free open source packages one could use to set up a commerce site, or various other kinds of business. The bounty for an exchange there was Open Transactions and there are a couple of free open source web-based exchange scripts, albeit in horrible shape but still someone could have fixed one of those up and used it.

If we have already established that there is no free open source package for the kind of auction we want, I think our first step, if we need this thing that desperately, is to get a free open source package for doing such sites developed. Once a working package to do such sites exists then we would be in a position to do a bounty for actually setting up and running such a site as a site that accepts DeVCoins, or in a position to look into hiring people to run such a site on behalf of the DeVCoin project itself, or we could create a corporation that will run it and set it up as a non-profit corporation that donates whatever would have been profit (after salaries and expenses and employer contributions to whatever employers have to contribute to and so on and so on) to the Devcoin project or something.

But first I think a free open source package one could use to achieve the bounty should exist. Otherwise people who resort to proprietary packages will have an advantage, maybe in context an "unfair" advantage, over free open source people who also would have liked to go for the bounty.

Once we start offering bounties that basically amount to "go buy that there proprietary software and use it instead of free open source software" I think we are way off track, in fact maybe directly at cross-purposes to our mission.

So I would like to suggest too that we formalise this idea somehow: do not offer any bounties other than actual development of free open source software to do a thing for the doing of a thing that no existing free open source software already does / can do.

-MarkM-

If the project is the creation of free open source software, fine, like bitcoin and Open Transactions it can, if it is mission-critical to Devcoin's mission, have some of its key developers receiving a share every round. (I am still not convinced it is mission-critical in any way though, quite the contrary I think it is a foolishly wasteful idea, that the publicity effort it would need to get anywhere would be far far better spent on trying to convince existing established auction sites to accept cryptocoins.)

If though you are still thinking of doing an auction site startup, probably the most important thing is how many hundreds of thousands of interested parties you have on your mailing list, how good your capture pages are at getting people onto your mailing list in the first place, how good your autoresponder series (the series of messages people on the mailing list automatically get sent in sequence once they are on the list) at eventually "converting" them and at getting them to come back to buy more stuff, what the retention rate is (how long before they unsubscribe/quit), and the average amount of money you end up extracting from each person before they unsubscribe/quit.

Advertising, aka "customer acquisition" is horribly expensive, often dollars per customer. Heck even just getting a visitor costs dollars per visitor in some fields, presumably someone will have already looked up how much e.g. Adwords charges per visitor for keywords related to auctions? Care to let us in on that little secret?

So you need someone very very experienced at getting hundreds of thousands of people to sign up for mailing lists and websites and at keeping them on the list and getting them back regularly to the website and extracting money from them while they are there.

I bought my house with money made from websites but that was back before the adult entertainment industry started buying up search engines and turning them into pay per click traffic engines. Nowadays it is really hard to get "natural" (as in "gratis") search engine traffic in any field that is commonly known to involve some nice amounts of money. Heck even "the long tail" is probably heavily congested, all kinds of obscure search phrases less and less obviously relating to auctions are probably being "worked" heavily already.

It would quite likely be much more effective to focus all that effort into "converting" existing sites into accepting Devcoin than to try to go up against them on their own keywords, their own field, their own years of search engine optimisation, their own years of A/B testing of capture pages and auto-responder sequences and so on and so on.

Probably a heck of a lot cheaper too.

We don't need more holes in the net to throw money into. Its not like we have more moeny than we can spend so need to come up with far fetched ideas like "lets try to go head to head against e-bay or quibids" to find ways to throw our money away.

The very fact that no one thinks it a good enough idea to "just do it" but instead keeps trying to get us to throw money at it kind of stinks. If it had an reasonable chance of being profitable someone would do it. Evidently only people who are imagining someone else's money being thorwn away instead of their own seem keen on the idea.

So how about instead come up with an idea you are so sure will be profitable that you are willign to pay for it yourself?

Or that you can so convincingly prove the profitability of that some Angel Investors will get on board and help you through to your first 'A' round of venture capital investment?

By the way, has everyone forgotten we already have quite a few websites on our road-map, domains already secured for a number of them, but that our market cap is not yet high enough for us to afford to start any of them yet?

I wonder if we will be able to start on one of them if this current exchange rate doesn't collapse too darn far too darn fast? Or are we also going to wait until we have Devtome at least covering its own cost before moving on to the next planned website?

Or is the forum going to be eating quite a bit of the website-subsidy budget?

-MarkM-

I think "creative people" would work better than "creators".

Because when Joe reads or hears that 90% of the coins go to creators, the default answer to "creators of what" is likely to be "the creators, duh, as in the creators of the coin/system itself".

But maybe if we say 90% of the coins go to creative people, and maybe try to even squeeze in "in general" right away, like "creative people in general", before starting to get all particular about different types of creative people creating different types of things, maybe four words is few enough more than two of them might stick.

At some point we would also of course want to tack on the part about these "creative people in general" are only getting paid for free open source things that they create, such as free open source beer recipes, free open source beerbottle-manufacturing equipment, free open source homebrewing-kit software, free open source artwork one can freely use to design one's homebrew / home-microbrewery beer labels, free open source music one can use to put music into one's beer-advertising videos, free open source videos one can modify to make one's beer-advertising videos, free open source hangover cure pill formulae, free open source software one can use to edit these sounds and images and words, control one's microbrewery and so on and so on...

"Free as in OPEN SOURCE beer!"

-MarkM-

I have said before that trying to explain that Devcoins are for developers seems to have been full of pitfalls.

Are they even reading stuff that says Devcoins are for developers of free open source art, music, writing, hardware and software or something like that as meaning it is for the developers of the coin?

Maybe developer(s) is just a bad word to be using anywhere in promotions since people will likely repeat that word leaving out all the details as to "developers of what" ?

On the other hand I would not put it past trolls to deliberately try to stir up such miss-understandings.

The next step anyway for the naysayers would be to say that regardless of who the coins ultimately go to it is decided by an elite group (like the Freicoin's foundation for example to point to a situations some have seen as quite similar).

-MarkM-

How much does such a commercial cost?

Cost of customer aquisition compared to average money gained from each customer is a big thing, an analysis of such things is probably a big part of any reasonable business-plan.

-MarkM-

The latest figures, found at for example http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/sharesindvc.html show latest per share valuation as 3753350.67447690  DeVCoins.

Obviously this figure is based on the "conversion rates as units of account" not on actual depths of markets since obviously the corp would be worth more devcoins than even exist using these figures.

The figure is thus based on "assuming you could get enough devcoins at the purported current going price" which of course one never can; trying to do so would drive up the price of whatever coin you are using to represent the price in terms of.

(The only reason that showing the value in terms of dollars wouldn't similarly be a little out of whack is there are so darn many dollars printed that obtaining as many as the corp is worth might not make a big change in the market price of dollars.)

-MarkM-

The latest figures, found at for example http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/sharesindvc.html show latest per share valuation as 3250108.3744094 DeVCoins.

Obviously this figure is based on the "conversion rates as units of account" not on actual depths of markets since obviously the corp would be worth more devcoins than even exist using these figures.

The figure is thus based on "assuming you could get enough devcoins at the purported current going price" which of course one never can; trying to do so would drive up the price of whatever coin you are using to represent the price in terms of.

(The only reason that showing the value in terms of dollars wouldn't similarly be a little out of whack is there are so darn many dollars printed that obtaining as many as the corp is worth might not make a big change in the market price of dollars.)

-MarkM-

I have been working for years on the Galactic Milieu project, but it doesn't get much in the way of bounties, writing about it probably accounts for most of the shares I have managed to get in relation to it. Though the Digitalis Open Transactions Server is also part of it so the small bounty it got as a devcoin exchange (twelve shares, maybe, was that?) is also part of the Galactic Milieu project's share earnings.

The Galactic Milieu will be big too, it is like Crystal Space (or whatever that darn 3d open source RPG is called) combined with Second Life with lots more thrown in too. But that doesn't mean devcoin should throw shares at it over and above what its documentation can earn by being posted to devtome.

Maybe you could write all your business plans, research findings, privacy policies, help pages, user agreements and so on and so on on devtome to earn enough to buy a script license?

The Open Transactions server has taken years and we still do not have clients for grandmas to make it easy for people to use it yet it is only worth that initial few shares bounty and the one share per round I get as a developer working on Open Transactions. (Though maybe my developer share might equally well be intended to be for my other development work on various coins and such too or instead? Cannot remember the details.)

So sure go ahead and start an auction site and try to get it done before the bounties for starting devcoin businesses have all been snapped up.

Or maybe if auction sites are a super-big deal another round of bounties could be done, six shares for first auctions site, five for second, four for third etc or something, but that will make more sense once a free open source auctions system is available so people going for the bounty will have code they can use to run their sites.

-MarkM-

Do it like Satoshi dice and all the other provably fair lottery/gambling sites.

For example hash all the hashes along with the hash of the block at which the "draw" is scheduled to happen. That resulting hash determines the winner in some deterministic well defined way.

Isn't there free open source code for provably fair dice / roulette / raffle / etc games yet?

Maybe we could do a raffle per round, with the hash of the last block of the round being hashed together with the hash of each ticket purchase to determine the winner by using the last ten or sixteen or whatever digits of the hash as a random number by putting a decimal point in front of it?

Unthinkingbit could probably whip up a python script that would not only do that but also, in addition, use the hashes of the receiver transactions to give all receivers one ticket per fifth of a share or something like that so that everyone on the shares gets gets a free raffle ticket. The decision of who won could be part of the scripts we run at end of a round to determine the shares people get in the next round.

So the announcements that the new receiver files are all uploaded could also include an announcement of who won the lottery.

Heck we could raffle shares instead of direct already mined coins, so the tickets become even more attractive because once you win, you will be getting more tickets too since you will be getting shares and shares get free tickets.

Well maybe not shares plural as prize, we already are giving out large enough numbers of them that granularity is probably starting to make noticeable variances in incomes. But maybe one share, and have the price for buying tickets be much cheaper than 100,000 devcoins.

-MarkM-

Great, yes, what do they respond when asked when they will start accepting devcoin?

Also here is yet another idea for your auction site: set it up then see if you are by then too late to get one of the "starting a business that accepts devcoin" bounties.

How much were/are the bounties for setting up businesses that accept devcoins? I forgot. Six shares? Maybe it was twelve for the first few? Yet you want 45 or more?

-MarkM-

If the guy who wrote the commercial script was running a site he would point at it, he only seems to run a demo.

We don't even have a free open source script for it yet so thinking about whether to actually run such a site is maybe premature.

Or lets do a real startup. We get a devcoin venture capital corp going then look for projects worth investing devcoins into.

A number of shares could be set aside for the devcoin project (if it existed: setting it up as a legal entity able to own shares and such would also be useful maybe) to buy shares of the venture capital corp so there will definitely be some capital available and so the devcoin project itself can directly benefit from the success of the venture business and thus indirectly from any ventures it finds worthy of investing in.

Meanwhile still if someone does make a free open source auctions script maybe that will provide the code lots of people will find is the inspiration they need to think about doing an auction site startup.

So far giving away shares to try to finance a site seems to have only brought us people, not profits.

Maybe if we just keep on running devtome eventually one of the people it finds for us will turn out to be the kind of totally dedicated person it takes to found a startup, though whether an auction site will turn out to be what they plan to dedicate their life to remains to be seen.

Currently the person who seems most dedicated to the idea of running an auction site seems not to even find the idea of doing enough writing for devtome to finance his dream to be worth doing thus does not seem a dedicated enough person to found a startup.
 
Even Shaggy was more dedicated than that!

-MarkM-