Heck it could be done as smart property, so each Tesla car's ownership is determined by the blockchain and the car checks who owns it on the blockchain to decide who is allowed to start its engine...

-MarkM-

Either he is totally just an outright scammer or he has such total lack of understanding and knowledge of the field that he cannot even see how totally broken and flawed his "ideas" actually are. Either way, nothing to invest in here except for him to invest a few years in some serious education relevant to the field and directly of/within the field.

Basically he seems to want to raise money to finance a fairy-dust / wishing-well factory on some dream that fairy dust and/or a wishing well might, if enough money is thrown at it, give some profit for him even if it fails utterly to accomplish anything else.

-MarkM-

Could you make these maps in some machine-usable form?

Like maybe do Crossfire RPG maps and/or Battle for Wesnoth maps and/or maps for whatever that online tabletop roleplaying system Novacadian uses is?

Maybe also Freeciv-scale maps of each entire planet would be useful...

-MarkM-

Hopefully this TeslaCoin would be a coloured coin that runs on top of IXCoin?

Unless he thinks IXCoin is not secure enough and insists on making it a coloured coin that runs on top of Bitcoin?

-MarkM-

No bots yet.

Instead I simply pile up buy and sell offers at every Satoshi of price upwards and downwards from the active "spread" gap.

Bots tend to actually get in the way of that, trying to make it seems in some cases even less on the trades than the exchange itself does, so some of them seem almost to be working more for the exchange than for anyone else.

That is what HFT (High Frequency Trading) is all about, make a satoshi on each deal even if that covers costs, trying to get millions of tiny little pieces instead of simply buying when the price goes low and selling when it goes high.

Presumably eventually exchanges will deploy such bots themselves, keeping prices in a narrow enough range that there is no profit to be made by anyone other than the exchange itself.

Then actual traders will only make something occassionally, when a price move is so large that it breaks right on through the amount of capital the exchange/bot has sitting there doing "buy wall" and "sell wall" each side of a spread so small only the exchange's fee makes anything on the trades.

-MarkM-

To the extent that we have changed from rewarding people who naturally as a lifestyle create free open source stuff to trying to bribe people who have no interest in creating free open source stuff and no desire nor intent to make such stuff into begrudgingly making it anyway despite preferring not to then I guess we have lost our way...

We were not supposed to be rewarding artists for making art, authors for writing, programmers for programming.

We were supposed to be rewarding activists who pro-actively create free open source stuff for their pro-active, out of their own pocket creative activism / activistic creativity.

-MarkM-

Probably same person buying high and selling low.

I have had buy and sell orders sitting untouched for weeks because someone is buying slightly higher than my highest untouched buy order and selling slightly lower than my lowest untouched sell order.

Basically they seem content to take a smaller percent on all orders instead of a larger percent on only those orders that reach up or down farther than this narrow band in which they have been confining it.

-MarkM-

Quark simply took an insanely expensive/wasteful system - the proof of work blockchain - and made it even more insanely expensive/wasteful.

It also deliberately made itself hard to secure.

Basically the whole flawed concept is that the public is better served by giving all the money in the world to postmen than by allowing delivery of letters parcels messages etc to be open to free market competition so that "postmen" will become mere commodities, a job done as cheaply as possible.

They basically are a postmen union, conspiring to make sure operating a post office is the most profitible business in the world by deliberately jacking up the price of stamps.

-MarkM-

Research proof of stake. There are years of deep discussion of it. Then SunnyKing came out of the blue claiming not to have even read all that work with his broken "solution" then later claimed to have fixed the obvious broken-ness that was pointed out to him, but I don't think any of the serious people working on proof of stake concepts was convinced at all.

Though maybe Cunicula has been saying that PPC is not too bad if you assume an economist's threat model (is it profitable to attack) instead of the traditional computer-science threat model (is it feasible to attack aka could an attack be done even if doing it might not DIRECTLY yield profits).

Cunicila's answer to "surely one can profit simply by shorting the coin before attacking it" is basically "even if the market would be stupid enough to offer shorts, surely after one person has profited by short-then-attack the market would not be so stupid as to offer shorts again".

Which falls flat, in my eyes, given the observed insanely hideously massive stupidity of this market...

-MarkM-

DOGE got onto VIrcurex because Vircurex is starved for volume and DOGE had good volume.

I nearly dropped Vircurex at that point, and still consider it a very bad sign that they didn't replace some other crappy scrypt coin(s) when they put DOGE in, since DOGE has more difficulty/security than any of them but litecoin so if it is even reasonable at all to have more than one scrypt coin DOGE would be the logical choice as the runner-up / also-ran scrypt coin, the rest are just toys waiting to be looted.

-MarkM-

Re proof of stake so far it seems to have been a man in the middle attack.

Sunny King can make any chain he chooses be the "main" chain, so basically the security comes down to how many bodyguards he has, how many armed guards his data centre has, and how trustwirthy all of those people are.

It is even more centralised than solidcoin was, as Solidcoin had 12 or more trusted servers supposedly or by design, whereas PPC has as far as I know only Mein Fuhrer Sunnyking holding and maybe possibly safeguarding the destruct/chainrobbery lever.

Supposedly some clones claim to be trying or pretending to ameliorate that central control guy problem but I dunno if any of them are anything other than scams.

Novacoin is maybe even worse because the one guy is the central bank who adjusts interest rates arbitrarily any time the whim to do so strikes him.

-MarkM-

Every time difficulty is adjusted it takes a lot of blocks before a new average time between blocks can be figured out and the random time it takes to find blocks can be averaged over enough blocks to make a reasonable guess at the current hash-rate.

So when the adjustment happens, if the next block happens to be lucky (fast) poof the average taken over just one block looks like huge hash rate. A few thousand blocks later, if difficulty has not already changed again already, you can make a better guestimate of hash rate because the average time between blocks might by then be statistically meaninful instead of being just a random number that is really measuring luck not hashrate.

So even with bitcoin itself, every time difficulty changes it takes a lot of blocks for the guesses / estimates of how much hash rate might be out there to start to stabilise at reasonable guesses instead of just being a measurement of how lucky people have been so far since the difficulty changed.

IXCoin probably changes difficulty sooner/faster than bitcoin does, as an attempted defense against fly by night miners stranding it at high difficulty. So chances are it does not even stay at any one difficulty long enough for the averae time per block to settle down to a reasonable average before poof the difficulty changes and the averaging has to start all over again. So chances are it is always as much a measure of luck as a measure of hashrate.

All you really know is the difficulty.

For coins that take many many blocks before changing difficulty, if you estimated the hashrate as of the last block before the difficulty changed, that would give you the best estimate but even then it would only be estimating the average hash-rate across that many blocks, not the hash rate at that moment.

-MarkM-

I wouldn't risk using Cryptsy at all, its entire purpose seems to be to enable as many scams as possible as quickly as possible so it is hard not to just throw their entire operation into the scam category itself.

So basically one has to figure it is not whether they will run with your money, it is when they will do so...

And maybe the answer to that is, when scamming people stops looking so profitable, as in, when enabling scammers to cash in on their scams ceases to be so lucrative it will be time to scam all the scammers by running with their money.

-MarkM-

The animation was an original work.

The new email stuff for a new forum is some original work placed on top of an existing off the shelf forum system.

An auction site is simply clicking install on an off the shelf auctions system and maybe entering some categories and maybe plugging in some kind of plugin or module that enables cryptocurrencies instead of fiat to be used.

Actually I don't know if the off the shelf auction systems even handle currency themselves directly at all as in automated payments automated commissions and so on, if they do not - if all the actual money is handled externally to the scripts that run the forum - then you are talking about just installing a web-app and hosting it. Then things like moderators or whatever as on-going expenses.

How hard can it be to just install an off the shelf web-app?

Seems to me maybe everything is getting wildly inflated.

Per the authors thing, consider that since wikipedia is free open source content, any existing wikipedia author who already does 10 hours per week of work on wikipedia could in principle be considered qualified as a developer thus get one share. If they were working on something specifically needed by the DeVCoin project - which for instance we could even claim Devtome qualifies as - then they could qualify with only ten hours per month.

So just with that much in place we could tell wikipedia authors they could get the same pay (one share every round) doing only ten hours per month of work for Devtome as they could get by doing forty hours per month for wikipedia or any other not directly DeVCoin-needed free open source writing.

A key thing here is the idea was to reward people who already without pay spend lots of hours creating free open source stuff.

A lot of why they don't tend to "dump" the coins is the coins are, to them, free extras, tips, something they never even need to think about because they already as a lifestyle always spent many hours creating free open source stuff. They basically go like oh cool, sure, a steady stream of tips that might some year turn out to be valuable, thanks a lot, but I am already making free open source stuff anyway so pardon me if I just leave those coins on a back burner for a few years until they add up to a nice reward for all my years of freely working on free open source stuff...

Nowadays instead it seems we have a bunch of professional author cum barracks-lawyers gobbling up all the money so the people originally intended to benefit - the people who already put in huge numbers of hours year after year freely creating free open source stuff - are finding their rewards are hardly even worth bothering to count up to see if the year has come yet to cash them in.

(Which is yet another reason they don't dump, it is like huh I got maybe $61 this month? Sheesh lets give it another few years to see if it ever becomes even worth the time it would take to set up a wallet to access the damn things...)

-MarkM-

EDIT: Is there a way to see your latest edits? I wrote some stuff a while back and did not link it to my user-page so was going to look at my last edits lists to find it but cannot find a list of the last edits that i did...

Novacadian told me that when he tried to write on Devtome about his game, he was told such writing did not qualify because the game was not a free open source game.

So from the sound of that yes maybe the things being written about should be free open source things.

I have written a lot about my metagame, but it is all made up of free open source games so it qualifies.

-MarkM-

Wikipedia never paid authors, did it?

So I guess it ran out of content/authors?

Even in relatively early days when pretty much anyone could give themselves a link or few from Wikipedia just by picking a relevant page and editing it to give themselves a link the links alone were valuable, worth becoming and author to get.

I think wikipedia pretty much proves that not paying authors doesn't lead to no authors and/or bad content.

How about we try a bounty system for the Devtome project as a whole?

Offer bounties such as "Devtome gets X number of DeVCoin shares if it manages to reach $#### paycheque from Adwords" ?

Have Devtome do its own sharing out of its DeVCoins to its authors any way it wants, but DeVCoin only award minted coins to it when/if it meets specific goals such as a certain sized ad-revenue cheque, a certain average pagerank of its pages, a certain pagerank of its highest ranked page, a certain amount of daily traffic to project X, a certain amount of daily traffic to project Y and suchlike?

Then the authors could work together to try to maximise such features of the Devtome as a whole...

-MarkM-

Yes well there is of course the idea that if a population is seemingly not generating enough income its curators / custodians / tourist-boards / someone should find ways to make use of / make valuable / make valued / value what it is they actually do, even if that means just admitting we are a nation of slackers who dribble a lot and making that a tourist attraction.

-MarkM-

Its original importance was that it was the only even potentially revenue-generating project.

There were supposed to be lots of revenue-generating projects but we seem to have ended up giving people bounties for creating their own privately held and not even open source revenue generating projects (bounties for exchanges that exchange devcoins, for example; Open Transactions is the only free open source exchange I know of so far, yet it is not the only exchange that got a bounty for including devcoins among their currency-pairs, is it?)

I guess maybe somewhere along the line the idea of the project owning its own revenue-generating businesses got lost, so instead in some kind of despair or somethng bounties started being given instead to third party businesses that merely happen to use devcoins in some way.

Businesses which presumably ought to have been run by the project itself, if the idea of the project having income generators was still a goal. Instead we have rewarded people for creating competing businesses maybe, in effect.

e.g. Maybe an example of a revenue generating site would be one that sells gift cards; but instead of creating a bounty for developing the project such a site, the profits of which the project would use to buy devcoins on markets to support the exchange rate, we somehow ended up paying someone or someones else to create such sites of their own instead of to create such sites for the project to own and use in its supposed strategic plan of making a bunch of revenue generating free open source projects so that it would have revenue with which to buy devcoins thus to uphold devcoin exchange rates.

Presumably using the original idea as I understood it what we would do with free open source spaceships once we 3d-printed them ought to be to use them in a business such as maybe a space tourism business or asteroid mining or something in order to obtain revenue with which to purchase devcoins on exchanges so that devcoin exchange rates would be upheld. A kind of a central bank concept though in a way, this idea that the project would deliberately buy devcoins in order to make devcoins have value...

So presumably we would hire astronauts and stewards and such with DeVCoins, to run these businesses, but offering the products and services of these businesses not only for DeVCoins but for any currency we could use to purchase DeVCoins on exchanges.

-MarkM-

You don't want to create something great.

At best, you want someone else to create something great but take as much of the credit as possible yourself.

At worse you just want to scam money out of people with the same old same old "altcoin IPO scam" that is so fashionable lately.

-MarkM-

Nope.

But it is not my system.

I have been using Vircurex to post offers all day without problem.

(Firefox on Fedora 17.)

-MarkM-