s/maystart/may start/

s/Moto/Motto/

This is a bit subtle maybe but when it says popularity is on the rise and shows a generally on average rising plot-line, the line ends on a downwards slope not an upwards slope. Wouldn't it be better for that last hint as to where it is headed be an upwards one?

-MarkM-

I am not suggesting prohibition. Just tell people plainly that if they are into scams and want to participate in scamming people there are exchanges that specialise in that so go play in those exchanges.

Meanwhile try to find an exchange you can mention to friends without feeling like you are sending them out to get scammed.

In Canada we have CAvirtex which handles only Bitcoin and CAD, that seems maybe a little more conservative than most people here would prefer I expect.

There is also Vault of Satoshi, I guess it is time to see what else they carry besides Bitcoin and CAD, although I have found they are insanely hard to get clearance for since they are doing things like asking for two photo IDs, which no one in Canada even has unless they are globe-trotters thus equipped with a passport.

Though they also are inconsistent with that; after much argument with them over email they now claim a credit card or birth certificate will do as a second ID even though they don't have photos on them.

I have been using Vircurex so far, but when they suddenly listed DOGE that worried me a lot, then the fact they seemingly were not listing DOGE to replace one of the other scrypt coins that has even more pathetic hashrate thus even more vulnerability than DOGE that worried me even more. Are they too going to end up flooded with crap, if only by not dropping the crappiest of the scrypt coins they had when finding a more secure one (higher hashing power) to replace it with?

Any other exchanges that maybe have a few very carefully chosen altcoins instead of letting themselves get lobbied by scammers into adding scamcoins just to make a buck out of fooling the uninformed into buying into blockchains that are not secure and probably never will be secure?

-MarkM-

Surely when a coin that is a good enough investment that you invested in it goes down in price that is a buy opportunity, isn't it?

-MarkM-

Usually it is only the scam-exchanges that specialise in getting as many scams in front of as many suckers as possible as fast as possible that list new coins fast, isn't it?

So maybe it is simpler to just warn against those exchanges instead of worrying about each coin?

-MarkM-

No way. It is back on Bitparking's mmpool merged mining pool since a while back when it was the first of the merged mined coins to get a fix for a RAM hogging problem that all merged mined coins would ultimately have come up against.

It is also on at least one exchange: Vircurex.

-MarkM-

I have been pouring bitcoins into IXCoin trying to do as I do with DeVCoin, the problem is that putting buy offers at every Satoshi of price all the way up is just impractical so I had to go in steps of 100, 25 or 5 Satoshis of price.

I have bought thousands and have them sitting in sell offers waiting to replenish my capital so I can put even more buy offers in place.

I have spent 16+ hour days just typing in offers because Vircurex lacks a tool to say "distribute this many coins into offers at all prices ranging from this price through this price".

It is going to take a long time to fill up the buy side orderbook the way I do for DeVCoins but I just keep plugging away at it and some day I will get there.

I even take money out of my DeVCoin-upholding to put toward upholding IXCoin.

I also have p2pool set up to merged mine so I can support IXCoin's hashrate without thereby sacrificing my ability to also mine other coins that for whatever reasons other pools have not seen fit to include, such as I0Coin and GRouPcoin that are now on Bitparking's mmpool merged mining pool and CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld that as far as I know are currently not on any public pools.

I am spending fortunes on mining equipment because migrant miners cannot be trusted to stick around securing blockchains so I feel it necessary to have dedicated equipment so I know for sure there is hashpower dedicated that will not run off chasing the latest scamcoin.

I also run an Open Transactions server and make available tables and plots at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html and have been gathering more data for such tables and plots ( see http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc ) that will be added to the tables and plots at the next update / expansion of the tables and plots scripts.

How much skin do you have in IXCoin?

-MarkM-

See http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc

They don't show on the tables and plots yet at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html because I had not accumulated data on them long enough nor really had much need/motivation yet to dig into the scripts to add them.

There is quite a few months of data collected on them by now though already.

Eventually I will break the tables and plots into up to the timestamp just before I started collecting info on these ones that weren't in there and the timestamps after I added them, since the plots are getting a bit scrunched up horizontally anyway so do need splitting up into old plots and recent plots at some point anyway.

Bounties / donations would be a way to acquire some of these coins you imagine yourself unable to acquire.

-MarkM-

Maybe it is more the exchanges that are the scammers really, since in some cases the authors of a new coin might not know for sure exactly how much dedicated hashing power they will be able to secure their blockchain with until they actually show it to miners.

But the exchanges are in a position to see whether a coin has at least half of the CPU power or half of the GPU/FPGA power or half of the specific type of ASICs the coin is mined with when deciding whether the coin is sufficiently secure - that is, has enough hash power of its type that it cannot be 51%-attacked aka 50+% attacked - before listing it.

Any coin which does not have enough mining power to be secure should not be listed, as listing it is basically simple a scam to scam people who do not understand how blockchains are secured out of their money.

-MarkM-

Yeah, sure, like Visacoin and all the other similar scams.

-MarkM-

This coin is broken by design, it should have had a Satoshi-dice type game built right into it for people who buy/win/earn the coin to play, not some stupid "random" pay for securing the actual blockchain (aka block-rewards).

A Satoshi-dice type game you can play without any third party website involved, with the "house edge" going to the miners, could have maybe actually been decent, but yet another poker-chip that is insecure and probably never going to be secure is just another scam.

Sites who aren't intending to throw their money away would be better off supporting Bitcoins than this totally insecure and probably unable to be secured piece of crap.

-MarkM-

GeistGeld is the super-fast-transactions small-change "sleeper" coin of the merged mined family, how about putting GeistGeld donation addresses in your .signatures so folks can send you some? Then hang on to them and also add them to your merge when mining. (But don't forget to also merge CoiLedCoin too of course, that is also somewhat of a "sleeper" at the moment so like GeistGeld is great for picking up at low difficulty right now before some public pool picks them up.)

-MarkM-

Scams are not gambles, they are deliberate theft/fraud.

If you ask "should I throw away my money on a blatantly obvious scam by a blatant scammer that does not give a damn that everyone knows they are a scammer and it is a scam because they know morons/idiots throw money away insanely around here" maybe you will find it easier to decide.

-MarkM-

Broken by design, I think.

I suspect they simply have some tiny number they use for how many active orders to display, instead of actually showing all your hundreds or whatever of active orders that you actually have.

-MarkM-

If topsites start also considering transactions pumpers will just send transactions round and round in circles to pump the transaction volume.

-MarkM-

The lower it goes the better, as not only is it a buying opportunity is also could reveal how much dedicated hashing power the DOGE community actually has, once all the migrant miners who just gang-bang any coin that comes to their attention as "momentarily profitable if sold before it matures" move on to gangbang some other coin.

(Presumably they actually sell the coins they already mined last gang-bang since the coins they mine in instant response to such topsites presumably will be back to no longer being the most profitable by the time the coins they mine mature...)

-MarkM-

Google Adwords?

What are you using for a landing+capture page?

It is crazy to pay for hits you cannot capture. Even if you have a good conversion rate of capturing visitors onto your mailing-list and a damn fine set of messages lined up in the mailing-list software to send out to them to keep them engaged and keep working toward further conversion, resales and so on Adwords is pretty expensive.

If you don't even have a high conversion capture to a high conversion series of emails then adwords is pretty much a waste of money.

How many millions of hits and dollars of experience do you have at adwords campaigns?

Seriously you are up against people with massive experience at every part of the whole adwords-campaigns scene, I sure as heck would not waste even a bunch of dumped BBQcoins on adwords let alone any of my precious merged mined coins.

Google used to constantly send out $100 adwords credits though, at the time I could hardly even give them away. Maybe if everyone who doesn't have an adsense account got their website approved for displaying adsense ads they'd all get free adwords credits to try to lure them into buying adwords, then you could try your adwords campaign idea using umpteen free $100 adwords credits instead of people's precious coins.

The videos are nice, but IXCoin is hard to get, it took literally years of merged mining at mmpool then on my own p2pool to get the few IXCoins I have managed to accumulate, I'd be more inclined to give out GeistGeld or maybe DeVCoins for bounties than IXCoin or I0Coin.

I think we should be promoting the whole merged mining concept, the entire family of merged mined coins, BTC, NMC, DVC, GRP, IXC, I0C, CLC and XGG as one family of coins all mined at once together merged. Denominations of Bitcoin even maybe in a sense. Litecoin is maybe not really the silver to bitcoin's gold as you don't dig them both up at once when mining for metals, a merged mined family makes much better sense as a bunch of metals you pick up any/all of at once when you set out to mine some metals. Maybe NaMeCoin is the silver because silverpoint lets you write on rock (you can write on stone/plaster maybe even drywall aka gyprock with a piece of silver) and NaMeCoin too has this thing of being able to write information down with/in it.

IXCoin is not competing with the rest of the family, or should not be, it is just another member of the family, with its own interesting flavour, mined right alongside all the rest by any miner who is competent enough to set up p2pool (which is dead simple to set up and merged mine with).

IXCoin the boat got missed long long ago. I0Coin got a second chance for everyone to get some at low difficulty when mmpool dropped it, but that opportunity is now gone again as mmpool has picked it back up. They also picked up GRouPcoin at the same time, so gone too are the days when merged miners smart enough to do their own merging instead of wait for some public pool to do it (and thus miss the boat due to public pools making them increase in difficulty so much so fast) were picking up GRouPcoin nice and easy. Instead of moaning about your want/need for bounties how about getting CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld included into your merge as those are where the rewards are to be found in the merged mined family now. Get them before you miss the boat on those too. Any moment now the scamcoins of the day are going to start churning out with merged mining included in them, so make sure you pick up lots of these last two of the old-timers before floods of scamcoins start trying to give a bad name to the whole merged mined family.

Maybe the whole family could be used as "The Allies" in more Hitler footage or something? Have something about how the whole lot of them are all over the place covering everything from data storage (NaMeCoin) through super-fast transactions (GeistGeld)... Maybe IXCoin's speciality is "sudden death" in allusion to its cold turkey sudden stop to minting compared to e.g. I0Coin's tapering off over a longer time. Ixians are hardened/conditioned to stare death in the face, sudden death is no stranger to them, they have lived with it all their lives... But like heroes, they only die but once, not a thousand times like cowards...

-MarkM-

Hmm I realise in my previous post I neglected to point out that actually the shortest simplest route would be to use the already built into the MUD internal currency to organise all the workers, then once you have all those workers running around all equipped with that local currency, build an exchange where that currency can be exchanged for other currencies such as blockchain based coins, fiat, WoW gold, Lindens, or anything else that an exchange operator might choose to list or that the workers (or the players who operate them) might be interested in trading for / exchanging for.

So basically you would "CPU-MUDmine" DeVCoins by trading stuff in the MUD for MUD-currency which you would then exchange for DeVCoins at an exchange.

In practice this would probably mean creating an asset such as "MUDgaard Archon Notes" (dMAN ?) on an Open Transactions server which could then on the server's markets be traded for dDVC, dBTC, dUKB, dCDN, etc etc etc - all the other assets that server supports.

(The main reason such an asset has not been deployed yet is FellowTraveler says all contracts, assets, nyms and even server-IDs are going to have to be re-done sometime because he now wants to incorporate checksums into such IDs instead of using raw hashes as IDs, to help catch typos humans might make when typing such IDs. So it seemed we might as well wait for those newfangled IDs to be implemented before creating any more assets otherwise we'd just be piling up more eventual work of converting to the new IDs when they do arrive.)

-MarkM-

But that turns the entire history of the coin into a lie.

You might just as well change bitcoin's minting rate to make it just keep on issuing 25 coins per block forever instead of continuing to halve its block subsidy.

It violates the most basic identity/nature of the coin, the covenant everyone agreed to that made the coin the particular coin that it is.

It seems a total violation of trust.

Everyone knew up front it was going to cold turkey at a certain block, that was much of the entire point of the coin, and if they didn't want that they presumably would not have bothered to hold or acquire any of the coins.

If you want a longer period of still generating some coins, maybe I0Coin is a better coin for you than IXCoin?

Or if you want a coin that keeps minting forever, maybe DeVCoin, GRouPcoin, CoiLedCoin or GeistGeld might better fit your needs/preferences?

-MarkM-

Oh I am not in a hurry. I am more trying to wrap my head around the whole "business plan" idea really.

I guess maybe what is needed is a commodities exchange, something I have been working towards for a long time.

The way I was working toward it was initially, years ago, by searching for market software that would let people trade "X amount of Y located at location X" for "A amount of B located at location C" type of trades.

So for example they could go like "I will trade you a WoW magic shield of thus and such a type, located at such and such a place in the WoW universe, for a magic helmet of such and such a type located in such and such a universe".

That search led me to find Bitcoin and Open Transactions (OT has markets, no explicit location sutff yet until they add "deeds" category of assets but still its a start and one could create location-based assets like instead of a grams of gold asset one could create a grams of gold located in a vault in London, grams of gold located in a vault in New York, grams of world of warcraft gold located in the inventory of thus and such a character in World of Warcraft and so on as separate assets).

Where I have been at lately on the road toward commodity exchanges has been to try to first have warehouses or whatever - stockpiles - of various things first, since I figured no one is going to bother to make for example a Deuterium exchange until first there are huge stockpiles of Deuterium secured somewhere to exchange, no one is going to bother to make a MUD pounds of stone exchange until there are many many pounds of stone already mined in a MUD and ready to be exchanged, and so on.

So I guess it also seemed pretty natural to me that once all kinds of stones and metals and woods and foods and so on had been stockpiled large scale trade would be able to commence, thus that people would be able to sell off that kind of stuff for various media of exchange such as devcoins, bitcoins, whatever, because supposedly it is more useful to use a medium of exchange than to directly barter e.g. stone for food or metal for food or metal for wood or wood for stone etc etc etc...

(No one bothers to build exchanges for altcoins that no one has, right? So why would anyone bother to build exchanges/markets/etc for resources no one has yet mined, woodchopped, foraged etc?)

One way I figured media of exchange would enter into it though was to do with scale.

Suppose a player on the individual character level of play wants to build a Freeciv-scale unit of settlers. That is a unit that, upon founding a city, creates a city with a population listed as 10,000 which might mean 10,000 families even though conservatively presumably means at least somewhere in the vicinity of 10,000 people even if that counts minors and babes-in-arms. The objective presumably would be to load that Freeciv-scale unit of settlers onto a Freeciv-scale starship to travel to a world they can colonise.

A Freeciv turn takes a year, so we are now looking at needing like maybe a million doses of lemonade or lime juice or something to keep those settlers from getting scurvy on their journey, and maybe three million meals so they can eat three meals a day per son on the journey, and gosh knows how many spades and pickaxes and skirts and pants and shoes and boots and shirts and so on and so on and so on to equip those people.

All that is huge scale. There is a fmour red balloon paper in which some university explained how, given that you need many things to obtain an objective, you can use a medium of exchange to co-ordinate smaller portions of the goal, so as to motivate people who might not be able personalyl to e.g. make a million dodes of lemonade to nonethess contribute some amount of lemonade toward the higher goal.

So I envisioned that the large scale would in effect be issuing bounties to the smaller scale.

A person wanting to raise and equip a Freeciv scale unit would basically issue a bounty, of so much of something for a million doses of anti-scurvy fruit or juice, so much of something for ten thousand shirts, so much of something for ten thousand jackets and so on. That "something" would presumably in many cases be a so called medium of exchange. For example it could be DeVCoins.

The small scale jobs then would arise from the larger scale... Lots and lots of individual fruit-packer, juice-maker and so on jobs would arise from what on the larger scale seems to be such a simple thing, "this city will build a unit of settlers"...

-MarkM-

Yeah really, you only lost if you sold while it was low.

Instead, pile them all up as sell orders up high so they get sold off next time it bubbles up again.

If it acts like DeVCoin then these down spells are great, as all your buy orders get hit on the way down, which hopefully are buy orders you placed low as your sell orders got hit on the way up. Ups and downs are the lifeblood of traders.

That is thinking like a trader. Thinking like an investor you should be still confident in your original estimation that the asset is a good investment (else you wouldn't've invested) thus just ignore these temporary down-spells. You wouldn't have unloaded all your bitcoins when they dropped from $32 to $2, would you? Or when they dropped from $1000+ to $725 or whatever?

Either be an investor and hold long term, or be a trader and love the downs as buying opportunities and the ups as times to sell some so as to place new buy orders down low to catch the next dip...

As a trader you want ups and downs, they are your income. As an investor you smile confidently at the "weak hands" who are dumping, maybe pick up more even, knowing full well that you picked winners and it is just a matter of time until they win.

-MarkM-