Miners' attitude kind of drives away business, y'know.

Even making it darn near free for them to mine a coin doesn't get them on board so coming up with technology that does not need miners at all becomes a necessity.

Long long ago CDN, MBC, UKB, UNS, NKL and so on moved away from using blockchains - moved away from using/needing miners - because it became clear that even bending over backward to accomodate miners by making a coin capable of being merged-mined right alongside Bitcoin using the same hashing power the miner is already using was not going to work, was not going to adequately secure the blockchains.

Bending over backwards isn't enough for the miners, it seems; they require everyone to bend over forwards instead. So to speak.

Miners evidently cannot be relied upon to do their part in securing blockchains even given merged mining; even though the marginal cost of merging a few more chains is almost negligible.

Miners thus became a big liability that blockchains accrue, making it more and more necessary to find alternative methods of securing ledgers / consensus.

-MarkM-

So you are looking to hire someone to clone NXT once NXT source code is released?

What is the 50 blocks thing about then?

-MarkM-

No one is going to be able to code your pure proof of stake if you refuse to explain how it works.

-MarkM-

What pure proof of stake algorithm / procedure will you use?

Please link to the whitepaper detailing how it works.

-MarkM-

When Canadian Digital Notes (CDN), Martian BotCoin (MBC), United Kingdom Britcoin (UKB) etc were created the idea was that each and every nation in Freeciv would be able to have its own coin.

So that Japanese coin logo looks potentially useful.

Back then of course what the various jurisdictions on this planet might decide to say and do about blockchain based currencies was unknown, so relating them to Freeciv nations provided a way of getting them up and running in virtual universes without necessarily having to worry at that early stage about what people on the planet known as Earth might do or say about its validity, legality and so on.

Since Freeciv also allows nations to build markets, banks and stock-exchanges, I also got involved with Open Transactions, so that eventually players would have the option of actually utilising the markets, banks and stock exchanges that they build.

The big problem that was encountered though is that blockchains are insanely expensive to secure.

Even using merged mining it is really really expensive; to this day most miners do not merged mine at all, or if they do merge they only merge a few of the merged mined coins. Getting them to merge more would be extremely expensive.

Thus most of the coins moved away from using blockchains for now, instead using Open Transactions until such time as either blockchains become feasible to secure or some other technology comes along that is feasible to secure.

I have not been a big fan of domains though, since way way back when I offered on ebay, as a matched set, windows.com, windows.net and windows.org and got no bids at all. I still receive regularly from ebay a monthly "bill" showing they owe me $2.50 for failing to find even a bidder, let alone a buyer, for that auction...

I ended up letting those domains go.

-MarkM-

None. It was mined at normal speed, by anyone who chose to, no GPUs or FPGAs or ASICs needed, having been announced well in advance and how it works described in a whitepaper.

-MarkM-

Is there a ledger showing what the pre-mine has been spent on so far, and a budget accounting for what it is to be spent on going forward?

The reason I0Coin was created was that IXCoin had a pre-mine, and to this day that pre-mine is not accounted for...

People are still sitting around waiting for the developer to show up and pay off the various bounties they have earned and holding off on doing new things due to wondering whethr he will in fact pay them if they do work on the coin...

-MarkM-

How fast? Faster or slower than GeistGeld?

-MarkM-

It was not pre-mined. It was announced long in advance, a whitepaper was published, then once the genesis block was created everyone was free to mine it if they chose.

It also was not insta-mined upon release either.

-MarkM-

Litecoin was the third scrypt coin, after Tenebrix and Fairbrix (both of which are still running, I think.)

-MarkM-

The genius devs have already built the genius code under the hood, but are you capable of wrapping it in brands and skins and marketing campaigns that will make it catch on?

You don't need a developer, you just need a user interface editor, which, conveniently for you, QT supposedly has.

I have no idea what exactly it does, but presumably it aims at being like CSS is supposed to be on the web, an abstraction layer that lets graphic designers screw around with the cosmetics without needing programmers, code rewrites, and stuff like that?

A skinning system, or something like that?

If so you should be able to basically proceed through all the most well-established coins buying up some then releasing an awesome new theme, skin, logo and so on and so on, and make fortunes.

I'd still suggest that you start with Bitcoin, because if you double the value of a puny alt you make a few people a few thousand bucks richer maybe, but if you double the value of bitcoins you make lots of people a heck of a lot richer. So the scale of gratitude possible seems like it would maybe be a heck of a lot higher with Bitcoin.

Its about disposable income. Seems like a lot of folks playing with alts don't have any disposable income, and you'd have to multiply the value of their alt some massive number of times before they'd begin to come close to having some disposable income.

But with BItcoin tons of people have lots of disposable income and many many many more will have even if the value only doubles.

Even just doubling the value of Bitcoin would likely create many people who would be able to afford to pay the 3 bitcoins you want for branding an alt for hundreds upon hundreds of alts if proliferating umpteen alts is actually a good thing to do.

(I mean one person paying for umpteen brandings, not oodles of people able to afford one branding each.)

For example if you release a super-attractive branding of Bitcoin that doubles the value of bitcoins I could afford to buy a branding for each of the child chains that one merged mines alongside it. (That is to say, NaMeCoin, DeVCoin, GRouPcoin, IXCoin, I0Coin, CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld.)

-MarkM-

EDITED: Listed the child chains that are merged mined alongside Bitcoin.

Death? What death? When did DOGE purportedly die?

-MarkM-

If you don't think "Imagine" and "Mind Games" are or involve ideas, I pity you.

Do you live in an elevator, or CDs/DVDs don't come with lyrics and you can't make them out ?

-MarkM-

Actually that number of coins is I think maybe outside the safe range, there is an article somewhere pointing out that the numbers Satoshi chose carefully fit into the ranges of numbers various programming and script languages can conveniently work with.

Much more than 21,000,000 coins and something somewhere in some language or other breaks, kind of thing.

Unless you use less digits after the decimal point so as to free up more digits before the decimal point.

So if they have less than eight digits after the decimal it should be fine, assuming they chose the correct number of digits after the decimal to free up enough space before the decimal to accomodate that max number of coins.

-MarkM-

It varies. If the coin wants to have a "how many in total have been issued so far" readout then yeah, problem.

(e.g. Proof of Stake coins, with their "money supply" readout.)

Coins based on Bitcoin though, like DevCoin, nothing in the code tries to add it all up, so as long as no individual transaction, wallet, or address has too many coins it should work.

Java, python etc programmers writing external systems to interface with it might have to resort to bignum libraries or something though.

Exchanges for example, how many exchanges written in PHP use some kind of bignum library?

-MarkM-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dHUfy_YBps

-MarkM-

Playing those mind games, forever...

-MarkM-

Supposedly the Buttercup or Butterball or whatever it was exchange software might not be just a free open source front end that requires their closed back end server to actualyl do the trades; someone said recently the server is free open source too.

If so then maybe that might be a good start for the exchange project.

-MarkM-

And the pets! Poor little dogs and cats being exploited like that...!

-MarkM-

Open Transactions already has a Java client, otapi-J.

NXT is a p2p network though, Open Transactions is server/client so far no federated servers yet for example.

NXT seems maybe more like Ripple, even down to having its own currency built into it like RIpple has their XRP.

-MarkM-