Not many years ago (oops, well, if 15 years or so is not many...)  you could get the original canvas of one of my dad's paintings for that kind of price!

I expect they are more than that by now though.

How slow a turnaround do you want, though?

How long did Frazetta used to take to come up with cover art for a paperback?

Do you think he managed it in 24 hours?

I suppose it is possible though that it might have only cost a couple of grand way back when, before those covers made his work famous...

Brand consultancy is a whole 'nother thing. Guiness paid oodles just to get told the harp is good, keep the harp...

-MarkM-

Have you read the DUNE series by Frank Herbert?

Apart from the originator of the coin and the possibly crazy VladVlad the possibly non-transexual Transylvanian IXCoin might not have holders large enough to be able to come up with 3 BTC worth of IXCoin, but maybe a fund-raising effort could try to.

The Ixians in various aspects of Galactic Milieu have been promoting IXCoin in the Milieu, and pointing to Herbert's Ixians as one possible in-game or in-science-fiction origin of the name.

I know that does not match the current website's concept of IXCoin as Internet eXchange Currency but layer upon layer of associations is all to the good, right? Especially since Herbert's IX is probably a trademark or something so these Ixians' personal associations are not really suitable for direct use in the mass market.

Nonetheless if you are familiar with the kind of ornate high - but technically within the bounds imposed by the rules established during the Butlerian Jihad - technology maybe you could come up with something that fans of that kind of Ixian might like while also addressing the concept of Internet eXchange Currency?

I like your funky coin creative, the figurative art reminds me of some of my father's stuff...

https://www.google.com/search?q=Graham+Metson+figurative

-MarkM-

You can't buy GRouPcoin, CoiLedCoin. or GeistGeld on Cryptsy so maybe a few of one or more of those would "sweeten the deal" ?

They don't have web pages at all I think, hmm, maybe they should consider some bounties for such things too...

-MarkM-

Nice, thanks, I shared it on Facebook.

-MarkM-

Yes but we don't need insecure "store of wealth" scams.

If the second/alternative currency is to be blockchain-based like Bitcoin is, someone needs to create ASICs for some other form of hashing than SHA256(SHA256(data)), and do so both as hobbyist cute little USB kind of scale devices and as smallest node available devides such as the KnC Neptune.

With such devices, especially the USB ones, on the shelf in massive quantities ready for launch, and no one knowing what the hashing chosen actually was until after a massive launch that hopefully starts it right out of the gate at massive difficulty, maybe it will be possible to get a second choice coin decently started toward being secure, and with enough massive publicity / huge network before its type of hashing gets too fragmented by all the wannabe clones that will doubtless spring up.

Maybe more likely is that the second choice coin will not be blockchain based at all, thus saving it the insanely high cost of trying to secure a blockchain.

("To secure your currency for you, we demand 100% of all of it that will ever be minted, plus also transaction fees on top of that." Is that insane cost or what?!?!)

-MarkM-

UKB, CDN, GMC, GRF, MBC, NKL, UNS ...

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

-MarkM-

Not if "mining" involves nodes that find proof that you relayed I2P packets correctly for them crediting you coins, for example...

-MarkM-

Maybe 0.25 bitcoins was enough, or maybe the person who claims to have sent 0.25 was not the only victim and however much of the coins were not the OP sending to itself was enough.

Given the easy acceptance of totally obvious scams it might be more lucrative to just keep spawning new ones than to waste any time or effort trying to make any of them look at all believable.

-MarkM-

I have many hundreds of open orders.

I have many on the same price, even, because I have started back at one satoshi all over again many times by now.

I post my offers manually though, not via the API. Maybe the API has limitations the website/webpage version doesn't.

Heck I just started back at one satoshi again today and am still in the process of filling each satoshi of price yet again on the buy side.

Yes it is important to fill every satoshi of price, because otherwise people try to break, to sit on a price you didn't sit on yet.

If there are no prices sitting empty except where the buys meet the sells - in the "spread" region - they tend to go there, which means you can kind of hint them along.

There is a bot it seems for example on the I0Coin and IXCoin markets on Vircurex that very annoyingly tends to refuse to let even a tiny little offer get in front of it in the sense of being closer to the spread region that it is.

It keeps three batches of coins on hand to sell, and if you place an offer at a lower sell price than it's lowest sell price it cancels the highest price of its three orders and put it one satoshi lower in price than your offer.

Even if it is dealing with a few thousand at a time and you place an offer to sell only ten, it seemingly cannot stand the idea that you might get to sell your ten whatevers before it has managed to sell its few thousand. But if you place offers at every satoshi way down toward the spread-region, you can sometimes manage to get your offer to stick, maybe because it does not want to sell for less than it bought for or something.

Rather than play cancel-and-re-offer with it, just putting offers on every satoshi lets me get tons of offers in on the whole range it tries to play leapfrog with, so ultimately my average sell price is higher than the sell price it ends up leapfrogging its way down to.

On the buy side, the purpose is to uphold the price/value of the coin, so having an offer on every satoshi means every satoshi of price is going to cost who-ever tries to drive the price down. There are no freebies, each and every satoshi they want to drive the price down is going to cost them.

I have lately been placing offers to buy one or ten million divided by the satoshis of price, so that each satoshi they try to drive it down will cost them more (of what they are selling) than the previous satoshi of price did.

If you look at many order books, often it seems the opposite: everyone is crowding their buy offers up near the highest price, as soon as that thin crust is broken, the so called resistance maybe could be what it is I do not know the terminology really, but once the people clamouring to buy at high prices are sold to often from there on down is a crash waiting to happen, hardly anyone apparently wants to buy for low prices. No wonder we see crashes so often in cryptocoin, everyone apparently wants to buy high and failing that not buy at all!

Similarly on the sell side: everyone wants to sell cheap, but once you buy that thin crust of cheap sell offers, it is thin air going way the heck up, so prices seem to skyrocket because so few people, so far between, want to sell for high prices!

-MarkM-

It is easy to find the genius Devs: they are the ones dedicated to genius projects, busily hiring all the best coders they can get hold of because there is no way they can write all of the code for the genius projects all by themselves.

You might consider Jed for example, who created MtGox and sold it, created Ripple and is rumoured to have moved on from that too.

What did he move on to, though? I do not know. Evidently not to your genius projects?

The genius devs seem to usually pay top dollar to get the best coders and cryptographers and such, maybe you can convince them that it might also be worth their while to hire the best graphical artists, logo designers, catchy-phrase makers or whatever else it is that you do.

Do you also do marketing, by the way? As in high clickthrough ratio landing pages, high response email campaigns, maybe even to vast targeted email lists that you have built up during your career?

Maybe if you demonstrate your value by helping a genius dev maximise the value of the genius project that is currently taking up all their time you can then attempt to convince them that your genius projects deserve a place closer to the front of their queue of genius projects yet to be worked on rather than falling way off the end beyond all the projects they already have lined up but just don't have time to get to... (Until, maybe, a genius like you accelerates their current project's success so they can move on through the queue faster?)

I think there is an article out there somewhere though about the ability to even recognise genius devs (aka hackers), I will try to find it for you.

EDIT: Maybe it was this one: http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

-MarkM-

For each percent of the total coins in circulation you yourself own, what percent of all coins would you personally consider "too few actively mining" enough to cause you to fire up a "miner" yourself?

For example if you owned half the coins, and one day it came to your attention that only ten percent of all the coins were online aka actively mining, would that be a dire enough situation to lead you to put some of your own coins online so they too could "mine"?

If not, at what percent of all coins being online actively mining might you consider firing up a node yourself?

Consider two different backdrops to that:

In one, your fifty percent of all the coins adds up to a total market value of only a day or so electricity and bandwidth cost of putting a node online.

In the other, your fifty percent of all the coins adds up to a total market value equal to many years of electricity and bandwidth cost of putting a node online, plus enough to buy hardware for two to a thousand or more nodes, and all that is without spending more than half your coins.

-MarkM-

Destroying bitcoins! Awesome, I hope you destroy lots and lots and lots of them.

Unfortunately, it is not clear how you propose to destroy 420,000,000 of them ?

-MarkM-

BTER's scripts (they are used elsewhere also so this might apply to any exchange using those scripts) seem to be broken.

It will not let me cancel my highball sell orders.

The tables where it purports to be showing me my active orders only shows four of my sell orders, and those are the lowest ones, which are not the ones I want to cancel because, who knows, maybe someone might actually take me up on some of them.

But I spent a lot of tiem yesterday placing orders way way up high, step by step, and the pale blue shading on the order book that indicates prices at which at least part of the order is your own shows many of my orders must still be active, although that table too only shows some of them, maybe about halfway up through the range of orders that I placed.

Now I wanted to cancel a few of my highest sell-orders but they do not even appear on the list of active orders.

Is this just a temporary glitch or is that script "broken by design" or what?

I think the active orders list might also not be showing all of my buy orders either. It only shows four of my sell orders and the rest of what it shows are buy orders, but it is not showing many orders at all so I suspect quite likely the buy orders that it does show are only a few of what I actually placed.

-MarkM-

The coin isn't important, the technology is.

Once the technology works presumably many many coins will be able to migrate to it, such as all the coins currently using blockchains that they are unable to secure.

Maybe even also some of those that already moved away from un-secure-able blockchains to Open Transactions.

-MarkM-

I don't think it has anywhere near Open Transactions' functionality yet.

-MarkM-

Yeah very short-sighted. They'd rather burn a million-dollar bill to sell its ashes for a penny than wait for the bank to have a million dollars in stock to redeem it for.

-MarkM-

Isn't it distributed / P2P ?

-MarkM-

The most profitable alt is one that you and all these others running around looking for it have not found yet.

Once you find it oh well time to move on as it won't be profitable anymore.

Slash-and-burn agriculture turned out not to be as effective in the long run as sustainable agriculture, crop rotation, heck a lot of innovations that happened since slash and burn was the best method known.

Might be similar with cryptocoins?

-MarkM-

Thus try not to spend bitcoins on such things.

What I did was spend BBQcoins on them, since they were an almost free windfall (their difficulty was low enough for almost a whole year that they could be CPU mined so I just had a core of one of my remote servers mine them all year).

Sure I had to turn the BBQcoins into bitcoins on the way to cashing them out, but I gritted my teeth closed my eyes and pretended I was spending the BBQcoins, trying to ignore the awkward fact they were in bitcoin form momentarily in the process.

A whole heck of a lot of them got stuck as bitcoins though so I try to view it has having lucked into vast numbers of bitcoins plus also some nice rigs, instead of as having not held on to as many bitcoins as I could have.

Basically I got so many bitcoins from those BBQcoins that it seemed reasonable to diversify.

Plus those BBQcoins had taught me that it is the coins that are not on exchanges that have the largest potential for profit.

Once a coin gets onto an exchange it tends to get harder to mine it. A coin on an exchange might need all your block eruptors all pointed at it to get a few, whereas the ones not on exchanges yet each eruptor could be pointed at a different one and do well, if there were as many such coins as you have eruptors.

Part of why I bought ASICs was there was no place to buy I0Coin and GRouPcoin and CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld so I wanted to merged mine as many as possible before the masses realised they were leaving all of those out of their merge.

As it was, I0Coin got back onto mmpool and then an exchange before I had much time at all to take advantage of its low difficulty. I had hoped for many months of quietly picking it up with all those block-eruptors that I bought.

Bitparking's mmpool also picked up GRouPcoin when it picked back up I0Coin, so I also didn't get much time to pick up GRP at low difficulty with my block-eruptors. But CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld are still nicely under the radar so are coming in all day every day at a nice rate...

-MarkM-

Also, difficulty is far from out of reach of hobby miners.

Little USB munchkin miners are still making money, and could be had for only about $13 to $15 or so at one point.

It is much easier on a hobbyist budget to pick up a $13 to $15 item from time to time - or heck even pay $20 to $30 each for some a friend of a friend is phasing out as he moved on to larger rigs as a friend of a friend recently did - than to blow $150 or more at a time picking up a used GPU on Kijiji or Craigslist or whatever.

-MarkM-