Okay, but we have no peg/target for price, whether price in bitcoins or price in botcoins or price in britcoins or price in dollars or whatever else.

What we have is a coin that generates new coins every block, just like groupcoin, coiledcoin, and geistgeld do.

Basically we have a family of 8 coins that are all minted by the same mint, albeit not all the workers working in that mint choose to mint all of those coins; and of those 8 coins four of them (BTC, NMC, IXC and I0C - am I right or is NMC actually not like the other 3 in this respect?) stop minting someday, in the case of IXCoin it stops cold turkey in the case of others it "ramps down" the number minted per block over time; and four of them that keep minting forever (DVC, GRP, CLC and XGG).

That seems like a nice balance actually, half inflate half intend eventually not to.

If you happen to prefer coins that ramp down minting or cold turkey their minting, the merged mined family has those, go ahead and play with or utilise those. It also has these constant minting ones, and some people like those, and some people like both, heck some people even like all eight coins of the family. (Some people even sometimes play around with the idea of adding a new coin to the family, since although these 8 between them provide quite a nice spread of different features there are still a few features not found in the family yet.)

-MarkM-

You maybe missed all the long laborious discussings of pegged currencies that happened months ago or maybe even more than a year ago.

People are still trying to invent a method of pegging, see for example the Mastercoin project and the Bitshares / Protoshares / etc project.

Maybe if any such projects prove that pegging is possible it might we worth considering the idea, but so far pegging remains an unsolved problem.

Maybe go discuss with them in their threads how they imagine pegging could be accomplished.

Remember too that difficulty is not the same among even the merged mined coins.

GRouPcoins "should" be worth 1000 DeVCoins each, if they had the same difficulty as DeVCoins, because GRP mints 50 coins every 10 minutes and DVC mints 50,000 coins every ten minutes. But their difficulty is different so they are a long way from that ratio of relative price so far...

Once GRP is stable at 1000 DVC each maybe your idea might seem to have some merit, but right now we have an experiment in progress (GRP vs DVC) testing your hypothesis that the number of coins being mined should or will lead to a ratio of value equal to the ratio of minting rate and so far it has not given much evidence that your theory is valid...

So go ahead and peg GRP as 1000 DVC to demonstrate that you are correct...

-MarkM-

If you will never have as many as one hundred million customers, then you can use the decimals of the amount to identify which customer sent the whole bitcoins part of the value that was sent.

So for example when customer number 12345678 send a bitcoin, have them send 1.12345678 bitcoins.

Either have them send it from a wallet they control so you can send the "change" (0.12345678 bitcoins) back to the sending address, or have a "change address" for each customer in your database so you know where to send the change.

If you do want to use the memo field, go ahead and use a coin that has a memo field. But bitcoin has no memo field per se yet.

See however the work that is going on toward a payments layer that will carry extraneous information between merchant and customer and vice-versa...

-MarkM-

The Canucks tried to peg Canadian Digital Notes (CDN) to CAD, and the Brits tried to peg United Kingdom Britcoins (UKB) to GBP.

The Martians ended up massively in profit from that because of course every time the CDN started to be worth more than one CAD the Canucks had to sell off CDN to bring the price down and the Martians bought it and every time the UKB started to be worth more than one GBP the Brits had to sell off UKB to bring the price down and the Martians bought that too.

End result was the Martian BotCoin climbed in value more/faster than CDN and GBP and the Canucks and Brits gave up trying to peg their coins to anything.

So don't try to 'peg' to anything, even trying to 'peg' to the current value whatever the current value is, in order to try to keep value 'stable', is a whole can of worms.

Compared to that, merely trying to always have on hand enough "reserves" of goods services and currencies to be able to provide value in exchange for the coin, thereby supporting the idea that the coin has value, and supporting the magnitude of the value (aka the exchange rate), is much less difficult it seems.

-MarkM-

Pegged currencies are a whole can of worms.

We never intended to peg our value to any other coin or currency.

We "solved" the "a dollar is a thousand or more coins" problem by moving our decimal point from the get-go so we would not eventually hit the same arguments bitcoin was having at the time about how the decimal point should be moved because people who use dollars don't like using three decimal places to express what a dollar is worth.

Now you are beyond trying to mollify people who don't like what a tiny fraction of a coin a dollar is and on to worrying about people who don't like how small a fraction of a thousand dollars (aka a bitcoin) a devcoin is worth...

What about the Martian BotCoin (MBC)? have you checked out what a tiny fraction of a Martian BotCoin a bitcoin, dollar, or devcoin is lately?

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

-MarkM-

If it were true that Democracy actually works, in the sense of actually representing the will and/or desires of the people, then it would seem likely that the majority of franchised adults in so called "democracies" prefer inflationary currencies, as witnessed by the apparent determination of such nations to ensure their currencies remain inflationary.

Just because some minority of gold-bugs, libertarian nutbars and gosh knows what else (Austrian economists, who seem a minority maybe too among economists?) might not like our coin as much knowing it is inflationary does not seem a good reason to abort the grand experiment of minint coins at a fixed rate forever.

It seems possible that the reason we see less shouting lately from people who claim that bitcoin is totally doomed and totally broken-by-design on account of deflation being a bad thing is at least aprtly because, partly to shut them up, we did make some coins that are inflationary.

I wonder how best to get those noisy anti-deflation people into this thread to explain at length and in detail how and why inflation is better than deflation.

-MarkM-

"The Royal 'We'."

(Or if you prefer, "we the people behind the currencies that moved to Open Transactions insead of continuing to use blockchains because 'we' foresaw that attempting to 'back' coins random miners all over the world mint would be a huge problem compared to only 'backing' coins that 'we' ourselves mint.")

The Canucks, Brits, Martians etc told me from the start that if you let other nations other corporations other people - other 'miners', in short - mint 'your' coins 'you' will have a harder time trying to keep up their exchange-rate than if 'you' mint all the coins so that no one else gets any without providing 'you' with something of value so that 'you' remain in a position to 'redeem' aka 'back' the coins by using those things of value you parted with them in return for to 'buy them back' or to stock shops where those things of value could be re-sold for coins which of course is another way to 'back' them. (Back them with goods, basically. Which most miners seem reluctant to do.)

-MarkM-

The number of coins being minted is only 200 million per "round".

The tendency toward zero value has been because of people dumping the coins instead of exchanging them wisely with care in ways that conserve or even enhance their value.

Now that we know the vast majority of people want to drive the value to zero, or maybe more correctly, want to dump them without caring or having to care about how their act effects the future perception of how valuable the coins are thus tend to act much as if they were trying to drive the value to zero, we can adapt to that.

Basically we can start by being set up ready willing and able to buy 200 million coins per "round", then we can continue to increase the number of coins we are prepared to buy, heck we can even keep increasing the "depth" of the buy-side of the order-book(s) to a point where we stand ready to buy not only each and every newly minted devcoin but also each and every devcoin that has already been minted.

It takes time to build up such depth but had we known from the first moment that we got onto the first exchange that the users of the currency would mostly be people who act as if their goal is to drive its value to zero we could have started preparing more robustly and sooner for such an eventuality.

I am not yet sure approximately how long it will take to build up the necessary depth but it can be done, although of course if exchanges tend to run away with the coins every time we build up a vast enough pile of "coins to buy devcoins with so that devcoins will be perceived to have value relative to the coins with which we are prepared to buy them" that will slow us down. Whereas if we keep our "reserves" with which we "back" devcoins off of the exchanges then clearly we face other problems.

Clearly some people are not holding as "reserves" enough of whatever they sell devcoins for to be able to buy back those same devcoins or even any significant fraction of them. Or maybe they do have plenty of "reserves" but are choosing not to use them as aggressively as some might prefer to keep the exchange rate up by buying devcoins when devcoins are cheap.

Now we know that, we should in principle be able adjust for it. So far I still think that we can.

-MarkM-

That is why right now the resulting game(s) are mostly textual.

I can convey stuff in text that I lack the rendering tools necessary to render in three dimensional or even two dimensional imagery.

From a game development perspective the primary use of artists and musicians is as rendering tools, and even then not as run-time rendering tools that actually render the sound and imagery as the player plays the game but, rather, as rendering tools used to render stuff ahead of time, at build/compile time.

Except, of course, in the case of artists and musicians who are skilled at playing rendering-instruments / rendering-tools / modelling-tools etc...

-MarkM-

One major goal of mine is to enable the development of playing.

I want people to be able to play games in which characters such as bards can exist and in which a bard is a type of character that is typically known for his her or it's ability to play and/or sing and/or recite (perform) songs and/or poems.

So development of the ability to play is important for the development of the kind of immersive environments/games I am trying to develop.

In order to develop free open source such games, I need free open source play-techniques and methods for playing free open source songs or instruments, so that, for example, a bard can be portrayed playing an instrument and/or singing a song.

The number of people who want the ability to create such games is not as important or driving really, even if you insist on being able to appeal to a huge audience in order to get lots of advertising revenue, because even if only one person in the entire world produces such games, and thus only one person in the entire world perceives the importance of the ability to tinker with the underlying details that make a particular song sound like the singer has a sore throat, or sound like the singer is female, or sound like the singer is pronouncing the lyrics with a particular accent - pronouncing it the way a certain region's inhabitants pronounce that word for example - and so on the end result game the development of which is enabled by having full access to as much as possible of the underlying mechanisms and instructions might end up being massively appealing to the masses...

-MarkM-

My version of the code is supposedly not to be the "current" version going forward, so any pushes / patches / etc ought to go to the currently in development version, though I am not even sure who is developing that or even if there is only one candate version for that. (Weren't at least two diferent "new versions" being worked on by different people or teams?)

-MarkM-

Not to you it isn't maybe, and I am not really keen at all on the lots of people part because, for one thing, creativity is often not regarded as something that crowds, mobs, masses are considered the ideal of, rather we often see that total loners producing stuff the masses might even try to suppress and certainly do not like are later appreciated for their creativity.

But to me, it is absolutely the case that in order for it to be truly useful for development it needs to be much more than just a teaser that forces me to have to go back to some black box in order to adapt it for use in some particular project or re-cast it in some different character's voice or adjust it in accordance with the fact that the singer turns out, in some particular player's playing of a scenario in which the song is used, to have a bad cold or sore throat or whatever thus sounds different than that same singer does when you bring a bottle of cough-syrup and have the singer drink some of the syrup before singing the song and so on and so on and so on.

There are entire universes being developed, in which singers of many races and species and genders need songs to sing...

-MarkM-

Of course art is being developed and has been since way back long ago, probably further back even than when cave dwellers developed the art and/or science of developing pigments from minerals and plants and maybe even from components of animals and so on, and developed techniques for representing, using such tools, recognisable things such as animals, hunters, maybe even actual hunts...

At some point techniques such as perspective and texture and such were also developed, such that over time the degree of three-dimensionality that could be, or was, conveyed by flat images was increased.

And so on. Nowadays we have developed entire new media and entire new techniques.

-MarkM-

I am still cogitating / meditating upon your schema, but right off the bat it strikes me that a lot of the explanations parts of it seem like condidates for Devtome, by having the explanations in written form.

The written form could be a transcript of course if the artist did not write the explanation down but, rather, spoke it.

It could even be a screenplay / script if the artist did not speak it in words that alone convey the meaning but, rather, used gestures, actual performance of actions / demonstrations so that the initial capture of the material was by means of one or more videocameras / movie-cameras.

Thus even just an artist's explanation of what they consider to be art or how they go about producing and/or developing art could be cast into various artforms (videos, sound recordings, scripts, screenplays, transcripts, wiki articles...)

But this idea of explaining does seem good, because it is maybe more directly related to the actual development of art than maybe a bunch of instances of the products of such development and production might be.

-MarkM-

Okay I will go back and read again.

But meanwhile, I so far still do tend to think that we should be about art development, specifically about free open source art development, rather than about art per se. Art per se includes non free non open source art, and its development is often non free non open source development.

We should in my current opinion as developed (hee hee) so far be about the free open source development of free open source art.

There are plenty of places where people can submit and maybe even be rewarded for non free non open source art development and even the actual pieces of art developed by such processes/means.

-MarkM-

I don't quite follow your reasoning.

Are you saying that you do have a full eight decimals if you use the dvc/cny pair instead of the dvc/btc pair?

In the sense that they are fixing a page at a time and that particular page has so far already been fixed?

Or do you mean that the problem of decimals can be avoided by using currencies that do not have eight decimals anyway so that the lack of support for eight decimals does not matter?

(Implying presumably that the problem only occurs on the "what you buy it with" side not on the "what is being sold" side of pairs?)

-MarkM-

We are devcoin - development coin.

So I do think it should be mostly about the development.

Maybe lets go back to the basic five categories of art, my father is an artist and was part of organising an art expo in Harlow, Essex when I was a kid. The artists designed the logo to have five squares, representing "the" five arts. Presumably at least five types of artist, representing those five arts, were all in agreement that five is how many arts there were. Or hey maybe they really just meant that was how many of "the" arts the expo would be about and would present and represent.

Five different ways of arranging five squares were chosen also so each art could have a distinct logo of its own but all of them being compositions of those five simple grey squares on a white background.

The five types were, I think, something like flat static art (painting/drawing), static three-dimensional art (sculpture), mobile art (dance/drama), sonic art (music/sound), and linguistic art (literature, poetry, presumably the scripts of plays/dramas...)

There is some overlap/crossover already so far, because choreographers might have some notation system (language, linguistic system) they can use to script dances, playwrights definitely have a notation system they use to script plays/dramas, heck even musicians have notation systems they can use to script music.

But we can also see some things that do need development in order to enable these arts. For example for flat art some kind of flat media would likely often be useful, so free open source flat media such as sketch programs and paint programs and designs for paintbrushes and formulae for paints and processes for creating paints and processes for production of flat medias such as canvas and paper and lithography-stones and so on and so on are needed.

Regardless of what emotional experiences your example dude went through before making his song, chances are that someone had developed a musical scale that appealed to him and that he chose to use rather than some other musical scale, and various instruments had been developed out of which he chose an instrument with which to express or perform or play his song and so on.

In case you missed my earlier edit on the end of my earlier post, please notice that devtome rewards people for using a free open source wiki, not, for example, for uploading a microsoft word document...

-MarkM-

Remember that we kind of need to bootstrap the whole process to some extent, and hobble along hobbled by various problems such as needing the free open source tools with which to develop the free open source tools, and needing artists and musicians and so on to use the free open source tools in order to create demand/market for improvement of the free open source tools and so on.

For example some people say free open source tools are not good enough so real artists and musicians do not use them.

I do not think rewarding artists and musicians for not using the free open source tools seems a likely way of encouraging the improvement of such tools.

Partly because free open source does not tend to proceed along a trajectory of "if you build it, then they will come".

Rather the opposite seems more normally / usually the case: unless they come, there is no point building it.

That is why some people claim that much of free open source software seems to be written for the software's developer rather than for masses of people who never even bothered to get involved in the development of the stuff.

Basically the programmers had already come, so what they - the people who did already come - wanted got built.

So if we reward artists and musicians for using free open source tools, and those tools could be improved / could be better, maybe the fact that they need to use those tools in order to get those rewards might cause those artists and musicians to apply more effort and finances and lobbying and so on toward getting those tools improved instead of just running off with some non free open source tool to go do some non free open source project or something.

Presumably the tools work just fine for the programmers who wrote them; maybe it takes a certain amount of knowledge or skill to even perceive whatever problems artists and musicians have with such tools.

-MarkM-

EDIT: Notice that for authors, we reward authors for using a free open source wiki program/site, not, for example, for uploading microsoft word document files...

We want the free open source version.

So we should reward the team that produces it.

This does not mean some dude with a converter gets to steal an artist's license.

It means, rather, that the artist needs to authorise the conversion of his art into a free open source form/format.

The artist's permission is still needed.

I was merely addressing the apparent inability of artists to output their art in free open source formats.

Basically an added layer: bundle the artist into a team that includes someone who can arrange the production of a free open source result, whether that person ends up having to do some kind of a converter or re-train an artist to use something that produces free open source output, or find a different artist, one that is capable of using free open source tools or whatever it takes to get what we want, (which is, I thought, the development of free open source stuff, thus includes the development tools used to develop free open source stuff and the stuff produced using such stuff...)

Presumably part of the hoped for results of our rewarding free open source developers to develop free open source art and music and so on is an increase in the number of artists and musicians who choose to use free open source tools and components and inks and brushes and instruments and such or to develop such things.

Remember we are about development.

It is the development of art and music that we are trying to reward / incentivise, many specific items of art or music might really amount to merely samples / examples of what can be developed under the free open source rubric; we are presumably more interested in the capability to develop such art and music than in any particular items of art or music that are developed.

-MarkM-

BTER unfortunately is broken as far as supporting eight digits of decimals goes.

It has weird things happen like not being able to use all the decimals when placing an order on the website, and displaying with different numbers of decimals on different parts/tables of a page, yet you see offers appear on the orderbooks that have more decimals than you can type in on the page.

It looks like maybe their API si allowing bots to make use of all the decimals while the webpages are inconsistent about how many decimals there are.

The only reason I ever used BTER was BBQcoins, which I have not been able to work with properly over there because of this weird glitch that forces ten satoshi jumps between prices for humans using the website, leaving huge gaps therefore between prices, while bots or the system's own internal manipulations or something gets to jump in-between all your prices by making use of those decimals that you the human are not permitted/enabled to use.

In fact when I started using BTER the extra digits of decimals that the bots or the internal manipulators or who-ever or what-ever were using were not even visible in the order-book, so you'd find you could not buy an offer at its displayed price because it was not displaying the full price, the last one or more decimals were concealed.

Basically the script they are using, which I believe is a commercial script that they sell to other sites or that they along with other sites buy from someone, is broken as far as dealing with bitcoin-based cryptocurrencies go; it was maybe hacked up from some code originally intended for fiat forex (in which one usually uses five decimals and trades blocks of ten thousand units of a currency so that the 10000 units in play at a time makes up for the five decimals, balancing them out by multiplying by 10,000).

Still, it was better to deal with BBQ over at BTER despite the broken scripts than to contemplate the ghastly idea of having Vircurex, which seemed to have been designed for eight decimals all along, get flooded with garbage crapcoins. I certainly do not recommend anyone use any of the scam-central exchanges that specialise in enabling all the new scamcoins that keep coming out, I merely happened to use it because I dabbled in BBQcoin, which was kind of an early proof of how scammy all those new scrypt coins are.

(Think of BBQ as an experiment to see whether having more scrypt coins would be viable; what it seemed to demonstrate was that in fact having another scrypt coin was not viable, yet nonetheless despite the demonstrated lack of viability of an increased number of such coins, more and more such coins keep coming out...)

-MarkM-