I don't think so, but phonic and graphic art gets very complicated because for example you often will find a single-layer image whose source is multiple layers, or a soundtrack whose source is at least partially various sound-bites or a library of various musical notes or sounds, yet they fail to release the underlying sources - the actual layers, the actual musical notes, the actual sound-bites - even though those underlying things that were composited together to form the image or soundtrack are from a programmer's perspective surely the "source material".

For example if a soundtrack is created by performing a number of actions such as "take that drum track over there, run it through this filter that you can download over there, layer on top of it that violin track over there" and so on, you end up with a bunch of such actions and components and arguments start about which parts are programmatic source code (the instructions about what to layer on top of what, which filter to use on which sound-bite before layering it and so on) and which parts are "content".

This is a crux of why programmatic source code (instructions as to how to go about doing something or logs of how something was done) licenses get to be hard to apply to various kinds of artwork.

Thus, it seems to me that for sound we should maybe consider starting out by funding the lowest level possible of the stuff, things like a free open source library of simulated musical instruments, a free open source library of sound-effects and so on.

Because what I have seen happen too often is kind of along the lines of either we get a file of bits, in some codex or format, that when played using a sound player of some kind comes out as some sound or song or symphony or whatnot, or we get a set of instructions (a musical score a musician would read while playing an instrument, for example: source code for execution by a musician who has such an instrument) telling us how to produce an instance of a piece provided we have access to certain instruments and sound-bites and musical notes and such but oops it turns out we do not in fact actually have such an instrument or such a sound-bite or such a musical note available in free open source form.

So I would like to start from the bottom-most layer for stuff we host ourselves.

For example for music we could have a point at which it is actually considered text/writing rather than actual music.

We could thus allow into Devtome (and I think we already do this) those aspects and parts of music that we can categorise as writing.

We could include under that heading the lyrics of lyrical pieces and the "scores" written in musical notation of frets and bars and quavers and semiquavers and so on.

Then when we do eventually get to the point of being ready to also start accepting recordings of actual performances of such pieces we would be in a position maybe to be very strict, much stricter than the wishy-washy arguments I have seen so many times in the past. We could insist that all the stuff used to perform the pieces must also be free open source, and first archive them before starting to accept recordings of performances of them or that use them.

For example suppose someone submits a score for a violin. I propose we accept that score as writing, it is a written set of instructions, thus in effect is it a program or programme instructing a musician how to produce a given piece given that they have access to a violin.

To my mind we should thus next ask where is the source code for a violin, and until we do have a free open source violin we should not proceed to accept recordings of performances of that piece since embedded in the code we have found this dependency upon a non free open source piece of code: the code for "violin".

So we'd want some form of "violin source code" in order that performances of the score using a violin could be open source performances, since one of the sources for the recording would be the violin that was used to play it, or at least some violin or other.

When you get to the actual recordings, some listeners might well be able to hear the differences between different instances of the general category of instruments known as "violin". Thus a recording of a piece played on a free open source violin might well be quite different than a recording of that same score executed upon a closed source violin. If the score was executed upon a closed source violin then to my mind the the recording is not open source, it is compiled code in which some of the stuff compiled into it is closed source.

Thus I would like our goal to be a free open source holodeck and 3d printer type of thing, in which each and every item and piece and performance is free open source, so that in your own holodeck at home or on your own planet's flagship or whatever you are free to freely replicate the instruments and objects used to create the sounds and all the brushes used to paint the paintings and all the inks used with the brushes and all the sound-filters and image-filters used and so on.

Basically if we do not have in free open source form all the details necessary for a holodeck to duplicate / replicate a thing then we do not have the sources for the thing thus the thing is not free open source.

Consider a scan of a printed document, for example, which was printed using a closed source font.

To me that scan is not free open source because we are not licensed to freely use that font to freely create/compose/compile such a scan ourselves from a text file of the words (aka lyrics?) and a script instructing us to use a certain font. We could produce a quite similar scan using a quite similar font, and that, in my opinion, is what should be done. We should tell the person submitting such a scan that they need to re-print it using a free open source font before we can accept it.

Similarly if someone plays a score upon a violin that is not free open source, we should tell them to go re-play it upon a free open source violin and submit to us the source of the violin along with the recording of the performance.

Since afterall the entire point of open source is the ability to replicate/duplicate/re-perform, and the entire point of free open source is that everyone is free not only to replicate/duplicate/re-perform but also to edit any of the components in order to produce similar or even very different end results using the same components.

For digital graphical art this should mean we get source code of all the brushes and filters and so on used so we can replicate the artist's performance if we are able to utilise those brushes and filters and so on in the same way that the artist did.

In cases where the artist used actual physical brushes to paint an actual physical painting for example, we unfortunately have a huge barrier ahead of us because we lack the source code of the physical universe (not to mention we lack the billions of years it would take to produce that specific paintbrush ab initio by executing a big bang and snipping out that brush from the resulting universe once our newly replicated universe reaches the point in its timeline at which its execution results in that brush).

But nonetheless that should be the ideal we are aiming at. We ideally want our Q-continuum buddies to have the full source code necessary for them to execute a universe just like ours, run it through from big bang to whatever lies ahead, and so on. We do not want patent or copyright trolls to come along and say that the Q, or the gods, or god the creator, or anyone else, is not permitted to create and/or execute a universe that happens to be indistinguishable from the universe that we live in right now nor the universe we will live in next week or did live in last week or next year or last year or next breath of Brahma or some previous breath of Brahma or next Kali-yuga nor next entire universe or some previous Kali-yuga or universe etc.

-MarkM-

Note: I am using this post as the initial sketch of a devtome article The ultimate in free open source.

Once upon a time that Matt something guy who seemed to be one of the top free open source perl-CGI authors at the time (at least I think it was him, this was like way back in the 1990s) had a system that seems like it would be a great fit with the "distributed everything" philosophy folks around here are so fond of.

It was called Hypernews, and it was pretty much just a distributed forum.

It created a "tree" of sections with subsections with subsections etc, but you could also tell it the URLs of other instances of the system located on other people's sites (or other sites of your own of course) and it would subsume them into the tree.

The catch of course with all such hierarchies is you always end up with two places to look for content, so you'd have to keep asking yourself whether a particular item/post best belongs in, for example, a devcoin section of an altcoin section of a bitcoin forum or one of the bitcoin-forum sections of an other-coin section of a devcoin forum.

But across the entire Hypernews network all the posts in the devcoin section of the other-coins section of a coin-forum would all appear, if that forum's admin chose to include such subsections into their tree/hierarchy.

Possibly http://sourceforge.net/projects/hypernews/ might be the hypernews I am thinking of.

I notice that http://sourceforge.net/projects/hypernews/ has two way email gateways too, which causes me to wonder how married Unthinkingbit is to Simple Machines Forum in his bounties for an email-enabled forum.

Maybe an alternate approach would be to add bounties for "subsuming other instances of the forum on other people's sites" functionality to Simple Machines Forum?

Because wouldn't it be nice if our own forum somewhere could simply subsume this whole alternative currencies section of this forum into itself?

So all the many coins' own forums could all share the same "other coins" section across them all, maybe even with an ability to redirect/link the parts of it that pertain directly to their own main/top topic into the main body of their forum so their own users need not go look in the "other coins" section to find any posts from there that actually belong (on their site) in their own this-coin section?

-MarkM-

Didn't you use something like git / github or other version control system?

Part of why we use such systems is one can thus get diffs between any point in time and any other point in time, see each individually submitted push/commit and so on and so on.

I suggest if you are not using something like git you please start doing so.

Or do you mean a CHANGES file saying in human terms what changes it was that the relevant diffs were intended to accomplish?

(Though each commit has a commit comment in systems like git so again if you submit changes with comments change by change one could in principle maybe even generate CHANGES files to include in distros automatically from the commit comments...)

-MarkM-

To get one share as a programmer you have to do ten hours of work.

To get one share pasting stuff into devtome you only have to paste 1000 words (admittedly ones you wrote yourself.)

So I guess some day when some programmer happens to have typed 1000 words that happen to result in a shiny new client maybe they will chose to paste them into the source code instead of into devtome.

But y'know, they'd make as much money just pasting them into devtome and letting someone else take care of copying them from devtome into the source code and compiling and updating the git repositories and packaging binaries and so on and so on.

Does it really take ten hours to come up with 1000 words to post to devtome? I think as long as it is quicker/easier to come up with 1000 words to paste than it is to debug / create code for ten hours it might even be in the economically rational person sense "stupid" to waste time programming that would be more profitably spent writing 1000's of words of excuses for not programming...

-MarkM-

The people developing the shiny new daemon and client need to add it into whatever code they are using for seed nodes.

I am editting my old-devcoin-git and old-devcoin-qt-git to add a seventh name it will look up, dvcstable07.dvcnode.org, I do not know what their code does, whether it checks the dvcstable nodes on the dvcnode.org domain or not. Your IP address has been added to the dvcnodes.org DNS as dvcstable07.

Also who-ever controls the DNS for devtome.com needs to add it into their own dvcnode## hostnames in their DNS, my code so far only looks for dvcnode01 through dvcnode05 on that domain as I have seen no notification that they have added any more nodes than the five. (In fact when first I coded the code to look for five of them we did not even have have at the time, I just wanted the code to have a couple of spare lookups we could plug IP addressed into in the DNS later.)

-MarkM-

I wrote to Vircurex about the idea of a FLOOD FILL (of orders) capability:


-MarkM-

Darn it we have to improve the wording on all docs and ads and marketing copy and so on, tons of people seem to keep thinking the 90% of the coins, the coins sent out to artists, musicians, coders, authors, hardware designers, rocket scientists (once market cap is high enough) and so on and so on and so on who work on (aka "develop") free open source hardware, music, art, literature, programs, spaceships (when our market cap is high enough) somehow means the coders who coded devcoin get 90% of the coins.

That is a totally bogus perception, and maybe totally eradicating the use of the word "developer" in all the text/ads/etc might be required, but however we do it we need to somehow make absolutely clear that 90% of the coins go to people who work on various free open source projects, hopefully not just projects like a free open source spaceship you can print with a 3d printer, not even just projects like that and a free open source printer to print it with, not even just projects like that and free open source formulae and production techniques for making the "inks" used by such printers, but also cool projects such as trying to make the "autodoc" described in Larry Niven's "Ringworld" milieu, that would be an awesome project, if you aren't familiar with Ringworld then maybe you have seen the Stargate series, an "autodoc" is similar to the "sarcophagus" the bad guys use except that the autodoc tries also to keep people sane instead of trying to turn them into megalomaniac sociopathic psychopaths...

Also, it is 90%, not 95%.

It was planned to change to 95% upon merged mining becoming a reality, but miners are so greedy and so filled with a sense of "entitlement" that we left it at 90% even when we did implement merged mining. (Maybe miners use sarcophagi instead of autodocs? If so, all the more need to get our market cap up so we can start financing autodocs as well as spaceships (and, of course, holodecks, gotta have holodecks...))

-MarkM-

"Back to people" sounds potentially complex or difficult.

It also reminds me of chats last night in which after explaining that devtome is intended to cause devcoins to have value by using its ad revenue to buy devcoins I did not know what it planned to actually do with the devcoins it bought.

Maybe whatever devtome plans to do with the devcoins it buys with its ad revenue it could also do with windfall devcoins such as ones being returned by people who "overdrew" like in this case...

Regardless, what the heck is the plan as to what to do with bought devcoins once devtome ad revenue exists and it used to buy devcoins?

Also, how will it do the buying? Blind dumping of the fiat, or smart trading?

Maybe it should buy shares in a smart trading bot or something.

Which brings me to hey how about a bounty for a tool one can use to say "place orders on each and every satoshi of price if possible, if not as many satoshis of price as possible, evenly spread starting at this low price going up to this high price using this many coins" ?

Basically I am spending 16+ hour days manually typing in on Vircurex offers at every satoshi of price, not just on devcoins (I already did them long ago) but now also on IXCoins and I0Coins and hey what the heck even on DOGE. In general I think it would be beneficial if all coins had offers at all possible prices, no empty satoshis of price inbetween.

I looked in Virturex FAQ for frequently asked questions about their API but didn't even see "do you even have an API" listed there.

But I think they do have one even if not active right now as I seem to recall having seen an announcement once upon  time that they were disabling the API temporarily to fix something or something like that.

In general whichever exchange one ends up using, a tool for that exchange would be useful for doing this, as a lot of the price volatility on all exchanges on all coins is simple lazienss of people just posting one offer instead of spreading their offer across every possible price to ensure no gaps thus to smooth out changes in prices.

-MarkM-

Vlad went back to his native earth in Transylvania or somesuch place for the holidays a while ago. Holidays usually tends to mean past newyears I think so likely won't see him until 2014.

Where is the purported new version of the clients? The linked thread didn't seem to have a link to the source code?

-MarkM-

Did Ixcoin really come before Devcoin and Namecoin?

(aka was it really the first altcoin (other than testnet and tonal bitcoin) ?)

-MarkM-

A name that does not make it sound distinct from bitcoin. Mastered Bitcoins maybe or Engraved Bitcoins or multi-purpose bitcoins or bitcoin overlay layer one or bitcoin multipurpose layer or repurposed coins or scented coins or custom coins or scented bitcoins or customised bitcoins or bitcoin market layer etc etc, basically get away from focus on making something other than bitcoin instead getting the focus back on the fact that this is just another of the many amazing things bitcoin offers.

Maybe bitcoin protocol overlays then call the master coins protocol overlay one or bitcoin overlay master, the bitdollars if any are created bitcoin overlay dollars, the goldcoins if any are created bitcoin overlay gold and so on?

Maybe even tinted coins or flavoured coins or coins on steroids or souped up coins...

Bitcoin Mastery, maybe?

Overlay coins, reflecting that they can be overlaid onto any blockchain?

-MarkM-

Vircurex has no deposit nor withdraw of fiat and has not for some time.

Though some say the reason Gox's prices for BTC are so high is because although they do in theory have withdraw of USD in practice good luck getting your fiat out, at least without having to wait weeks or months for it. So the theory was that everyone on Gox who wants fiat buys bitcoins, at any price depending how desperate they are to get the fiat and how vast their profits were that they are trying to extract into fiat.

If that theory was correct ought it not also apply to Vircurex? Hmmm...

-MarkM-

Someone PMd me asking me to give them some coins out of my meagre stash, and I thought my reply worth crossposting here:


The idea was that people would "CPU mine" them by using methods such as those described at

http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=cpu_mining

Except that of course we would ideally be using a MUD in which the races are things like humans and cylons instead of all the usual default elves, dwarfs, etc etc most off the rack MUDs use. Same mechanism but make it fit the theme of the coin.

Same for all the other Sci-Fi coins.

So no I do not want to give any away, it is bad enough that already there are as many or more out there as there are waiting in my wallet for the Battlestar-Galactica themed MUD to be set up ready for people to "CPU mine" the coins using BSG-theme characters in a BSG-themed MUD...

-MarkM-

So far no proof of stake coins can be merged-mined.

Thus the merged mined family of coins (BTC, NMC, DVC, GRP, IXC, I0C, CLC, XGG) lacks a proof of stake member. It has most other innovations in it, so that one need not split up one's hashing power in order to mine a nice spread of different coins, but not one with proof of stake and not one with transaction memo.

So maybe either make a PPCoin that can be merged mined as a child chain alongside the existing merged mined coins or do that plus also throw in the transaction memo idea. Though really I'd prefer first just a PPCoin that can be merged mined before getting into blockchain bloat ideas like the transaction memo of the data storage that datacoin offers. (Namecoin already stores data anyway, so the big eight family of merged mined coins already includes a data storage coin, and possibly one could even put one's memo into a namecoin transaction so that maybe namecoin might also be able to function as a coin that allows inclouding a memo with a transaction, though I am not sure if one could do that or not, hmm. Maybe it'd be a memo per address rather than per transaction, thus still leaving the merged mined family lacking a coin that has the memo feature.)

It just seems kind of hypocritical to claim to be doing proof of stake to save energy then refuse to let people use recycled hashpower aka merged mining to mine it: PPCoin should have been merged mined from the start if saving energy truly was one of its goals/features...

-MarkM-

I mined over two million of Cubits version 2 coins; when Cubits v3 came out I sent all my v2 coins to cassieheart and she sent me in return that same number of Cubits v3 coins.

So I can account for over two million of the "pre-mine" myself. They were mined legitimately, not instamined nor pre-mined, on the v2 chain.

I do not know whether v2 had any pre-mine, nor anything about v1 that I recall off the tip of my mind right at this moment.

-MarkM-

Most of the altcoin exchanges seem to basically be opportunistic scam-enablers, listing any scam or piece of crap that they think they can make enough money off of to cover their labour and support costs of adding it to their exchange, but...


Wouldn't it be nice if there was an altcoin-exchange that did a whole lot of due-diligence, only listing coins with high enough difficulty and dedicated hashpower to be reasonably secure against 50+%-attacks, with good history of bugfixes and availability of public nodes to connect to, with good "fundamentals" such as hashing algorithm, block speed, schedule for minting of coins and so on and so on?

The closest thing I had found to seeming to be such a site so far was Vircurex... but today they added today's scam-of-the-day! Hmm... maybe worth watching to see if somehow in such a very short amount of time since the coin was launched they have delved into it enough to have made a really good call on this one or whether they are going downhill starting to grab scam of the day coins instead of waiting to see which coins do turn out to actually be good candidates for listing on the exchange?

Myself I went ahead and starting trading the new coin, figuring hey so far they don't seem to have picked any real dogs so no matter how scammy DOGE looks to me maybe the Vircurex admins are on to something. So basically I am tentatively trying "trust them on this, they haven't screwed me yet maybe they aren't screwing me this time either".

Just trying to keep abreast of one's trading on one exchange can be massively (as in way the heck more than a full time job) time-consuming so if you can find an exchange which picks good coins even better than Vircurex does I'd love to hear about it as I'd rather put in my trading hours as quality time than put them in chasing garbage coins that in the long run are just going to get 50+%-attacked to death etc. (That is what I suspect most scrypt coins are headed toward since they cannot be merged mined; all the SHA256 coins that cannot be merged mined likewise seem ultimately doomed. So I kind of hope that Vircurex is going to drop old scrypt coins (that cannot be merged mined) if it adds new ones and am looking forward to seeing whether their addition of DOGE means they will drop some other one that has less difficulty/hashrate than DOGE; if not I worry they might be heading toward being just another scam-enabling site, listing more coins than seem reasonably likely to be able to end up with over half the hash rate of their type/form of hashing (half the scrypt hashpower in the world or half the SHA256 hashpower in the world or half the prime number sequence finding power in the world etc.))

TL;DR maybe simply using the exchange that seems to you to do the best job of only listing the best coins would be a good solution?

(And if so, have you checked out Vircurex?)

-MarkM-

I guess for prolific writers it will be a kind of pension scheme! If you wrote twice the max every round until you retire, you'd be in effect banking half your income toward your retirement!

-MarkM-

It is not a max number of words really, just a max number that get paid out in one "round" of payouts.

One of the underlying limitations is that there only 4000 "blocks" (on the "blockchain") per "round", and our code only supports fifths of a share granularity, meaning only five people can get paid in any one "block".

Thus even if each person to be paid only gets paid one fifth of a share, we can currently only pay 5 * 4000 = 20000 people per "round".

Thus in essence each 1/5 of a share you get is 1/5 of a share someone else isn't getting, and we can only support a max of 20000 recipients per round with our current code.

20000 recipients sounds like a lot, but even supposing we only had 200 recipients, for any one of them to get more than 100 * 1/5 of a share (20 shares) would require at least one other of them not to be able to get that many shares.

So the code/capability in place already prevents us from issuing all 200 people in such a scenario any more than at least a full 20 shares each. For someone to get 80 shares, three others of the 200 people would have to get none, or 60 others of them only get 19, etc.

TL;DR there are only ever 4000 shares total in a round, maximum. (Thus up to 20,000 1/5ths of a share.)

-MarkM-

If, as it sounds like, you are a lifestyle creator of free open source stuff such as you describe above, and typically work on such stuff ten hours a week anyway already, you are the kind of person who should be on the receivers list anyway as a lifestyle developer of free open source stuff, regardless of what happens or fails to happen about these specific projects you mention above.

In other words you sound like a possible candidate to become a "tenured developer", that is, someone who just always has a share in the receivers list ongoing until some day when you are too old/feeble or sick or dead to be able to continue with your "developer of free open source software" lifestyle.

(If some day someone reports that you no longer do tend to spend 10+ hours per week working on free open source projects for free then if that turns out to be true you'd be removed from the list, but basically until then you'd just always be there, without nitpicking about what project you happen to work on this or that week...)

-MarkM-

Long term history of DVC: see http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

The actual plots and pages there are kind of in reverse maybe to what you want, for example the list of what all other things cost in terms of devcoins and the graphical plot of what all other things cost in terms of devcoins, but the raw underlying data would do what you want, basically you just need to pick out the devcoin columns from the lists or plots of all the other assets.

All those tables and plots are generated from a historic collection of past "latestrates.inc" files, I don't upload that collection to the website currently though, the website just has one latestrates file at a time, uploaded to http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc

The include file is included into bash shell scripts in order to compute the value of any asset relative to any other asset.

-MarkM-