It looks like maybe the current difficulty is simply too high for a new block to be created within two hours by the small number of CPU cores that are actually mining it?

Maybe someone with a GPU or an ancient tiny Scrypt-Jane ASIC (if such things exist) could wean it down in difficulty enough that the few CPU cores the supporters are able to muster will be able to keep the blockchain moving?

If there are such things as ancient tiny Scrypt-Jane ASICs maybe it'd be worth aquiring one powerful enough to keep the chain moving? Though in theory we only need to move it enough slow enough for its difficulty to drop into a low enough range the current family of CPU cores working on it will be able to keep it going?

I guess it is always going to be vulnerable to someone popping in now and again with massive hashing power to drive up the difficulty then running off again, but oh well not much we can do about that except eventually get the value up high enough to attract a lot of hashing consistently.

I just checked my http://MakeMoney.Knotwork.com/ site and see I haven't yet documented GPL on the HORIZON network; the doc for GPL on the Stellar network is http://makemoney.knotwork.com/stellar/gpl/

-MarkM-

Well whatever you did seems to have worked, suddenly there have been 70 new blocks. Thanks.

Also it looks like once you had created a block my PoW nodes were able to generate again without being restarted, so maybe once someone does create a block everyone gets un-stuck?

I am not sure if I am using stratum, does the daemon support that? I think my miner program could do it but it didn't seem to work with the GPL daemon?

-MarkM-

Yes it is still on Cryptopia they just haven't gotten around to it yet in their process of re-activating one market at a time.

-MarkM-

It is still traded on an exchange (Yobit) and its blockchain is still chugging along, so it is a long way from dead.

-MarkM-

The old GPL blockchain has not moved now for weeks, when I managed to get a scrypt-jane miner working that did get it moving for a while but I have the miners still working and my staking still going and the checkpoint server running but for weeks now not none of my nodes have seen the blockchain move.

So no idea what could be going wrong but the chain does seem very dead. As far as I know the difficuly for POW mining is plenty low enough for my scrypt-jane miners to have been able to find a block in all this time so presumably something is preventing POW blocks from working, and also by now my staking surely should have found a block so presumably something is stopping that from working too.

GPL seems to be moving fine though.

-MarkM-

Well the blockchain IS still moving, albeit slowly, and the players who use it have started thinking about starting a Civilisation whose currency it will be so that they can support it with the full backing of an actual "nation" in the game. I do not know how long it will take for the difficulty to adjust downward enough for the blockchain to move at a more reasonable speed, or for more hashing power to be applied to get it moving better, but players are not particuarly concerned about the slowness of the blockchain since most activity will probably take place on the HORIZON and Stellar platforms.

-MarkM-

The wallet generates I think 100 addresses when it is created, then as it runs low it generates more; and there is a command to make it generate more too so if you expect to use a lot before your next backup you can deliberately generate a lot so your backup will contain the next however many addresses that will be used.

So you have some leeway.

When you send coins often an address will be used up to send the change to, and of course every time you do getnewaddress to get a new address to tell someone to send to that uses up one of the pre-created addresses.

So basically every time you do a backup it includes the next X-number of addresses that are to be used.

Once they have all been used, you will be into new territory, using addresses that had not been created at the time of your last backup.

So the key is to make backups faster than you use up addresses.

For example if you have a website that lets visitors cause an address to be created for them to send coins to, and thousands of visitors get addresses created daily, or one visitor uses a bot to have it generate tens or hundreds of thousands of addresses for them in one day, you might be hard-pressed to make backups often enough, and will want to generate vast numbers of addresses ahead of time to back up before the site gives them out.

If on the other hand you only have one publicised address for folks to send you coins (a donation address for example, or the address DevTome sends your shares to), and never send coins so never use up addresses to send change to, then one backup will last you "forever" with plenty of pre-generated addresses in it ready for some day when you do suddenly need another address or few.

-MarkM-

Yeah their default and well known hosts lists in config file have all gone offline when the developers abandoned the project.

Put a well known hosts line or default hosts line in config with things like dvcstable01.dvcnode.org, dvcstable02.dvcnode.org, dvcstable06.dvcnode.org, crossciv.no-ip.org, ufbsh.no-ip.org, ufbtr.ddns.net and ufbar.ddns.net

Damn it is hard to log in here now they added the stupid reCAPTCHA thing that thing makes it sometimes take hours to get onto a site, sometimes completely impossible.

-MarkM-

Stellar is available all over the place, in fact right now BlockChain.com is still in the process of giving away $25 USD worth of Stellar Lumens per validated user, so it might be worth your while to get yourself validated there. If you can get their weird photo-ID thing to work, for me it just keeps taking a photo then claiming the internet hiccuped and taking the photo again, and again, and again, never failing to claim the internet hiccuped.

HORIZON the last released version can be downloaded from inside my http://LFM.knotwork.com/ site if you can't find it elsewhere.

I have not modified it so you will need to give it some current active nodes, I believe my site says how to do that.

A bunch of other coins some might regard as "obscure" are also available (in source code) there too, such as some of the original family of merged mined coins merged mined alongside bitcoin and devcoin. (IXCoin, I0Coin, GRouPcoin, CoiLedCoin etc).

The thing with HORIZON is that it is a NXT clone, so all trading pairs have to have its native token (HZ) as one side of the pair.

Stellar lets you offer any asset directly against any asset, no need to involve its own token (Stellar Lumens, XLM).

But, Stellar needs a so called "line of trust" for each asset you want to use, and each line of trust "ties up" ten Lumens as long as the line of trust exists.

Still, being able to trade arbitrary pairs directly, only needing to worry about their value relative to each other without reference to the platform's native currency, is kind of nice.

Also its fees might actually work out cheaper, depending on how much an HZ turns out to be worth.

That is the trouble with HORIZON, to use its trading pairs feature we need to somehow arrive at a value of the HZ itself, and right now HZ is yet another token you don't find on the public, website-type "exchanges" since Poloniex de-listed it.

It seems to have been used as if it were about a Canadian penny per HZ, but that is probably only because the vast majority of folks who actually have some still think it is "dead" since Poloniex de-listed it; if those folks come back chances are a lot of HZ will be wanting to get dumped for anything they think they might be able to "cash out" somewhere. Which might put a premium on things like IXC and I0C and maybe even DVC that can still be found on the typical website-type public "exchanges" folks are used to.

-MarkM-

The Latest Rates include-file has been updated, along with the whole site of asset value tables.

Using those latest values, the proposed DVC Holdings treasury/warchest is now valued at 9880733930.99764890 DeVCoins.

That is an improvement for sure since last report, but still not enough to "back" all the DeVCoins that hae been minted at the current vlue per DeVCoin that was used to calculate that figure.

There does not seem to be a lot of action so far on the HORIZON and Stellar platforms, how many of you have those installed so far?

If you have DeVCoins you would like to sell in bulk but do not want to bother setting up either of those platforms, maybe just look at the Latest Rates file and make some offers?

-MarkM-

Well it would probably help to have more activity on the HORIZON and Stellar platforms.

Despite there being a share of DeVCoin minting each for 12 people who help with that, folks here do not seem to have particularly gotten involved in that. No-one yet has claimed one of those shares.

There definitely should be demand for DeVCoins in the game, really the original idea of giving loans deniminated in DeVCoins was that that would create demand for DeVCoins with which to make loan-payments.

The problem for a long long time though has been folks getting DeVCoins for writing unrelated stuff that does not seem particularly designed to contribute to the over-all multiverse have been getting so many DeVCoins compared to developers of the software that is used to actually implement the multiverse, and dumping it so cheap on "the planet known as Earth" instead of pouring it into the game's economies, that DeVCoin became so low value, with so few DeVCoins actually available within the game, that it simply is not practical currently for characters and Corps to actually get hold of enough DeVCoins to make loan payments, so they pretty much always nowadays just look at the Latest Rates include-file and select some asset from that with which to pay based on the other asset's listed value in DeVCoins.

If we can get a lot more DeVCoins actually into play, and increase their value, it should increasingly become feasible for players to trade other things FOR DeVCoins then pay their debts WITH DeVCoins.

Despite there being a share of DeVCoin minting each for 12 people who help with that, folks here do not seem to have particularly gotten involved in that. No-one yet has claimed one of those shares.

It would probably he helpful also to be more active on the Galactic Diplomacy Planet where folks are supposed to be in touch with one-another about this kind of thing.

The Mercantile Association, whose association-house is next to West End Trade (across from the Traveller's Society) in the part of the planetary capitol known as West End has contacts that know about this kind of thing, though for most common folks their guildmasters or clan officers or whatever do most of the politicking, conversions between currencies and so on helping their members with all this kind of thing and with making useful contacts that they will need if they are themselves going to advance within the clan or guild or party or association or society or whatever or form one of their own.

(Unlike Crossfire RPG as distributed, in the Galactic Milieu we have cloned the clans functionality to create guilds, societies, parties etc that work just the same but you can be a member of one of each type, so that even if you are in a clan you can also join a guild and a society and so on.)

-MarkM-

In the Galactic Milieu we like to be able to compute the per coin value of a currency by adding up the total "treasury" or "warchest" of the Nation, Corp, Civilisation or whatever that "issues" the currency and dividing that total by the number of coins minted.

This calculation is of course easier for coins that are no longer "minting" new coins.

Thus for a long time the Ixians within MUDgaard and the character known as Ix on the CrossCiv server have been piling up as many assets as they can with which for form an "IXCorp" Corp that can take upon itself the mantle of being the "backer" of IXCoin, the Corp whose full faith and wealth etcetera is supposed, if only within the game, to be in effect the issuer of the "IOUs" known as IXCoins.

I did a search to see whether IXCorp, like so many other Corps within the Milieu, has a thread here, but the only mention of IXCorp a search of the Altcoin Discussion section found was in the "Volume versus Liquidity" discussion thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1303473

In DeVCoin's official thread I have posted about a Corp known as DVC, which hopefully will eventually serve to be how we compute the value of a DeVCoin; that is, we will add up the assets of DVC and divide that total by the number of DeVCoins in existence to determine a "fundamental" value of a DeVCoin.

What the Ixian clan and the character known as Ix are trying to do is to pile up enough assets to make it feasible to do the same for IXCoin.

Basically what they need to do initially is pile up assets whose value adds up to 21 million multiplied by the approximate "going rate" that so called "price discovery" (exchanges, markets) has come up with for an IXCoin.

IXCoin having had such pathetically low prices on exchanges lately is actually helpful toward this effort, since it lowers the size of the pile they will need to accumulate in order to be able to be feasible as the "backer" of the coin.

I have just posted a bunch on the DeVCoin thread about how the DVC one is going; I will soon be consulting with Ix and the Ixians and other interesed parties about the proposed IXCorp.

Note that this is all part of the game, to determine the in game value of various in game assets, in no way should it be construed as being a "security" on the mythical planet known as earth.

-MarkM-

I just checked the Corp listings at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/companies.html to see whether DVC Corp is listed there yet, and found that it is not.

However I noticed that DeCorp is listed and is worth several times more DeVCoins than have yet been minted:

Total assets: 653181230832.54459102 dDVC
Total shares: 1000000
Share value : 653181.23083254 dDVC

If you check DeVCorp's bitcointalk thread, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=61407.0 you can see that it's mandate is decribed in post https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=61407.msg855065#msg855065 as follows:

"DeVCorp's aim is to increase the value of DeVCoins, so it will do whatever it thinks will accomplish that goal, within the limitations imposed by the resources at its command"

The thing is, DeVCorp is already a Corp, having a million shares, so it is far too late now to try to change it into a treasury "backing" DeVCoins themselves. It's milion shares are already long ago distributed.

However as I mentioned in an earlier post, there is a Corp named DVC which WAS created specifically for the purpose of hopefully someday eventually accumulating a treasury sufficient to "back" the DeVCoins in existence.

The reason I visited the Company Assets page at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/companies.html just now was specifically to check how that treasury is looking since the most recent update of the whole assets tables site http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

Basically I figured if indeed DVC had been added to the http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/companies.html page it would be a quicker way for me to look up the current valuation of the DVC entity/Corp than going digging around in the data that eventually creates the http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html site including the http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/companies.html page.

I guess that as long as the value of DeVCoins as shown in the Latest Rates include-file at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc is based on "price discovery" (markets/exchanges) instead of being based on the total value of the Corp/Entity we are calling DVC divided by the total number of DeVCoins minted as of the time the reports/pages were generated it makes sense not to bother listing the DVC entity/Corp on the Company Assets Summary page (http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/companies.html).

So, herewith the value of the DVC entity in the raw form that would have been used on that Summary page had DVC been added to the list of Corps to display on that page:

totalinDVC=8944263423.59525065

I guess it has not changed much since I last posted here about it because it does not currently own a lot of "growth assets"; I thought I'd check how it is getting along though because it does own SOME growth assets, such as

gfc_shares=461
ghc_shares=1015

The thing is, if DeVCorp's mandate is to try to increase the value of DeVCoins, and we hope to be able to "back" the value of DeVCoins with this "treasury" known as DVC, might it be worth DeVCorp's while to DONATE to DVC?

I suppose DeVCorp would want to own a lot of stuff whose values derive from the value of DeVCoin, but I see already a couple of things it owns that do:

gfc_shares=119539

and

dDVC_reserves=21187949.908015

I see that it also owns

gdc_shares=200000
grc_shares=200000

and I think maybe both of those might also be heavily into DeVCoin.

For example looking at GDC I see

gfc_shares=200000

and looking at grc I see

gfc_shares=200000

You might recall that GFC is Galactic Financial Corp aka General Financial Corp, whose bitcointalk thread is https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=61557.0

Its entry on the Company Assets Summary page tells us

Total assets: 2704842704928.26015831 dDVC
Total shares: 1000000
Share value : 2704842.70492826 dDVC

It is a "growth asset" in the sense that it has lots of ("secured") loans out, denominated in DeVCoins. I would not be surprised if its total Accounts Receivable still exceeds its total other assets (the stuff debtors have given it in payment of their debts and accrued interest on their debts over the years) even after all these years that it has been in operation. I believe its thread gives some info about it's operations way back when, especially the massive profits it made early on for it's initial investors due to the fact that the amount of funding provided by those founding investors was trivial compared to the sums it then proceeded to borrow at one (usurious) rate of interest to loan out at a twice-as-usurious rate of interest.

So looking at all this, I am thinking maybe it could be possible that if DeVCorp were to donate a lot of assets to the DVC entity, AND DeVCoins were then to be value as if each DeVCoin were a share of the DVC entity, it might be possible that the value of DeVCorp itself might even increase by doing that, thus allowing DeVCorp not only to carry forward its mandate of increasing the value of DeVCoins but also to not annoy it's own shareholders by lowering its own value.

Also maybe its shareholders might want to bolster their own holdings of things that can be expected to increase in value if DeVCoin increases in value...

IT SHOULD BE NOTED THOUGH THAT ALL OF THIS IS WITHIN A GAME, THE SO CALLED GALACTIC MILIEU, SEE http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=galactic_milieu AND MOSTLY BASED ON THE PLANET KNOWN AS M5, THUS IN PARTICULAR NONE OF THESE ENTITIES SHOULD BE CONSTRUED AS SECURITIES BY PERSONS ON THE MYTHICAL "PLANET KNOWN AS EARTH" (SEE http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=the_planet_known_as_earth). WE ARE BASICALLY JUST WORKING OUT WHAT THE GAME VALUE OF VARIOUS GAME ASSETS ENTITIES AND CURRENCIES IS WITHIN THE GAME AND IT IS IMPORTANT TO BEAR IN MIND THAT MOST PERSONS IN THE GAME REGARD "THE PLANET KNOWN AS EARTH" AS PURELY MYTHICAL, JUST AS QUITE LIKELY MANY PERSONS ON THE PLANET KNOWN AS EARTH CONSIDER THE PLANETS AND PERSONS IN THE GAME AS PURELY MYTHICAL.

-MarkM-

P.S. It occurs to me also that maybe DeVCorp should start selling some of its assets, especially those not greatly based upon DeVCoins, FOR DeVCoins, to try to increase its DeVCoin reserves.

Remember that all the stuff from the Digitalis Open Transactions server, and more, is migrating onto HORIZON and Stellar networks.

I am sure my listings of the assets are still incomplete, so if you notice any I have implemented by haven't yet gotten around to listing on my MakeMoney.knotwork.com website do let me know. I think IXCoin, I0Coin and the other ancient merged-mined coins are probably already listed, check it out:

http://MakeMoney.knotwork.com/

Also of course we still from time to time put out new pricing data at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

-MarkM-

Sounds like these weaknesses might apply to some of our Proof of Stake coins?

https://medium.com/@dsl_uiuc/fake-stake-attacks-on-chain-based-proof-of-stake-cryptocurrencies-b8b05723f806

-MarkM-

Someone created a "Discord" for HORIZON, here is an invite link: https://discord.gg/CG4n5MQ

-MarkM-

Because in the Galactic Milieu we like to be able to compute a "fundamental" value for an asset by adding up the net worth of the nation, civilisation, treasury, warchest or whatever that presumably "backs" it - the nation or Corp whose currency it supposedly is, kind of thing - we have been putting together a warchest to back DeVCoins themselves directly. Basically the treasury of some as yet unidentified Civilisation whose currency is DeVCoins.

It is the account labelled "DVC Holdings" on the HORIZON platform.

For years DVC has been one of the entities that has had loans out, denominated in DeVCoins, so currently the net worth is not just what is in that "DVC Holdings" account but also what is owed to it by debtors. As of the latest (at time I am writing this) Latest Rates include-file, the net worth of DVC is 9148766769.80688876 DeVCoins, I am not sure exactly how many DeVCoins have so far been minted but I think nine bilion is only about half of them, so this initial start toward "backing" DeVCoins is so far only enough to "back" about half of them or so. We need to double or more the holdings before we can compute a "fundamental" value of DeVCoins from it that would meet or beat the value reflected by the current Latest Rates file; so far we have not been using the "fundamental value" mothod of coming up with a value for DeVCoins, we have throughout history-so-far used actual rates on exchanges. But really, the current batch of exchanges are not realistic. We have had so many exchanges fold under us running away with all our DeVCoins that the exchanges remaining now are just silly. Thus it seems wise to move to using a "fundamental" value, hence this "DVC Holdings" account whose value of course now needs building up to allow it to operate as proper "backing" for DeVCoins.

The DVC account has actually existed for years, it is just that it has been on the books as a Corp having a million shares. What needs to happen now is we need to adjust its number of shares regularly to be the number of DeVCoins that have been minted. Which is inconvenient with a coin that has no known maximum number that will be minted.

This is just an initial calculation to see how far the current "treasury" falls short of being able to back all the DeVCoins in existence at their current purported value.

NOTE that the sDVCrate shown in the Latest Rates file refers to shares of DEVcorp (which has a million shares), not to shares of DevCoin. The initial lowercase s in the variable names means shares, a convention inherited from the Open Transactions server.

Unthinkingbit never seemed to understand why I always wanted to have a whole bunch of different coins (currencies), but this idea of each currency having a "reserve" of other currencies "backing" it is a large part of why. Look around this planet we live one, nations do tend to have reserves of each other's currencies, don't they? And maybe it is not even such a great idea for them all to use the same currency (the U.S. dollar for example) as the one and only "reserve currency"?

So I have always wanted us to be working with all the merged-mined coins, maybe also other coins too, so that we could in fact have, for each coin, reserves of other coins with which to "back" them.

-MarkM-

It is one of many currencies used in the Galactic Milieu, though currently we are still at the "value discovery" stage since we currently cannot really gauge it's value by looking at live markets (since as you point out the market is unrealistic currently) nor do we yet have a known "treasury" or "warchest" to look at that we know is its "backing" - that is, the treasury or warchest or net worth or somesuch thing of the civilisation, race, species, Corp etc (generically "group") whose currency it it supposedly "is".

Discussions are still in progress as to what kind of group might choose it as "it's own currency" and "back" it with their full faith and value as it were, and thus provide a treasury we can look at and divide by the total number of coins to determine a "fundamental" value per coin.

This kind of discussion is going on about all the Sci-Fi coins, especially ones already imagined to be associated with a particular group such as "the Ferrengi" or "the Klingons" etc.

-MarkM-

I have left a cpu miner running a few weeks now supposedly mining the old GPL, but nothing is moving and neither the miner nor the debug.log of the coin show any sign of anything happening, nor does "top" show the miner using any CPU power.

The only CPU miner I could find that purported to be able to do scrypt-jane on Linux was cpuminer-opt, a supposedly optiminsed miner. But it actually seems to do nothing whatsoever.

With the old built in mining ability it never took weeks to find a blocks, so I figure I have given it long enough a try.

Does anyone know of anything that CAN mine the old GPL coin, without special equipment such as a GPU?

I lost my last GPU by trying to mine KED (Klingon EMpire Darsek) with it, and it took out the whole motherboard too.

So even if I actually had any more GPUs I would't want to risk them, and entire motherboards, especially when I know CPU mining used to work just fine back before the code to do it was stripped from the wallet.

-MarkM-


EDIT: Went back to the problem with "fresh eyes" and got it working.

DeVCoin can be spent on various assets associated with the galactic Milieu, as well as being widely accepted within the particular portions of the Milieu for special equipment etc from other players that might not be found, or easily found, in the in-game shops that only accept the particular local currency used within any particular aspect of the game(s).

For asset prices see the latest rates file http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc which conveniently enough is denominated in DeVCoins, and for historic tables see http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html


-MarkM-