So is Inaba ever going to pay any of the bets he already lost over the years?

Or is this just a funny funny ha ha since we all know he doesn't pay his betting debts?

Or is Bruno playing him, "ha ha Inaba I lost the bet, I'll be paying you just as soon as you pay your own betting debts, remember that charity you owe to for example" type deal?

-MarkM-

Supposedly just holding bitcoins has pretty much always been the most profitable thing to do, so this time I am seriously considering doing just that.

The number of bitcoins I paid for my Saturn, that arrived so late that it has barely started to make a dent in the problem of paying for itself, would be a lot of money right now. It'd buy me two november jupiters with money left over...

Meanwhile the Saturn I spend those coins on hasn't even paid for itself, it is no way anywhere near about to buy me two or even one november jupiter...

So I would be much better off right now if I had resisted the urge to buy that Saturn... and maybe would have had two jupiters by end of november instead... heck maybe three...

-MarkM-

I have Lancelots too but it seemed better to just keep mining with them longer to see how things go as I was not sure how soon they might want me to turn them off and send them in, leaving me without them until february...

...Plus I'd still have had to pay 2/3 of the price out of pocket, so I want my miners of various kinds to fill my pockets some more before going for it.

-MarkM-

If bitcoins continue going up more and more people will buy crazier and crazier price rigs, losing massive amounts of bitcoin profits in pursuit of far far lower and ultimately probably imaginary fiat profits, driving difficulty way beyond what you seem to be imagining. Two billion was likely predicted based not only on a long gone by low price of bitcoins relative to even today's price, and maybe also on a failure to fully appreciate how irrational the "I don't care how much profit I miss by not holding bitcoins, I want to burn lots of electricity lowering my potential profit massively by pursuing fiat at cost of massive losses on the botcoin side" folk can be...

Especially if bitcoin is up over $1000 by february...

-MarkM-

Bitcoin has been going up so fast it seems better to give it some more time to peak before buying, and even then actually it might not feel so great to buy a Jupiter with $350 bitcoins then watch as bitcoin climbs way up over $500 overnight... Then when after a quick little dip for profit-taking it continues toward its over $1000 goal things will look worse and worse as more and more suckers cash out to buy rigs to drive difficulty way beyond any hope of ROI instead of sitting back swimming like Scrooge McDuck in their pool of bitcoins...

Bear in mind that for bitcoins to be able to be used on any kind of reasonable scale, even a quite small reasonable scale, they need to be at least several thousand dollars each. It is the fact only a tiny tiny tiny clique of leading edge folks have dabbled with them so far that has kept them so low so long... that, and people throwing them all away for dollars to buy rigs that will never ROI...

-MarkM-

He said he got five blocks in four hours using one GPU. If that can be done consistently it would be 30 blocks per GPU per day.

-MarkM-

Easy and profitable do not really go together, because the more profit, the more competitors flock to it, making it harder.

So easiest is the lowest difficulty, and that can also be massively far and away the most profitable in the long run, for example last year for about a whole year people could mine BBQcoin with just one core of a CPU quite nicely, and after doing that for a year they made massive amounts of money as compared to the electricity they had spent on it over the year, far and away the highest profits that year for anyone who did it.

Right now though even Tenebrix and Fairbrix is hard with just a CPU, but if you have a GPU you can rake in lots of both just with one GPU. Then after doing that for a year start working on bringing them back into the limelight like happened to BBQcoin after its year of CPU mining and you could make way the heck more money than you would with any other coins.

In general mine what other people are ignoring, and sell what they have pumped up if they pumped it high enough to make parting with it so cheap seem worth doing.

-MarkM-

I have run the daemons on several machines for months on end, no problem.

-MarkM-

I think that back when we discussed longcoins and shortcoins ideas it turned out that it is possible to not need a data feed.

Basically at any moment when either party saw a price somewhere that made them prefer that price, they could escape the longcoin/shortcoin position to cash in wherever it was that they thought would for them be a better deal.

It thus needed no oracles aka data feeds, since it is no one else's business but your own why it is that you exercised, or even whether you were in fact going to actually be able to get the better deal that had lured you into exercising.

Why should anyone but you need to know how much you are going to go sell something for elsewhere? If in fact you do know of some obscure marketplace where you can get a better price than others who only know of some well known markets not the lucrative markets you know of isn't it in your best interest not to reveal what price the asset is worth on some market somewhere but simply to close your position and go make your sale without telling everyone "oh by the way, right now gold is going for $XXXX.XX over at such and such a place" ?

I do not recall offhand the details of the setup that allowed people this freedom from third party claims about what things are worth, but isn't it in general better in a supposedly free market to be able to decide for yourself whether exercising or not is profitable for you, taking into account what prices you with your possibly extraordinary contacts and knowledge of markets can get, than to let some third party dictate how much your stuff is worth based on some oracle or market or feed that they themselves happen to prefer to use for making their own decisions as to what the current value of things is to them?

In the context of whether something is worth a meatspace dollar or not for example, if you yourself happen to find a buyer who is willing to pay a meatspace dollar for something shouldn't that be sufficient, shouldn't you be able to just sell the thing to that buyer for a dollar without having to reveal to the people you are doing long and short stuff with that you do know of an opportunity to get a dollar and maybe even reveal to them who what where you (or maybe anyone in general who knew of the opportunity) could go get a dollar at this particular moment?

Basically such a system even allows both the long position person and the short position person to totally dis-agree about the current value of a thing, while allowing both of them the freedom to go cash in at the value they believe they can get for it, whether or not the other party could get that same amount for it or not.

This could even go to totally personal opportunities, "oh my uncle will give me a hundred bucks for this first dollar I ever earned by trading, so I don't care that you believe it is only worth a dollar I am going to sell it for a hundred dollars too bad for you your uncle isn't so generous" type situations. When you want out of the position you get out, no one need know how much you got or hoped to get for the stuff you backed out of / withdrew from  the long/short situation. No need for an oracle or feed telling everyone "by the way so and so's uncle will buy one for a hundred right now" etc.

The end result though was like a contract for difference except both parties got what they could get for a thing without any need to know what the other party or a third party arbiter/oracle/feed claimed a thing was worth.

(You sell your stuff where you think best for you, other chap sells his where he thinks best for him.)

It thus seemed like a pretty good setup, but I think the reason it never got pursued was that it had no leverage into it, and back when we were discussign it everyone was all about leverage, they wanted basically what the teenager's site that had died with everyone's funds was providing, an ability to bet small to win huge on changes in prices e.g. of bitcoins compared to dollars or dollars compared to bitcoins etc.

The longcoin/shortcoin approach I think basically needed collateral, so in those days with that audience all of whom wanted something for nothing without collateral it was anathema.

-MarkM-

No need for one on one info for me, work on what all the public gets to read.

I'll mine some protoshares and if bitshares or protoshares takes off maybe they will make me enough spare funds to make me think about buying some Mastercoins.

If I do buy in I'll be better off with the public reading stuff that is understandable than any personal explanations just for me would make me.

-MarkM-

Since you supposedly can program, how about programming your actual real what it does part yourself and worry about all the marketing and distracting images and fonts and window dressing and wallpaper stuff later? If your fundamental concept is actually good and useful you will get a dedicated core group of users who find it indispensible enough that they won't care that it is ugly as sin and extremely hard to use and full of bugs because they need it now and/or they see its potential.

So far it sounds like you don't even have the skills to operate a simple "have and manage users" membership site so seem to think such things do not exist so need to be created from scratch just for you; other than not being able to operate any existing membership site or adapt one all you are about seems to be flim flam window-dressing marketing no actual underlying core algortihms or data processing or even business model or business process at all...

So it sounds like yet another "if you get them to come it will somehow then be possible to build it" idea-person bullshit.

-MarkM-

Thanks for actually indicating an exchange. I posted in some thread or other some time ago asking what exchange it is on when someone posted about it having some certain price or other, but so far I had not stumbled upon any response.

Personally I did stumble upon it a day or few before the deadline, decided it sounded worth checking out so I started the process of reading up on it but by the time the deadline hit what it was that was to be created still did not seem to have even been decided. Even reading the last few days it seems the process of working out what it is that Mastercoin is going to be still seems to not be quite figured out yet though various prototypes do at least seem now to be able to read each other's messages once they have seen them not figured them out quite right and been tweaked again, and I read today that what one person has been using for a protocol or standard or syntax or somesuch he does expect will actually end up in the specs when next the specs are released.

So It does seem much closer now to actually being a particular protocol or set of protocols one could by this point maybe dig into enough to try to figure out whether they seem well thought out.

But not only are the centralised data feeds a concern but also it now seems that possibly the whole pegged currencies based on data feeds might be going on the back burner? Whereas that was what I thought we were deciding whether to buy into during those days I did have before the deadline in which to decide whether they did sound like they would work. So if I had bought in I would now be having to worry that that stuff is maybe no longer what the project is even about?

So yeah it still seems too early yet to even know where this project is even heading. Contracts for difference now possibly, maybe?

-MarkM-

Namecoin is already fixed, search for the memo aka threads.

Was fixed a few or several days ago, I lose count, seems a while now.

-MarkM-

I don't know, some posts have indicated that hyperthreads or hardware threads or whatever it is that makes four real cores get seen as an talked about as eight cores or threads might by a problem. But, my actual hashes per minute is shown as more than twice as many on those boxes as on any boxes here at home. The posts about the type of core or thread didn't mention whether the problems they are about would leave hashes per minute high while not really finding blocks or would make the hashes per mintue low so that I'd see the machines are not really performing well.

I am though starting to consider putting those boxes back onto primecoin and doing protoshares only at home because still the home machines seem to do better than the seemingly (according to hashes per minute readout) better remote servers. The stuff people said about latency/connections also should make the remote servers better than my home boxes as the home boxes have no incoming ports so only get to go up to 8 connections whereas the remote ones have like 120 connections or so. Plus my home line is no-where near the bandwidth the remote servers have.

So I don't know, maybe the big servers are just not good at this coin despite supposedly higher hashes per minute, whereas for primecoin all the boxes here at home went a week or two without finding any blocks while the remote servers keep on finding them (not fast, and likely not enough to pay for the servers, but the servers are paid for a year up front anyway so might as well let them pay a little of their cost.)

-MarkM-

I don't see having to stumble upon a thread within an extremely limited window of time in order to get to buy some Mastercoins as elegant at all, on the contrary it seemed like the kind of rush rush hurry hurry you'll miss the deal if you don't buy right now hustle that hustlers and scammers like to use to get people off balance to get them to buy quick before really thinking about it or even getting to thoroughly investigate what it even is. By the time word got out that there was a new altcoin being launched but not in the altcoin part of the forums, it was too late to buy in. Its just like people who launch an alt on some obscure forum elsewhere, but you did it right here, clever trick but maybe just as sleazy since having a username on here meant you could as easily have put also an announcement in the altcoins section.

If there is no exchange yet for protoshares and you want to invest in protoshares maybe investing in a project aimed at creating / running an exchange for it would be a logical starting-point

If there is an exchange it is on then what is the problem, just put an offer on the exchange? Or would you not consider that an ivnestment into the coin/ecosystem?

-MarkM-

That is how things like e-Gold work(ed). People tend to regard that as centralisation thus deprecate it (around here where we are supposed to be all about decentralisation).

It is how I have tried to set up my Digitalis Open Transactions server. Ideally I do not want to ever dig up my cold-stored assets that the tokens people are trading represent, my hope is that they stay frozen forever, basically until there is not perceived/anticipated to be any future use for the tokens, that is, until there is no longer going to be any trading in that asset thus no need for tokens representing that asset thus no longer any need for a Fort Knox or Fortress of Solitude or whatever "stone cold frozen" cold storage of that asset. As that point, when trading in that asset is being shut down, maybe centuries into the future, the actual assets would get dug up and handed out to the owners at that time of the tokens that represent them.

This model totally separates the function of permanent storage of hopefully never again to move assets from the function of providing liquidity of the tokens that represent those assets.

That is, like e-Gold did, I want the whole buying and selling of those tokens aka of ownership of portions of those assets, to be a distinct different business, hopefully run by third parties.

One effect of that approach is that it is always at least 100% reserves, and usually more than 100% since only assets in excess of the 100% actually move, the 100% is frozen "forever", only unfrozen when the whole business shuts down aka when there are no plans to enable any more trading of that asset.

For things there is a limited number of in existence, such as bitcoins, this permanent freezing approach should even actually increase the value of any of that asset that has not yet been frozen into our reserves forever so that we could issue tokens representing it. Though if a majority of coins were to be frozen it would probably be best to have many servers/entities operating on these principles but run by different entities so people don't start thinking of the coin as one that is almost wholly owned by one server/token/trading company or entity.

The big problem with that whole approach is all the legal mumbo-jumbo vulnerability though if some regime somewhere decides for whatever reason that it wants to confiscate the assets or shut down trading of the assets. An ETF has a certain kind of possibly illusory resistance to such disasters, but then again didn't people in places like Cypress and people who put money in places like Cypress also imagine that having paperwork somehow made their assets safer?


Presumably an insurance layer would kind of amount to additional reserves over and above the 100% reserves? Ideally maybe there would eventually be at least a 100% reserves in the insurance fund over and above the 100% reserves originally and permanently frozen back when the tokens corresponding to that initial frozen reserve was issued. But that would presumably depend upon fees/income of some kind, some of the "profits" that the original frozen-forever reserves are "earning" by means of their existence being an enabler of confidence in the tokens would go into the "insurance" reserves, something like that?

I kind of envisioned maybe other well known people in the community would act as market-makers buying and selling the tokens and that each of them would hopefully, even probably, have at least as much reserves themselves as my original frozen-forever reserves that originally determined and fixed the total number of tokens in existence. Thus that any one of them could if they chose buy the entire total lot of all the tokens that exist. What I ended up with was a realisation that the total number of tokens that exist is basically the bandwidth of a pipeline; you can only transact that much value in any one transaction. So you need velocity, circulation, if lots of trade is to be enabled by just the fixed number of tokens that exist. But the advantage is you don't have hot wallets as part of the "reserves". The "reserves" are totally stone cold dead, our descendants will dig them up some century when they no longer intend to trade in that asset so they dig it up to melt it down or burn it or maybe they just leave it to rot and turn into fossils even.

(The "reserves" are in that way like that big round stone that fell into the ocean but still was useful as money because they could still change who owned it whenever they needed to, the fact no one could actually touch it visit it carry it etc was of no importance it seems. We have submarines and salvage corps now that could raise that stone from the ocean though if someone still after all this time wanted to move it...)

-MarkM-

Yes it seems a good idea to think ahead on your look/style, so that you can end up putting out lots of books all clearly related, like the O'Rielly (sp?) bunch of books on programming and the for dummies books and so on. A look you can carry over through book after book to lead to a nice shelf of books all clearly from your reputable publishing company / education project.

-MarkM-

Yeah my powerful dedicated servers out on the net are still doing poorly compared to some of the crappy old core two duos here at home. Its a crapshoot/lottery.

-MarkM-

My position has tended to be that the merged mined coins are ultimately a good bet simply because it is so trivially easy for miners to support them.

Most of the altcoins all have to divide up among them the hashing power that is available in the world, but the merged mined coins such as DeVCoin can all share the same massive bunch of hashing power so hopefully will long term be the most secure.

The thing about coins that never stop or even decrease the number of coins minted per block, such as DeVCoin and GRouPcoin and, I think, also CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld, is that in their second year the number of coins minted is 100% of what had previously existed, in their third year the number minted is 50% of what previously existed, in their fourth year the number minted is 33.33333333% of what previously existed and so on, that is to say it takes years for the new coins coming into existence in a given year to become a small fraction of the number already existing. Billions of DeVCoins already exist, but billions more are still being made. So it seems reasonable that it should take years from the time such coins are launched until their rate of inflation is low so we should expect that the first bunch of years people will dismiss them as printing way too many coins per year.

Take some comfort in the fact that at least some people who hold billions of them are not dumping them, because they could totally clean out the buy offers any time but they have not done so. They are maybe even the very people who are buying as well as selling, like I do, to keep the coin liquid. I have offers on Vircurex at every possible price on both buy and sell sides except the gap in between buy and sell where the actual trading at a given moment is going on. Thus basically whenever anyone sells I am buying but also whenever anyone buys I am selling. I have a fixed amount on the exchange and it just keeps changing how much of it is in bitcoins and how much is in devcoins as the buying and selling goes back and forth.

I would suggest that unless you like the idea of doing that - sitting on both sides of the gap between buys and sells, to profit on either direction - you simply forget about your DeVCoins until you hear they have gone back up above 200 satoshis each, or maybe 200 satoshis adjusted for bitcoin value increase since back when above 200 was the reasonable level bitcoins themselves were only worth $100 or less.

Looking at how much bitcoins have been going up, it has looked to me like maybe devcoins were actually being carried up with them to some extent, that is, devcoins haven't seemed offhand to me to be dropping relative to bitcoin as fast as bitcoin has been going up relative to fiat currencies. Is that not lately the case? Maybe I had the wrong impression.

I consider the times when DeVCoin is low to be great times to be buying, because I am confident they will go back up eventually.

When you bought for 250 satoshis per devcoin, how many dollars were bitcoins worth?

If you buy more devcoins while they are cheap, your average price paid per devcoin will become lower than 250 the more you buy the lower!

I suggest not directly/instantly buying or selling "accepting the market price" but instead pick the price you want to buy or sell at put your offer there and sit back waiting for someone someday to take you up on your offer, instead of being the impatient side of the trade accepting some offer someone else already has in place. (Assuming a somewhat trusted exchange such as Vircurex that historically has always made good to its customers any time it took losses from hacks etc, of course, so you can feel reasonably confident leaving coins on the exchange waiting for your offer to be taken up by someone.)

-MarkM-

Bear in mind difficulty! Back when years were only 365 days long it was easy, sure, but at higher difficulty when years are two to the umpteenth power days long it will be whole lot harder!

First you have to find two to the umpteenth power people to populate the mall with, too!

-MarkM-