Since you seemingly didn't follow the posts originally, re-posting them might not help since the re-posts will likely scroll away beyond your attention span of backscroll just as fast as the original posts did?

-MarkM-

Dunno what you mean, but generally in the game(s) one just uses the "price list", much like when you go into a branch of your bank and buy or sell foreign currency; though maybe I am way out of date, as I am recalling from decades ago my bank would just look up the rate for USD versus CDN or whatever, not go log on to some forex sites and check for arbitrage etc.

Basically there are a bunch of tables and plots at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html and the latest figures added to them get put at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc which is formatted suitably for use as an include-file in shell scripts and such.

For example these latest rates figures were used in a bunch of market-making scripts that would add or subtract one two or three percent or whatever to make offers on three scales of the Open Transactions server's markets. Actually you lot would likely even think the way those scales were done is kind of the opposite of what you are used to since the larger the scale of the market the less the markup or markdown, so that to get the best prices you would buy in bulk. So for example someone could buy something in lots of one million and break that up into lots of one hundred throusand or even ten thousand to sell at a profit on a smaller scale market. Sort of like bank rates or nation to nation rates versus wholesale rates and retail rates or whatever.

So basically when you look at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc bear in mind it is a middle of the road figure, sellers would mark it up one, two or three percent, or maybe more depending on relative scale of the assets of a pair, and buyers would mark it down, so typically you'd be offering to sell for more than those prices or offering to buy for less than those prices and how much more or less woudl depend on the scale of the market, basically you'd be asking more for screwing around with just hundred-lots or thousand-lots than for making substantial trades at larger scales.

Also bear in mind that the Digitalis server only uses integers, shares or coins are all the same, commodities measured in integers, no decimals/fractions. So in addition to the markup or markdown then also there would be rounding to be a price in integer number of this per integer number of that.

The whole numbers even for currencies is not only to stop acting like currencies are somehow magically different from shares or commodities but also because in the kinds of games a lot of players were used to one uses whole copper pieces, whole silver pieces, whole gold pieces, whole platinum pieces type of coinage not "pices of eight" as in chopped up little fractions of coins. So basically this way we get all assets to be similar in their integer wholeness whether whole shares or whole coins or whole porkbellies or whole pallets or containers or shiploads of porkbellies.

-MarkM-

Yeah in Canada too there is a monopoly going on so high prices here also.

-MarkM-

But hey if you like the unlimited coins idea just go ahead and open businesses that accept any and all of the altcoins that are still being launched almost every day.

That way people get variety, lots and lots of colours of sand, new sand, different sand, grains of different sizes and shapes, much more interesting, variety is the spice of life...

Oh and go ahead and mine them too if you like, there is never any shortage of coins to mine, if you are tired of the ones already out there are plenty of new ones constantly being launched, pick the coins of the day and have fun mining them all!

If you are right that providing services makes a currency valuable, then go ahead and provide services for every coin, they will all become valuable, everyone will love you for it, and you will be rich having mined lots and lots of them by always mining whichever has the lowest difficulty instead of the so called highest "profitability" since you know that the real profit will happen from all the services you are going to provide so you can afford to stockpile all the coins that people think are not profitable since really the reason they are not profitable is that you have not yet seen fit to open services for them! You will presumably open services for the coins that were "the least profitable" since those will be the ones you were able to mine the most of easiest! So people will be totally fooled, running after the pathetic tiny "profits" shown on the profit sites instead of the lowest dfficulty coins that are considered the most worthless which are the ones that will skyrocket since those will be the ones you will make valuable by opening services for them!

Awesome plan! Good luck with it!

-MarkM-

Litecoin is a "clone" of bitcoin, go figure.

I think I0Coin is something like one and a half minutes block target time whereas IXCoin is maybe ten minute or so like bitcoin.

-MarkM-

Once all the people who are masochistic enough to build mining businesses have the most efficient mining hardware available and have put it in the places on Earth that have the cheapest electricity, upgrades of mining gear will mostly happen when a new smaller type of chip becomes possible or a new cheaper way of generating or gathering (from wind, sun, whatever) power becomes available.

The big mistake right now is all kinds of amateurs trying to jump into mining because they still see it is some kind of goldrush where one guy with a shovel or a swishing pan can dig up or swish from river-muck tiny amounts of gold, instead of as something that takes a huge amount of very expensive industrial equipment to do.

Remember that mining is a "race to the bottom" industry, who-ever can do it cheapest gets to do it and anyone who cannot do it as cheap is not going to have any room for any profit. That is intentional.

So just forget about mining unless you are a huge multinational corporation looking to put datacentres wherever power is cheapest, as it is a losers game, you might just as well go into sewing or something, maybe, if you are in a place where cost of living is dirt cheap so that you can labour cheaper than other people located in places where labour is dirt cheap. It is a similar mechanics. If you want to make money in business you need to figure out what you can do cheaper than anyone else on the planet and do that, or do some puny local thing like a pub or barbershop that caters to a strictly local set of people - and even then you'd better be the cheapest and/or best in that little area else again you'll find you just don't have room to profit at it...

-MarkM-

Because so many coins are being blown on ASICs whose manufacturers or payment processors are dumping them cheap for fiat, maybe?

The crazy low price of bitcoins is a huge buying opportunity, buying bitcoins and holding them a year or few will likely be massively more profitable than buying ASICs.

The smart money is probably laughing at wannabe miners and snapping up all these insanely cheap coins...

-MarkM-

That is part of the beauty of merged mining!

Even as some of the coins that are merged mined by the most people start returning you less and less coins, you still have merged coins you can mine that a lot of people are not bothering with yet. So basically as profit margins get smaller and smaller the edge you can get by mining another merged coin that other people are not bothering with will become more and more significant.

RIght now people look at merged coins and think "oh less than one percent, why bother" but when one percent is all they make they will look again and go like "wow a fraction of a percent, every fraction counts, how was I such an idiot as to have ignored that many basis points (hundredths of a percent) for so long, silly me!"

-MarkM-

Oh we have lots of coins that "inflate". GRouPcoin, DeVCoin, I think maybe CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld too, plus even a bunch of the scrypt coins.

-MarkM-

There actually is already at least one coin with a difficulty that never changes: liquidcoin.

Basically instead of higher and higher difficulty as more and more people mine harder and harder you just get more and more orphans, since everyone is creating hundreds or thousands or more blocks every second...

So if difficulty doesn't change in your "ideal coin" you'll be complaining about orphans instead of difficulty, and costing a massive amount more bandwidth too of course for no greater chance of getting coins unless your plan is to simply hand out coins to everyone in proportion to how much mining gear they have, in which case you might as well just sell them the mining gear with all the coins it will mine in its lifetime already included. The gear can be an envelope, the coins be a private key included in the envelope. Save on electricity! People buy the gear aka envelope and instantly "mine" the coins by opening it!

If you want to spread the coins out over a "lifetime" of the "mining gear" the envelope can contain a whole bunch of crypted keys, and the secrets to how to decrypt them be released to them over time...

-MarkM-

You should move this thread to the politics-and-or-culture forum.

If it actually made any economic sense maybe the economics forum but unfortunately so far it doesn't seem a proper fit for that one...

-MarkM-

Wasn't (s)he already identified as the same person who scammed 250 bitcoins back when and then another bunch of bitcoins more recently with the primecoin GPU miner scam?

-MarkM-

Until recently, GRouPcoin was mostly used by groups, such as guilds, clans, gangs and so on, bunches of players working together.

So most never even used the satoshi-client at all, instead their guild or gang or whatever (their "group") would have an account on the Digitalis Open Transactions server and maybe for some groups, the group might also have some kind of group banking system set up somewhere, maybe even on Tor or i2p, maybe running something like Cyclos.

Some "groups" tended mostly to use in-game currencies in the various games, leaving the holding of blockchain based coins and such to the clan/gang/group "officers" to hold as basic behind the scense collateral for the group as a whole.

So maybe if you are not a compling type of person you could check around in your "group" for someone who is, or form a "group" and try to attract someone into the "group" who likes to do nitty gritty financial program type stuff, or even maybe try to join a group that already has some kind of banking/finance stuff set up for its members...

-MarkM-

No, those are source-code tarballs, so you can compile them however you want.

-MarkM-

The way I find out whether a coin is updated, usually, is simply to go through all my coin source directories doing a git pull on each. The ones for which the git pull pulls new code are evidently updated.

Now though it is sounding as if there might not even be any particular github repo that is the one updates are pushed to

-MarkM-

Merged mining is a big reason to use p2pool. It is really really simple to do merged mining with it, in fact I think it is the easiest way to do your own merged mining at home. You can pick which coins you want to merge, so you can get all the coins the public pools leave out.

Also the real p2pool has always been fine, no virus or trojan yet from there. I would not be surprised if lots of the clonecoin versions people keep hacking up have all kinds of problems, could have wallet-stealers or anything. If you want good safe code wait for the people who are adapting it for various altcoins to get their pulls accepted into the mainline repo, that way you can be reasonably sure their code actually made sense enough to include into the mainstream distribution.

-MarkM-

Usually in prediction markets there is a feedback mechanism, at some point the real world is checked to see what the real fact is and the prediction is compared to that, so people who predict well get rewarded.

If there is no feedback from the actual price of dollars in bitcoins or bitcoins in dollars or whatever then what you name your tickers is irrelevant and people are surely going to realise that. So in fact the way to make moeny would probably turn out to be to bet away from the actual value of dollars, so lots of people who are fooled by the label will think you are crazy but since ultimately whatever number gets the most bet on it wins a millionaire or billionaire or cartel or whatever can just have fun betting more than everyone else all put together on some insane value that people who think the labels mean something will think cannot possibly be right, but because it has the most bet on it thus is the consensus it wins anyway. Eventually even the most stupid of suckers is bound to realise the label means nothing, it is all about who has the most money. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, its business as usual, the labels are just more smoke and mirrors to fool the suckers.

-MarkM-

Maybe you could simply mine one or both of the really low difficulty merged mined coins, quietly building up a large stash of them so that you will be in position with lots of them when they go onto pools and exchanges? Unfortunately it is already too late to jump on I0Coin and GRouPcoin as they already did go onto pools and, at least in I0Coin's case, exchanges. It is too bad you didnt' pick up those while they were easy. But CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld are still easy to get. The nice thing about the merged mined coins is you can expect them to have decent difficulty very rapidly, look at I0Coin and GRouPcoin now for example, just getting onto bitparking's mmpool jacked their difficulties way up. So if you pick up CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld now before that happens to them too you could end up with a large stash of well secured (high difficulty) coins very rapidly once they do get picked up. In fact you might prefer they not get picked up for some time, so you can have more time to build your national warchest before it happens.

-MarkM-

Did anyone get chips? There has been no word that Yifu even sent him any for real...

-MarkM-

What can you buy locally and export?

Because if you can ship something people will buy with bitcoins you might be able to increase the value of bitcoins themselves by making them available to the Venezuelan market.

Basically try to hold as many bitcoins as you can, while shipping out emeralds or something, whatever you can get there that is easy to ship, to bring in bitcoins...

-MarkM-