Why does everyone go on about how a bitcoin increase would help?

Think about, a bitcoin decrease could work too: you could mine $85, bitcoin drop to $1 per bitcoin, buy 85 bitcoins.

Just as reasonable as doing it by bitcoin increasing, it just takes converting to dollars and back instead of only to dollars and stopping there.

(For "just as reasonable" the reader might be well advised to read "just as unreasonable" but maybe that is a matter of taste/tastelessness.)

-MarkM-

Asset values expressed in DeVCoins: http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc

Also listed at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/indevcoins.html and http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/sharesindvc.html

And plotted in colours at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/plotdvc.html and http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/plotsharesindvc.html

Also of course DeVCoins are among the coins people like to use in conjunction with http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=cpu_mining

But yeah its really all just part of one meta-game, the Galactic Milieu so I guess you could count it all as one thing.

-MarkM-

They made it clear that the stuff is as far as they knew all going to arrive in time.

So until they know otherwise harrassing them is just a waste of space and time.

If something ends up running late enough to derail their plans maybe they will tell us so once it happens.

In the meantime we already have been informed what is going on: everything was on track last we heard.

-MarkM-

Awesome! Thanks. It will be fun to see what happens with altripple networks of course but bitcoin has survived altcoins so it seems likely Ripple will survive altripples.

-MarkM-

Ripple ledgers are public so you know what accounts hold how many of your stocks at any given iteration of a complete accurate ledger.

Your trusted friends are deprecated in modern Ripple, you are advised to trust a "gateway", in this case the secretary of the company, or the service they engage to track and handle their shares, would be the "gateway".

About the only aspect that isn't off hand known for sure right now by me is whether in RIpple you can designate a currency as integer-only, to prevent people from trading fractions of a share.

But if not then lobbying them to support integer "currencies" should commence ASAP if they never thought of this yet themselves.

-MarkM-

And have it turn out to be a lie?

If it is just their guess, then they already told you: everything is on track.

If it is to be the day they actually do arrive, then until that day arrives they don't know.

No wonder Josh makes shit up, assholes like you insist on some wild ass guess then bring blame when suppliers / shippers / etc make the guess inaccurate? Jerk.

-MarkM-

The higher bitcoin goes the less electricity will be a factor, but still if you are basing your decision on confidence that bitcoin will go up you are probably better off just holding bitcoins.

A while ago rushing to get some hashing power might have made some sense if you were going to merged mine I0COin, GRouPcoin, CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld before the masses picked up on them and skyrocketed their difficulty but now that both I0Coin and GRouPcoin have been added to mmpool's merge that leaves only CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld windows of opportunity still open, which is probably no more than half as much of an opportunity as when I0Coin and GRouPcoin too were still sitting there easy to mine.

-MarkM-

Someone started a two months to maturity coin recently, Extremecoin maybe?

-MarkM-

Yeah well part of the reason for using a sockpuppet might be not only to try to create some "excuse" for no relevant linked-in etc profiles showing experience in the field, relevant skills and so on, but to try to conceal that the reason the whole scheme seems so sophomoric is due to its being come up with by a 12 year old...

Maybe with the emotional maturity of a two year old - "I don't care that it is doomed, I gonna do it anyway, its not my money so I don't care"...

-MarkM-

This seems kind of sleazy, even scammy, somehow.

The referenced thread seems to show there is community support.

So now this attempt to sucker respected members of the community into manipulating the community's money - assuming the community does by this trick get sucked into putting in money at all - on behalf of this imagined entity "OurAsic". which appears to be basically a sockpuppet / scam-account or somesuch yet presumably will be telling the "treasurers" what to do with the money.

Does this kind of smell bad to anyone else?

(Community supported against the community's will? What the?)

-MarkM-

NaMeCoin can be used in recent versions of Open Transactions for your master identity which authorises all your revokable identities/nyms, though as the iPhone and Androind apps for Open Transactions are not quite ready for real world use yet that could take a while yet to have much impact.

All the SHA256 merged mined coins look pretty good, they have stuck around for years and merged mining gives them decent difficulty provided pools do bother to include them in their merge.

If it is true that fast blocks are a good feature then GeistGeld might be a big darkhorse candidate because its blocks are really fast and it is merged mined.

DeVCoin has been really popular with borrowers, there is more outstanding debt denominated in DeVCoins than there are DeVCoins. Like, way more. Years from now - many years from now - there still will not be as many DeVCoins as the amount of DeVCoin-denominated debt already existing. Unfortunately if it is having any impact on DeVCoin exchange rates it seems to be a downwards impact, as if the debtors are successfully suppressing the rates so as to be able to pay down their debts as cheaply as possible.

GRouPcoin is looking interesting right now because although it is merged mined at bitparking's mmpool I haven't heard of it being on any exchanges yet, if it is not then, who knows, maybe people who missed out on the years it could be merged at low difficulty still might be able to pick some up cheap over the counter from people who are getting it "free" at mmpool and have no idea what to do with it.

I0Coin is also interesting because like the rest of the merged mined coins it has been around for years, and like GRouPcoin it is merged mined at mmpool; it is on at least one exchange but weirdly its price is much lower than that of Ixcoin despite the fact Ixcoin is giving out 96 coins per block while I0Coin is giving out only 3 coins per block.

Ixcoin of course might be in trouble when its "sudden death of minting" hits, as some day in the not so very far distant future it will drop from minting 96 coins per block to minting no coins per block. An interesting experiment but so far its supporters don't seem to have put in place a lot of commerce to generate transaction fees to keep miners mining when that "sudden death" hits.

-MarkM-

Most coins are alike in that they have a wallet.dat file in their data directory. Most likely put their data directory in much the same place too, but named after the particular coin whose data directory it is.

For example on Linux, ~/.bitcoin, ~/.i0coin, etc.

-MarkM-

I thought I had read that they screwed his customers, or at least those in their distributor-region, by jacking up the price way beyond usefulness so that not only would there be no profit in buying the product but also no one else in their region could offer it as a reasonable price as they are a designated distributor so people in their region are supposed to buy through them.

But maybe I misunderstood or they have been removed from the pipeline for that or something.

-MarkM-

The more time that passes the more people are not going to want the boards.

Maybe Yifu is still busy scamming people and lied about sending the chips, if so maybe another round of demanding refunds from Yifu might be in order...

Even if they had arrived last week and been put on to boards over the weekend it might be too late, if they aren't even on boards yet or, worse, haven't even reached the assembly house to be put onto boards that is just crazy-insane and it'd maybe be better to just forget about even trying and just send the marines or sherrifs or whatever over to deal with Yifu's seemingly neverending propensity to lie and scam.

-MarkM-

Good idea. I don't do Windows and have no desire to do Windows.

-MarkM-

Well maybe ripple will be ideal then.

It avoids the hideously massive cost of paying "hashers" to secure a blockchain, yet anyone can issue assets.

So a company can issue share IOUs, redeemable for actual shares maybe even if someone wants to walk into the office of the secretary of the company or their share owner tracking service they employ if they have chosen not to be anonymous.

Dirt cheap, easy, already up and running, seems like a pretty obvious approach...

-MarkM-

It isn't so much which hash you use or how many types of hashes you use, as do you have more than 50% of the GPUs or CPUs or whatever the world can muster?

Bitcoin seems reasonably secure because you can add up the computing power of gosh knows how many of the top supercomputers and computing nets in the world and all working together they still do not add up to enough computing power to pull off an attack...

-MarkM-

The experiments, pilot projects and initial deployments of what is now being called "CPU mining" (a somewhat different approach than "dumb hashers" or even "fancy jane-type hashers" or even "prime chain finders" are accustomed to) are still looking quite promising, although they do not actually attempt to "secure" the currencies they are used with; instead their aim is simply to distribute the currencies. So although they seem to have been so far a "win" for their "miners" and for holders of the currencies (see http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html for valuations) the problem of how to actually secure blockchains so that those currencies can reasonably move back to using blockchains (like they used to originally) is still a waiting game. (Wait until the sheer volume of transactions is high enough for the transaction fees to be enough to attract and retain hashers...)

-MarkM-

Quite a few American families like at least a whole room to themselves too, instead of sharing a room with another family and splitting costs.

So although American families might in some areas find lower electricity costs they might end up paying so much more for a room, or maybe even multiple rooms, that it would eat up the electricity savings. Though maybe one could live in a shared room somewhere else and just rent enough space in America to co-host and power however many rigs you want to run.

Mining is hideously expensive, and justified mostly by the assumption that once you have massively more hashing power securing your chain or merged collection of chains than the entire remainder of the world could feasibly manage to combine together for an attack the sheer scale of the expense involved becomes more of a barrier to attackers than it is to the incumbents - the people defending the chain(s).

So basically it does not really make much sense for anyone to "pay you well" to waste electricity on a pretty much doomed attempt to defend one of many many many little toy blockchains that are not even all ganging up together via merged mining to at least share the cost of defense. Instead it makes much more sense to keep those chains so pathetically low in value that it is their sheer worthlessness that "protects" them from attack, by making them "not worth the trouble of attacking despite their puny defense".

Also, it seems most miners of alt-coins are not even really engaged in defending blockchains at all. Very often they damage the value of coins they mine by doing crazy things like driving their difficulty way high then abandoning them, so that blocks get generated massively slower than the target time, which seems unlikely to enhance the value of the coin. So those coins aren't even actually paying for security at all, they are in effect paying for the fact that they do not have enough security. Probably the first thing they should have done before launching was secure far far more hashing power than all the gang-bang pools all added together, so as to launch a coin with high enough hashing power that being gang-banged would not make much of a blip at all on their hashrate...

-MarkM-

Now that mining is so simple that even computer-illiterate Windows-users can do it, its time is almost over.

Any make almost-free money on the internet scheme goes that way... At first only a few people have it figured out, eventually too many of them are doing it so it becomes more profitable to sell Windows programs that do it than to actually run the programs yourself, then pretty soon it is just like all the "ten million email addresses on a CD, send emails to make money" and "automatically send ads to newsgroups, can send hundreds of thousands of ads per day, make a fortune" and "sign up other people underneath you into a vast pyramid" systems: either so overdone that there is no money in it anymore or so overdone that it gets banned or somesuch but either way there is only so much pie to go around and so many users of Windows that the amount any individual user gets of the pie becomes not worth fighting for, just making back the cost of the get rich quick tool gets hard...

-MarkM-