In those days a whole lot of posts and threads had been or were going on about how with bitcoin going up in value so much ordinary things people buy like a cup of coffee or whatever was going to end up needing lots of decimal-places, and normal people would be weirded out by that, so bitcoin should move its decimal place, and on and on like that.

So part of the design that Unthinkingbit hired me to help him learn how to implement and help him implement included that the intended coin was to have already moved the decimal place from the get-go, so as to get the whole big argument about whether to move the decimal place and if so how far to move it and so on out of the way right from the initial design.

So basically it was handed down to me "from above" by the client as part of the initial specs of what he wanted.

When bitcoin is $1000 per coin and a cheap cup of coffee costs 0.001 BTC, maybe if we are really lucky, and awesome marketers, and create oodles of businesses that use devcoin, and convince masses of people and shops and so on to adopt it as yet another of the many currencies their payment processor processes for them, that same cup of coffee might cost the much less confusing price of 1 DVC.

(Good luck with that. We'd presumably need our difficulty to catch up with bitcoin's too while we're at it to achieve that, so I guess we need to convince all the bitcoin pools to take up merged mining too...)

(Oh and we keep mining forever, so we'd get an inflation hit that bitcoin doesn't...)

Unthinkingbit did most of the work, he is the developer, he hired me to help him learn/discover how to implement what he wanted and I helped a little in actually coding it in the process of us both discovering how it could be done. He mostly just needed someone more familiar with the bitcoin codebase to help him learn faster how it worked, and we both needed to do some actual experiments to learn what kind of hacks at it we could get away with.

(I think I had already been working on all the game-nation and game-corporation blockchains at the time so was quite familiar with making basic hacks at the code to make clonecoins, though I had been hacking the testnet code to make those so that gamers could use the -testnet switch (or a renamed such switch) to make their client do their chosen gamecoin or use the same client without a switch to have it do normal bitcoin as usual.)

-MarkM-

That does seem to be about where bitcoin mining might be headed, doesn't it? At least for a while...

-MarkM-

It seems reasonable to list it after DeVCoin, because DeVCoin already existed in our heads when we created GRouPcoin as a testbed to try approaches toward implementing DeVCoin, and I am pretty sure it wasn't until DeVCoin was working that we ripped out the failed attempts at creating a DeVCoin from the GRouPcoin code making it the actual GRouPcoin we are familiar with today rather than just a testbed - with gamers actually trying to use it so there'd be in effect actual testers testing it - on which to try ideas aimed at creating what we were actually trying to create (DeVCoin).

We can probably reasonably regard GRouPcoin as having remained a test coin until DeVCoin was launched; once DeVCoin was up and running its -testnet flag presumably would have been the way to go for any further testing of it. GRouPcoin never did have what DeVCoin has, it mostly tested little crucial details of what exactly one can do to coinbase transactions and how. Once we knew enough about what we could do there, we knew how we could implement DeVCoin so went ahead and did so. The gamers continued to test the use of cryptocurrency in games with the GRouPcoins they had accumulated, and naturally did not want their coins to vanish... If they were willign to game with vanishing coins they would have used bitcoin testnet coins in their games. A key feature for coins for gaming was, to them, the fact no dungeonmaster or game script etc etc could take their coins away aka cause them to vanish. Permanence was, to them, an essential feature. So GRouPcoin, without any of the failed attempts at changing genesis blocks or first few blocks or every block's coinbase or anthing like that, chugged along much like while other gaming coins such as United Kingdom Britcoins, Canadian Digital Notes, United Nations Scrip, General Mining Corp scrip, General Retirement Funds scrip etc etc etc. (All of which eventually moved away from using blockchains "temporarily" until such future time as sufficient transaction volumes exist to make the transaction fees add up to enough to attract miners.)

I think I read somewhere that the scrypt coins - Tenebrix then Fairbrix then Litecoin (though that list might be leaving out SHA256 coins launched in the meantime, I do not know) came after DeVCoin and thus presumably also after GRouPcoin. I do not know if that is true though.

-MarkM-

I suspect any "other work" hosted on the Devtome server or included directly into a page served from the Devtome server probably needs to be free open source content used in accordance with its existing free open source license.

Are you familiar with wikipedia's stance on this issue?

It seems to me references are typically put at the bottom of the page and consist basically of links to third party sites that hosted the material that is referenced.

So for example if you want to make reference to a particular proprietary photo out there on the net somewhere, or even a photo you yourself took for some corporation (they own the copyright and have released it as free open source) that they now host on their site - probably regardless of whether it shows any logos - you should use a little superscript reference-number link like wikipedia does or some such mechanism the reader can click to jump to that reference's little blurb/link at the bottom of the page, from which they can click away to the third party site if they wish to see/read/hear/watch the actual thing/material you are making reference to...

-MarkM-

Well of course once I posted my previous post one of my servers found a block. So here's nagging the other two hoping this post will get them off the pot too.

-MarkM-

One that I know of, and have used in the past (before I set up p2pool for myself so as to be able to merge more coins than mmpool merges), and still use as my backup pool, is

http://mmpool.bitparking.com

-MarkM-

Remember that by uploading it you are free open source licensing it, so anyone can then grab it to use for pretty much anything they want to, derive derivative works from it, hack it up to use for other purposes and all those usual free open source activities people do with free open source stuff that is why free open source stuff is so useful to humanity in general. (No one ever again need go cap in hand to Bill Gates or Stephen King for a text editor or a horror novel, for example, once free open source text editors and horror novels exist that can be freely used instead of the proprietary ones...)

-MarkM-

Oh well of course now that BBQcoins are worth too little to buy mining rigs with re-investing bitcoins into rigs sounds good... if any rigs ever come on the market that have a reasonable chance of turning a BTC-denominated profit, that is...

-MarkM-

But wait!

What if...

Inaba shipped the customers officer to Kansas City ahead of time and used the BFL mind control ray on him?!?!?!

Or worse! ... What if BFL's mind-control ray has been launched into orbit and can target customs officers worldwide?!?!?!

 

-MarkM-

Is it really true that DeVCoin is the second-oldest cryptocoin, right after BiTCoin?

It really came before NaMeCoin, before, oops, GRouPcoin?

Hahaha we (Unthinkingbit and I) made GRouPcoin initially as just a chain to try out ways of implementing DeVCoin, then once we figured out how we could do DeVCoin GRouPcoin shed all those test/prototype features and the gamers who had been getting into it for use in games continued using it. So okay lets not count GRouPcoin, since we can lump it in as basically "part of DeVCoin", and it didn't really "go public", much at least, really, until after DeVCoin was launched. It just kind of continued along on its merry way as a coin used in certain games - such as the Galactic Milieu - for quite a while before much of anyone other than the gamers using it really noticed the darn thing had not died.

(Some gamers, coming from games like Dungeons and Dragons, Chivalry and Sorcery, Land of the Rising Sun and so on and so on, still to this day think that ultimately GRouPcoin ought, by market forces, end up as in effect a 1000-devcoin coin, because it generates one thousandth as many coins per block as DeVCoin and, being as how both are merged mined, ought hopefully to end up having the same difficulty as DeVCoin too. Thus, one thousand times as many hashes per coin to mint, thus, one thousand times as expensive. They aren't at all adapted to having different coins have different exchange rates, they are used to the number of silverpieces per gold piece, the number of copper piece, etc hard-coded into the game as constants! )

So I don't mind GRouPcoin being considered to come after DeVCoin, afterall it was only in order to implement DeVCoin, and as part of implementing DeVCoin, that it came into existence at all. DeVCoin already existed as our goal in our heads when we came up with the idea of making GRouPcoin as a testbed to try out some implementation ideas.

But I have a vague recollection that people who made chronological lists from time to time of which coin got created when used to list something else after BiTCoin before DeVCoin, didn't they? Or did they? If they did, were they wrong?

-MarkM-

Miners will still get transaction fees, and it is a merged mined coin so it is pretty darn cheap to mine it since you still get to use your hashing power on bitcoin and all the other merged mined coins at the same time.

Still, it would make sense to get a whole lot of transactions flying by then, such as by having lots and lots of shops with lots and lots of customers all buying and selling in Ixcoins.

Also techish is the RAM usage problem that all merged mined coins will show more and more the more blocks they go through, the coins that make blocks fastest, GeistGeld and I0Coin, were already using huge amounts of RAM some time ago, all the others will eventually unless they get updated with the new code the current maintainer of I0Coin has put into I0Coin. SO basically all the other merged mined coins, including Ixcoin, will want to update their code based on latest I0Coin eventually, and probably the sooner the better, in order to consume less RAM.

Yes, 121 plumbum (lead - chemical element symbol Pb) etc etc FAX is mine, thanks.

-MarkM-

Well sure, if you insist, but I am also posting that story to the Devtome, which will pay me one share of Devcoins per thousand words, so I already do have a plan for getting paid for the post.

My tip address, which works for devcoins or for bitcoins, is shown near the bottom of my Devtome wiki userpage, which is at http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=wiki:user:knotwork (I am known as knotwork there, because I own knotwork.com and knotwork.net - for example I run the Digitalis Open Transactions server at ot.knotwork.com ...)

-MarkM-

Transaction pipe fatness and the Digitalis Open Transactions server

Okay, let us suppose that someone is interested in buying, lets say, a United Kingdom Britcoin (UKB).

Looking around for places where people trade such things, they happen across the Digitalis Open Transactions Server.

Looking at their junk pile of lottery-tickets aka their collection of altcoin wallets, they happen to pick Ixcoin as the coin they figure they can afford to part with some of to take a gamble on this UKB stuff that has somehow caught their interest. (Maybe they met a member of Britclan on MUDgaard, for example, and thus learned of the existence of UKB and thought it might be nice to have some, if only to have an "in" with that clan.)

So okay, lets say that they also learned of the "last known value" readout located at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc ... They look at those "latest rates" and see that Ixcoin's latest known value is listed as IXCrate=236.85086190 and UKB's latest known value is listed as UKBrate=131720558.06933953

From that it is trivial to compute that the value of UKB in Ixcoins, (UKBrate / IXCrate), should, if markets operated efficiently, have been somewhere around 556132.90579855 Ixcoins per UKB.

Now obviously people waiting patiently to sell UKB for IXC would obviously be hoping/waiting to sell for more than that, and people patiently waiting to sell IXC for UKB would obviously be hoping/waiting to sell less IXC than that for each UKB, so likely the actual prices asked and offered would have been above and below that figure, with people who are in a hurry paying a premium to get what they want as soon as they can get it.

So anyway, this prospective buyer of UKB decides he wants to get, say, 600000 IXC onto the Open Transactions server so as to try to buy a UKB even if UKB turns out to have gone up in valuation compared to IXC by the time they are actually able to place a buy offer or take someone up on a sell offer.

This is where the "fatness of the pipe" comes in.

It turns out that the server only actually has 10,000 digiIxcoins (dIXC) in existence, because the cold storage vaults backing the digitokens on the server only contain 10,000 deep-frozen actual on the blockchain Ixcoins.

So, the most dIXC anyone is going to be able to sell in one shot is 10,000.

So, our hero seeks out people who have dIXC on that server who are willing to sell some dIXC in return for some actual real on the blockchain Ixcoins.

If he is lucky, he is able to find a so called market maker, who, just like the various third party sites that used to sell people e-gold, or Liberty Reserve, or who still sell people Pecunix, is in the business of selling people digitokens for actual on-blockchain coins, and has some dIXC for sale for real actual IXC.

The most dIXC that market-maker could have available is 10,000 since that is all that have actually been issued. Maybe our hero gets lucky, and that market-maker happens to be holding all ten thousand of the dIXC that exist. Awesome! Our hero buys them using real on the blockchain Ixcoins. A transaction pipe ten thousand dIXC fat is now possible for our hero to use to buy UKB!

Oops, here we hit another little glitch! It turns out, possibly even to our hero's surprise, that the Digitalis Open Transaction server only deals in integer numbers of things. Whole shares, whole coins, whole whatevers. Whole United Kingdom Britcoins, for example. There is no dealing in fractions of a coin. If you want to deal in smaller granularity, that is what lower-value coins/assets are for!

So our hero looks again at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc , this time looking to see what thing has the lowest last known value. It happens to be the case at that time that the lowest value shown is DVCrate=1.00000000 , because in general the list of values has the best "granularity" when the lowest-valued asset is used as the asset in which the values are denominated.

So, he can now compute that in order to buy one dUKB he would need UKBrate dDVC, that is, 131720558.06933953 dDVC.

Checking with the market-maker, lets say he gets lucky again and learns that the market-maker sells DVC and has the entire 200 million dDVC that is the entire total of all the dVC that have been issued onto the server. Awesome, that is enough dDVC to buy a whole dUKB!

At this point our hero is quite likely to ask the market-maker whether, perchance, the market-maker happens to deal in UKB or dUKB, since it is becoming apparent that if you could trade on the blockchain coins for on the blockchain coins without going through an Open Transactions server maybe this whole Open Transactions thing could be avoided and he and the market-maker could simply do a direct person to person trade of IXC for UKB.

Ah but there is a catch, it turns out. Actually, two catches!

One is that this particular market-maker does not carry UKB, because he only deals in actual on the here-on-the planet known as Earth blockchains and the digitokens used on the Open Transactions server to represent such coins.

Two is that UKB does not operate on a blockchain here on the planet known as Earth, because on this planet miners charge such outrageously massive fees for hashing blockchains that it would be crazy to even attempt to secure a blockchain at such usurious rates. Thanks to the lack of affordable hashing power to secure a blockchain on this planet, UKB operates on this planet using Open Transactions servers instead of blockchains.

So, okay, our hero says, I want to buy 135 million dDVC on the Digitalis server, using actual on the blockchain Ixcoins.

Lets get our fatness of pipe thing back into the story here though, shall we, so we can show how, in the case of things low enough in value per each such thing that at least one such thing can be bought using the fatness of pipe you have at hand, you can do multiple trades to add up to the value you want to move...

So our market-maker says oh sorry but I already have ten thousand actual on the blockchain Ixcoins, which is all I will ever need, at least until the Digitalis server sees fit to issue more dIXC, so I don't want any more of your actual on the blockchain Ixcoins. But I will work around this problem for you, because market-making is what I do so solving problems such as this is my bread and butter. First off, if you would be so kind, let me refund you your actual on the blockchain Ixcoins, as I will be needing those ten thousand dIXC tokens I sold you for them. Thanks. Now watch as I offer those dIXC for sale for something else, hmm, it has to be something I can buy at least one of for only 2,360,000 dDVC or less because that is about what these 10,000 dIXC are worth. Hmm, lets pick dNMC, as those are only worth about 11500.79662986 dDVC and I happen to know a chap who has lots of them and who collects all the merged mined coins so I know he will be interested in buying some actual on the blockchain Ixcoins. Yes, sure enough, lookie there on the ten thousand scale dNMC/dIXC market, that offer to buy up to a hundred lots of ten thousand dIXC per lot for dNMC is probably him. I'll sell the dIXC to that offer. Oh lookie here, as I expected his scripts automatically sent me a request to buy some real on the blockchain Ixcoins for ten thousand digiIxcoins! Ha! Y'see I know he really prefers on the blockchain coins to digitokens so I figured he would do that. I am his usual market-maker, and I already told him I'd keep an eye out for actual on the blockchain Ixcoins for him to buy from me for dIXC. Now, please, send ten thousand real on the blockchain Ixcoins to him, here is the address he has me send real Ixcoins to him at. He - or his scripts, anyway - will send me back the dIXC on the Digitalis server and we can sell it to him again for more digiNamecoins, and so on until we have enough digiNamecoins to buy you a digiUKB...

-MarkM-

Here is a really simple - maybe even "simplistic" - currency-backing bot strategy idea:

Suppose you have a currency, lets call it DeVCoin, for example, that you would like to have some value.

Suppose, further, that you have some kind of revenue-generator also, lets say for example a wiki with adsense ads on it. You could call it something like Devtome, for example.

Suppose even further that you know that 200,000,000 of your currency - lets call that 200 million DVC - is entering the market each month.

Finally, let us suppose that there exists an exchange where you can exchange the type of currency the ads bring in for your currency that you would like to make "valuable".

So, okay, each month you need to be prepared to buy 200 million DVC, so that none of the 200 million coins coming onto the market that month will seem "valueless".

Now we plug in the revenue from our ads. For example suppose your ads bring in, after all operating expenses, fifty somethings. Lets call them dollars, denoted with a $ sign.

Now we have a simple bit of arithmetic we can do: we have $50 available and 200 million DVC that need to be capable of being sold, in case someone turns out to want to sell them.

It would be really nice if the exchange used for this let you place offers that do not have a duration at which they auto-expire, so lets assume that once we place an offer it won't go away unless someone buys it all or we cancel whatever is left of it.

So, we place an order to buy 200 million DVC for $50.

Next month, we can simply do the same again. And just keep on doing so each month.

If we are really lucky, or really good at managing/operating our revenue generator, we might even find that over time we have more and more dollars available each month with which to try to buy the 200 million DVC that are entering the market each month. But if not, no worries, whatever offers we can afford to place will just sit there on the exchange year after year, decade after decade, until either someone does take us up on them or we launch another revenue-generator with which our first revenue-generator can team up to try to make, between them, offers high enough that folks do start taking us up on them. (In which case, maybe, not sure if its worth the bother, we could consider cancelling our old single-revenue-generator-based orders and replacing them with dual-revenue-generator-based orders?)

So far of course that seems like a pretty stupid bot, maybe a bit too simplistic to be practical.

So maybe we do need to make it at least a little bit more complicated.

Suppose, for example, that people snap up all our offers as fast as we make them. Would that be a problem? Surely if we had been doing all this from the original launch of our currency that would mean no one else but us actually has any of our currency, we have bought it all as fast as it was minted. Hmm.

Okay, suppose for some reason - even a really stupid reason - we somehow got butterfingers and allowed some of our currency to slip from our grasp. Like, maybe we paid our hosting bill with some or something like that. Oops, that month there was more than the normal 200 million DVC entering the market! There was 200 million plus our hosting bill!

Can we just plug that new/different "how many enter the market" value in as that month's amount entering the market and go on using the same formula? Simply offer our net revenue of the month in dollars for two million plus our hosting bill DVC on the exchange? Would that work?

-MarkM-

Ixcoin seemed and I guess still seems pretty similar to I0Coin, the main difference lately having been that bitparking dropped I0Coin thus making its difficulty drop thus making it much much easier for small merged mining miners to get them. Ixcoin meanwhile stayd on bitparking all along so stayed hard for small miners to get much of.

I guess I0Coin likely is faster blocks than Ixcoin otherwise presumably Ixcoin ought to have increased in RAM usage as fast as I0Coin did, so I am not sure why I0Coin used to be called a clone of Ixcoin but without Ixcoin's pre-mine. It has less coins per block too, so again, doesn't seem a clone really, certainly it does not seem to be "Ixcoin but without the pre-mine" as I seem to recall it used to be advertised as.

I think Ixcoin is some weird combination of same number of coins per block forever yet no more coins after a certain block, a sudden death scenario or something? If so that might be the most unique thing about it, pretty much all other coins either churn out the same number of coins per block forever or taper down such as by halving number of coins per block every so many blocks.

If it is a sudden-death scenario for minting that could be interesting to see when its time comes.

-MarkM-

Well maybe they had been doing it free on their own dime just because it needed doing, for so long, so well, that it seemed reasonable to invite them to do it officially on the company dime?

EDIT: As to auto-buying devcoins, maybe best would be to take half the budget and put a fifth of that on each satoshi of price from the highest current bid downward, that is put some at each of the top five satoshis or so of current bid; then periodically look again and if those sold replenish them or if current high bid is higher than the high was when you placed previous bunch, put more upward from there.

But basically don't do market orders, they are stupid, bid a price. Traders take crazy amount of advantage of auto-dumpers so whatever it happens to be that you are in effect "dumping for DeVCoins" traders will deliberately stand way the heck back far across as big a spread as they can maintain waiting for the next stupid autodump bot to give them a crazy price due to not looking what price others were asking for a similar volume of whatever it is the bot is dumping.

e.g. Adsense pays your site USD, so you plan to "dump" the USD for devcoins. Smart traders knowing some idiot is going to autodump USD for devcoins will try to lure it into giving a stupid price. So also don't put more on each price than is already there might also be wise for a bot, in case what is already there is just a lure set by a trader to try to trick the bot into offering $1000 USD at the price the trader is offering $0.01 USD or something like that...

-MarkM-

I am not sure how many I really have, I just checked the issues clerk's notes of how many of each digitoken were issued onto the Digitalis Open Transactions Server and is says only 10,000 dIXC were issued so I guess I didn't issue some 20k or so afterall so likely I had some 20k or so and only issued half of them onto the server.

I am pretty sure though that even if I somehow have accumulated enough to be able to sell all of them plus the 10k on the server I'd be lucky to get 5 bitcoins for the lot, and sure as heck nowhere near 10 bitcoins at current prices. ince even just a KnC Jupiter would cost somewhere up near 30 (and might not ROI but that's a whole 'nother story) what would I even buy with even 10 bitcoins nowadays, let alone 5 ?

Then suppose the iPhone and Android clients for Open Transactions do finally come out and it turns out 10,000 dIXC isn't fat enough of a transactions-pipe to carry the load of transactions-involving-dIXC? So maybe I should hold some a while yet just in case I need to issue more dIXC once the masses start actually using Open Transactions?

-MarkM-

I have three eight-core servers that were getting blocks with version 10 but haven't gotten any since version 11.

(Sometimes a day or even two might go by without any of them getting a block but most pairs of days at least one often two got a block or even more than one block.)

I am starting to wonder if maybe there is some github weirdness or something such as maybe git pull isn't really getting me the latest code even though the last time I pulled all I got* was a change in version.cpp, which changed the actual version number displayed to 11. (What I'd already installed on my servers seems to have been version 11 minus that afterthought change of the version.cpp file to actually have it admit it was version 11...)

* All I seemed to get, anyway. Git doesn't sometimes not mention every file that it pulled changes for or anythign like that, does it?

-MarkM-

"chassis and controller 300usd"

Who uses a chassis? Or maybe first, what do you even mean by a chassis? A milk crate? a shoe box? If it is expensive many would likely prefer to get just the guts of the device I suspect.

What do you mean by a controller? A Raspberry pi like people use to control many many USB devices and/or FPGA boards? With maybe some extra RAM because cgminer mining scrypt needs more RAM than when it mines SHA256?

How many boards can a controller control? 127 per USB port?

-MarkM-

Back before we got flooded with authors devcoins were regularly selling for well over 200 satoshis each, now we have all these new authors it has not seen even 100 in gosh knows how long and is lucky, it seems, to see 40.

40 / 200 = 0.2  = 1/5 ... We could maybe divide all author pay by five and still have authors be able to get just as much fiat or bitcoin or whatever out of it as they get right now simply by placing their sell orders at 200 satoshis, which it used to hit quite regularly and barrel right on by even if millions were sitting there waiting to be bought so might well start doing again once floods of overpaid authors aren't dumping their grossly overhuge allotment of coins at the bottom of the price range.

(It used to also cycle down to the thirties then go back way the heck over 200, probably when enough rounds had gone by that someone figured even at dirt cheap rates they had enough to buy something with or somesuch. Likely when someone did dump a lot bringing the price way down word got around, people came to pick up coins cheap, but many of them took hours to hear about it so by the time they arrived to buy cheap coins the price was well on its way back up so they bought anyway before it went even farther back up... Oh and of course when it approached 300 people would hear about that too, come looking to sell way high, but again be beaten to it by people who were faster to hear about it and react so saw it was already on its way down so sold anyway being as how they already fired up their client and came to the exchange planning to sell...)

-MarkM-