Often when I write long posts such as I have in this thread I think hmm maybe I should make it a devtome page and just link to the page from the thread.

But every one of my posts has a link to devtome in my signature, and these posts usually/often mention devcoin and/or devtome, thus are relevant content with links to devtome, so should be helping to increase devtome's page-rank.

Also in case you had not noticed I relatively often include links to devtome pages directly in the text of posts, though you have now in effect reminded me that I have not yet gotten around to turning the word Martians or the phrase my page/article about Martians in a recent post into an actual link to that page, which I should now go back and do, again to increase the page rank of a devtome page by having real content on a real forum, relevant to the specific page linked to, contain a link to a devtome page...

I also tend to go back and fix typo's and spelling mistakes and such in my forum-posts, so that the value of the link to devtome in my signature doesn't potentially get downgraded by any search engines that might consider the quality of the writing of an article or post in deciding how much weight to give it toward the rank of things it links to.

So I do my part by posting here, its just that mechanisms to make the effect my posts have here (if any) have on the pagerank of devtome pages or devtome itself in its entirety directly reward me are not currently in place.

Plus if my written reasoning here can succeed in getting 80 shares per author cut down to one share per author then my one share for being a whatever should be maybe not worth eighty times as much but sure as heck a hell of a lot more than it is while people are getting 80 shares a round for being an author...

-MarkM-

Devtome, and money-earning projects in general, is/are supposed to support not only themselves but the entire devcoin project/ecosystem.

Yes, the ad revenue is supposed to be used to buy devcoins on exchanges, thus hopefully giving devcoins some actual exchange-rate value.

In order for there to be devcoins for sale on those exchanges for the money-making sites such as devtome to buy, there need to be people or sites or something that actually earns devcoins directly somehow, such as miners and people who are such avid devoted producers of free open source stuff that they got nominated and approved for inclusion in the receivers files, that is to receive a share of devcoins.

The entire 200,000 devcoins minted each round is really only worth as much, all added up, as the amount of money the moneymaking projects manage to bring in each round, on average over time, unless some speculators speculatively buy some coins or some potential customer of a shop or something chooses to buy some coins so as to pay in devcoins for something at a shop (and the shopkeeper likely will only value the coins the customer pays them at pretty much the amount they can dump them on an exchange for, thus ultimately at whatever price the moneymaking projects/sites can afford to buy them for).

So far devtome doesn't seem to have brought in much money.

I would not be surprised if adding code for divvying up more than just the bitcoins to a merged mining p2pool turned out to bring in massively more money than devtome, but thanks to it being massively more lucrative to paste stuff to devtome than to write code for divvying up rewards among p2pool miners such a pool still does not yet exist.

(It could sell all the namecoins, groupcoins, i0coins, ixcoins, coiledcoins and geistgeld for devcoins and use those to pay its bandwidth/hosting/admin costs and reward miners for mining bitcoins at that zero fee p2pool rather than at some other bitcoin mining pool...)

-MarkM-

If Devtome draws traffic then its ads should make money so it should be able to pay its own way.

In fact it should even start to churn, with authors paying other authors to wikify (make into links) keywords in the other author's articles to point at the paying authors articles, or to write entire new relevant articles linking to their articles to increase their page-rank and stuff like that.

For example if my page about Martians was making money, for me, it might be worth my while to seek out all articles that mention our solar system, or the planet mars, or war, or gods of war (mars as in martial), or to write such articles, in order to have them link from such articles to my article about Martians, so I will earn even more money due to even higher relevance / page-rank of my page.

Why would any coder join the project when they can make as much coin pasting one thousand words they already wrote about anything to devtome as they would get if they regularly as a lifestyle freely spent ten hours OR MORE without pay working on some code project directly relevant to devcoin's mission for so long and so well that someone picked them out to nominate to receive a share of devcoins?

They'd make a lot more coin just pasting a few kilowords of man pages or issues/bugs/fixes/changes logs of an existing project entirely useless to devcoin to devtome than they would being a devoted lifestyle free open source contributor of code to devcoin-critical missions...

An investor would probably advise them in fact that it is stupid to code because of the opportunity cost of wasting time coding that could instead earn more coin "collating" free open source content such as wikipedia pages and pasting them to devtome. They'd advise don't even consider coding until you have pasted 240k of collated material or 80k of crap you have lying around from when you took a mandatory course in English in college or whatever.

-MarkM-

They don't care enough about such a tiny amount of potential money to bother taking it to exhanges, maybe? Remember a lot of people mine on merged mining pools that include Ixcoin in their merge, so a lot of people are getting some Ixcoin, so the total number of Ixcoins mined per day is divided up among a lot of people. For me it has taken years of merged mining to get a small hoard of Ixcoins that is still worth so little bitcoin that there is not really much/any temptation to go cash it in right now. If I get so broke sometime in the next few years that I desperately need that trivial amount of capital then maybe I would dig them up to sell, but right now I have food clothing and shelter and it is not really enough capital yet to go do any serious investing with so to heck with it, if it skyrockets in value maybe it will be worth digging out, or if my hoard gets big enough over the years or decades to become worth a decent amount maybe then...

Or like you maybe they think it is crazy-low in value right now so crazy to part with it at such crazy-low prices?

Heck even litecoin is worth well over a buck a coin, so maybe might as well just forget about any coin until it goes over a buck a coin, as even just a buck a coin would be a nice increase over the pathetic prices most coins are fetching these days...

-MarkM-

As long as people can make massively, insanely more coins writing for Devtome than writing code for bounties I suppose it is not surprising that bounties are not motivating people to get things done.


Not more shares, we want as few shares in total as possible, nicest would be no more than forty receiver-lines in total UNLESS we always make the number of receiver-lines an exact divisor of four thousand.

Right now we have had to put in an over-ride for admins because of the insanely high payments to authors, just to make sure admins do actually make some fraction of what authors do instead of beign crowded out entirely by authors.

Better would be to cap devtome at eighty shares total for the whole of devtome and let it share out the resulting coins among its authors.

(Though that would eat up eighty receiver-lines right away, twice the forty that would be a nice max number for fairness sake.)

Those shares would be worth a lot more coins per share than when a bunch of authors each get 80 shares all to themselves, each individually.

Lets remember again that a person who puts in ten hours a month OR MORE regularly and naturally on a lifestyle basis on directly important-to-devcoin projects of their own free will merely because they are going to do that anyway just because it is what they do gets one share. So basically any author who has a demonstrated history of putting in ten hours a month OR MORE writing articles for devtome freely without incentive/pay/bribe/bounty should be eligible to be nominated to become a recipient of devcoins.

Do we even have any such authors yet, or are all the ones we have found so far basically mercenaries who only write free open source articles for devtome (or even at all) when they are offered a direct bounty per thousand words for doing so? (If so maybe we have done enough bounties/paying now for getting articles written and should start offering bounties/pay for other things instead, watching authors to see if there do turn out to be any among them who do end up still writing for devtome ten hours a month or more as a lifestyle free open source writing person who would do that anyway even if there was no bounty / payment for it, and consider nominating some of them as deserving of getting put on the list of people who get a share of devcoins?)

Its not like we have any shortage of articles now. So maybe now we should start awarding bounties (payments) for promotion of the existing articles instead of for making yet more articles?


Actually bounties have historically been far from great for getting actual long term services, because opportunists tend to nip in, whip up something to get the bounty, then scrap the thing as soon as they have pocketed the bounty.

For example if you offer a bounty for settign up a pool, you are quite likely to have someone set up the pool, picket the bounty, then rip down the pool to free up their server for yet another different pool some other coin is offering a bounty for, then pocket that bounty, rip that pool down and put up yet another to pocket another bounty and so on.

That is why we are instead offering a bounty for free open source software for merged mining pools; once that exists people capable of operating such pools long term will be able to go ahead and do so, likely making decent money doing so due to pools are usually operated on a for-profit basis.

Similarly with block-explorers, offer a bounty for a block-explorer and someone whips one up, pockets the bounty, then rips it down again.

So again probably a bounty for free open source code would be the way to go; a bounty for getting your coin added to the standard distributions/repos of the standard free open source block-explorers.

-MarkM-

I keep trying to make a (merged) mining p2pool that will pay out in devcoins (in addition to 100% of the bitcoins mined being paid out in bitcoins) but it is a very expensive thing to do, partly because I0Coin and GeistGeld both needed massive amounts of RAM. I had to get a third dedicated server to host GeistGeld because having I0Coin and GeistGeld on one server and all the other merged mined coins plus p2pool itself on another server was not working, p2pool kept getting "over 5 seconds to get work from geistgeld" errors.

Now that our soon to be newly tenured developer has developed code allowing merged mined coins not to need such massive amounts of RAM I maybe could move GeistGeld back onto the same dedicated server as I0Coin, but, I already paid up front for the third server for a year so might as well use it for something. So for now GeistGeld is still on the third server. (He only fixed up I0Coin so far, so I0Coin uses way the heck less RAM now but GeistGeld has not yet been updated to match so it still uses crazy amounts of RAM.)

Just keeping up with updates/fixes of all the coin daemons and maintaining those servers and mining rigs to mine on them eats up quite a bit of time, though maybe the part that eats up the most is having to keep up with these forums to discover what is going on with all the coins, especially when just trying "git pull" on each coin does not actually result in getting the latest code. (Some github repository maintainers do this annoying thing where they create a new branch for new code then fail to make that the master/main/default branch so git pull stops getting the latest code.)

All of this massive expense for servers though is all still failing to actually result in a publicly useable merged mining pool because the bounties offered for code/scripts that will figure out how much each miner contributed to the mining since the last time such code/script was run have not yet sufficiently incentive-ised any coders to actually come up with free open source scripts for doing such things. I have not yet had time to delve into the inner workings of p2pool far enough to even know yet whether it has a historic record of all payments it has ever made to miners. If it does have such records then one should be able, in principle, to add up for each miner all the bitcoins they got paid since last time the desired script/code was run and from that compute what fraction of the total work-that-worked they evidently contributed, in order to produce a list of what fraction of any extra awards each one deserves so that one could do things like divvy up all the devcoins among them or sell all the other coins for devcoins and divvy up those devcoins among them or whatever extra awards one might want to divvy up among them based on how much each contributed since last you decided to divvy up something extra among them.

EDIT: As long as people can make massively, insanely more coins writing for Devtome than writing code for bounties I suppose it is not surprising that bounties are not motivating people to get things done.

-MarkM-

I buy devcoins. I have offers to buy at every satoshi of price from one satoshi all the way up to, as I write this post, 38 satoshis.

I offer to buy more when I have bitcoins on the exchange to offer with, which is basically when someone buys one of my sell offers. I have sell offers at every satoshi of price from 41 satoshis all the way up to something like 385 satoshis or so.

Right now people aren't buying my sell offers so I am not adding more buy offers, trade has been very slow lately.

In the past, usually periodically people would buy all my offers all the way up over 200 satoshis, sometimes even over 300 satoshis, which is why I have sell offers up that high.

I have tried several times to get the price up to 40 satoshis by buying all sell offers that were offering to sell for 40 or less satoshis, but someone or someones seem to keep insisting they want to sell for less than 40 so finally I have had to just let them go ahead and do that, hoping that once they run out "we" can start trying again to get the price back up to 40 or higher.

-MarkM-

Well maybe we can let the rich folk, the authors, prove this theory about how much they will benefit the community with the bitcoins or fiat they dumped their devcoins for.

We could suspend share payments to authors completely, since we already massively overpaid the entire devtome sector of our economy for quite a while now.

The stinking rich authors, using the proceeds of their dumping of their devcoins, will easily rake in enough wealth to pay for more authors if they feel that they need more authors in order to carry out their task of working on devtome, since they will have all kinds of income from the businesses they started plus also all kinds of income to share out that devtome earns from the ads on its pages...

-MarkM-

Bullshit, you can start as a mail-order type of store, placing free ads on Kijiji, Craig's list, maybe even e-bay on days when they have make a free auction promotions. You don't need to rent a storefront aka website etc until you are making enough sales to justify such expenses.

When someone sends you money for something, you buy that something at your supplier of that something and ship it to them, or have your supplier ship it to them (which is known as drop-shipping.)

-MarkM-

If the largest number of people - the authors (who also are the richest, the massively higher earning upper class) - dump their coins, then of course there will be only a (relatively) small number of people holding the coins.

By dumping your coins, that is, by not holding coins, you are decreasing the number of people holding coins.

So it is the fault of the dumpers - the people who do not hold their coins - that there are only a few people holding coins; it is not the fault of the few who do actually hold the few that they get.

Remember the authors get massively, insanely more coins than anyone else. They are the fat cats, the rich, the people raking in massive, insanely massive, paycheques.

The entire bitcoin development team makes like maybe 1/20th as much between the lot of them as one author who dumps 80k of his childhood writings or collates 240k of wikipedia articles into articles for devtome.

Similarly for the entire Open Transactions team.

So you, one of the stinking-rich, are the rich pig who is screwing all the small folk by dumping your rubles for imperialist capitalist bernankenpaper fiat!

-MarkM-

Holy cow this is amazing.

Cunicula, would my MUDgoldat40 (described in my earlier post) scheme be illegal? If not I think it might be a major moneymaker...

-MarkM-

See this is where it helps to have a whole newfangled currency of your own you can print at will.

In CoffeeMUD we have gold coins, it just so happens that CoffeeMUD lets the admin(s) create the stuff at will.

So, we could propose a whole grand scheme of things in which we point out how much gold coins trade at, even if that is, say, one satoshi per billion of them, then go on about all the grand investments in magic armour and shields and pounds of wood and stone and so on and so on that we propose to invest in to do productive "work" in the game producing stuff to make more gold coins for you, and thus have some awesome gold coin bonds you can buy that will pay you seven percent per week on the gold coins you invest.

We can do it, too! No problem at all! The MUD admin can create out of thin air seven percent more gold coins!

So buy gold coins right now with your bitcoins, earn seven percent a week, and sell your profit gold coins for bitcoins when you want to cash back out to bitcoins!

Now do you see where the interest rate parity between currencies comes into it?

-MarkM-

Maybe the "work" is the increase in bitcoin value compared to USD value?

So that, like pirateat40, as long as bitcoin keeps going up (or was it down in pirateat40's case?) the scheme will get to continue a little longer?

-MarkM-

It could work as long as they could keep printing more bitcoins. But if the interest due increases faster than new bitcoins are printed/minted, it, as described by Cunicula, is obviously doomed.

I suppose in principle the possibility remains that Cunicula is over-simplifying a complicated system, but if their marketing also did so it would seem like the marketers were trying to market it as a ponzi.

EDIT: Oh wait, possibly as long as bitcoin keeps going up in value relative to USD that also could prolong the scheme?

-MarkM-

It is not really devtome by itself per se that has a problem, it is the whole devcoin thing that is suffering from such insanely high amounts of shares being offered for devtome articles.

It is not sustainable, as there are only at absolute maximum four thousand shares per round, because each block is one share and a round is four thousand blocks.

Fifty people each getting 80 shares would blow it out, no shares left for admins, programmers, or anything else, every coin would be going toward paying for devtome articles.

So I think what we need to do is figure out what fraction of the entire devcoin shebang devtome should max out at.

Also bear in mind that payouts get more and more "unfair" the closer we come to actually having 4000 shares in one round, UNLESS the number of shares divides evenly into 4000.

If we happen to have 4000 or 2000 shares exactly in a round, each share gets one block's or two blocks' yield of coins.

If we have 3999 shares in a round, one share gets two blocks' yield of coins all the others only get one block's yield.

If we have 39 shares in a round, one share gets eleven blocks' yield of coins, all the others get only ten blocks' yield.

See how the "unfairness" gets less as the number of times the shares for the round divide into 4000 gets larger?

So unless we force each round's total number of shares to divide exactly into 4000, which would arguably offer the "fairest" shares, less shares per round is better than more shares per round.

So for example if the max an author makes used to be 80 shares, we can make the shares much more fair by calling that eight shares and scaling everything else proportionately.

For example instead of 80k words yielding 80 shares, it would yield 8, and instead of 10k words yielding ten shares it would yield one.

If everything were scaled that way, the number of actual coins each share actually received each round would not change, except for any "unfairness" caused by the number of shares not dividing exactly into four thousand would be less, so those who had been short some before would be short less as compared to those who happened to be the lucky lines of the receivers file that got used (sent coins) one more time than other lines did. It would simply decrease the actual size in coins of that "unfairness factor".

If authors are to get (up to) 80 shares each, we have to have less than 50 authors, since 80 multiplied by 50 is four thousand. To have fifty authors all writing as much as they can earn for would consume every coin every round. That just is not practical.

All of this is devcoin concerns though not devtome concerns. Devtome can still give authors 80 shares OF WHAT DEVTOME GETS each round, no problem with that. But devcoin needs to have some limit on how many receiver lines in the receiver files devtome itself in total can get...

Then devtome can have scripts of its own to divvy up its devcoins among its authors however it wants to.

EDIT: For example maybe it would make sense to say that devtome as a whole will get a maximum of eighty shares a round, if it manages to get authors to write 80k or more words, less if the total words it manages to get authors to write is less; then have devtome take care of dividing up the coins it gets in a given round among its authors. Even giving such a huge amount (80) of shares to one project (devtome) would still be way out of scale with every other project though.

-MarkM-

There are also private label content clubs you can join, I joined some of the free ones years ago when I was researching web-marketing, that provide you regularly with niche moneymaking websites selling things plus a whack of articles relevant to that niche for you to modify to make unique and place on the site. Some such clubs even have pull scripts in the sites that will regularly pull new articles, so that the club can use the niche site they gave you to publish more articles regularly, so that your niche sites become in effect satellite sites of theirs, with of course most likely theirs appearing higher in search results than theirs and the copies that members didn't customise usually probably being at the bottom, relatively, of the results due to modern smart search engines realising they are duplicated-content sites and trying to figure out who has the original of that content or which is the highest pagerank site with the most-active social networking likes community that has that content.

My spam/marketing email account I used to sign up for all that kind of stuff might have years worth of such niche site of the day content in its inbox by now, unless the email provider stopped accepting email once I'd not signed on for a year or few. Even if they did that there must have been a year or few already saved before I stopped logging on to that email account / stopped researching web-marketing.

We could dig up all that stuff, "collate" it, and pour it onto Devtome. Heck maybe I could pour 80k per month of it onto Devtome come to think of it... Oh sorry I mean 240k, since collated only pays 1/3 as many shares so would take 240k to get 80 shares...

Heck I threw out gigabytes of articles back when I quit autogenerating "content sites" to attract search engine spiders. Or maybe not even threw out... maybe it is on some of the ancient hard-disks I have laying around here somewhere. Maybe complete with all the scripts I wrote for auto-generating interlinked networks of sites out of the stuff.

I got to number one spot on the major engines other than Google (which was way too smart to fall for such crap) for major keywords like "Religion" way back when.

Of course back then MSN and Yahoo were so stupid that the most relevant site you could possibly make, in their eyes, was pages and pages of their own search-results output...  

You didn't really actually need articles as their own results attracted them way more than actual content.  

So the gigs of actual articles were kind of just gravy, that only later came to be of much importance/use.

I could make scripts to auto-submit 240k of articles to devtome each month for me: write the scripts once, include a suck-articles-from-inbox to suck in all the new articles the content-clubs send, and it'd be a write once, earn 80 shares a round every round automaton for me. Hmm...

So if you authors want to compete on who can max out their words per round, I guess I could whip up scripts that'd give you some good competition...

-MarkM-

If we are going to do SEO work, then just the privilege of having their articles published on our site would be an incentive for people to provide content, because as it is they already buy huge batches of "private label content" if they can afford it, or write articles like crazy themselves, just to try to create content in which they can somewhere place a link to whatever their actual cash-cow is. If we have a high page rank site, and SEO people who work on attracting hits to its pages, being permitted to have one of their articles, with a link to their site, on our site would be worth money to people as it would increase the page rank of their own site and drive traffic to it.

There are lots of sites that exist purely for the purpose of accepting, for free, quality articles, permitting the authors a tiny "about the author" box at the bottom of the page that includes a link to the author's site. People submit massive numbers of articles, sometimes even by means of mass submitters that submit to hundreds of such sites making synonym substitutions and simple grammar re-arrangements and such to ensure each article is "unique", just to get links to their sites.

The article sites get so many submissions that just vetting them all to pick out ones worth accepting probably would take quite a bit of work, but they don't have to pay the authors, in fact some of them probably get paid by the authors by means of things like selling them submission programs that will modify-and-submit articles to the article-site owner's hundreds or thousands of such article-sites.

Once they get nice page rank they then also go on to make link clubs where people pay by the month to have links on such sites so as to boost their own pageranks.

So if we get into marketing / SEO, paying authors could easily become un-necessary, instead we could have authors flocking to us hoping we will deign to accept their articles.

Some article-sites even let authors include three links directly into the text of the article, so as to have maximum-relevance links. There are clubs you can join where for $29.95 or $39.95 or $49.95 or whatever per month you can get to submit X number of articles per month to the Y number of such article-sites that get articles from the club. So again, the model is that authors pay to get their content onto those sites.

-MarkM-

Surely in all these years humans have been soldering, someone must have hit upon the idea of making different-temperature solders so you can do things like solder the board with higher temperature solder then use a lower temperature solder to solder-in the ASIC when it arrives, so you can remove it without all the other components on the board coming loose?

They said the plan was to test the engines that are in the chip, shutting down those that don't work, how are they wasting the rest of the board if so many don't work that they have to loosen the lower temperature solder to remove the ASIC later once their shipping deadline has been hit?

Heck they could auction off "too few good engines board plus tested all-good-engines chip" do it yourself kits to DIYers later once they do have a system set up for testing the chips before they get onto boards. They could even have had the foundry make way the fuck more chips than they need for this initial formula-one-race run (including oodles of spares just in case) and thus have as many or more chips heading out to some testing place that can take a week or few to test the bejeezus out of them before sending them on to Sweden so that everything after the big race is totally tested fifty-five ways from sunday before they get them.

-MarkM-

No no, you don't understand, when you are in a formula one race, every penny counts, so damn right you want to slow way the fuck down to keep your tires from wearing out because tires cost money plus changing them takes time...   

-MarkM-

Are the solder spots on the bottom of chips so non-standard that there are not some kind of socket things you can solder on the board instead of a chip and some kind of conductive gel or something so one can just press a chip onto the thing, hash, remove it, press the next one in etc? Doctors have some kind of gel or something they use for electrodes and paddles and such can't electronic engineers form a connection without actually soldering the thing?

Even if it doesn't always form a perfect connection couldn't you just skip chips that don't and keep moving on, worrying about the "poor connection or bad chip" ones later?

Or even use a conductive solder-paste so you place and press, hash, if it hashes convey it into the soldering oven?

-MarkM-