But these guys are professionals, so no way they'd have a nice reflow station, right? 

-Markm-

Maybe someone has never raced in a formula-1 race, too...

-MarkM-

It is hard to accumulate because it has such high difficulty (because it is merged mined).

I started mining it years ago on bitparking's mmpool with two 5870's, lost one of the GPUs, later got another, and eventually set up my own p2pool to merged mine, yet still I do not have enough to consider bothering to part with them for the puny amount of bitcoin I'd get for my entire hoard. It will take more years of occassionally lucking into a block, or a big increase in price, to make it worth my while to bother digging them out to sell them.

Plus the first twenty thousand or so of them that I got went into cold storage to back dIXC tokens on my Open Transactions server so unless I plan on not supporting IXCoin on my Open Transactions server anymore there'd be all the hassle of getting back and un-issuing all the dIXC on the server if I did decide to dig them back out to sell the actual on-blockchain coins that the dIXC tokens on the server represent.

-MarkM-

Yes, that is what the latest I0Coin does. All the other merged mined coins need to be upgraded using that new code.

Hopefully GeistGeld first as it won't even run on my 8 gigs of RAM machines anymore since some time now.

-MarkM-

No, bitcoins are precious, good for long term store of value. There are a bunch of altcoins you get free alongside bitcoins when you merged mine, unless you think every one of those has better long term increase of value per coin prospects than bitcoin you are probably better off selling some of those when you want to buy stuff than selling bitcoins.

Sure you might have to do that by buying bitcoins with them then spending those resulting bitcoins, but the trick there is to close your eyes to the fact bitcoin is serving as an intermediary in the process and pretend you are spending the altcoins not your precious bitcoins.

But yeah if you think those altcoins all have more chance of doubling in value or multiplying in value by 10 or 100 than bitcoin does, sure, save them and spend your bitcoins...

-MarkM-

Right, that is why we have not yet done the "divide into fields" system.

So far there have been few enough projects that initially it worked fine to give one share to each project, sent to the devcoin address of that project's team's choice of who they choose as lead developer of their project.

Then along came this whole crap about paying insane amounts to random article-writers so they can dump huge numbers of coins and drive exchange rates down driving away investors convincing people the coin is dying etc etc etc.

We could make an "arts other than writing" project for example, and give it a share, sent to the lead developer of the "other arts" section. That lead developer would use those coins to recruit artists. Maybe in the process of looking for artists they would discover some artists who already naturally as a lifestyle spend forty hours OR MORE a month creating free open source art, and nominate them to get onto the receivers list. Those artists would thus be raking in as much coin as the "arts other than writing" project, with which they could recruit helpers / team-mates / whatever to expand their own already long in progress as a lifestyle free open source projects, and so on... Until we hit 4000 devcoin shares per round being allocated; once that happens we could change all projects that get one share to getting one fifth of a share, so as to make room to continue adding more projects. 4000 things getting one share each or 4000 things getting one fifth of a share each makes no difference to how many coins each thing gets, so they are not being paid any less when they all get divided by five. They only start getting paid less when a 4001th thing comes along and starts getting, like all the other things, 1/5 of a share...

We could even, once proper categories exist in the devtome wiki and all pages are part of a category, make categories into projects, give a share or some fraction of a share to each category, and have that category's lead developer use the resulting coins to attract people to help develop stuff for/in that category...

-MarkM-

Right. That is why so far there are no dev arts sites, dev physics prizes, dev math, dev music, dev beats, dev videos etc etc etc.

All those can come in time, once the total value of the 180,000 devcoins available each round adds up to more than just enough to pay admins, coders, and devtome-authors.

So for example if we would like to also pay beats-recording artists, musicians, videographers and so on only as much between the lot of them as devtome authors, coders and admins all added together get, that would mean we'd have 90,000,000 DVC per round to divide up between admins, coders and devtome authors and 90,000,000 DVC per round to divide up between beats-artists, musicians, videographers and so on.

-MarkM-

Sure they can carry over.

Devtome would have some huge number of coins to divide up, and instead of devtome shares being devcoin-receiver-lines each devtome-share would work out at the end of the round to be some number of devcoins, down to eight decimals of accuracy. If it wants some max an author can get, it can carry over the excess to more rounds.

It would be dividing up coins it has received from the fact that devtome as a whole has some number of shares of devcoin rounds.

Same for DevSculptureArtsSite, DevMusicalArtsSite etc etc etc whatever other projects/fields there come to be.

-MarkM-

How about, each field gets some shares. Reading/writing X shares, arithmetic/math Y shares, artwork Z shares, whatever. Then each field divides up its coins however that field likes to divide up its coins.

-MarkM-

Miners get 5000 coins. The other 45000 in that block they just mined go out to addresses listed in the receivers file. One line in that file is one block. If there are less than 4000 lines then some lines get used twice. If all get used twice and the round of 4000 blocks is still not finished, some lines get used 3 times. If all get used three times and still we have not gone through 4000 blocks, some get used four times. And so on.

Ideally it would be nice if each line got used a lot of times, so that the difference in income between people who were in the lines that got used one more time than the other lines would not be huge.

If some lines get used only once and others only twice, the people on the lines that got used twice got twice the pay.

If some lines get used 99 times and some get used 100 times, the people on the lines that got used 100 times only got somewhere in the neighborhood of 1% or so more pay.

So nicest would be to never have more than 40 shares given out. That way each line (each share) would get paid 100 times, so if there happens to only be 39 shares some month, one share would get paid 101 times the others 100 times, not a huge difference.

If never more than 40 shares are to be given out, and we want 13% (the current quota) to go to admins, that leaves less than 40 shares to go to all other things combined.


All of that the devtome project participants could worry about on their own if the entire devtome project was allocated some specific number of shares. Those shares would pay out devcoins to the project's Open Transactions account, from which the individual coins could be divided up however that project likes to divide up its coins.

-MarkM-

Only if there are not going to be 3999 other lines in the receivers file.

There are only 4000 blocks. If devtome authors get 80 blocks (shares) each and there are 50 such authors, that is it, sorry, no coins for anyone other than devtome authors.

That is why the plan is to deploy Open Transactions, so each project/field, whatever those may be, maybe like math, physics, biology, geology, history, art (conveniently there are five arts, so each could get one fifth of the arts budget maybe, sculpture (3D art), drawing/painting/computer-graphics etc (2D art), drama, dance, music), whatever the fields/projects, can have the coins their share(s) provide put into an Open Transactions server so the individual coins can be divvied up as that project or field chooses among its workers.

-MarkM-

Coders already get the maximum: an entire whole share.



Coins are different than shares. If you were admin of a project, such as maybe lets say, the history category of devtome, or whatever, your project could get a whole share, and that would mean you have 180,000 coins so you could hire 180 authors for 1000 each, or pay yourself 2000 and hire 178 other authors for 1000 each or however your team likes to dvide up the coins that its share gets them.

-MarkM-

There are not more shares, the maximum number of shares the software can handle is limited. That is why many things pay in fifths of a share.

Once we hit 4000 shares that is it for the month, there are only 4000 blocks in a round, that is, 4000 shares. Each share is one block.

So increasing the number of shares is the wrong way round. Once we have four thousand projects more and more projects will have to be getting fractions of a share instead of whole shares.

So if eighty thousand words is the max per person, and we want up to 4000 people, we need one share to be worth eighty thousand words. One fifth of that is sixteen thousand words, so we could give one fifth of a share per sixteen thousand words. That way the max any one of the 4000 recipients could get is one entire whole share. So simple math, we know the max words an author can get paid for per 4000 blocks and we know the max number of shares there are per four thousand blocks. (One share per block, 4000 shares.)

If we make the max one whole share, we could have four thousand people/projects all receiving one whole share.

If one person is to get two shares, we'll only have enough shares for 3999 people instead of 4000, unless maybe we find five people to each only get 4/5 of a share so that the one guy can get two shares.

-MarkM-

The price definitely turns people away. They see it has gone no-where but down for the last however many months, and figure it is dead or dying so don't invest in it.

People getting large amounts free does not increase adoption, it increases dumping, which lowers the exchange rates, which turns off potential adopters.

A faucet is one thing, giving people more than Gavin or FellowTraveller or other people working forty hours a month on important projects just for posting some dubious but 2000 words article is just crazy.

Seriously. One share is worth forty hours of skilled work. How many words can a skilled author write in forty hours of writing? Or even just ten hours if we assume they are writing new material specifically for us?

Once Stephen King has a story idea worked out and plotted ready to write, how many hours do you think it takes him to write it down? If he doesn't have something ready to write that month, no problem, take him off the list that month. Some month when he has come up with something ready to write he can sit down and write it.

-MarkM-

For adoption we probably need things people can buy using DeVCoins. So maybe the idea of packaging free open source content into e-books for sale has some merit for that.

I think DeVCoins might be one of the coins the many-coin-types payment processor handles, if so then that should make it easier for people who sell stuff on the web to accept DeVCoins for whatever it happens to be that they sell.

But giving out DeVCoins at the rate of one full project's worth of coins (a whole share, such as a whole open source project's lead developer gets) per each 1000 words is clearly not helping adoption, on the contrary it is causing massive dumping, driving down the value of the coins, which in turn turns people away from adopting the coin.

So to boost adoption we would probably be better off not paying out anywhere near as many coins, maybe pick a lead developer for Devtome and give them one share, from which they then divvy out coins to their team, such as any authors they get to help them develop devtome.

The less coins given out the less dumping, likely we'd see prices go back up to 200 to 300 satoshis like they used to regularly before we started throwing away 80 shares at a time to authors.

Periodically the price used to tumble to thirty-something satoshis once enough rounds had passed that a few developers started to think maybe enough shares-rounds might have passed for them to have accumulated enough coins to be worth the trouble of firing up their client to sell the coins, but it used to then climb back to the 200 to 300 satoshis range.

Quite likely also the long span of low prices these so eager to dump all the coins authors have created has triggered other people who had been happily sitting on their coins maybe not even bothering to set up a devcoin wallet since afterall their coins go to a bitcoin address, they never needed a devcoin wallet to get on the list, to decide there is no point letting it ride a few years since it seems like it is going no-where and has in fact lost its direction completely, throwing away far far vaster sums on dubious wiki-articles than even the most important projects' most dedicated developers get.

-MarkM-

Those people are supposedly putting in ten hours a week on their projects.

If they were working directly on projects that devcoin particularly wanted, they could get away with only putting in ten hours a month without being remvoed from the list.

It is arguable that either Bitcoin or Open Transactions or both are particularly important/relevant for the devcoin project thus that maybe Gavin and FellowTraveller ought to be able to get away with only putting in ten hours a month without being removed from the list.

Instead what we have done in those particular cases is to find a way to direct more devcoins to their projects. Instead of requiring that it is up to them to share out the devcoins among their team members, we have put some of their team members on the list. So basically instead of the project being on the list, with the coins going to the lead developer of the project, those projects are deemed so important that individual team members have been placed on the list. I think both Bitcoin and Open Transactions each thus get about three or four shares of devcoins, one share to each of three or four or so major members of the teams.



Maybe better would be come up with some nominal number of words that can be taken to on average probably be about an hour of typing/writing, and say that any devtome contributor who posts ten times that many words OR MORE per month can be nominated to be placed on the list.

That would make article-developers who are working specifically on developing articles for devtome just like any other developers who are spending ten hours a month OR MORE on devcoin projects.

-MarkM-

That is what we do.

For example we found a project named Bitcoin, and found that there was someone who was spending lots and lots of time and energy and thought and coding and so on working on it, and added him to the list of people who get a share of devcoins.

We found a project named Open Transactions, that someone was spending huge amounts of time on, so we added him to the list.

And so on.

-MarkM-

The point of devcoin was that if for example we discovered that you are a person who writes free open source books, for free, as a lifestyle, you would be the kind of person devcoin was created to reward, and we would like to place you on the list of people who get a share of devcoins each round.

We would love devcoins to be worth so much that your one share of devcoins each round was worth enough to seriously reward you for your lifestyle dedication to publishing free open source books, but, for that to happen, we need to make devcoins be worth a lot. There is no point adding so many lifestyle devotees of free open source things to the list that they each are being rewarded with a satoshi or two worth of devcoins per round.

So if the free open source books that you naturally all on your own are devoted to writing can be caused to make money that can be used to buy devcoins, that would be awesome, and we wouldn't then have to feel like awarding someone a share of devcoins is a worthless award/reward.

So we first tried to focus on free open source things we could turn into moneymakers.

I don't know how this whole devtome authors mess happened, though I think part of why it is so horrible is the insane 80 shares maximum thing.

Doing ten hours per week (on your own unrelated things) or per month (on mission-critical things we need) OR MORE lets people get one share.

OR MORE is important. It does not matter that FellowTraveller puts in forty or more hours per week, it is unfortunate but devcoins are not worth enough for us to be able to afford to pay by the hour. All we can do - except for this whole devtome mess, it seems - is give a few of the most deserving developers of free open source things that we can find one share per round of devcoins.

If we discovered that Stephen King was spending ten hours OR MORE per week writing free open source Stephen King novels, we might well consider nominating him to receive a share of devcoins per round.

Even if he spent forty hours per week doing it, sorry, developers get one share right now, as devcoins are not worth enough yet that we can afford to pay more, as doing so would simply devalue the coins, so likely work out to the same number of bitcoins or dollars or whatever anyway.

-MarkM-

Right. So we should find people who spend forty hours a month or more developing free open source writing, and offer to put them on the devcoin recipients list.

Because their writing is free open source, we are free to put it on the wiki.

We need not even make them do the grunt work of pasting it to the wiki, In fact we need not even put it on the wiki at all really, that would be gravy for the devcoin project, the real point is to find those people who do excellent free open source work freely because that is what they do, and reward them by putting them on the devcoin recipients list.

The problem had been that if we searched the internet for each and every developer of each and every type of free open source stuff and put them all on the list, the number of coins each would get would be tiny so the coins would need to be worth a lot per coin in order for them to experience any real benefit from being on the list.

Thus, the strategy had arisen of trying first to focus on free open source things that can be caused to make money, and cause them to make money, and use that money to buy devcoins, so that devcoins will be worth something due to all that monetised free open source stuff constantly buying any that anyone wants to sell.

That is how devtome arose: the idea came up that if we put free open source writing on the web and put ads on the pages, the ads would earn money,  thus enabling us to buy devcoins from anyone who wanted to sell them...

So I guess I agree we should not pay by the word.

We should find free open source content we want to paste onto the wiki, paste it there, then if any of it turns out to have been created by someone who routinely, lifestyle, spends forty hours per month creating such content, nominate them for a place on the list of devcoin recipients.

-MarkM-

Do you think your 5000 words are worth more than, say, 5000 lines of code by FellowTraveller that let us do finances for all the many sub-projects we are still hoping to be able to launch?

It does not matter how many more hours FellowTraveler does, he gets one share a month because he puts in ten hours a week or more on Open Transactions.

If you put in ten hours a week or more on a history of the world for devtome, arguably you deserve a share just like he does.

The point is the shares are rewards given to people who already are doing good useful work we want to reward even though they are not getting rewarded for doing so.

The intent was not to lure people into doing such work but, rather, to reward people who are going to do such work anyway even if it costs them their health life money or whatever it is costing them already to do it unrewarded just because it is what they do.

-MarkM-