Actually, being valuable seems to lower popularity, at least among the suckers who keep falling for each new scamcoin of the day.

Bitcoin is valuable, that is why they do not want it. They want something totally worthless because if it is worth nothing then any increase at all is infinity percent gain, and it is the percentage gain they want, not actual value per se.

The more worthless the coin the better, because the more it costs per coin right now the less likely they seem to think it is that it will increase in value by ten or a hundred times overnight.

-MarkM-

Well remember to make it a unique different network of its own, so that it does not think some other coin's clients are its own clients and connect to them instead of or as well as its own clients...


Are you seriously trying to claim that google cannot find any of the huge amounts of stuff that has been written about it?

That the search function of this forum cannot find any of the threads that go through it all? Etc?

If so then maybe you should just page through the altcoins forum page by page back a few years and do some kind of search engine optimising or something (creating links to them) to help make sure google can find the stuff in the future.

Such as, for example, the complete teach yourself to make altcoins package that includes a before coin and an after coin showing an existing coin you start from and the changes to do and the end coin you end up with having made those changes.

-MarkM-

It is worth so little that there really isn't much point firing up an Ixcoin daemon and waiting for it to catch up with the blockchain in order to sell one's huge hoard of them for a fraction of a bitcoin.

Until one's hoard is worth several bitcoins at least it seems more of a thing to just let build up a few more years as a side effect of (merged) mining bitcoins; maybe in a few more years, if one has enough hashing power, one's accumulated stash might be a sum worth firing up the deamon to get at.

Nice long-term savings, in other words, like collecting small change for years against some possible future need for lots and lots of small change.

So it is far from dead, look at its difficulty to see that. It is simply being used as a long-term store of lots of tiny bits of value for now.

Until one has a nice sized stash, why would one want to make it harder to acquire by making apparent one's interest in it? Wouldn't it be a better long term strategy to accumulate it in as low-profile a way as possible so that one can have a nice stash by the time it does enter the limelight?

Also remember that I0Coin only recently got added back onto bitparking's mmpool and the Vircurex exchange, for a long time I0Coin was a much much more interesting coin than Ixcoin because you didn't need a super-massive mining farm to mine it, compared to the amount of Ixcoin one was getting at the same time in the same merging of merged-mine-able coins. Ixcoin is for the big boys, who actually get blocks of it on a more than "I won the lottery" kind of basis. The interesting coins for smaller miners were I0Coin, GRouPcoin, CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld. Even now that I0Coin is well on its way back to being a coin for the big miners, there are still three nice low difficulty coins the big boys are still leaving on the table...

-MarkM-

Devtome took on a lot of new authors, which means a lot of people are now dumping the coins they get because the main reason most of those authors are there is to make some quick fiat or bitcoin by dumping devcoins, instead of having as their main motivation the improving of the devtome so as to increase its income so as to buy up more devcoins on markets so as to drive up the value of the huge hoards of devcoins they save up.

It seems insane that they part with them at such pathetically low prices, and by doing so they sem to have ended or stretched out a lot the old cycle we used to see where it would go down to thirty-something satoshis a coin then back up over 200 satoshis sometimes near or even over 300 satoshis then back down to thirty-something.

So to me it seems mostly to do with the motives of the type of people being attracted by the "shares for authors" thing devtome is doing. Once upon a time we had peple who wanted to write, had stuff to write maybe even stuff actually directly relevant to ultimately increasing the value of devcoins and often also bitcoin, and were happy that as a side-effect they were accumulating coins that in a few years might be worth quite a bit if they did well the projects at hand in the moment.

Now we seem to be attracting more people who just have a bunch of writing laying around that they have no use for any maybe no one has any use for so they dump it for quick fiat or bitcoins. Having no interest or stake in devcoin they don't even care whether their contribution will ultimately increase the value of the coins.

Maybe republicans can see in it a microcosm of what welfare states lead to, even...

-MarkM-

They aren't even useful for games, because they are so insanely insecure.

Until you have a difficulty high enough that the gangbanging pools cannot shift your difficulty by their coming and going from your coin, you are almost less than a toy even, since serious players tend to like their toys to be at least somewhat durable. They don't like to wake up and find the coins they spent all night killing goblins to get are gone or whatever.

Maybe the first thing a new coin should do is get legally binding contracts with enough miners to ensure the hashing power for the first year will be at least twice the total of the high points of the last year of hashing power of all the gang-bang pools. If not enough people are confident enough in the proposed new coin to commit their mining power to it for a year maybe the proposal needs some work before bothering to implement the thing.

-MarkM-

Sounds reasonable. Should hopefully take less than the $300,000+ of venture capital some other propoals raked in to try it out, too.

How many hops are to be pre-mined? Or does that depend on venture capital, like X amount per bitcoin of capital ventured?

-MarkM-

Its bad for a coin to be listed on an exchange before it has enough difficulty that the gangbang pools cannot make much if any dent in their difficulty.

That is because it is the price in the exchanges that attracts the gangbangers in the first place.

There is much much better profit made mining or buying coins that are NOT listed on exchanges then there is in bothering with the crapcoins whose main purpose in life is to get on an exchange so they can dump. So really the longer your coin manages to NOT get onto an exchange the better, unless your goal is simply to dump it as fast as possible and move on to something else.

Also, just because hundreds or thousands of scammers demand a place to dump their useless shit doesn't make the place they dump it a good place to buy good things.

-MarkM-

I am knotwork (or sometimes knotwork_), on Freenode IRC.

-MarkM-

I am not saying close the exchange, I am just saying if you want to be ripped off or to rip people off go to the scammy exchange that have all the latst rippoffs of the day, if not then patronise exchanges that try harder to pick only coins that might actually be worthwhile.

If you insist on buying from sleazy fences in back alleys its silly to complain about what you end up buying.

Shop at a butcher's you're likely to end up with meat, shop at a jewelry store you're likely to end up with jewelry. Shop at scam of the day shop and you're likely to end up with scam of the day. So pick what specialty you want and shop at a place that specialises in it.

A bunch of exchanges clearly specialise in scams such as pre-mines, instamines, cut-and-paste jobs etc. Don't shop there if that isn't what you want to buy.

-MarkM-

My pool that I still use privately used to give people 100% of the bitcoins, and convert all the other coins into DeVCoins to pay out.

But it just wasn't worth all the work of adding it all up and working out what it was all worth when only one user other than me actually used it.

If there was code for doing all that computation and there was more than one person who was going to use it, it might be worthwhile, but even if doing the math each month to work out how much I owed that one other guy only took an hour, it was an hour not worth spending, basically a total waste of time.

Even just a script that looks up how much bitcoin p2pool has paid each person since last the script was run would have helped a lot since then I could have paid everyone (aka that one guy) based on how many bitcoins p2pool had paid out. But I don't even know whether p2pool even keeps all the data such a script would need. (Historic list of all payouts to each miner.)

I have a p2pool mining bitcoins, devcoins, groupcoins, coiledcoins, geistgeld, namecoin, ixcoin and i0coin, all that is missing is a tool for paying out devcoins to miners based on how much bitcoin they mined there. I even have scripts posting the relative values of the coins for me to an include-file for shell-scripts that is put online as http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc

But so far no luck eliciting such a tool (a divvy up the take tool) using bounties.

-MarkM-

Huh? You are listing one of the many years successful cards.

No mention of all the little pieces of plastic whipped up by forgers and scammers with made up new names hawked in back alleys off of times square.

Go print up a whole bunch of clonecards, with new different names, Xcovercard, Winer's Club, Fastercard, etc etc etc and flog them in back alleys and see in 20 or 30 or 50 or whatever years how well they all are doing.

The fact that you can buy the crap in a back alley is not convincing. The fact you can ONLY buy it there is even worse.

You probably don't even know a dozen, maybe even half a dozen, of the crapcards scammers pressed out with backroom plastic-forming kits back in the years when discovercard etc were first launching, so your statistics are almost certainly totally off, based on looking back with 20/20 hindsight.

If we print off 100 different "brands" of made up pretend cards, how many of each are you going to buy into on the chance one of them is the next Diner's Club or Discover Card or whatever?

-MarkM-

Its like you are saying that the fact a bunch of sleazy fences operating out of back alleys accosting people with offers of cheap new watches that look like a Rolex causes people to think those "new brands" are legitimate.

It is crazy to think that the biggest sleazebags among exchanges picking up yet another ripoff of the day "legitimises" that new ripoff of the day.

To the contrary, the fact that the sleazebags love the stuff should be a red flag. "Oh oh, I see this coin is traded by the biggest rippoff artists in the business, maybe it'd be wise to check whether MtGox trades it yet... Wow MtGox doesn't even trade litecoins and namecoins yet, if even those aren't legit its obvious the crap the biggest scammers of all are pushing must be illegitimate..."

I mean really, for gosh sakes, most of the crap is pre-mined and/or instamined from the get-go, both of which are also huge red flags.

Its too bad the legit coins cannot force the scam exchanges to remove them, instead people have to realise that just because the scammers trade bitcoins as well as the latest ripoffs doesn't mean the latest ripoffs must be just as legit as bitcoins.

If you wallow in shit you're unlikely to come out smelling like roses unless you are the shitter / scammer / ripoff-artist looking to dump your garbage...

So far the solution is trivially simple: just don't deal with the scummy "exchanges" that facilitate the scams.

-MarkM-

Citing Cryptsy seems to be where your problem is.

Cryptsy seems to be basically a junk/crap exchange, it is where you go when you want to offload a bunch of totally useless crapcoins, sucker a bunch of suckers etc.

Look instead at exchanges like Vircurex. If a coin is not on Vircurex yet it is probably because it is a bunch of crap best left to bottom-feeders such as Cryptsy.

It can be argued that even Vircurex has set its standards too low, I am sure some people out there think so, but compared to middens like Cryptsy it is sure as heck trying a lot harder to only list coins that might actually maybe in the long run turn out to have been worth listing.

So basically if you want to go get ripped off or rip other people off go play in the crappy places like Cryptsy that specialise in ripoff-of-the-day, otherwise stick to reputable exchanges and even there do your due diligence carefully and don't "invest" more than you can afford to lose.

-MarkM-

I thought the white plastic pegs around the heatsink would hit the blades of a larger fan but turns out putting the fan the right way up the blades have enough clearance, so for now I put the only one of the three "bad fan" boards that still lights up when it gets power on top of a stack and just loosely sat on top of it (as I don't happen to have long-enough screws/bolts handy) a 60mm or so fan I got a bunch of for a couple of bucks each from a place that sells off all the old fans from all the ancient machines they dis-assemble and throw away. It is a three-prong connector though plus I don't know if it would match the power from the four-pin connector on the lancelot so I am powering it via a fan-connector-adapter from the ATX power supply powering four of the boards. (The power bricks they supply with the lancelot do not power four boards per brick like their site claims, so I had to use an ATX to power four of them. The bricks mostly can do three boards though sometimes one of them seemed borderline even powering three.)

Two of the boards just don't light up so presumably the heat got too much for them or something.

-MarkM-

What kind of fan does the Lancelot use? Three of the fans on mine are gummed up somehow, maybe at least one of the boards that stopped working might have been due to its fan stopping.

So I'd like to get replacement fans somewhere somehow but I am not sure what their specifications are nor where to get them.

They seem really gummed up, I sprayed some WD40 spray on one and it didn't help at all its still stuck, whereas when I did that to a GPU fan that was stuck it loosened it up nicely.

-MarkM-

Well if it intended to actually make money it should be using whatever ad-provider yields the most ad-revenue per page or per visitor or something. Hopefully including some pay per view ads not just pay per clickthrough. Thus, probably, google adsense.

I think words always carry over. don't they? It counts your currently still there words, deducts the shares you already got paid total since forever, and pays either what is left or the max allowed per cycle?

-MarkM-

If the up front costs are already paid why the pre-orders then?

The guy was saying earlier that no company is ever going to sell mining rigs for any less than the amount of coins they will ever mine, because it makes no sense to sell the rigs instead of mining with them.

So basically parting with any rigs is just a side-scam to help defray the cost of the company's private mining centres. Which, considering they could host their miners in places with $0.02 per KWH electricity, also means it makes no sense to sell them if mining with them at $0.02 per KWH power would rake in more money.

In short they are saying it makes no sense to be in the mining hardware business, the only business that makes sense is the actual mining business, and that only if you design and have-foundried your own chips.

I guess the big problem bitcoin mining has compared to gold etc mining is the lack of a stake. If miners needed a stake - a place to actually mine, kind of thing - then it could make sense to be in the mining hardware business because you could be in that busienss without having to own any actual gold-mines like the actual miners - of gold etc - have to do.

So maybe a new kind of stake-based mining would be a good innovation for a coin: one where to do mining at all you have to have a stake, so that hardware-only companies will no longer consider merely supplying hardware to "not make sense" compared to actually mining.

-MarkM-

Actually I think one of the biggest "red flags" is the apparent lack of belief that there ever can or will be such a thing as a bitcoin mining hardware company.

This apparently is a company that does not believe such a thing can even exist, so basically asserts that the only way you can ever hope to even come close to making ROI in mining is to jump-start private mining operators such as themselves, who have no intention of equipping other people but happen to very-temporarily be forced to due to not having good enough credit rating to borrow money from normal sources of loans so have to grudgingly part with some pie in the sky to get their private farms, which is what their real business is, off the ground. The message seems to be they have no intention of going into the mining hardware business, as soon as they can they plan to go private-farmer with the hardware a bunch of suckers paid for the development of.

-MarkM-

It might be worthwhile to lower the max number of words you can get paid for each cycle. Lower it each cycle for quite a while. Because the amount per share should go up when you don't have a few authors dumping 80k words and lots of authors who only write 1k or so words. Maybe have it drift toward the mean or something.

Meanwhile get serious about paying for income-producing development. For example we still after all this time do not have free open source code for merged mining pools. A pool could probably make a decent amount of money.

How much is devtome making now from adwords, anyway? I saw somewhere someone claim it gets some huge number of hits, but no mention of how much is coming in from ads on the pages. Maybe all those hits are search engine spiders not real readers?

There are so many topics there should be a lot of different topics context-sensitive ads should be able to make money from, if a smart system like google adwords is hard at work constantly trying to figure out the most lucrative ads - as in the ones that attract the readers of a specific page best - for each page.

-MarkM-

Maybe we could do like Wikipedia, have featured articles, or some kind of flag indicating high quality articles, and pay only for those?

So that authors will have an incentive to keep improving their articles instead of spamming more articles?

-MarkM-