Mission critical infrastructure includes such things as up to date client source code. Less critical would be things like compiled clients for various operating-systems.

Devtome seems to be insanely more than mission-critical, its authors probably make more per hour than do people who build devcoin clients.

One share is supposed to mean you do ten hours of skilled work, such as programming, each week. That is what programmers get paid... or if they are working on specifically asked for things directly useful to the devcoin project, then they can get away with ten hours per month to get their one share.

-MarkM-

We could do it by paying based on clickthroughs, on the principle that if the video fails to convince the viewer to actually follow through by going to the site the video is promoting then the video failed to "convert" that viewer...

-MarkM-

We can't, because the largest bounty given to the most massive and essential infrastructure projects is twelve shares. Once. Not twelve shares per round.

Yet authors can get more than that, every round, just by doling out 13k or more words per round.

We aren't likely to get any infrastructure built when it is 80/12 as lucrative to dump old crap you wrote in high school than it is to work on mission-critical infrastructure projects.

Maybe the solution is to claim that devtome IS a mission-critical infrastructure project, and be extra super insanely generous to that project by awarding it - the entire devtome project - a max-sized bounty every single round, that is, twelve shares a round to devtome for devtome to share out as it pleases to its authors.

Then we can get on with finding other critical projects to promote, though so far those usually only seem to get 12 shares once, not twelve every damn round...

EDIT: Bear in mind that the less shares there are in total in a round, the more each share is worth. So if there were only five projects, each getting twelve shares, that would only add up to 60 shares but there would not be dozens of authors getting 80 shares each diluting the value of those shares, instead all authors added together would divide up the twelve shares that go to devtome.

-MarkM-

Well the 80 shares was probably a massive mistake, letting someone get that many shares, especially in one round, totally devalues everyone else's shares like crazy.

The incentive to write at all simply evaporated, heck it nearly wiped out admins and programmers and so on too from devtome authors suddenly getting 90+% or some such of all the shares, Unthinkingbit had to put in minimum percentage quotas for the admin category just to try to ensure people admin-ing websites for the project could maybe cover their hosting and bandwidth bills, maybe they still don't actually make anything once those bills are paid I am not sure.

I basically gave up writing, figuring if a whole bunch of people are going to dump 80k words on the devtome each round there really isn't much point bothering to write less words than that and since I don't figure I am likely to be able to write that many words I don't bother.

It would have made more sense probably to limit it like bounties, the biggest bounties usually seem to have been twelve shares, that is for entire programming projects specifically commissioned by the project. No author of random stuff should be able to make more than one massive bounty per round, surely? So 12 shares seems like a reasonable limit, some might say unreasonable since even that amounts to getting the largest bounty the project gives to the most-essential pieces of infrastructure yet authors get it for just having dumped 12k of some old story they wrote in high school?

The twelve shares for a bounty also tended to assume you might have a team doing the work, the team leader then shares it among the workers.

Heck entire software projects were only getting one share originally, with the team lead intended to share out those coins appropriately among all the programmers working on the project!

Open transactions doesn't even get twelve shares a round I don't think, and it gets shitloads compared to most projects because it has like maybe as many as four programmers, maybe even more, who each get one share, and they work tons and tons of hours on that stuff all the damn time! I think they get one for FellowTraveller, and one for a guy who codes and debugs and packages it all for Windows, and one for a guy who does the whole autotools auto-build mess and maybe one for some other guy too.

Maybe it should not be per thousand words but, rather, per "mean number of words per author per round", so that if typical/mean words authors contribute is 50K words then 50k words is what it takes to get a share...

-MarkM-

Not if their first submission is awesome quality and on a featured topic so it gets bonus for quality and bonus for featured article of the month and bonus for being on a specific topic that is being specially rewarded that month due to its direct relevance to other projects that are also going on and such, maybe also best new author or second best new author or whatever.

So far we seem to be spending so much on random writings that we aren't really getting a lot of other projects done that could in turn be written about, for example.

There could also be bonus for increasing the relevance of existing articles by spinning them together into some larger picture, so the whole thing hangs together more instead of being a bunch of unrelated pages without much in the way of relevant links drawing readers deeper and deeper in as they follow the links to learn more and more about all the various pieces of the puzzle...

-MarkM-

I wasn't thinking of making authors pay up front to get to be authors.

More like start them with a one share per month maximum and have ways to move up from there.

So someone could join up, dump 80k of old crap they have no use for and could not sell anywhere, and then either sit back getting a share per cycle for 80 cycles or do something to raise their max shares per cycle rating.

Like maybe retaining some of the coins to become a "stakeholder" in the coin, or maybe fixing up all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors and typing errors, maybe even tightening up the plotline and dialog and such, to improve the quality of their submission. Or maybe even have a couple of raises just on sheer seniority, one share the first cycle, two the second, three per cycle thereafter. So they'd have six shares worth of payout three cycles in and could maybe consider holding some of it as stake to speed up the rate at which their initial big dump of text actually pays off...

Maybe even set it up so they'd be better off posting their 80k words in batches, 1k the first month, 2k the second, 3k the third etc, so as to gain a step up in max shares per month each month for posting more than they did the month before...

-MarkM-

Yeah but if someone did just mass produce chips and mass produce mining rigs to put them in all those companies that wasted time and effort and money building mining farms could maybe all have been royally screwed because if someone seriously churned out mining rigs really really fast they could have turned over a small markup over and over and over again while driving up difficulty so fast that only home miners heating their houses in winter and heating their linen closets year round and such, with no employees and no extra space rented specially to house rigs, could hope to profit...

Basically if you seriously churn out rigs, mining as a commercial entrprise would be a sucker's game and the company that saw that ahead of time and went full out just "selling shovels" without getting into the "sucker's game" themselves could maybe have really "cleaned up".

-MarkM-

Hopefully the mining-ASIC manufacturers will eventually realise that mining is a sucker's game, that their huge farms are obsolete, and realise how much money they missed out on by not pouring out ASICs to suckers in vast, vast quantities much much faster, driving all the conflict-of-interest manufacturers who wasted time and money setting up mining farms of their own into obsolescence...

TL;DR there is reason to sell the damn things quick instead of mining with them, because if someone does mining with them is going to be a white elephant...

(Whereas for mine-at-home folks heating their bathroom floors and heating their houses in the winter and not needing employees and not having to rent datacentre space and so on and so on, all the overheads of a commercial mining operation, mining might still actually make sense.)

Basically the normal return on investments is only maybe 5%, 10% if you are really lucky, so if you can sell the darn things at 10% profit and buy more wafers you could make 10% over and over again adding up to much more than 10% per year by the time you've churned out product for a year...

-MarkM-

Sure. Or you can point your miners at http://dvcstable01.dvcnode.org:10332 which is a zero fee p2pool.

Plus if someone manages to figure out some kind of script or something for finding out from somewhere in the p2pool data directories how much bitcoin it paid each miner it would be possible to pay miners extra besides by selling merged mined coins and divvying up the proceeds. So far though despite bounties offered no one has come up with any tools for doing such divvying.

-MarkM-

Maybe use p2pool?

-MarkM-

A lot of altcoins claimed that really fast blocks was a major important thing to have, if they were right then maybe GeistGeld will turn out to be the best fit for that niche since you get it "free" alongside your bitcoins and it has very fast blocks.

-MarkM-

But why is that surprising?

If they were able to develop something worthwhile they would have made a bundle accepting bitcoin for it.

Instead they made yet another scamcoin and accepted bitcoin for that.

Pretty much the standard everyday scam we see all the time around here.

-MarkM-

I see you are evading the actual thread about the coin, that presumably shows how much it was pre-mined and insta-mined, instead shifting focus to a bribery attempt, do such bribes actually serve to distract people from whatever dirty laundry might be hidden away in the actual launch thread of the coin?

Besides, value isn't attractive, it seems. If it were we'd see people running Open Transactions clients so they could get in on all the coins that skyrocketed far above bitcoin in value.

-MarkM-

An interesting one to do would be this one: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=297147.0

Maybe you could offer on that thread to create that coin, maybe giving some indication of what kind of level of "donations" you would be looking for to do so...

-MarkM-

All the merged mined coins except I0Coin need new code to deal with the fact that merged mining eats more RAM, faster, than non-merged mining.

The faster a coin spits out blocks, the faster it runs into the problem of it using huge amounts of RAM.

GRouPcoin is a relatively sedate coin, with ten minutes block timing target if I recall correctly, so it is less urgent to update GRouPcoin than it is to update those merged mined coins that have faster average time between blocks target.

Presumably GRouPcoin will get done eventually, it is just not the one in most-urgent need right now.

Also, once it gets onto exchanges then maybe developers will be more interested in bounties denominated in GRouPcoin thus more responsive to the needs of GRouPcoin users who desire work done on the coin and have coins to reward developers for doing the work.

-MarkM-

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 seem 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 and 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-