There is nothing to fix. The coder in control of the github already fixed nuggets long ago and has been running it ever since, it seems.

-MarkM-

Ahh there is an idea! Yes, try doing a diff of the last version of bitcoin to use Berkeley DB against the latest version of bitcoin, then try to apply that as a patch to the least-different-from-bitcoin merged mined coin that has no known bugs or quirks of its own. So, like groupcoin or ixcoin, I guess.

-MarkM-

Presumably either one of the rejected chuncks was supposed to correct the number of arguments or recent bitcoin has a different number of arguments to that function than older versions such as the one the diff was done against to create the patch had.

part of manually applying the rejected chunks is resolving such things.

Have you applied the rejected chunks that I did not get to apply yet?

Maybe you mgiht grasp the whole thing more clearly if you clone for yourself the latest bitcoin and apply that big multipart main patch file by using the pach program so you see all the rejects and don't have to worry about which ones I already applied and which still await being applied?

-MarkM-

The mergecoin repo is bitcoin and the patch and the rejects that resulted from using the program named patch to apply the patch.

However it looks like the patch did not include any entire new separate files needed, only changes to files that already existed in bitcoin back when the patch was made.

The missing files though are already in all the merged mined coins that were already made by applying the full version of the patch, including it seems some entirely new files that had not existed in bitcoin before.

So groupcoin, devcoin, whatevercoin all likely contain copies of the files that for some reason the one big patch file form of the patch does not contain.

-MarkM-

Did you finish the applying of the patches?

Several chuncks of the merged mining as a secondary coin patches were rejected by the patch program, they need to be manually applied, they are the .rej files.

I applied what I could, however i left the .rej files anyway so people can check what i actually did to what was supposed to be done but got rejected.

Even once all are cleanly applied the result will be a version of bitcoin that would be able to act as a secondary chain in a merge, which would be a hard fork of bitcoin.

But once that has been done, then all the various coins can clone it and start chaing the name the icons the block rewards and so on, all the things that make them each a different coin.

-MarkM-

EDIT actually once those patches are cleanly applied then also whatever bitcoin's vulnerability fix should also be applied before all the various coins clone it to mutate into a newer version of themselves.

The point of using latest bitcoin is it has bugfixes and vulnerability fixes no other coin is fully up to date with.

Including the vulnerability fix they added while i was part-way through doing mergecoin.

-MarkM-

Most free open source games do not maintain fully relational databases. heck even most supermarkets do not.

Rather, things get 'stacked' and abstracted.

The supermarket might know how many cans of beans are in each warehouse, but typically does not know - not maybe even particularly care - which can is in which warehouse. You could sneakily exchange any pair of cans of beans because any distinct ones that are known to be different, such as damaged cans of beans, would be a separate inventory item but again no fully relational. Most engines for fully relational databases died off because full relationalness was mostly of theoretical interest for relational calculus not often of practical use in the field.

So hey who knows maybe if you bought a copy of EVE online or World of Warcraft server source code you would find there is no such thing as ten swords, because ten swords is not a thing, there are ten things, each is a sword, and each has different fingerprints and scents and history so that a psychic could tell which of them once was used by so and so, which is stolen and from who, which one sold where to who from who when and so on.

But in free open source games I have not seen such accounting/inventory yet.

Oh wait, maybe a MUD comes close, if it does not implement stacking/bundling.

But once you stack or bundle there is typically no going back to which item in the stack was which individual item before the stacking or bundling; it is partly a way of saving data space by reducing many database rows all saying sword to one database row saying fifty swords, type of idea.

You could illustrate it in OpenSim by rezzing fifty models of swords, each with their own object-ID, or by rezzing one model depicting a bundle of swords and maybe using less than fifty prims.

-MarkM-

You are thinking of three dimensional representations/models of things as the things themselves, and there is value in such models so on the level where you need to reward artists for creating images of things that is useful.

I am more rooted in the old classic idea that our games use the most powerful graphics processor in the known universe... your own imagination!

Throughout history much of literature got illustrated much later, the authors of the actual scenarios that many artists over the centuries took a stab at creating their own artist's impression of didn't pay those artists, and once upon a time the greatness of the plotlines and characters and events and so on did not lie in how high a definition the movie of it was filmed in.

So I am currently thinking more along the roleplayer lines, where a roleplayer might say "and he generously offers a million coins of gold!" and presto, to illustrate, being in an OpenSimulator environment, a million coins of gold can appear, illustrating the story.

To me with my current approach, whether the player actually has a million devcoins or bitcoins or MUD gold or whatever with which to "back" that gratuitous illustration comes in later; if a player cannot illustrate such a storyline because the player failed to purchase an entire million copies of a no copy no modify gold coin so they could rez it a million times that is a problem, a glitch, because it would make it harder for players to sit there spinning their yarns doing their bragging or whatever. Albeit it it would also prevent a scammer from rezzing a million copies of a gold coin to try to convince someone he or she has that many actual gold coins somewhere or that many devcoins somewhere or whatever.

I am looking at three dimensional graphics as an output device that could be useful to provide certain kinds of readouts/views, not as being in itself the thing to generate views of.

I am more looking to take a statement from a novel or a MUD or other "in words" medium and illustrate it, than to try to figure out what some pattern of pixels is intended to convey. What is to be conveyed is known in advance, how a particular artist or screen or sculptor or whatever will image it is largely a matter of their taste and their ability to convey through such media the meaning that the plot or story or game is trying to have it convey.

So if it is the case that a goblin enters and hacks off the head of a rabbit, there is no "sorry, no artist has drawn a goblin or rabbit yet so that cannot happen"; rather it is more a case of "sorry your display does not currently seem able to adequately display what is happening, which is, that a goblin enters and hacks off the head of a rabbit"....

I guess I am conceptually thinking of two modes:

In one mode, players are using OpenSimulator, so they can rez anything in any quantity without regard to whether it corresponds to what is really the case in any/whatever game they might be bragging about or recounting yarns about while hanging out in OpenSim.

In the other mode, the players are playing a game, and one more more of the screens their computer has available to it can, thanks to OpenSim, illustrate various aspects of the game in 3D.

In both cases, the illustration is there to attempt to illustrate the story/facts. Illustrating something doesn't make it so, rather, what is actually so is actually so whether any illustration of it portrays it faithfully/understandably or not and whether or not any illustrations even vaguely resembling what is so have ever yet been created.

-MarkM-

It is not really practical to use actual blockchain coins in games.

Rather, one would tend to use either things denominated in devcoins or, even better, things that can be exchanged for devcoins.

The "even better" part is because when some glitch in your game causes players to clone their stuff, such as can happen in so many games, it is not good for the survival of the game for the game operators to have to redeem all those cloned coins one for one with blockchain-based coins.

In essence the banking in almost all games is not reliable, for example in all the web based games I have looked at not one of them used transactions that either happen in full or get rolled back and retried, so any time a hosting provider reboots a web based game there is a chance the game was part way through a transaction, which will never thus be completed, so it will be out of balance.

For example suppose a player visits a moneychanger to change goldpieces into silverpieces. instead of using one atomic transaction in which the moneychanger gains gold and loses silver while the player gains silver while losing gold there would be four separate database operations, one for each currency to remove it from the one that is parting with it and one to add it to the one that is gaining it. if the machine goes down while that is happening, maybe the player paid the gold but didn't receive the silver, or maybe both parties had what they were parted with subtracted and neither has had anything added yet, or maybe even, in code that is particularly bad for the game operator, both parties got given what they were to get but did not get taken from them what they were to part with.

So no virtually no game can be trusted to account inventory and balances so you need to turn inventory and balances into actual hard blockchain-coins at an exchange/market so that if suddenly all items and currencies owned by all players got doubled it would not leave the game operator owing a doubled amount of hard coin to the players, instead it would simply lead to the market prices of the things that got doubled tending to fall somewhat as players sell off their duplicate copies of everything.

However one could put Chaumian blinded cash tokens, cheques, teller's cheques and such into games as items players can pick up, since such things if someone already cashed them they are worthless. The only way a player finding one of a many times cloned cheque or Chaumian cash token can know it is still valid is to try to cash it in at a server. (I am thinking Open Transactions style here for example) so those kinds of things could be used, in which each individual one a player has is a separate distinct serial-number kind of thing that either has or has not already been cashed-in by a previous owner.

-MarkM-

All bitcoin miners who care about making more income from their bitcoin mining have been raking in this coin as a free extra on the side since way way back.

Essentially if you are a bitcoin miner you get to have namecoins, ixcoins, and devcoins thrown at you too if you use bitparking's merged mining pool.

Once upon a time you used to get I0Coins too, but who-ever cloned IXCoin to make I0Coin apparently could not resist adding a stupid "die daily" bug and it seems likely one or more memory leaks, so I guess it is not really a clone of IXCoin at all but rather a butchered broken pathetic attempt at a clone of IXCoin.

So part of why IXCoin is still with us is the fact that unlike I0Coin it did not force bitparking to drop it by gobbling up memory like crazy and dying every day or few trying to do some DNS lookup that either no other coin considers necessary or that other coins manage to do without killing themselves.

Maybe it could have been partly because of the gory failure of I0Coin to just basically work like normal coins just basically worked that led to bitparking not adding the rest of the merged mined coins, such as groupcoin and coiledcoin and geistgeld. (Though geistgeld is even more of a memory hog than i0coin so has its own justification for not being included.)

So this coin is one that vast numbers of people already have some of, yes. Another way of putting that is to say it has a large user-base.

However those users have very weak hands, many of them probably just dump their IXCoins on an exchange without even caring about depth, they likely don't even bother to put an asking price and wait for it to be met, likely they just pretty much blindly dump. In other words you can buy the things dirt cheap, many of the old holders might not even hold any really but just dump to an exchange those that bitparking gives them "free" while they mine bitcoins.

I admit that the amount of hashing securing the IXCoin chain makes me feel like oh gosh I can hardly mine any of those compared to I0Coin, I am so glad bitparking dropped I0Coin because now I0Coin is much much easier to mine so I can mine a lot more I0Coin than IXCoin. It is great because all the lazy ignorant people who just want to be given money by a magic money machine without even understanding how the thing works are too lazy and too determined to stay ignorant to actually go out and merged-mine stuff themselves, if its not on a big pool they don't do it. so all the merged mined coins that are not on big merged mining poos are awesome opportunities for anyone who is computer literate, they can run p2pool themselves and merged mine whichever merged mined coins the want to.

But for a lot of the ignorant masses anything that is not on major pools major exchanges and so on doesn't appeal to them, so the mere fact that IXCoin is on a major pool and a major exchange gives it a lot of cachet... and it has been there year after year.

-MarkM-

Database error sounds like the database might be corrupt or borken or out of synch with its index files or somesuch.

also, are you on 32 bit windows, maybe, as the bitcoin it was based on might pre-date the addition of a workaround for some systems inability to work with files more than two gigs or some number of gigs in size. Did we get bigger than some such limit, maybe?

-MarkM-

Hmm, neither the minted currency nor the total supply on those charts seems to indicate any pre-mining or special blocks for the author or anything like that happened?

It seems in fact to claim the money supply started at zero and went up slowly...

-MarkM-

Unfortunately with GPUs now having 6 gigs of RAM, and faster RAM than most desktops, one GPU now has more RAM than most consumer desktops, doesn't it?

Plus, a desktop is a rapidly becoming obsolete fossil that businesses maybe still use because too many of their employees who need a computer don't have a laptop or handheld yet; isn't a desktop a kind of specialised equipment less and less consumers tend to have in their homes? Maybe if first they get some kind of run your own business thing in their minds they might go out and buy a desktop but isn't it more and more likely they have a handheld or laptop or xbox or whatever?

Do entry level desktop machines at Walmart routinely have more than 6 gigs of RAM?

i do like the intermittent nature of their mining as you envision it though. Six billion people each running a miner 24/7 on their phone are not likely to get more than one six-billionth of the loot, but if it only takes one phone one week to mine one person's typical ongoing-average amount of coin wanted and each only wants/needs that coin once per year each could rake in up to fifty-two six-billionths of the loot...

Hmm, those numbers still seem to work out to be somewhat scant. maybe we need to be using not electricity, which goes up in heat, to buy with but, rather, something that isn't burned up on use like that, so that when someone mines $10 worth of coin, close to $10 worth of what they expended to mine it goes to someone else who is also looking to mine $10 worth of value/wealth.

Real trade seems to work that way: I want to "mine" (aka take posession of, make it mine, cause it to belong to me) ten pounds of cabbage, you want to "mine" ten pounds of potatoes. We both run our "cause things to be mine, aka 'mine things'" software, my cost to run my mining app is ten pounds of potatoes, your cost is ten pounds of cabbage...

-MarkM-

Well maybe you could round up more people who are on Windows 8 and form a Windows Clan or Windows Nation or Eight Clan or Eight Nation or something, or choose among yourselves some nation that is actually implemented in Freeciv as the nation you lot would like to run if you are interested in strategic scales of play. Or you could all get together and enter a MUD server or the Crossfire server aiming to try to get a clan-house set up.

If you all by yourself wander into some rabbit-hole into the game it is not really practical to have staff sitting at computers 24/7 watching waiting ready to hand-hold you, that is why I suggest getting a group/clan/whatever together. A hundred Windows 8 users who can be relied upon either to be 24/7 inhabitants or to regularly hold get-togethers on some specific schedule would make it much more feasible to look into budgeting some kind of support/help/introducer staff to meet with them in whichever rabbit-hole they want to use.

For years and years now the CrossCiv server has been sitting there but it must be at least a year now maybe two since one would see a dozen or two dozen characters on there at once, heck come to think of it it was back before the opportunity to become CEOs of intergalactic mining operations via web-based operations-control interfaces.

In theory/principle those characters are still in their keeps or houses or rooms in the CrossCiv server, using web-browsers to control their intergalactic mining operations.

In practice though over time fewer and fewer players bothered to leave their CrossCiv character online 24/7 so they could chat like one does in IRC, as once they came to know each other individually they tended more and more to use Torchat or gosh knows what else (Yahoo messenger? Google messenger? MSN messenger? Skype?) to communicate with one-another. Heck there is even a message sending capability inside the web-based village-management system and the web-based intergalactic mining operations system.

I guess the Galactic Milieu really takes to an extreme the problem of the larger the universe the players can spread themselves out into the less chance there is of actually encountering another player in whatever locale you yourself happen to wander into. Facilities permitting everyone in the whole unviverse to shout out to everyone in the whole universe have problems too though, especially before the advent of faster than light, multi-galaxies range communications systems. One thing that needs doing over the long term is setting up appropriate economics, like how much would it actually cost on a given planet at a given technology level under a certain government type to make an intergalactic call to a friend, how much to an enemy of the government that is in control of the area you are trying to call out from and so on?

A lot of the opportunity available to traders who actually make the trek to remote places to discover what deals might be findable there vanishes if anyone in any galaxy can instantly look up who on what planet of which galaxy can intergalactic-teleport them a magic sword of the best quality cheapest and fastest...

Yet for bitcointalk users it seems likely the interface they are going to like best will be one in which that is exactly what they can do: find what game offers cheapest what some other game pays the most for and how to ship an appropriate quantity of it out of the one game into the other game at a profit after shipping-expenses...
 
-MarkM-

Do you mean the CrossCiv server in my sig? If so Crossfire is still very unstable, there is even a certain door that seems to have about a 50% chance of crashing the server when someone opens it. There also seem to be ways of crashing it during character creation. It seems maybe the specific sets of maps most public Crossfire servers us do not, or do not often, find those bugs so in years they still have not been tracked down and fixed.

For years i have been hopiong that the general progress toward elinminating ways in which a mailicious map-designer could design a map capable of crashing a server would eventually fix whatever my particular sets of maps are still managing to find, but no luck with that so far.

Also the link I give for a java based client that in theory browsers could be set up to be able to launch directly from a website is for a daily build, so some days it might work better than others and of course somebrowsers might be wisely set not to run java directly from websites.

Also some distros of some operating systems have quite old versions of Crossfire clients in their installable packages collections, for quite a while because i was using latest sVN to build from no distros at all provided pre-packaged clients up to date enough to work.

It has long ago been pretty firmly refuted that if you build it they will come, so the fact that very few people come via Crossfire clients has, over time, led to support/development effots tending to drift away from that particular set of clients and windows-into-the-Milieu-multiverse to others.

For example CoffeeMUD turned out to be a much more popular doorway, since there are web-based MUD-clients aplenty, compiled MUD clients aplenty for most platforms, and they can be played with just telnet, which presumably any platform that has internet access has in its toolkit.

Right now though you also would find cofeeMUD blocked to you... popularity has its downsides. We are looking into batch sales of player-accounts in order to be able to properly budget servers. You no longer just appear out of no-where and create a character out of nothing, with clothes out of nothing and maybe gear out of nothing, rather your clan or nation or whatever would be buying a batch of 100 or 1000 or whatever user-accounts to divvy up among their members/citizens/whatever as they see fit.

OpenSim though you should find some of our regions currently online on OSgrid, albeit i think the ones online there right now are either unmodified or not much modified linda Kelley OARs no hand-built landscapes with custom new architecture on it there yet.

Then too of course there are web-based systems too, but there too simply allowing random internet passers-by to create whole new villages or planetary mining operations out of nothing had to go, so there you'd first need to get a character on Crossfire or a MUD or some other individual character level of play up to a point where they equipped themselves with enough followers to go found a village or enough space-travel hardware to equip themselves with an intergalactic mining colony ship in order to get into those scales of play.

-MarkM-

So maybe I should have written there is not an infinite amount of storage on Earth and maybe not in the universe.

I think I basically meant that we don't have enough compression / generation tools for primes yet to be able to practically be able to recall/regenerate them on demand. Maybe if we understood them better we'd have some kind of tool that would compress the information like the way various infinite series can be written in less than infinite amount of symbols. Calculus routinely adds up an infinite number of numbers, for example, whether or not the universe actually has room for that many numbers to actually be stored. It doesn't take in infinite amount of time to add them up, either.

-MarkM-

Can you refresh our memories as to why we want to resist GPUs?

Are we trying to get it down to a pure battle of who throws the most money at mining so that people who throw their money at chip and board manufacturers don't gain an advantage over people who throw their money at Walmart?

That is, do we hope that by using commodity parts the mass demands for the parts will end up making them more cost effective than more-efficient parts that don't have a lot of outlets selling mass quantities of them?

So really we need, or should want, to be aiming at handheld devices, as mass sales of homebound/desktop devices keep falling while sales of handheld devices keep climbing?

-MarkM-

See http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=galactic_milieu

For OpenSim regions, search for Digitalis on OSgrid. I actually have/had not just some regions with Digitalis in the name but also some generic names among the block of 29 or so regions I was running when testing how much resources it actually takes to run regions. Like Garden Centre, Adult Shopping Centre, Welcome Centre, Avatar Centre and so on, fresh out of the OAR file examples of Linda Kelly free open source regions. currently many of the regions that were up some days ago are down due to load problems; some of Linda's OARs ended up eating 100% of a core each, for example, even when no one was anywhere near them, just constant 24/7 load.

Even if we fudge a little, referring to 1024 metres by 1024 metres (a 4x4 square made up of sixteen regions) as a "square mile", and scale our Freeciv maps as if the tiles were only 100 kiliometers by 100 kilometres instead of 100 miles or more by 100 miles or more, it takes a heck of a lot of Open Simulator regions to represent at full scale even just one Freeciv planet... So the dynamic loading of regions as players enter regions adjacent to them will be really useful if the service that currently has that, based on Amazon instances, as closed source code ever actually opens their code or the community ends up re-inventing that wheel due to that service not getting around soon enough to releasing it.

We have been working on the idea of taking the so called "square miles" that Freeciv says a civilisation has and using that figure as the basis for hosting fees for hosting civilisations, but the scale, so many regions per square mile multiplied by so many square miles, still makes a massive gap even though that "square miles" reported by Freeciv does not seem to really include every square mile of every tile you control. (It is less than you'd get by figuring each tile is only 10,000 square kilometres, that is 100km by 100km, and counted every square kilometre of each tile that is within the civilisation's borders.)

The gap is that between how much it would cost if the entire civilisation was all fully ready for OpenSimulator players to walk into/over any part of it, compared to how much it would cost if all that was actually implemented was the Freeciv server running the planet the civilisation is located on...

...Plus of course details such as whether each and every market, bank and stock exchange's trading has an Open Transactions server representing/implementing it on detailed scale or whether merely each city that as a market and/or bank and/or stock exchange uses just one Open Transactions server to present all such services available in that city, or even just each civilisations has just one Open Transactions server representing all such services available in any city of that civilisation...

-MarkM-

Making apartheid shops/services around whatever your pet pyramid/ponzi coin happens to be is not actually all that useful, especially to the people operating the shop or service if it, rather than the ponzi/pyramid itself, is their actual business, their bread and butter, their living, their children's college fund and so on.

It gets simpler and easier and cheaper all the time to accept any food anyone wants to put on your starving children's table, any scholarships anyone offers your kids, so to speak. That is, as an actual business that is actually in some business other than one or more pyramid/ponzi coin schemes, there is not even any actual need to pick and choose among coins or fiats or any other negotiable instruments, all one needs to choose is a payment processor who is willing to give you the kind of value / money / food / wealth / income you like, whether it be fiat or cryptocoins or whatever, who will handle all other things all possible customers might like to buy things with, be that ancient hoary coins of actual physical gold, Fed-printed dollars fresh from the presses, or the latest fad in e-currencies.

So really what providers of goods and services other than the service of payment processing choose to accept or not accept is pretty much a non-issue.

The nearest issues to it are what forms of payment are the best payment-processors able to process and which payment processors are the best...

-MarkM-

Blockchains are INSANELY expensive to secure. You are saving a fortune right now by using a normal database or whatever to record people's balances and do transactions, basically you are doing "off-chain transactions", and that is the way to go for on-site interactions.

Blockchains are really only useful for going off the site to unknown destinations the site does not control and for coming onto the site from who cares where with something the site considers valuable.

Thus the entire insane expense of trying to secure a blockchain can be left to third parties.

But, you still of course are one of the victims who will be screwed if those third parties fail to secure whichever blockchain you end up deciding to accept/use, or left holding the bag if/when they decide their blockchain is not worth the insane expense of securing it (especially in view of the lucrative profits to be made by suckering people into yet another insecure blockchain... why bother to secure yesterday's blockchain when it is so easy to make a sockpuppet and launch yet another blockchain?)

So unless your goal actually is to scam people, you'd serve your users/community best by picking a blockchain that might hopefully be among the very few (assuming there any at all) that can actually be secured and, also important, will actually be secured. (just because they can do something doesn't mean they will do it...)

I expect, statistically, that your goal actually is to try to sucker people into wasting resources / time / hashes / money / coins on yet another ultimately-un-secure-able blockchain, so expect you will now make all kinds of excuses for why the number of victims and the amount they will lose justifies your going ahead with your get rich quick scheme anyway, of course. But nice try with the getting rather old now verbiage about how your case is different you aren't out to harm anyone etc.

("But, your honour! I'm only planning manslaughter, not murder! I'm not out to harm anyone I'm just going to go ahead and harm them without intending to!")


-MarkM-