Did Vircurex support this coin once upon a time? I don't recall, possibly it was one of the crapcoins it did try for a brief time then threw out?

-MarkM-

Unless you like to optimise it, like maybe by using some shifts or whatever (albeit maybe also with counters involved in that part too?)

I have often wondered if the Trachtenburg Speed System of basic mathematics is any faster on machines than other approaches? Maybe more useful for base ten than binary though?

-MarkM-

Considering the sheer number of coins GeistGeld puts out per day its exchange rate is pretty high compared to some others that put out less per day:

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc

That is measured in devcoins, which themselves have only yesterday or so started to adjust downward in a belated response to the fact devcoin rates on most web-based exchanges that are popular with bitcointalk folk have been a fraction of the devcoin rates prevailing in the tables and plots found at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

-MarkM-

Yes you should all turn off so I can find blocks easier, kthx.

-MarkM-

Use yum search or even google to find what packages your distro has for the things you are missing.

Fedora uses yum too, package names are not the same as in debian-derived distros but search for the missing thing, like yum search ssl or whatever and usually something that is reasonably recognisable as probably providing what you want will be found. If not google the actual lib its not able to link if the linker didn't tell you what package you need to get it and usually some google result will hint what package its in. or there are RPM sites where you can search to find even third party RPMs for stuff. So really it all just amounts to don't be lazy, use search routines.

You likely don't even have it as bad as Fedora, as your openssl might have elliptic curves built in, Fedora's doesn't due to some expired patent they evidently are still worried about so on Fedora I have to build openssl myself to get elliptic curves into it.

-MarkM-

The GUI? I admit I haven't even considered trying to compile the GUI, I always use daemons.

Or is it the daemon that is crashing? I haven't had it crash yet in quite a while now of using it.

What operating system and distro etc?

What debug.log and /var/log/messages (or your system's equivalent) clues?

-MarkM-

Yeah I ask myself that too. I used to go through bouts of paranoia a lot that some bug in some script somewhere was making the entire edifice of valuation stuff totally out of whack somewhere.

Presumably though it is a simple and pretty direct consequence of who-ever usually took care of arbitraging that pair across those exchanges or families/collections of exchanges was on vacation or something. Like maybe there aren't really a whole lot of Vircurex BTC/DVC / Vircurex DVC/BTC folk active regularly who also regularly keep in touch with Galactic Milieu players who are interested in BTC or DVC.

Like really only General Financial Corp, General Mining Corp and General Retirement Funds encounter DVC much in the course of play, so only their staff or maybe the miners who sell to GMC or GRF who also have devcoin-denominated loans from GFC have any reason to maybe even pay much attention to the fact that such things as devcoins even exist, let alone such things as bitcoins (like what do bitcoins have to do with anything, really? The "Hacker" nation purported to use bitcoins as its national currency is widely regarded as a mythical civilisation the Martians invented so as to pretend the Martians didn't invent blockchain technology but actually got it from someone else...)

-MarkM-

Well I think the players might consider it kind of sleazy, a kind of in game equivalent of "insider trading", for me to do that; as a dungeonmaster or gamemaster or server operator or game operator or whatever maybe leaving it up to the players to play those parts of "the game" might seem more-appropriate behaviour.

As to why e.g you don't, that might be something that you know better than others do?

Similarly for each player and for each person who happens not to be a player, their own reasons for not doing so are maybe best known by them.

(Don't know how or didn't realise the situation existed are likely very common reasons though, both among non-players and among players who happen not to be traders on the markets bitcointalk people are most-familiar with.)

-MarkM-

That latestrates file is intended for use by shell scripts and basically any script languages in which that simple syntax for assigning values to variables works.

One looks down the list to see which rate is equal to 1.00000000, in the case given you can see that is DVC (DeVCoins), indicating that whatever currency the rates (prices) are being shown in happens to be a currency in which devcoins are worth exactly 1.00000000, so its pretty obvious the prices shown are given in terms of devcoins.

Devcoin are convenient because they have more granularity than most (or maybe even more than any other) thus finer grained prices can be shown by pricing in devcoins than by pricing in, for example, bitcoins, number of decimals shown being equal.

So then, what we have there is the number of devcoins each of various other assets conversion rate is, aka what their price in devcoins is, ready for use in scripts.

The scripts they were originally set up for are market-maker scripts for Open Transactions, which would typically make offers at three different scales (lot sizes of 1, 10 and 100 coins, or lot sizes of 10, 100 and 1000 coins, or lot sizes of 100, 1000 and 10000 coins or even lot sizes of 1000, 10000 and 100000 coins (heck maybe even some pairs, like DVC/BTC might have used lot sizes of 10000, 100000 and 1000000 coins)).

The scripts would place offers in both ways round of the pair (e.g. BTC/DVC and DVC/BTC) at each scale (lot size), with higher markups for smaller scales than for lower scales, in order to facilitate buying wholesale to resell at retail kind of thing.

So basically the rates were intended for use like the rate charts tellers in banks used to look at when you wanted to buy or sell foreign currency at the bank; selling they'd sell with a slight markup, buying they'd buy at a slight discount. Thus only in pure abstract accounting would anyone normally/typically get the actual rates shown in this latestrates file.

As a concrete example consider a galactic mining operation that has debts denominated in devcoins and is delivering a fleetload of "deuterium" resource to a General Mining Corp depot.

General Mining Corp would offer some number of their own currency, GMC, for the resource. The miner says oh I want that applied against my debt, please. So the clerk uses a table that can be derived from that shown table simply by dividing all rates by GMCrate. That is, they use a table in which all rates are shown in terms of GMC, that is, a table in which GMCrate is the one shown as 1.00000000

So they can thus convert to any. In the case where the miner wants it applied against a devcoin-denominated debt obviously the latestrates we have already seen would have worked fine, since it already showed everything in terms of devcoins. I am merely trying to make it clear that by simple arithmetic one can from that table derive a table that gives all rates in terms of whichever one you prefer your rates to be denominated in, which in the case of GMCorp would probably be GMC.

Maybe even in pure abstract accounting ("unit of account") most moneygrubbing corps would do the extra work to apply a percentage service fee of some kind for the conversion. However historically it has often been the case, partly due to the fact that all assets on the Digitalis Open Transactions Server are integers, that miners doing such deliveries typically were not charged by percentage but the corp would simply do the rounding to integers in their own favour. (Presumably paying the clerk out of the rounding on the GMC side not out of some fraction of a devcoin of rounding on the devcoin side! )

-MarkM-

Well how many people have yet another 20 million to dump for a pittance?

At some point even 80,000 devtome words per cycle will be worth less than 20 million per cycle presumably even if it isn't already, so where are dumpers going to keep finding yet another 20 million to dump?

The entire minting is only enough for 9 such dumps a month, and if they continue to dump at lower and lower prices it is going to take less and less bitcoins to pick up each 20 million they dump.

I am sure someone will go like wow yet another 20 million devcoins for less than a bitcoin for the lot, sheesh why not, I'll take them...

Plus even though the dumping has started to make a dent in the prices shown in e.g. http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc notice that BTC rate is still at BTCrate=392005.28810379 there as I write, despite Vircurex showing offers of 1,470,588.23529412 per bitcoin (aka BTCrate=1470588.23529412).

Maybe if more people who use web based exchanges also used Torchat and I2P and various games and of course Open Transactions servers, arbitrage would close such gaps faster than has often been the case.

-MarkM-

The exchange rate is part of the profitability formula, who is paying high rates to attract chain hoppers to mess up the coin, and how do they profit by doing that or why do they find it worth paying high prices to accomplish that?

Maybe the best approach for the small miners is to try to convince exchanges that coins vulnerable to chain hopping are also probably vulnerable to attacks and thus should be delisted until some future time when the small miners have racked up enough of the coins that getting back on the exchanges for a moment will allow them to buy enough mining gear to no longer be small miners but, rather, a dedicated 24/7 mining operation securing that particular chain... or something?

Certainly getting a coin that small miners can nicely mine onto exchanges seems to be the end of the small miner period for a coin, the small miners should maybe plan on not encouraging it to get onto an exchange until they have stockpiled a nice nest-egg, knowing that once it does get on an exchange the bigger miners will come get all the coins from then on.

Basically as a small miner plan on mining low difficulty things that are not on exchanges. Then like the miners who CPU mined BBQcoin for a year once the coin you are mining gets onto an exchange decide whether it is time to invest in mining gear to become a larger miner or just move on to other coins that are not on exchanges while waiting for your nest-egg (or collection of nest-eggs after some time of doing this) add up to enough to make it seem like time to move up to being a big miner (who will then get to either go chain hopping or be part of the massive 24/7 defense force of rigs securing some particular chain or merge of chains...)

How many GPU-less miners who mined BBQcoin last year still only have CPUs I wonder, and how many are spending or have spent their BBQ earnings on GPUs or even ASIC pre-orders (or even USB ASICs)?

-MarkM-

Maybe not the only botnet though to their chagrin, eh?

-MarkM-

I believe GRouPcoin fixed the Time Travel exploit so if someone simply clones GRouPcoin to cut and paste newer versions of I0Coin and GeistGeld instead of waiting for the "mergecoin" repo (latest bitcoin with ability to be secondary chain in a merge added, the common code all the merged mined coins need in order to upgrade to latest bitcoin code) the timetravel fix will come along with that as a freebie.

(Both I0Coin and GeistGeld are already considering cloning from GRouPcoin anyway as a temp fix for their memory problems if someone doesn't want to wait to upgrade them directly to be based on latest bitcoin code.)

Similarly if anyone is in a hurry to fix it in Fairbrix and Tenebrix they can always go ahead and cut and paste a current Litecoin to make newer versions of Fairbrix and Tenebrix instead of waiting for a version of Litecoin that is based on latest Bitcoin code.

Thing is, fixing any of them might bring in more miners to divvy up the daily coins among, so there is some tendency to figure "maybe tomorrow, might as well rack up another day of easy mining before attracting more competing miners..."

-MarkM-

It was about the best starting difficulty I recall noticing in a log time. Scammers typically don't care or make some trivially tiny increase so they can try to pretend they tried.

-MarkM-

Well yeah, but in so many more words!

-MarkM-

What does it matter whether DeVCoin gets buried or not? To test merged mining it is useful to have a number of merged mined coins. Testing so far has seemed to indicate that adding UKB, CDN, MBC, GMC, GRF, NKL and UNS to the merge would only weaken all of those coins, which currently have retreated from blockchain form due to the insecurity of blockchains, even merged mined blockchains. If GRP, which was left as a blockchain, can eventually manage to be secured maybe those others will reconsider using a blockchain form of representation/implementation.


I count more than five, see above. Seven of them already moved away from using a blockchain because using a blockchain would be irresponsibly insecure.

-MarkM-

You don't think that showing the radio noise from star XYZ represents the elements and their isotopes and the first (number of elements shown) prime numbers, to make up a hypothetical message, would be easy to verify?

(Automatic verifying, though, sounds like an interesting challenge, a library you can use to specify the message content in a way that allows machines to see that you are correct that is seemingly what is being represented...)

Of course if each civilisation discovered only counts as one block it could be a very slow-growing blockchain...

-MarkM-

You didn't really read what I wrote, did you?

Just because you cannot stop a massive spree of bank-robberies or pick-pocketings or muggings or pyramid schemes or ponzi schemes or Enron schemes or gross fiduciary malfeasance on the part of banks or any other victimful crime is not a good reason to join the criminals nor to aid and abet the criminals.

The things cannot be secured. Until we solve the problem of securing such things, it is morally if not quite yet always clearly criminally wrong to encourage people to fall for them or to create more to suck people into.

Possibly one day maybe we might be able to show that PPC's proof of stake system can provide some security, but so far that is somewhat confounded by mixing in proof of work and by the automated centralised checkpoints. So even spawning more coins based on PPC is kind of irresponsible, and even PPC's author, Sunny, has long been accused of irresponsibly sucking people into his unproven proof of stake scheme because of things like purportedly trying to do some kind of coverup by obscurity or something where he was accused of claiming to have "fixed" a known problem with his system but has supposedly not actually offered any kind of explanation of what the "fix" was, how it would actually "fix" the problem and so on.

So the whole concept is on very shaky ground, about the only reasonably sure thing so far is that bitcoin's hashing power is so incredibly massive compared to all the supercomputing facilities in the world that it seemed quite likely, until this last year or so of ASIC shenanigans, that maybe the bitcoin chain might possibly be able to be secured.

You are basically suggesting "the huns are coming, the huns are coming, so take up a sword and swear aliegance to Attila and join his army! slaughter innocents! Rape and pillage!" Except if Attila like Genghis actually made an empire so safe a virgin carrying sacks of gold could walk across it unmolested then sorry bad example maybe its the Nazis that are coming thus that we should join cause with, which, by ancient usenet law, brings us to the end of the thread.

-MarkM-

All you need to know is that blockchains are INSANELY expensive to secure, so much so that even using merged mining alongside bitcoin so that the world-record, world-leading amount of hashing power directed at bitcoin can secure a chain while still also securing the bitcoin chain, STILL most of even the merged-mined coins have not been able to afford enough hashing power to come anywhere near being "secure".

Part of the reason for the coin freezing approach used for the Digitalis Open Transactions Server is the simple fact that most blockchains are far from secure. If any of those frozen coins moved, they would lose the security provided for them by the many hard-coded checkpoints that have been coded into coin clients since the coins were frozen to issue tokens on the Open Transactions server.

Even if someone managed to 51% attack a coin, reversing a transaction on a blockchain, the frozen coins the tokens on the Open Transactions server represent should not be affected, because they have not moved since many hard-coded checkpoints ago.

Even if we imagine bitcoin itself to be secure, which does not seem that bad a bet though what happens with ASICs could maybe change that prognosis, the second-most-secure merged mined chain, NaMeCoin, has vastly less hashing power securing it than bitcoin, and the next down even less, and the last few have pathetic amounts of hashing power securing them (and thus ridiculously low difficulty, making it easy for even small miners to collect nice stockpiles of them currently.)

So maybe possibly one chain in all the world might be secure, maybe if one is optimistic one might imagine two are, but in general blockchains are not secure and the more there are that cannot be merged mined the less secure most of them probably tend to become.

So it is pretty much gross negligence and dereliction of fiduciary duty to spawn more blockchain based currencies.

if you really do have a background in banking that ought to be understandable?

-MarkM-

EDIT: if/when a verdict comes in regarding proof of stake offering any actual security maybe proof of stake might help some a little, but then again might turn out not to.

It is my Open Transactions server that has over two hundred million DeVCoins. I'd have to check balances within that server to find out what nyms own how many of them, they are frozen so that "digiDeVCoins" could be issued onto the server, and should not need to un-freeze until such time as there ceases to be any reasonable expection that there will be any needs for any "digiDeVCoins". That is, basically, until such time as the server no longer supports devcoin accounts, trading, contracts, blinded Chaumian cash and so on.

I don't even know offhand who exactly would end up with how many of the frozen "actual on the blockchain DeVCoins" if that happened right now but I think I "spent" most of "mine" on various "shares" and such long ago.

-MarkM-