I simply "nice" (see "man nice") all CPU mining programs including coins that are doing their own mining internally without using external programs.

Basically put nice in front of the daemon name if you are setting gen=1, or type nice minerd etc whatever blah blah instead of plain old minerd etc whatever blah blah blah.

The CPU miners than pretty much only use spare CPU cycles, which if you have more than one core they usually can find. I have been raking in lots of primecoin this way.

-MarkM-

How are you going to afford to check people's passports or social insurance numbers or whatever so as to be sure they are actually distinct different people?

It is very expensive to be reasonably sure no two purported "miners" are actually the same "scammer" in disguise.

I do have a way to reward small players, but it depends on them actually being players, because the way it makes a botnet controlling person's millions of "non player characters" less effective per fake person aka "non player character" than characters played by "real players" is by having the "game" (the actual process of standing up, drinking when thirsty, bathing when dirty, eating when hungry, getting to a mine that has valuable resources available to be mined without being robbed or killed, etc etc etc) be difficult for scripts to fully handle.

A botnet owner could deploy a million characters (at the same cost per player-account or per character as anyone else pays to cover the costs of the game servers) but one superhero of higher level with better armour and magic sword, or one high level thief,who observes the botnet characters' actions carefully with insightful thinking about exactly what the scripts running them are really triggering on, can screw up thousands of them at a time. Or one artisan demolishing a fountain the botnet characters all fill their waterskins at could make them all die of thirst until the botnet owner improves their scripts to make botnet characters who find a fountain gone or gone-dry call in an artisan to construct a new one, maybe meanwhile also having a whole list of fallback fountains and pools and rivers and so on to fall back to.

Basically until scripters have developed amazingly fully-adaptive character-running scripts a player who can put a few minutes now and then into putting each character back into a situation its scripts expect should be able to do much better per character deployed than the botnet player who will tend to regularly need to manually get thousands of characters back on script...

And of course once amazingly adaptive scripts have been developed wow, what amazing populations of non player characters games will be populated by!

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

-MarkM-

Take a look at UKB, CDN, MBC, GMC, GRF, UNS, NKL game-currencies at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

The problem I expected with game currencies was players dumping them for hookers and blow (fiat, groceries, rent, whatever) in preference to spending them on in game items.

When you can make $5000+ just by shipping five million units of Deuterium to a General Mining Corp depot, how long will it take for so many people to be offering to ship that much deuterium for less than that price that the price drops to maybe a buck per five million units?

If your game items are not being bought by means of auctions or "exchanges" (markets) similar to the various coin-and-fiat "exchanges" then I guess you can expect problems. If people were bidding litecoins (or millionths of litecoins, or whatever) to buy stuff in the game then prices should simply get worked out by the market. If litecoins go up, pickaxes or whatever might well by comparison go down.

I actually used microbitcoins in a MUD for a while and it did not attract anyone to play despite the fact it meant in effect I was giving out free microbitcoins to players.

I went back to just using the normal default goldpieces the MUD normally used, it seems to work out simpler for people to go trade that currency on an "exchange" for whatever other currencies cryptocurrencies etc they might like than to mess with all those external currencies on a waterskin by waterskin, dagger by dagger, pound of meat by pound of meat basis in the game.

The Brits, Canucks, Martians, General Mining Corp, General Retirement Corp, (galactic) United Nations etc though seem to maybe have been on to something with their claims as to how best do things; it is a pity that they were unable to obtain enough hashing power to continue to use blockchains for their currencies as I never expected any of them to outperform bitcoin, I always expected bitcoin would remain more valuable than Martian BotCoin. It has been interesting watching it play out.

-MarkM-

How are you going to even create so much as a shallow illusion of an ability to tell who is small and who is large, let alone actually tell?

-MarkM-

Luckily most coins are alike so given a working module to plug a cryptocurrency into minecraft and/or minecraft clones pretty much any cryptocurrency should be able to work with it with trivially simple changes (port number, maybe, maybe not even that; and cosmetics such as what name/symbol to display).

So really the coin itself isn't the important/interesting thing here anyway, the module is; people could go ahead and use it with real bitcoins instead of mucking around with some obscure newfangled coin, or maybe litecoin or devcoin or whatever if bitcoins are considered "too valuable" for use in games...

-MarkM-

Are you sure? Neutron stars aren't effectively superheavy atoms, for example? Or do they contain no protons, or something?

I suppose you could maybe claim universes are not infinite therefore there must be some finitely large largest atom in any specific non-infinite universe but even if our universe happens not to be infinite are all others also? Etc... Maybe there are islands of stability of infinite sized universes as well as islands of stability of elements?

-MarkM-

If the metal ends of the thing are what you'd need to short then I guess the fuse is not blown, because shorting across those ends does not make any LEDs light up nor the fan move or any other visible effect.

I thus figured maybe the actual connections you'd need to short must be under the thing and my guess based on old time glass tube fuses that the ends are the contacts was wrong.

Hmm if the fuse is fine what next would make it ignore power?

Also, the fact its labelled F2 makes me think maybe there is another fuse somewhere, an F1, though I have not located such a thing yet.

-MarkM-

Thanks. Looks like on this model it is F2, on the underside of the board, under the ATX connector. I will take it somewhere capable of checking whether there is or is not any connection still between one end of the fuse and the other I guess since there is no visual indication of its being blown.

-MarkM-

One of my Lancelots no longer reacts to power at all. No LEDs light up, the fan does not even try to move, supplying power by the ATX connector or by the barrel connector, neither way does it show any reaction at all. nothing looks obviously broken or burned or melted. It seems unlikely both power connectors broke at once so maybe the on/off switch could be no longer working or i don't know what else.  Are there any particular things to look for that would make it totally show no reaction at all when supplied with power?

-MarkM-

Fairbrix, like Tenebrix, is scrypt based, they are what litecoin eventually came out of.

You should be able to CPU-mine them. Maybe put a third of your cores on each of those and a third on primecoin.

Or maybe put just one core on each of them and the rest on primecoin, if primecoin looks like it will pay something sooner, since it is likely more liquid currently.

On a sixteen gig dedicated server out on the net in a datacentre I run p2pool and used to have all the merged coins right on that machine too.

Then though p2pool would complain that some coins took more than five seconds to respond to getwork requests, so I moved geistgeld and i0coin to a separate machine and told p2pool to use them from there. I still though at times also run geistgeld and i0coin on the p2pool machine I just don't tell p2pool to ask getworks from there as it is into swap space enough that it would get those over 5 seconds problems. I run them there simply because the time when all other miners momentarily vanish I still need a connection in order to mine. I0Coin dies almost daily, so there still are times when everyone's happens to have died at once, so I like to run some spares to lower my unable-to-mine time. GeistGeld people tend to stick to for a while then decide their RAM could be put to better use so they go away once they have accumulated however much they feel will be enough to be a decent nestegg when it comes back into the limelight, so from time to time I would find zero connections, so it seemed reasonable to have a spare copy of it myself to tide me over those times.

So yeah a couple of 16 gig machines should be fine, put p2pool and all the merged coins on one, but tell p2pool to getwork for i0coin and geistgeld from the other. Run I0Coin and GeistGeld on both, in case all other miners happen to be down at any particular moment. You should be able to run Fairbrix-qt  (*) on one and Tenebrixd on the other also, with both using all their cores to (with "nice", see "man nice") cpumine using minerd. ("nice" primecoin too, I have that on both servers too. Once it has a standalone cpu miner, "nice" that.)

(*) Note I don't have GUI of Fairbrix-qt on either server; the GUI shows up on my desktop at home.

-MarkM-

I set up a Dell Optiplex 755 with 8 gigs of RAM, installed live fedora linux, which caused only 10 gigs of swap space to be created, and ran GeistGeld. It was killed due to out of memory error before it even got to the point where it had rescanned and was ready to actually work.

I0Coin though I have often run along with bitcoin and BBQcoin or bitcoin and devcoin, or even all of those, plus fairbrix-qt, all on an 8 gig machine.

I am actually starting to think about hacking a copy of IXCoin into a version of GeistGeld simply because such a hack is cut and paste trivial so even though its nicer to wait until I have even more coins thus nicer to wait for a full update to latest bitcoin code, the sheer RAM needs of GeistGeld are getting annoying enough I start thinking it might be worth my time to do the quick hack to make an out of date copy based on IXCoin just to save me some RAM.

But then I just got 16 gigs of RAM for an IBM Intellistation Z Pro I have here, and found even with only two gigs of swap I can run GeistGeld in that so far, and once it no longer runs in that I can take the time to make a proper sized swap space for it. So hey, I am content to keep on racking up GeistGeld by throwing RAM at it for now, since once a merged coin based on latest bitcoin does happen its not only GeistGeld but also GRouPcoin and I0Coin and CoiLedCoin that will suddenly have many more miners flooding to them eating more and more of those pies leaving less of each for me.

Basically if you want something so easy to do that every computer-illiterate using Windows can do it you will hardly make anything because there are so damn many such people out there who will all easily grab part of the pie. If you want more than just the tiny crumbs such vast unwashed masses would leave you you need something as many as possible of those masses consider "too hard" or "too complicated" to grab a piece of. Something its easier for them to buy than to mine, maybe.

If six billion people can all grab a slice without hardly even trying, you're not going to get more than one six-billionth unless you have some edge they don't have, simple as that...

-MarkM-

Fairbrix is a pain to use on headless server as it only has GUI no headless daemon. So I have to have stupid GUI cluttering my desk at home while I run fairbrix-qt on a remote server, and any loss of connection between home and remote server screws it up.

Tenebrix the Tenebrix-QT in Lolcust's github is the one that works, fairbrix I don't recall where git pull pulls it from since git pull doesn't bother to tell me, when pulling, where the heck it is pulling from. But I don't think there are even options, else one of the options would have a deamon one would hope, so likely its hobbs choice, there is only one repo out there...

Lack of a daemon for Fairbrix means I cannot even see its difficulty so cannot actually really tell whether it is really still only being mined by CPUs.

Some GPU user did come to Tenebrix one day, but within hours had realised we all only use CPUs so turned off his GPU and likely is still thereby saving electricity like the rest of the people mining it.

-MarkM-

Excluded how?

Fire up p2pool, bitcoind and geistgeldd, merged mine geistgeld alongside bitcoin. Even with a GPU, the bitcoins will subsidise your electricity, and because geistgeld is incredibly low difficulty, you will rake in geistgeld.

Or do i0coin, or coiledcoin, or groupcoin, heck do them all if you have the RAM to run them all. I0Coin and GeistGeld use the most RAM so if you don't have tons of RAM just do bitcoin, coiledcoin and groupcoin.

(For the high difficulty ones like namecoin and ixcoin its roulette, if you actually want some of those you might as well use mmpool at bitparking).

Only you are excluding yourself. Heck you can CPU mine fairbrix and/or tenebrix, are you even doing that? Seems like you are determined to exclude yourself, unwilling even to pick up these virtual-freebies laying there for the taking...

Remember its all limited pies though, if six billion people all divvy up one pie it does nto matter whether they divvy it up with ASIC or FPGA or GPU or CPU, they'll still only get the same fraction of the pie... So the best money might be in picking pies no one else sees value in, until you have a big enough piece of it for it to start looking worthwhile to consider starting to help others see some value in it...

(IXCoin is so difficult it will be maybe years yet before i have enough of them for it to seem worth my while to start convincing others they are valuable, since most others already have many more than I do. I0Coin though got dropped by bitparking, so lately I get to pick up more I0Coin than I can get of IXCoin. Basically as a small miner I need coins that not a lot of miners are mining yet, so I can hope to get a nice enough chunk of one someday for promoting it to others to start to look more like increasing the value of my holding than like urging competitors to take more of the pie leaving less for me...)

-MarkM-

DeVCoin is no different from the other merged mined coins in its need to be updated to latest bitcoin code, for example the new type of database instead of the old BDB database, and the recent attack fix and so on and so on.

ALL the merged mined coins ALL are based on bitcoin-plus-ability-to-be-secondary-chain.

ALL of them thus need a copy of bitcoin with ability to act as a secondary chain added.

Once that exists, all of them can do thier trivial or not so trivial little search-and-replace changes of name, port, reward, whatever, that makes them each different from the others.

As the constant spew of crapcoins shows, it is trivially easy to do the 'make a different name/port/reward/etc coin' part. The hard part is to have a latest bitcoin that can act as a secondary chain. Once that exists, all the trivial change the name change the port change the reward etc is trivial.

So we need that baseline, then ALL the merged mined coins can ALL update to ALL the latest fixes, most of them as easily as all the cut and paste crapcoins are made.

Cut-and-paste of some ancient out of date code merged coin can make a crap merged coin as easily as all the crap scrypt coins are cut and pasted.

There is no latest bitcoin based merged coin to cut and paste to make a new crap merged coin based on latest bitcoin code.

-MarkM-

You still don't get it, do you?

We already launched new coins, well over a year ago. Since we still have not enough hashing power hashing those coins, it is stupid pointless premature wasteful and so on to keep churning out more and more "new" coins.

First lets get all the coins we already put out there a year or two ago all up to secure levels of hashing before worrying about adding yet more coins.

We are getting ahead of ourselves. We haven't even updated the existing merged mined coins to latest bitcoin code yet. We haven't got even one public pool yet that merged mines all of them. We don't even have software yet that can divvy up all of them to pool miners giving each miner the appropriate amount of each of the coins. We don't even have free open source apps all coins need such as exchanges, payment processors and so on, heck we don't even have thin clients yet for most of them nor even any plugins for browsers that would allow actually-secure webwallets to be built.

Spewing out more and more coins each of which still needs all these things we have not yet built isn't helping. Lets build all these things first, and get all the existing merged coins all up to comparable levels of hashing.

Its like inability to focus or concentrate syndrome or whatever they call it, long before even those apps that have been built for bitcoin have even been standardised in free open source form so that a second third etc coin can off the shelf open up all those same apps for public use already people are making more coins and more coins. We cannot even keep up to date codewise the few merged coins we already have. Lets prove we can do that before spawning even more coins that will only increase the support/update burden. We cannot keep up with the few coins already existing, we need to catch up on all that backlog of work still needing to be done, not create more and more and more work that will need to be done while we cannot even keep up with all the work already needing to be done.

-MarkM-

Are your coding skills up to the task of applying the merged-mining patches to a recent copy of bitcoin?

Right now that is probably about the most important coding task for all the merged mined coins, not only DeVCoin, as once it is done all of them will be able to update from it.

-MarkM-

It looks to me like a big part of the confusion or problem is fast-buck syndrome.

It used to be pretty normal for a business to lose money its first few years.

People made fortunes from BBQcoin precisely because there was no profit at all during a year or so of CPU-mining it at really low difficulty; that happened because the fast-buck people were not interested in making a fortune in a year or so, they saw they would be spending pennies now without getting pennies back now so weren't interested. So the people who did spend a year putting in pennies were able to take a huge profit a year down the line.

Right now you can merged mine GRouPcoin, I0Coin, CoiLedCoin, and GeistGeld at low difficulty because there is no well-known and web-based way of cashing them in for pennies each day as you mine them. Just like happened with BBQcoin you are looking at spending pennies for hopefully even several years since the more years you get to rake them in at low difficulty the more you will have of them come the day they come out into the limelight, if they ever do, like BBQcoin did. Small miners can get their small trickle of bitcoins still to pay all or part of their electricity bill, and still get to rake in any or all of these "sleeper" coins all day every day. The more days they get left in peace to do that the better for them in the long run.

Sure some script-kiddie might come get some laughs pretending to "kill" a coin, so what? CoiLedCoin was "killed" how long ago now? For a few days someone took all the blocks, not building on other people's blocks or something like that. The coin was declared "dead", and just like happened with BBQcoin the masses spent a year or more believing it was dead while anyone who chose to do so picked up as many as they wanted for almost nothing.

The fast buck people aren't willing to risk a few pennies to make a bunch of dollars, if they don't get more than a penny today for a penny they spend today they are off chasing whatever they think will give them more than a penny today for a penny they spend on it today. That is why BBQcoin miners made such fortunes, and it might well turn out to be how merged miners of the merged mined coins that most pools are not including in their merged mining mix end up making similar fortunes.

-MarkM-

It is still running.

Like all the merged mined coins it is waiting for an up to date bitcoin with merged mining as a secondary chain patches applied so it can update to latest code...

-MarkM-

Vlad, since what you apparently bring to the table is promotion of coins, forget about making more new coins and just put your efforts into promoting existing coins that you already own some of.

If your promoting skills are good you should be able to pretty much buy up a bunch of any coin you can get a good deal on then promote it increasing its value, take profit, then rinse and repeat either with the same coin if it still seems a good deal or with whatever coin next looks underprixed compared to how much your promotion skills can boost it to.

-MarkM-

Oh litecoin is a lot different from the SHA256 coins then I guess. I have never messed with litecoin based coins.

Either that or you are talking about something other than the 4 magic bytes the bitcoin based coins use to do p2p connections to each other.

Or heck maybe all the coins started to use it for more stuff later after all the years ago batch of coins had been assigned unique handshake byte sequences.

I don't remember which coin we first noticed the problem, after whichever it was then all new coins made it was already known that those bytes were among the things you change when making a new coin.

As to just changing the port number, that doesn't suffice, as people can pick any port number nowadays so malicious folks will of course deliberately do that.

The first ones changed might even have been UKB, CDN, GMC, GRF etc etc etc, even though they were based on testnet not mainnet so would only have potentially conflicted with testnet not the main net.

-MarkM-