As far as Ican tell there is some rather different version of devcoin-qt out there, and maybe this diff is for applying the changes to it, not to the old-devcoin-qt that I am trying to apply it to.

I think the other version may have wallet encryption in it too as well as image changes.

-MarkM-

I have some kind of weird supposedly git thing,

diff --git a/contrib/Bitcoin.app/Contents/Resources/BitcoinAppIcon.icns b/contrib/Bitcoin.app/Contents/Resources/BitcoinAppIcon.icns

that supposedly is somehow to update the github source code for old-devcoin-qt

But I have no idea how to play is, there is not "git patch" that takes a "git diff" and applies it it seems plus even if there were, none of those directories actually exist in the source code.

So I do not know how to pull this or whatever it is that git does to put such a file into use.

Maybe if it was a pull request git would know what to do but since none of the directories even exist it does not look like it has anything to do with old-devcoin-qt in the first place.

I also tried patch and patch -p1 and patch -p2 and patch -p3 and patch -p4 but none of them knew what to do with it either.

So sorry I dont see any way this file can actually be fed to anything to get it to take effect.

-MarkM-

Difficulty is measured differently for Scrypt coins than for SHA256 coins.

With CPUs you can still get some Tenebrix and Fairbrix, but they are not traded anywhere so are purely speculative, might end up not being worth the electricity used or might end up massive money windfalls like BBQcoin did (used to be you could CPU mine BBQcoin too, for about a year).

To merged mine you need to run your own p2pool, it makes merged mining easy, it gives you the bitcoins you mine and with GPUs those should just about cover the electric though ould take a LONG time to pay for the machien and the GPU at current low price of bitcoins. Then all the other coins you can merge are gravy, although with just one GPU you can go a year without happening to find a namecoin block and might maybe find a devcoin block. But you will get some GRouPcoin, maybe once in a blue moon a block of Ixcoin, and lots of I0Coin and CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld.

There is some speculation lately that maybe it could be worthwhile to set up a merged mining corp, that would run its own p2pool and save all the rare / obscure coins in its inventory until some potential far away day when they start to become valuable. Not much actually happening yet toward making that happen though, partly because it takes quite an expensive dedicated server just to run all the coins and the p2pool.

-MarkM-

No, it is a p2pool, with no fee, so miners get 100% of the bitcoins.

If also merged mines all the coins, but there is no tool to divide those up, so for miners it currently just works as a no fee bitcoin pool.

Someday it is hoped tools will be developed so a pool admin could sell all the other coins either for bitcoins or devcoins or whatever, then divide up that resulting loot to the miners in accordance with how much ming they have done.

For example maybe a pool could set up as a 105% payout pool, where miners not only get 100% of the bitcoins they mine but also periodically an extra 5% be sent out to them.

Or what we devcoiners want to do is to sell altcoins for devcoins and send out the devcoins proportionately to how many bitcoins the miners got aka how much mining they did.

-MarkM-

Anyone mining on the merged mining pool on dvcstable01, please update your software to look for the pool on dvcnode.org in future not on devcoin.org anymore.

That is, in future point at the pool as dvcstable01.dvcnode.org:10332

Note that we still have no tools for divvying up the merged coins so it still is only in effect just a zero fee bitcoin pool currently.

-MarkM-

What price lists are you looking at? The one I use - pretty much the only one I look at at all really - is https://vircurex.com/orders?alt=dvc&base=btc but the numbers you mention don't seem to be from there?

People's coins come in all through the round, its not lump sum payments, it goes out as it is mined.

Back to the debt a moment: the primary way of paying it off is by shipping "deuterium" to depots. The deuterium price lists show how many devcoins or whatever else the deuterium is worth, which is then applied against the debt. So in the long term they don't need any currency to pay their debts, they can just keep shipping ever-larger quantities of "deuterium".

They can also ship "crystal" and "metal" though those resources are not as valuable; they can be used to build fleets but not to fuel fleets, and fuel is a major strategic resource since if you can keep your fleet in flight in those types of games it is invulnerable, since attacks are only implemented as attacks upon planets or moons, which involve destroying the "defending" fleet in the process. So if your fleet can always fly away, leaving the planet or moon to be looted or whatever, you can keep increasing the size of your fleet until no planet or moon's defenses, unaided by a defending fleet, can possibly resist it, and if your total production capacity is largest you can ultimately have the largest fleet and crush all opposing fleets. Which the civilised worlds aim to do to prevent any enemy fleets coming to any galaxy anywhere near the home galaxies.

-MarkM-

The major financial entities in the game use the currencies more as units of account than as limited supply commodities.

There are tables at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html where you can look up the conversion rates, so they basically do not care which currency you pay your debt in, they just look up the conversion rate of the one it is denominated in to the one you are paying in. The tables are historic, so that they can even bring their accounts up to date later. like sit down periodically and look up for each shipment of deuterium that came in what the going rate for deuterium was that day, how that converted that day into the currency the debt it was to be applied against was denominated, round it to whole coins because the Digitalis Open Transactions server does all assets in whole integers, and send off balancing payments to the appropriate other entities.

Thus really all that denominating one's debt in devcoins instead of, for example, General Mining Corp scrip or General Retirement Funds scrip, is let you avoid the massive deflation GMC and GRF went through, because devcoins have not shot up in value nearly as massively as those other currencies did. People whose debt is still denominated in GMC and GRF, which is what the original startup loans were in, would be screwed totally from the massive deflation, but, the inhabited planets simply cannot afford to let the plan fail, they need to get massive fleets of deathstars set up in distant galaxies to provide a defensive shield around the home galaxies.

The interest rates were already halved a couple of times and various other measures were taken, but in general over the long haul the whole thing is pretty much a sure thing it just is going to take a lot of years. If they fail to get a defensive perimeter set up all the worlds will be attacked by swarms of deathstars from even-more-distant galaxies eventually, their only chance is to get out there with massive force before some enemy appears out there in massive force. Once those mining corps have their jumpgate(s) built to reach the farther galaxies and set up production facilities in the farther galaxies they will be able to sell off at profit to governments or sell deathstars to the united home-galaxies defense initiative or whatever. It is just going to take a long time to actually get out there.

-MarkM-

Darn, and to think I was selling off my BBQxoins for only 28 bitcoins per hundred thousand not long ago!

I should have hung on to them!

-MarkM-

Not really yet, because no one bought mining rigs due to ASICs always supposedly about to ship in a few weeks for the last year.

Once ASICs are finally available with same day shipping then yes, because all the game currencies expected to use merged mining to secure their blockchains so they will all be wanting ASICs to set up merged mining, and of course they will merge DeVCoin as well as everything else.

-MarkM-

A lot of games give players various stuff when they start the game.

This can lead to flooding the game with "starting gear" simply by creating thousands of player accounts purely for the purpose of accumulating all the free stuff new players get.

Thus we load players with debt, that is, we assume their starting gear was obtained by taking out loans.

Over time this has led to vast amounts of debt, and because most other currencies in the game appreciated in value much faster than DeVCoins, DeVCoins became the preferred currency to re-finance debt into for any players who could find refinancing denominated in DeVCoins.

General Financial Corp specialised in providing such financing, it managed to talk the Martians into loaning it a huge amount of wealth and into denominating that debt in DeVCoins instead of in, for example, Martian BotCoins.

Then GFC refinanced a whole bunch of intergalactic mining corps, in DeVCoins but at double the interest rate GFC was paying to the Martians for their bulk loan.

As can be seen from the tables and plots at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html this has worked out very lucrative for GFC, and thus for the value of GFC shares (the asset known as sGFC).

These loans are of course all secured loans; in fact, almost all the corps did in fact get repossessed already, and are now controlled by repo corps. The intergalactic mining operations are not only lucrative, they are also essential to the security of the home galaxies, because looking at all the similar intergalactic games out there we can see that typically species or races or guilds or groups or corps or entities or whatnot that you meet out among far flung galaxies are very hostile. So the home galaxies need this inner set of mining operations in far galaxies in order to build jump gates to reach even farther galaxies where they will set up their outer defense galaxies.

So ultimately the civilised worlds cannot really allow the mining operations to fail, else some day hordes of alien deathstars will inevitably descend upon the homeworlds like swarms of locusts.

-MarkM-

There is massively more debt denominated in DeVCoins than there are DeVCoins. I don't even know how many years it would take for DeVCoins equal to just the current debt to be created, and of course unless the debt is paid interest will have increased it by then.

I suppose it might be interesting to try to figure out whether the current interest is accumulating debt faster than coins are being minted!

-MarkM-

It is all free open source, for images that usually means some kind of "creative commons" license. Free for anyone to use, to create derivative works from etc. Maybe an "attribution" thing where they have to retain a notice that you made it. So you get eternal fame like Andy Warhol got from being the designer of Campbells' Soup labels. Except they didn't have to actually write on the labels that he designed it, so I guess there was no "attribution" clause there.

-MarkM-

I had the impression long ago that SolidCoin was a scammer and a thief, he ran off with 250 bitcoins for example supposedly.

An exchange built and run by that guy just doesn't seem like a good idea.

How many more bitcoins does he need to run off with before people stop throwing their bitcoins to him?

Maybe all those stories were just malicious libel though and he can be trusted with huge amounts of other people's money?

-MarkM-

They will be getting a code upgrade along with all the merged mined coins (except maybe namecoin, I am not sure how different namecoin is internally from bitcoin)antime they are merged mined at bitparking and can be traded at Vircurex so they are chugging along just fine, one of the highest difficulty merged mined coins in fact.

-MarkM-

Remember that DeVCoins are minted 50,000 per block not 50 per block! They are intended to be 1/1000 the value of typical 50 coin per block coins. Back when they were invented there was talk of having to move decimal points, so DeVCoin started out with its decimal point already moved three places, in effect.

So compare the value of 1000 DeVCoins to one of any other coin to get a better concept of value.

-MarkM-

How high did you set the initial difficulty in order to make those initial bonus blocks last one day as listed and then one week as listed?

As for the instamining scams it would have taken probably just a few hours to go through the number of blocks that you have listed as taking a week?

-MarkM-

We would be using up people's electricity uselessly.

It would be cheaper to buy the coins than to pay the electric bill for pathetically trying to mine them.

Because the difficulty would always be too high for them.

It takes special equipment, expensive equipment, to do that kind of just plug it in and it goes mining.

Even without "the masses" mining already mining gets to hard too fast.

GPUs are heading toward being obsolete, some folks are only even selling anyone else ASICs because it would be bad public relations to control more than half the network's hashing power.

You have totally the wrong idea about this mining thing. Better for the masses to have would be point of sales systems that are really simple or something like that. Something that makes it really easy for their business to accept cryptocoins.

-MarkM-

Sure, if you like.

-MarkM-

Yes but they come and go a lot because the daemon tends to die every day or two.

-MarkM-

Someone should build good support for merged mining into free open source pool software.

So far the easiest way to merged mine is to use p2pool, which was intended and designed for each miner to run individually as a node of a distributed pool, even though eventually people's determination to use centralised pools ended up being slightly / token-ly catered to by p2pool adding support for allowing third parties to use your copy of is, sharing out the coins of the primary chain.

Maybe though if merged mining does become popular it will give people incentive to run their own p2pool...

-MarkM-