Everyone seems to be back on the "mining is the main thing / mining is the main appeal" trip about cryptocoins, but really mining is just the industrial underbelly, the 24/7 datacentres crunching numbers all day and all night to keep the transactions moving.

The mining "appliances" do make it pretty easy to mine at a pool, but for whatever reason most miners do not bother to pick a pool that merges secondary chains, and few pools bother to merge any secondary chains at all.

Part of the reason for that is probably the lack of free open source software that supports sharing out the merged mined coins.

p2pool makes merged mining easy, but p2pool is intended to be used by individual miners. It has kind of minimal or even token support for allowing third party miners to use your running instance of p2pool, giving them their share (optionally minus a percentage fee) of the primary chain, but to use it for merged mining really you should run it yourself, which is how it was originally intended to be used anyway. It was supposed to make "centralised" pools un-necessary by enabling each miner to be a node in a de-centralised pool.

So maybe if miners do get interested in merged mining, that interest will lead them to use p2pool the way it was originally designed and intended to be used: as a decentralised tool to let individual miners get the advantage of a pool on their primary chain so not have to use "centralised" pools...

-MarkM-

Run your own p2pool (or other method of implementing merged mining) is the only way currently, as I don't think bitparking's code is free open source software; I don't think any pool software that has been released as free open source has tackled merged mining yet, so it is pretty much a do it yourself project still at this point.

For a while I ran one where I sold the secondary chain coins for devcoins and sent out the devcoins but it was more work than it was worth. Bounties are being offered now though by the DeVCoin project for tools to make doing it that way easier. (The admin could choose any coin to send out the rewards with, but sending them as bitcoin or devcoin are easy since p2pool already knows the user's bitcoin address and devcoin uses the exact same address style.)

That doesn't help miners actually get their hands on those GeistGelds or whatevers though, a more sophisticated tool would be needed that knows various different kinds of addresses for the users, or a more sophisticated user base would be needed who can not only export bitcoin addresses and import them into devcoin but can also import them into any coin at all. Which would just boggle some users since the other coins' addresses don't even look the same as the bitcoin address they correspond to.

-MarkM-

Maybe because of the Open Transactions iPhone app screenshots revealed today?

Current plans seem to indicate BBQcoin will be second only to DeVCoin in sheer number of tokens issued on the server, so it might get a lot of use if a lot of people use the app.

(The app will also be ported to Android once the iPhone version is fully completed.)

-MarkM-

Unthinkingbit invented DeVCoin and basically "hired" me (bounties, in bitcoin) to help him with some aspects of the bitcoin code.

First we did some experiments using GRouPcoin, which we created to try some ideas with, then once we had figured out how exactly to do DeVCoin GRouPcoin became just a simple 50 coins per block forever coin while DeVCoin became 50,000 coins per block forever but with 90% of the coins minted going to the "receivers" listed in the "receiver" files.

The original plan had been that once we moved to using merged mining 95% of the coins would go to the "receivers" since with merged mining it really does not cost miners much at all to mine a scondary chain; but that never happened and we still even hear miners complain now and again at getting a full 10% of the coins instead of the planned 5% they would have got according to the earlier plan.

As to what other coins to buy I don't know, I have tried to buy Litecoins, Namecoins and PPCoins at vircurex but when I put a buy order someone moves their by a satoshi above mine when I move mine a satoshi above theirs they move theirs again and so on, so I just stopped bothering to try. But, I already have some of each from having mined them at some point so I am not really all that determined to buy them anyway at current prices. I was putting in buy orders because of the large spread, as I figured hey if I get them the spread is large enough I can turn around and put them back in on the sell-order side and profit.

I think the best profits are to be had in coins so easy to mine that you can mine them with CPUs, BBQcoin, Tenebrix and Fairbrix were like that for a year or even a couple of years, then BBQcoin got popular, GPU people jumped back on it, the difficulty got way to high for CPUs, and they started selling at nice prices, selling only a few million I was able to do very well. Now tonight suddenly their price seems to have rallied too, so another few hundred thousand I had had sitting up above the cheap prices they had fallen to got snapped up in the last few hours. So I am very pleased with BBQcoin and looking forward to updating the codebases of Tenebrix and Fairbrix and seeing them on an exchange some day.

Then too, I0Coin and CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld are all very low difficulty, they are merged mined but so low difficulty just one GPU can pick up plenty of them, heck one GPU also picks up plenty of GRouPcoin which is also merged mined right alongside the rest. The bitcoins pay for the electricity and also, eventually, even the GPU and the machine the GPU is in, and all the other coins are pure gravy. Lovely rich delicious gravy!



-MarkM-

Most players don't bother with blockchains directly, so you'd send it to their character care of some particular game, or to their "wallet" or "account" at some particular "bank" or "website" or whatever.

As more and more blockchains get spawned it becomes more and more apparent that the masses aren't going to touch blockchains directly.

On the bright side though, the Open Transactions app for iPhone is looking pretty good, saw some screenshots today...

-MarkM-

It is kind of amusing that we now have all these currencies and exchanges just like I wanted in my game, but without even a game to put them in, they are game enough all by themselves no one cares that there aren't game nations and races and species and so on behind the coins, just the bare forex-type game itself all by itself is quite game enough to attract lots of players!



-MarkM-

Get GeistGeld. 15 second blocks and you can mine it with the same hashes that are also mining bitcoins, because it is merged mine-able.

So no need to replace bitcoin, bitcoin can still do the high value and store of value stuff, with GeistGeld as its accompanying fast small-change coin.

-MarkM-

On Vircurex I'd give you 0.0175 BTC for that right now, but to do it direct, over the blockchain, might easily cause a fee, which on such a tiny amount could be significant. So I have to decline.

Maybe you should consider joining VIrcurex if that is not the last batch of DeVCoins you'll ever be selling.

-MarkM-

Didn't namecoin fix their difficulty adjustment system as well as going to merged mining?

I know the difficulty system GRouPcoin and DeVCoin adopted around that time came from somewhere, if not from NaMeCoin then where, I wonder?

-MarkM-

Yeah you lot holding the coins aren't the only bag-holders, the altcoin coders / sysadmins / etc also get left holding the bag, we already had more coins than we could keep up with maintenance work for, this latest bunch of crap is going to have to wait as long overdue now is an upgrade of the whole family of merged mined coins...

-MarkM-

Something else, maybe even just another copy of BBQcoin, must be listening on that port I think.

-MarkM-

Withdrawals to Payza just went through. So they were just backlogged/slow not run off with the money.

-MarkM-

Go read all the previous threads, and go study up on Tahoe-LAFS and other distributed storage systems.

Just waving your hands around pretending "it must be solvable" does not make it solvable.

You seem like you have not even followed all the threads that already went over this again and again and again, its like every so long along comes another know-nothing newbie who imagines unicorn dust can solve any problem and starts the same crap all over again without ever researching all the previous threads that already went over the exact same crap again and again and again.

-MarkM-

dvcstable01.dvcnode.org

-MarkM-

Yeah I felt the irony as I typed "scamcoin", since if they really cared about that they would stick to merged-mining SHA256 coins.

-MarkM-

People got tired of wasting their hashing power on scamcoins?

-MarkM-

There was some thread not long ago that seemed to imply the MicroCrash scam might be starting up again too.

To do with that same exchange also, advising to move your solidcoins there ready to trade them in for MicroCrash coins.

-MarkM-

Many times people have tried to come up with rewarded p2p file storage and/or seeding ideas.

SO far the only thing  that has worked is a central company that rewards people for making space available, and even then it does it by only rewarding them with space, not with any kind of "money".

If they tried to reward people with any kind of "money" they would probably not be able to operate because the number of cheaters they get who want to cheat them for some extra filespace is trivial compared to the number of cheaters they would get if they tried to reward them with anything that could be cashed in, including cryptocoins since those could be cashed in at an exchange.

So tons of people have spent shitloads of hours trying to solve this and that corporate approach is the only actually working solution so far.

All the distributed storage open source apps and freenet and so on and so on have all looked at the problem, so unless you have a genius solution forget it; if you do have a genius solution go explain it to the people in #tahoe-lafs channel on Freenode.

-MarkM-

All of that should go away once someone cleanly applies the merged mining patches to a stable version of bitcoin so all the merged mined coins have one common codebase to update themselves to/with.

-MarkM-

Not to build in, no, as my only nodes so far are really mainly for bitcoin and devcoin.

People will just have to wait for lfnet to come back up if they find it down, for now, pr get a -addnode to add temporarily just the once to get them initially running.

I am heading toward getting more infrastructure set up but unfortunately it is taking time. The fact the CAvirtex has seemingly stopped doing withdrawals isn't helping either.

What you could do though is plug in hostnames that hopefully one day WILL point at nodes.

So maybe plug in ixcstable01 through ixcstable05 on knotwork.com, or something like that?

Then those hostnames can be populated with IP addresses once nodes are set up.

-MarkM-