Actually I fired up Fairbrix recently. it is a very inconvenient coin because it has no daemon, so I have to keep a connection to my server 24/7 for it to open a GUI on my desktop while actually running on the server, which is a really stupid way of running.

Turns out it was still out there, quietly humming along like BBQcoin had been, serving just like BBQcoin had been as a haven for CPU miners where they can quietly rake in coins day in and day out without GPU-wielding bullies driving the difficulty too high.

Once we get a daemon built for it and newer code for the QT GUI client it should be following in BBQcoin's footsteps.

First though we are still in the process of getting BBQcoin launched onto exchanges, Cyclos servers and Open Transactions servers.

Tenebrix, of course, has always been well known to be a CPU-miner haven that is always there waiting for any CPU miners to pop in for a few days or weeks or months, however long it takes them to accumulate as many of them as they feel they might like to have in hand when Lolcust finishes working out all the details of the re-launch and re-launches it.

He did not fail to observe Novacoin's approach to dealing with "the pre-mine problem"; it is a pity the primary project which those coins were created to enable is not wanted enough by the masses but que sera sera, if the people do not want massively mixed coins let them do without massively mixed coins.

Remember that no coin is dead while there remain two people who have the blockchain, the code and the technology to run it on...

-MarkM-

Today the last wholesale lot of 100,000 BBQ for only 25 BTC goes out the door, next lot will be 30 BTC for 100,000 BBQ.

-MarkM-

It is starting to look like the number of BBQcoins that will be frozen into the cold-vaults so that digiBBQcoin tokens can be issued on the Digitalis Open Transactions server is going to be five million BBQcoins.

Since a lot of the point of freezing assets into cold-vaults when issuing tokens to represent them in the server is that such frozen assets need never leave the cold storage as long as there is expected to be some use found for the tokens, that would result in a nice round five million BBQcoins being held out of blockchain-circulation for pretty much as long as there is any foreseeable need or use for digiBBQcoins, which in turn of course should be pretty much as long as there is any foreseeable need or use for actual BBQcoins.

Which hopefully will be a long long time.

-MarkM-

It should not really be all that hard, it would just take a lot of bitcoins.

You could continue to spawn new coins that you and a few forum-buddies mine half the coins or more of at one or more blocks per second until enough minutes or even a few hours have gone by so that the reward halvings (or quarterings, or decimations etc) have set in, dump the coins for bitcoins, and use the bitcoins to buy dollar bills to airdrop into famine/drought regions, for example.

It really only takes the will to do it and the means to obtain the bitcoins to pay for it.

-MarkM-

It is not hard really to separate mining, which is about processing transactions into blocks, from minting aka issuing coins.

So mining can continue to use the most-specialised hardware to secure the network while getting paid coins directly rather than by mining them in the form of transaction fees from the transactions required to actually send people their pay involves pretty much any activity anyone who has coins wishes to pay people to do.

So far the largest obstacle really has been miners themselves, so maybe they will turn out to have priced themselves out of the market, making Ripple a far better platform for real use simply because Ripple does not have the overhead of the parasites known as miners sucking all the value out of the currency.

-MarkM-

You aren't mining it yet?

Hmm why not, aren't you a member of the Scam Road site on Tor where new coins are announced to make sure everyone has a fair chance to mine them at launch without potentially compromising their anonymity by having to go out of the Tor netwrk through an out-proxy to read the launch announcements?

It was right there in the Swahili section, all you had to do was cut and paste all the Swahili posts into Google Translate!

-MarkM-

Inside the game just a normal database is sufficient.

Moving to outside the game is massively expensive, which is why all the game currencies that built blockchains years ago have since moved to Open Transactions.

They hope some day to have enough transaction volume between them all that with the whole family of them all paying they will be able to pay miners enough to convince miners to merged-mine them.

Merged-mining is "close to free", yet even just getting miners to merged-mine is still very very expensive.

Maybe if you plan on using merged mining too, when the time comes the dozen or however many it was coins that retreated back away from being blockchains can save a twelfth on the cost of getting miners, and you save eleven twelfths, by you joining in with them in the move to blockchains, once you and all of them all have enough volume of transactions to be able to pay a credible amount to miners?

-MarkM-

So what was the problem?

-MarkM-

I kind of feel or suspect or maybe just "prefer" the term "currency" to the term "money" for that motto, but maybe that is an artifact of left-over old usages I have experienced of those words.

(That is, my impression was "it should say [b[currency[/b] should enable commerce".)

Initially the impulse was that currency is current, flow, whereas some forms of money can be more like voltage, potential; and that in some ways the whole point of certain compound-formations intended to serve as or represent money is precisely to make it as difficult as possible for that static wealth to be turned into liquid "current", which in my mind was being tagged "aka currency".

For example, Fort Knox, back when it actually did succeed at least for a while in locking down lots of gold to prevent anyone sneaking it out from being static, locked-down potential (possibly akin to voltage in some way) into being flowing/liquid (moving) "current" (aka currency???)

However your statement that currency is specialised/niche money makes me think maybe in your terminology money that has been specialised into a special form (fortress full of armed guards keeping gold from being moved) is, by very virtue of being specialised, by definition "currency"

Is the superficial appearance of relation between "current" and "currency" just an unfortunate coincidence rather than a useful (in providing an insight into the actual meaning of the word) etymological relation?

Or maybe it is an etymological relation but not at all a fortunate one but rather a misleading one, a kind of superstitious carry-over of primitive misconceptions as to what property or properties are significant?

Also presumably, even stuck in Fort Knox, that gold, thusly guarded and locked down, was in some way enabling commerce

-MarkM-

I have finally started getting down to some nitty gritty economic stuff, pertaining to the Galactic Milieu, on Devtome:

Investing in an Economic Sector (Galactic Milieu)

From a very general and non-player perspective the article is about a currency decirculation device: a mechanism that ties up currency in the game thus decreasing the amount of currency in circulation.

Basically players "invest" in "Economic Sectors", the coins "invested" are frozen, and the rest of us hopefully experience higher exchange-rates because less coins hit the exchanges to get "dumped".

The mechanism does include the concept of "liquidation" (bailing back out the coins that are frozen into the "sector"), however the implementation is such that typically one should get a better price for a "portion" of a "sector" by selling it as an intact "portion" to another player than one would get by "liquidating" a "portion" into coins.

The intent, from a narrative and gameplay perspective, is to represent in an abstract game-mechanics way distinctions such as that between liquidating a business by selling off the raw materials and components of which it is consructed and selling a business as a going concern to new management/ownership. As a side-effect, players should tend to prefer leaving coins tied up in these "Economic Sectors" by selling "portions" over liquidating "portions".

(LIquidation involves un-freezing coins, releasing them back out of the "sector".)

-MarkM-

P.S. That glaring red link, "Application Program Interface (API)" is an invitation to someone to create that missing page, not an indication I intend to someday get around to writing such a page myself.

If that is a clone or fork of Gavin Andresen's bitcointools, I think it is not what one uses to import private keys, maybe also not to export them. I think it does some other thing or things entirely.

What we use(d) to export keys from bitcoin wallets and import them into devcoin wallets was pywallet.py which is just a simple single file python script, (On github somewhere, google knows where.)

-MarkM-

I didn't think it *was* "an online password".

I thought what it is is a private key, like in bitcoin, and used for things like encrypting your data blob that you can store at a blob storage facility. Or, if not the private key, then, like a brainwallet, a seed used to deterministically generate one or more private keys.

Thus, I had always thought that hackers could spend as much computer power as they wish, for as long as they wish, cracking it, just like any private key controlling any bitcoin address or any brainwallet phrase used to deterministically generate a deterministic wallet.

-MarkM-

BBQcoin latest price: 25 bitcoins for 100,000 bbqcoins.

BBQcoin difficulty: 0.93117265

What does that come out to for "profitability"?

Previous few batches of 100,000 sold for only 20 bitcoins per 100,000 bbqcoins. What does that come out to?

Yesterday one could pick up (and several people did) 100,000 bbqcoin for only 10 bitcoins, what does that come out to?

-MarkM-

Pass phrase, isn't it, for Ripple?

So, an eight character phrase?

Hmm...

-MarkM-

.config ? Really? Not, for example, .conf like in many/most other coins?

(I do not use config files myself except for multicoin based coins so I don't actually really know offhand, I put everything on the commandline in a shell script.)

-MarkM-

Don't forget BBQcoin! It was mined for months and months and months, maybe a year or more, by sneaky CPU miners before announcing it was going to be launched onto some exchanges someday maybe so that GPU miners became attracted to it!



-MarkM-

EDIT: Pre-mining means mining before launching it on an exchange, right?

Ridiculously expensive might translate into easier for huge centralised / centralising corporations/groups to accomplish than for grass roots cottage industry to accomplish.

A 23 year old chinese chap was able to pull off creating an ASIC for bitcoin, would such grass roots level players be able to do the same s easily for litecoin?

What you are citing as an advantage sounds like it actually could be a disadvantage.

-MarkM-

Think bigger.

SMC: Soccer Mom Coin.

HMC: Hockey Mom Coin, why should soccer get all the love?

Etc.

-MarkM-

Okay, so the entire future of block rewards is pre-determined at launch.

As soon as the source code is released, everyone / anyone can compute all the block rewards block by block into the future.

So it is not really "random" in an expectation sense, it is merely an announced in the code at launch pre-determined sequence of rewards well known to all miners so they can plan in advance which blocks to hop to this chain for and which to leave to the peons.

It has a so called "random distribution" in a statistical sense maybe, but it is totally scheduled in advance, you mightt as well include a list of the first million blocks' rewards with the package to save others the trouble of generating the list themselves.

-MarkM-

Any coin will do it if the number of inputs needed to add up to that much causes the transaction to be just too darn big.

For example with BBQcoin most of my "coins" are of 42 BBQ denomination due to having been mined. I can send 10,000 in one send but at some higher number it gives that error. I didn't try a whole lot of different sizes as I am well familiar with the problem so just jump down to some convenient round number size of standard spend.

With DeVCoin, where most of my "coins" are of 45,000 denomination, I have managed to do 20 million coin spends sometimes, 10 million every time I have tried, but some number above 20 million I tried once gave the error.

With coins that only mine 6 or 7 or 10 coins per block (I0COin, CoiLedCoin, etc), I cannot even send 5000 coins in one send, so use sends of 1000.

You can "fix" the problem by "consolidating" coins though.

Send a hundred sends of 1000 to an address and suddenly you have denomination-1000 coins to use instead of only the 42's or 10's or 50's or whatever the minting initially creates.

-MarkM-