Assets on the Digitalis Open Transactions server. Also pretty much anything in various games that players are willing to sell.

-MarkM-

The typical bitcoin markets really mess up the idea of using a "unit of account" because they make the purported exchange rates be kind of mythical. That vis, you might look up on MtGox the exchange rate of bitcoins as, say $100 per bitcoin, but the way that market operates you cannot really very well conclude from that that the price of a thousand one-hundred-million-dollar mansions would be one billion bitcoins.

But, that is exactly the kind of thing you have to be able to do with a "unit of account".

So basically what happens in practice is someone ships close to five million units of Deuterium to a General Mining Corp depot, the amount of GMC currency their shipment is worth is looked up on the tables for that moment in time at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html and then if their debt is not a debt to GMC and denominated in GMC those same tables are used to convert the GMC they earned for the shipment into whatever currency their debt is denominated, and GMC settles up, usually in some national currency or in GMC currency or even in GRF currency, with the creditor on behalf of the miner.

This would get royally mucked up though if for example GFC did suddenly start demanding actual DeVCoins instead of the equivalent value in any generally acceptable currency... But, that would kind of be a step backwards from being an actual currency useable as a unit of account, and being just some weird limited-edition commodity...

-MarkM-

DIff is why you want high efficiency; all the fast-buck people with their marginal efficiency units will drive diff up fast, until their electricity costs put them out of business. Then the electrically efficient ones will keep on chugging along.

-MarkM-

Sure, but 335,107,623,248.14274990 owed by debtors ... They can buy up cheap coins at Vircurex a long long long time and still not make much dent in that debtload!

-MarkM-

It seems possible they might not be strictly proper multicoin coins, as I am not sure where the message comes from they put on their status output saying what coin they are. I am not sure if that is something multicoin does of if they actually hacked the code of multicoin, for example to add that message.

Multicoin was intended that you would use the exact same binary program to run all the various coins, but maybe these two aren't really like that, it'd be interesting to compare their code to the actual multicoin and to each other...

Best of all though will be to recreate them using latest bitcoin code.

-MarkM-

So is this a second team now working on scrypt FPGAs?

Are they starting from scratch or continuing along with work already started by the previous team?

-MarkM-

The traditional first stage of development of products is market research, isn't it?

First find out if there are people willing to buy it?

So getting people to sign up to a mailing list makes a lot of sense as an early stage of development...

-MarkM-

Tenebrix and GeistGeld are both currently implemented using Multicoin, so you should now be able to get both of those running, and since both are low difficulty you can set them both up chugging away in background earning you coins!

-MarkM-

There are 50,000 coins per block forever, my client last saw block number 86178, so (50000*86178) existed when I looked at the client's readout just now.

Bear in mind though that General Financial Corp and the Martians have both made (secured) loans denominated in DeVCoins, which add up to way the heck more, by far, DeVCoins than actually exist or even will, over the next few years, exist. That has to have some influence somewhere along the line even if most debtors pay using other currencies based on the conversion rates listed on the price lists at the time they make a payment.

(GFC owed the Martians 209559292109.76655006 DVC as of last record I have, while as of the block mentioned above there were only 4308900000 DeVCoins in existence. GFC was itself owed 125548331138.37619984 DVC ... It borrowed from the Martians in bulk at one interest rate and re-loaned to people seeking refinancing, charging them twice the interest rate. Since the currencies the people seeking refinancing had had their debts denominated in previously had been climbing in value far faster than DeVCoins, plus in some cases the interest rate charged by GFC was lower than they had been paying, this worked out as a good deal for the debtors as well as for GFC and the Martians. Hmm looking at those figures it looks like GFC owes the Martians double what is owed to it but that is not the case; the amount shown as owed to GFC is the amount owed to them over and above the amount they owe.)

-MarkM-

Coins have been bought up dirt cheap too, someone or a bunch of someones bought many many many millions various times when the price went really low.

I have something like 250 million or so tied up in cold storage backing tokens in my Open Transactions server, and hope over time to tie up more and more that way, since those coins never hit the web-based exchanges hopefully that helps a little pricewise too.

-MarkM-

Yes, several in fact. But they failed to attract miners so ended up moving to Open Transactions for now until such time as their transaction volume is enough for transaction fees to be able to pay for mining.

See http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

-MarkM-

More people familiar with varying the code and variants of the code is good, as it seems like there will regularly be need to update all the many altcoins so the more people capable of doing so maybe the more likely it is to happen.

Two that really need updating badly are Tenebrix and GeistGeld, they might even be old enough that they might crap out on file size of the blockchain on 32 bit Windows systems maybe or something silly like that.

They are interestingly different from each other too since Tenebrix is scrypt without merged mining whereas GeistGeld is SHA256 with merged mining. So bringing both of those up to date would be a really great learning-project for someone and meanwhile of course both are also so ridiculously low difficulty you could be mining them both all along with CPUs and rake in tons of both while you learn. Unlike starting a new coin you don't tend to get jumped on by all the big miners with these old coins, so you can go months on end peacefully mining them with CPUs.

Compare that with the way difficulty skyrockets on new coins lately and you'll see those new coins won't likely be useful for spreading the coins around newbies for maybe months or years, whereas these old coins have been serving newbies well for what, a year or more now and still nice low difficulty...

-MarkM-

Well its not like we were keeping it secret, though admittedly when it was really high there was less temptation to tell everyone about it.

Quick, lets bury those posts with new posts so people who only jump to the end of the thread won't read that part!

-MarkM-

There are ancient bullion repositories that are insured by LLoyd's of London and all that good stuff, that provide notarised cetification of balances and stuff like that, so I don't think proving the cold-storage bullion exists is a problem, although how expensive such storage places tend to be, and how much they charge for each audit of how much you really have in them, I do not know offhand. It'd be an expense to take into account for sure.

-MarkM-

This is pointless, because people have to trust you, the centralised authority, for the bullion thus they might as well also trust you for the accounting system, so it is insanely expensive to use a blockchain for this, you should use Open Transactions or Ripple, or even Cyclos.

Possibly a good method would be to have me hold a cold-vault storage of bullion that will never move, and issue gold and silver tokens in Open Transactions, and you run a hot-vault service where you buy and sell the secured (fully backed) tokens for bullion from a "hot wallet" aka "hot vault". People then know the tokens are fully backed regardless of what accidents might befall the hot vault or any bullion that is in the mail etc.

(The bullion the tokens represent never moves, except some day when the whole business shuts down; it just sits forever in a secure vault backing tokens that hot-wallet / hot-vault operators buy and sell for bullion.)

-MarkM-

DeVCoin deliberately uses addresses that look exactly like BiTCoin addresses, so that people's bitcoin donation addresses can be used to send them devcoins; this lets us assign devcoins to developers without their having to get themselves a specifically devcoin address; they can thus accumulate devcoins sitting at their bitcoin address waiting for them to some day get around to importing the private key of the address into a devcoin wallet to access their coins.

This let us set people up on the recipients lists who maybe to this day might still not have actually set up and run a devcoin client.

-MarkM-

You just aren't doing it right. You could mine lots of i0coins, GRouPcoins, CoiLedCoins and GeistGeld, even all at once using merged mining, with just one GPU. Their difficulties are very very low, I guess most people mining them are just using CPUs.

-MarkM-

If you only have one GPU, merged mining can be a good way to go. If you do it using p2pool you get bitcoins to pay your electricity, plus rarely find a namecoin block, occassionally a devcoin block, and can get lots of blocks of all the other coins that can be merged-mined. It works out pretty nice...

-MarkM-

Maybe best will be when we get something equivalent to what the Jalapino was intended / designed to be, cheap ($150) to buy, low power, so anyone can easily get involved.

-MarkM-

The main limitation botnets have is dealing with too many threads per actual human operator.

A normal person running, say, five characters can relatively easily adjust each character periodically, maybe even daily, certainly one each day so as to get 7 characters adjusted each week. Whereas someone trying to run thousands will have significant manual work to do to keep up with a changing environment.

Also, by employing others, anyone with managerial / marketing skills could recruit as many actual people into an organisation as a botnet operator could recruit zombie systems, but the actual people would be able to be more adaptable maybe - more capable of making independent decisions and such.

-MarkM-