We need scrypt merged-mining then to make it an efficient profession!

-MarkM-

Go GeistGeld! Ten second blocks! Or maybe its 15 seconds. Something like that.

And merged mined, so unlike Litecoin it can share/recycle the same hashing power used by Bitcoin.

If only I had a few more gigs of RAM...

-MarkM-

The Galactic Milieu game has lots of currencies.

Take a look at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

Are you suggesting that if the Martians had not given blockchain technology to the Brits, the Canucks, General Mining Corp, General Retirement Funds, whoever is behind bitNicKeLs, and the (galactic) United Nations the Martian BotCoin would be worth seven or more times as much?

The Brits, Canucks, United Nations and so on would have happily driven up the value of the Martians' currency for them instead of promoting their own?

Au contraire, I think the players who play the ministers of finance or whatnot that engaged in all that stuff are correct that it is the very fact that each currency has huge reserves of many other currencies available with which to back their coins that helps them all be valuable.

If no one backed bitcoins with any dollars or yen or botcoins or BBQcoins or Litecoins or gold or platinum or nickel or whatever, bitcoin likely would not be worth as much as it is worth today.

-MarkM-

Akka, are you using some "theme" other than the plain old default shades-of-blue?

As maybe some "themes" act differently on details like that.

Or maybe it is that voted and I didn't, or even vice versa. (I don't remember voting but also am not positive I didn't.)

-MarkM-

What results? It isn't showing any is it?

-MarkM-

That is part of what I am hoping to explore with the Galactic Milieu...

Basically if you look at totally differently scaled games one sees a vast range in scale of what a given number of dollars will buy; in clubs and swords era villages games you might only be able to buy some swords and clubs, whereas in galactic armada games you might be able to buy entire armadas.

I am interested in seeing what happens when galactic armadas fly around in galaxies in which some planets have clubs and swords villages on them... If it is learned how many millions of swords and clubs it takes to build a ship, of which thousands might form an armada, yet swords and clubs are worth a few bucks, imagine how expensive, in bucks, a galactic armada might be...

-MarkM-

Litecoins are easy to buy, you can send devcoins, bitcoins, ppcoins, ixcoins, even maybe solidcoins, to Vircurex and either buy litecoins with them directly or trade to bitcoins then buy litecoins with the bitcoins.

Of course this assumes you are buying using real (blockchain-based) money not some made-up fiat crap from some government.

-MarkM-

So world of warcraft gold and eve online currency and second life lindens and such all become more and more valueless as more and more such things come into existence?

The more MUDs there are, each with their own variety of MUD-gold or MUD-currency, the less second life lindens are worth?

This seems like crazy talk. Surely as more and more virtual currencies and game currencies are observed to be exchangeable with fiat currencies the more all virtual currencies and game currencies gain in credibility as potentially of value?

If even BBQcoins have value, as evidenced by someone paying 100+ litecoins for 40,000 BBQcoins, then heck, darn near any such thing could turn out to have value, and if even far-fetched ones have value surely the granddaddy of them all, bitcoin, must be supremely valuable?

-MarkM-

Anyone can make Litecoin useable inside Ripple just by issuing LTC IOUs.

Actual websites that let you turn those IOUs in for actual coins on the blockchain, and turn coins on the blockchain into those IOUs will have to wait for the Ripple server source code, or at least the ability to set a Ripple account up to require destination codes so the webpage will work, but that is just a convenience thing, until then you can still buy IOUs over the counter and sell then back for coins over the counter.

-MarkM-

It is looking like it might end up simplest to just let people pay via Ripple, so they can use any currency they like.

-MarkM-

Yes, I expect too that GPUs will continue to be useful not only for Litecoin but also for merged-mining, sure you don't get a whole lot of bitcoins but you get a heck of a lot of various under-the-radar coins that could pay of big time when they finally come into the spotlights.

-MarkM-

Somehow bitcoin's price has contrived to stay insanely low for a ridiculously long time, and even now somehow something keeps suppressing it, so it is a good thing growth has started to pick up in one or more of the many alternatives. Maybe if something contrives to squash litecoin's exchange rates like seems to be happening with bitcoin yet naother contender will take up the position of being the growth coin.

The more the merrier, maybe we will find out how many it is going to take to be just too many moles for the suppressors to whack.

-MarkM-

For some time litecoin was useful as a way to avoid having to part with your bitcoins, as you could use bitcoins as collateral to borrow litecoins to spend.

Now that litecoins too are going up in price it is time for litecoins to join bitcoins as something to hold onto while it appreciates, thus now some other coin will have to be used as the one to borrow to spend.

Unfortunately devcoin is so insanely low price lately on vircurex that borrowing devoins to sell there to spend isnt a good idea either since it obviously has to go back up a whole lot if people ever start actually using devcoins to pay back all the huge loans that are denominated in devcoins.

Hmmm, looking for next coin to use for pocket-money coin...

-MarkM-

Open Transactions has been useful for a long time.

You might as well say that MPEx is not useful, and for the same reason: Joe Sixpack finds it more complicated than PayPal.

-MarkM-

I have some price lists and plots using different base currencies that can be fun for seeing the same data from different points of view:

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

-MarkM-

What is the ECB? Is it European Central Bank?

If so, is XBC an obsolete old code from back before Europe got assigned the EU country-code?

If XBC is actually a European Bond, how is that a world currency? Isn't a US Bond, a Bhutan bond, etc etc equally much a world wide currency? How come all countries don't get an X code for their bonds?

Is maybe XBC being wrongly squatted by the EU?

-MarkM-

Okay, fine then, they are "tips" or "gratuities"

-MarkM-

It isn't really possible to do anything useful yet on any scale, as you cannot even set up an account as a business account - an account that forces destination-tags - which doing anything useful seems to pretty much require.

You can putter around with personal accounts doing personal lunchmoney loans and buying and selling the IOUs of the two businesses who have been provided with a server to try to do something useful with, so I suppose you could say that yes, two entities are doing something useful, the two gateway entities, and the useful thing they are doing is pre-release testing of the server to make sure that it will in fact be useful when the time comes to release it for people to try to do something useful with.

-MarkM-

They function similarly to XRP in the sense that they ration the use of server resources.

But they are not a currency nor an asset, they are outside the system, outside the markets; they are arbitrary credits the server operator assigns to nyms (identities) and which the server consumes at the rate of one credit per API call.

Currently all API calls cost the same, one credit aka token per API call.

Since quite likely some API calls consume far more system-resources than others possibly this initial simple system will need to be adjusted to charge more for actions that consume a lot of resources.

The system operator can make up these tokens aka credits out of thin air, they are not transferable from one identity to another nor can you trade them on the markets. There is not yet even any built in mechanism for requesting them from the system operator nor for offering bribes or inducements to the system operator to encourage said operator to assign you some of these tokens aka credits.

They are not transferable from server to server either: if I assign one of your identities some on the Digitalis server that is local to the Digitalis server, they cannot migrate to the OTdemo server.

What they do do is give the server a way of paying its bills other than by taking a percentage of trades or transfers.

There is no mechanism for taking any percentage of trades or transfers.

I had imagined volume traders would flock to Open Transactions precisely because the higher the volume you trade the more damage you would take from percentage-based fees; I figured paying a tiny fee per API call would be far cheaper for professional traders than being charged a fraction of every trade, a larger fee the larger the trade.

Of course this usage tokens approach also means window-shopping is not free; an API call to obtain prices as just as much an API call as is an API call to make or take an offer...

-MarkM-

Okay first we guess the ratio of the two primes, right?

Like, maybe it could be a ratio of

1350664108659952233496032162788059699388814756056670275244851438515265106048595 338339402871505719094417982072821644715513736804197039641917430464965

to

8927425623934102086438320211037295872576235850964311056407350150818751067659462 9205563685529475213500852879416377328533906109750544334999811150056977236890927 563

Next step?

-MarkM-