Would you use curl/perl/whatever scripts to check the link is stable not fly-by-night type of stuff?

I tried running link-lists long ago and learned that it can actually be a surprising amount of work, and that was with a links list app with an admin section in it, not ad hoc manual link-trades type of work.

Also are these ongoing-forever as long as the link is still up? Or just this cycle we will at the end of the cycle give out these rewards for any links that were up through the entire cycle, next cycle we'll see how that want and consider increasing or decreasing depending on how worthwhile a links drive it turned out to be?

Many sites used to just give a one time benefit for putting a link, maybe knowing that lots of people are not going to run around later pulling them down. (Costs more in tiem to remember oh I put that link up last month I should pull it down, and actually go pull it down, than to just forget the entire incident (it might not even be a site they ever even look at much or at all themselves!)

Also, what about forum posts that mention DevTome?

-MarkM-

Unlikely, because you would not be likely to know what private-key to engrave/burn/store into your replacement chip/emulator.

-MarkM-

The max block size is a HARD LIMIT.

It is like going from 8 bit machines to 16 bit machines, or from 16 bit machines to 32 bit machines, or from 32 bit machines to 64 bit machines, or from 64 bit machines to 128 bit machines, or from 128 bit machines to 256 bit machines, etcetera: ONCE DONE WE DO NOT WANT TO GO BACK!

Only world wide catasrophe should force the world to all revert to 16 bit machines or even, really, now we are in the process of moving from 32 bit to 64 bit, ever shut down all the 64 bit machines and go back to 32 bit.

Stop thinking of the HARD MAXIMUM BLOCK SIZE as some kind of "soft" number miners come up with as their most profitable size at a given moment. It is more like can you even buy commodity 128 bit machines yet? How about commodity 256 bit? Ask walmart how many bits you can get as a mass market, best bang for the buck due to the absolutely massive number being sold, machine. Check whether your installed base of miners are using 128 bit machines yet. That kind of a hard limit.

-MarkM-

Thanks, yes, that makes sense.

I was holding this back so as not to shoot down my previous narrative, but one could kind of suggest we have in a sense sort of already provided miners a futures contract in the form of the block subsidies.

If we make sure we do our part well so the value of those subsidies actually goes up in real buying power despite going down in number of bitcoins, miners should be able to survive. If we can make the buying power of bitcoins four times higher by the time the subsidy halves, miners will have double their current subsidised income, so should be able to afford to double network capacity, one might hope. (Or even expect?!)

(So lets get busy raising exchange rates! )

-MarkM-

It is also, *maybe*, backwards-compatible with the subsidy halving we already had.

That is, the existing blocks already in the chain have not violated it yet even if back last december (we belatedly realise upon looking at the new code), the block size limit already doubled, according to the (new) protocol, but we hadn't gotten that fact into the code back then.

(The *maybe* is a caveat that we don't know yet if we can actually handle one megabyte blocks so for all we know two megabyte blocks might not be feasible yet.)

-MarkM-

Nice, though you might want to check your grammar at the very end of the article.

You left out a potentially interesting option:

Show some folks your business opportunity! Look, I make money selling 100 apples a day just to this small neighborhood! How many could you sell to your neighbors? Heck I can even let one of you take over my retail operation here, a proven business with existing customers! Because I will move up to wholesale, I will buy lots of 1000 or more apples from farmers, assuring their livelihood with futures contracts on apples, and deliver to each of you 100 apples per day cheaper than I am paying for them right now! It is win win win, provided of course you too enter into a contract: I need assurance you will in fact be buying at least one lot of 100 apples per day from me so I can finance all of this.

(Our miners correspond to the farmers, the retailer to the people making a profit on having transactions put into the chain. So its again my "bring the money" argument: prove/assure you have enough customers ready to use a megabyte a block and blocks can be increased in size by a megabyte as fast as your assurance investment can get turned into upgraded capacity of the network.)

-MarkM-

Even if we do assume it, you forgot to include the percent who want to be able to screw the merchant by reversing the payment; a lot are likely to prefer "wallet" services that don't actually move coins on the blockchain, just credit the user's account with X number of coins. Given that the masses are used to 180 days to charge back, no coins need move on the chain until six months after the user "made a payment", and even then only for the amounts in aggregate that were not charged back from that six-months-ago business-week.

-MarkM-

Bigger transaction fees are not really essential for miners for many years yet.

By the time we halved the subsidy, bitcoin had doubled in value.

If it doubles in value again by the time the subsidy halves again miners should still do fine.

If it more than doubles by then less fees (if doubling block size does in fact lead to less fees) won't bother miners much if at all.

-MarkM-

Because for me the long term value of the bitcoins, namecoins, devcoins, groupcoins, i0coins, ixcoins and coiledcoins I get by merged-mining seems better than the short sighted attempt to grab tiny amount of high difficulty litecoins.

Plus many of the merged-mine-able coins are low difficulty enough to be vulnerable, they need more hashing not less, once ASICs arrive we will be merged-mining them all with ASICs

-MarkM-

bitcoin-otc's Web of Trust might help you come up with trust limits for people who have entries there. So I'd say that bitcoin-otc might help when extending trust in Ripple.

-MarkM-

Re Google, I mean that as you read the source code, Google can help you understand what it says / what it is trying to do, because lots of guides to C++ must be on the internetz somewhere and Google probably knows where.

As to a guide specifically to making Yet Another Altcoin, I suspect it is no accident that such guides are few (as in, maybe non-existent) and far between (as in haven't seen one in quite some time and might not for some time to come).

Maybe the closest thing to a guide was the Multicoin thread, which the forum search might find for you; multicoin was specifically designed to move all the things you'd need to change into the config file to make it easier to change them to use Multicoin to run various different chains just by telling it to use that chain's config-file.

-MarkM-

Hmm. Unthinkingbit simply offered 100 bitcoin bounty* to get DeVCoin built, if I recall correctly. Maybe a few more bounties along the way.

Bitcoins have gone up since then of course, but different folk have different budgets for financing their hobbies.

Haw are you at programming? Familier with C++ ?

Maybe just try to read the source code anyway, even if you haven't programmed in the past. Maybe you will at least be able to figure out some of how they say things in that language and maybe it will all start to make sense. Maybe with a little help from your friend Google...

* Yet nonetheless did most / a heck of a lot of the work himself!

-MarkM-

The project lead of Open Transsctions plans that bitcoin's multi-signature transactions system could be used to allow coins to be locked up in m-of-n style, where you could have n custodians and any m of them must sign any transaction that tries to move the coins.

Not sure how bitcoin is coming along with m-of-n transactions though.

-MarkM-

No, because the price crash will lead to a difficulty drop, which if the situation keeps going will lead to more and more coins pouring out of my magic money machine hardware.

Cheap coins = great time to (re)enter the mining business!

-MarkM-

That is another profit-centre for the server: mints last X time and new ones are made every X/2 time, for example on my server cash lasts 6 months and new mints are made every 3 months.

Nice clients would automatically refresh your cash for you so you would not need to remember to.

But if it did expire, thanks you just paid for the service.

-MarkM-

I, in my capacity as Digitalis Data Services (see WHOIS knotwork.com and WHOIS knotwork.net) run the Digitalis Open Transactions server:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0

I also run the OTdemo Open Transactions server, which allows anyone to issue assets.

Open Transactions already does Chaumian blinded tokens, however creation of "mints" for each asset as the asset is created is not automatic currently thus assets people make up for themselves to issue on the OTdemo server do NOT have the ability to mint Chaumain blinded cash tokens for their asset; currently creating the mints for them would require my intervention.

My policy for blockchain based coins such as BBQcoins, DeVCoins, and suchlike* is intended to be more like e-gold or Pecunix than like MtGox or Vircurex: stone-cold wallets, I hope never to have to dig coins out of cold storage because they are there to back tokens and tokens exist to be used. Unless I am closing down the business I expect to continue to need tokens thus to continue to leave the coins in the cold vault in order to continue to have full one to one correspondence between the number of tokens and number of coins regardless of whether I own the tokens (having not sold them yet or having bought them back) or someone else owns the tokens.

Thus I perforce must operate at more-than-100% reserve, as any "hot wallet" funds must be over and above - distinct from - the coins the tokens represent.

I also hope, like e-gold (not sure exactly how Pecunix works) that selling these tokens to end-users and buying them back from end-users will be done by others; e-gold called such others market-makers. Those market-makers apparently could ship physical gold to e-gold's vault facilities and maybe also order bars of gold shipped out to them, but Joe Sixpack never sees/touches gold, he buys and sells tokens from and to those market-makers. (He could buy the tokens with coins or gold though I guess if the market-maker offered such options, or sell them back for coins or gold, etc.)

As to this "trusted computing", I am not sure which brands Open Transactions might incorporate soonest, currently interfaces to that kind of hardware are not yet at the top of to-do lists I think.

-MarkM-

...

* "Suchlike": I hear some similar coins seem to claim to be money; I hear money has regulatory problems. Other than such problems, such similar coin types are technically pretty much interchangeable / compatible. Should some particular flavour be problematic, other flavours abound. Currently none have been proven problematic as far as I am aware. Thus currently my server supports a number of such assets, see http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

Oh good I'm not the only one who thought that photo looked familiar.

Doctor Who's newest Companion, though? (Didn't Zhou already go from 15 to 17 over about two years a while back?)

-MarkM-

Nah, it has a simple elegant satoshilution: a million or few million ancient coins suddenly awake from their sluimber, Satoshicorp International datacentres spring up on all seven continents, and lobby for a one terrabyte or ten or twenty terrabyte max block size because obviously any "reasonable" world currency verification operation can "easily" handle such blocksizes.



-MarkM-

If you don't mind the counterparty risk (such as if you are not insisting on a wallet that has you keep your private keys at your end instead of on their server) then Ripple is maybe about the closest thing to it right now.

You'd have IOUs for many different currencies in your Ripple account, basically, and go through gateways to turn them back into actual coins on actual blockchains.

-MarkM-

Well actually, to really make a decent market you need populations that for whatever reason do not hunt, gather, or farm their own food.

So far the Brits and Canucks have been getting magic berries from the Faery Fellowship, which act as healing berries as well as nutritious food, so both of them and the Faery actually have piles of steaks lying around that they never eat.

Being basically rich they prefer the berries over using up their number of items of carrying capacity carrying healing items and food items as separate items.

Meanwhile the Drow and Duergar live in caves, where foraging only finds one type of food, mushrooms, which they find convenient because their automatic "eat when hungry" triggers in their clients thus know what type of item to eat, (CoffeeMUD has no generic word, it seems, for "anything that is edible" so triggers need to know exactly what it is that the character should try to eat.)

Thus so far there is not yet a population really that one could become a steady supplier of steak to.

The search always continues though for other free open source games with which to open trade routes.

-MarkM-