Ok that's interesting. Wonder why they did that - probably because of the problems MtGox had when they registered under the wrong thing - or perhaps because they were intending to offer conversion to dollars in the future?

None of the cryptos are convertible to fiat in the USA though, are they. Therefore they are not convertible currencies. Cryptsy has never quoted any dollars in any of their trades - they weren't treating them as convertible to fiat at all. You were simply barterring one alt for another. You'd have a devil of a job proving XPM, sexcoin and others are convertible.

With e-gold and others, they were actually offering to convert to dollars, which made egold a convertible virtual currency and which is why they took them down. If they were converting their egold to second life tokens, there wouldn't have been a problem.

I'm puzzled here. Cryptsy doesn't trade back and forth into fiat.

It just trades alts, which are all imaginary tokens under the law, like Second Life money and Star Wars Galaxy money. It's not regulated by anyone, it's just "tokens" being bartered back and forth. No dollars are ever quoted on the trades, all trades are just in BTC, LTC and XPM.

Therefore don't see how you can legally claim that you "lost $75,000" when you can't trade BTC for dollars on Cryptsy nor on any exchange regulated by the American govt. You mentioned in the other thread that the Florida regulators "eyes popped at the amount of dollars being traded" - but you were misleading them, weren't you, because no dollars are traded on Cryptsy at all.

You are not covered by any regulation involving finance, because imaginary tokens including cryptos are not recognised as money. You may perhaps be covered by regulation involving sale of goods. But those types of regs simply rap a provider on the knuckles if their customer service is poor or delayed - usually you have to prove their service delay is extraordinarily bad - that you waited months for your goods, and gave them plenty of time to rectify their problem and it still didn't happen. Going to the regulator for sale of goods errors is supposed to be the last resort when you have exhausted all avenues yourself.

As for Cryptsy - their problems all started when they moved from their old trading platform to the new one. The new one had bugs and a lag and it was unfortunate coincidence that they launched it just when loads of new people were trying to join. but I expect they'll sort it.

I personally prefer vircurex - but they are no good for those trading the smaller alts, they only deal with the older established alts.

P.S. People getting involved in cryptos need to stop referencing everything in terms of dollars. It's not about dollars. You haven't lost any dollars. At most you've lost BTC which is a fun imaginary currency, and in any case, you got your fun crypto tokens back didn't you?

you can buy amazon vouchers for devcoins:

http://dvc4giftcards.us/store.html

Devcoins are cheap right now relative to other coins (they haven't gone up as much). Instead of spending your bitcoins, switch one of the alts with no merchants into devcoin and get some amazon vouchers.

Reddit has a jobs for bitcoin board:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Jobs4bitcoins

Browse and see if there's a job you can do

All Satoshi wanted to do was prove that his idea of how to send money securely online without double-spending, worked. That's all. Everything else is speculation projected onto him as he's a blank slate who hardly made a political comment.

Bitcoin is a technological breakthrough, not a political one. And Satoshi made it open source so anyone could clone and amend it if they wanted.

If people want to buy altcoins, they are free to spend their money. If they want to make and mine altcoins, they are free to spend their time. Don't know what it's got to do with you.

As for the politics, lets keep that out. Imagine if MP3 had been released and people said, you can only use this technology if you want to download for free, and if you haven't bought into the pirate world, you are excluded. How would that have affected how many songs got released in MP3 format? Think about it. Politicising technology narrows it's market.

People who issue alts in 2013 have five years of bitcoin experience to go on - they know that miners will jump on it, to try to get in early and make some money.

Back in 2009, nobody knew. Nobody even knew if the cryptography was sound and it would really eliminate double spending, let alone that it would take off the way it did and be actually worth something. The early guys were not really miners, they were cryptography geeks and mathematicians bent on solving the digital problem of how to move money online securely, and on testing it and building the infrastructure (eg I understand Hal Finney did quite a lot of work on coding the wallet).

They were scientists and pioneers. It really wasn't about pre-mining and making a killing - that's the mindset of the non-scientists who came afterwards and piggy backed on the original idea (even issuing alts because Satoshi kindly make his code open source so they could copy it!).

At the moment shares are only allocated to "work done". So if a writer hasn't written anything in a round, they get nothing, and if a developer hasn't developed in a round, they get nothing. Not sure how it would work out if shares were allocated to developers for ongoing work which wasn't complete - room for abuse there for someone to string out the work indefinitely...

I think the shares allocated per development task completed could certainly be increased. But whether anyone would bother is another matter. The devcoin price has fallen back so much that even writers arn't bothering any more - the last round had only a few articles, mainly from a couple of newbies enthusiastically trying it out for the first time. So if a developer had chosen that moment to complete a lot of tasks, they'd have scooped the jackpot!

As to why the developers don't bother - Devcoin doesn't get much visibility in general. The only developers who know it exists date from a couple of years ago when this was one of the few alts out there. I suppose we could advertise for developers in the Project Development part of this forum - but the problem of people second guessing the price will remain. It's not possible to know in advance how much a "share" is worth - it could be 400,000 coins or it could be 100,000 coins, so even if you knew that you would be getting say 20 shares, it's anyone's guess a) how many coins you'd get and b) what those coins were worth in BTC. People who want "guarantees" don't mix well with the crypto world because it's all so up and down...

That's not quite correct. There is no rule at all saying that all coins should go to the writers.

The total number of coins distributed per round is fixed, but how it is allocated is completely flexible.

So, when a lot of writers are writing but no-one is doing development, the coins go to writers, but when there is a lot of development, the share the writers get is less.

A simple example: if there are just 5 writers in a round each getting 10 shares and no developers have participated, each writer would get 20% of the distribution. But if there are just five writers each getting 10 shares and a developer has claimed bounties for 50 shares, then each writer gets 10% and the developer gets 50% of the distribution.

So to "fix" the problem, all that needs to happen is that the shares allocated per development task is increased. If you up-ed it to 100 shares per development task for example, the portion the writers get will immediately drop. I don't know how unthinkingbit decides how much each development is worth, but I don't think anyone would object if he raised the bounties for development.

The "problem" if you like is that developers arn't really bothering to claim their bounties for the list of tasks already out there, but writers are, which is why it seems so lop-sided.

Because people like to take profits. The price has tripled in about three weeks, it has to pull back at some point.

Re devcoin - yes, I meant billions :-)

Devcoin has actually made a lot of progress in the last six months - there is an ongoing experiment with monetising devtome, there are now new places to spend the coins that didn't exist before. What we really need is unthinkingbit to get interviewed on "lets talk bitcoin" about why devcoin is perfect for microtransactions (v low transaction fee in dollar terms compared to all other alts and bitcoin) and generally get the existence of the coin out there. Then we'll get new buyers.

It would help if some of the scam alts died. I understand back in 2012 there were concerted attempts to kill coins (successfully), but that seems to have died and there are now too many alts with no point to most of them beyond mining and pumping.

Back in April when bitcoin last had it's big surge, there were only about six or seven alt coins - and it was the fashion for newcomers to the bitcoin world to put some money in all of these "just in case".

There's now about 150 altcoins, and while a few people this time are talking about putting some money in altcoins, this time round the consensus in places like Reddit is that all alts are "scams", due to the sheer number of them. Those few newcomers who are interested in alts don't even know Devcoin exists because it doesn't get visibility on places like "lets talk bitcoins" or wired and the other "mainstream" places which occasionally write about alts.

Regarding the writers - they receive their coins 45,000 at a time, so while the small sales of 100,000 coins a time might be from them, the big dumps of several million coins at a time tend to be from savers who've accumulated in the last two years. There are about 92 million devcoins in existence - and as the bitcoin price rises, people are scouring their wallets and selling any and all alts they have for bitcoins, which they cash into dollars asap because the bitcoin price is likely to pull back (nothing goes up permanently in a straight line after all). All the alts have crashed as a result.

When the bitcoin price drops back a bit, the alts will stabilize too as the desperation to sell abates. It's a waiting game.

The price of a Big Mac in South Africa for example is just $1.82 and in India it's $1.50 - and mere cheeseburgers are cheaper still. In that context the Litecoin fee of $0.1 is too expensive. A 5-6.5% charge just for the pleasure of paying with a crypto is too much - hence the reason no-one will bother to use it.

People need to understand that Cryptocurrencies are not just about the USA. Satoshi was not American and the majority of people who currently hold of cryptocurrencies are not American. It's quite conceivable that they will be outlawed in the USA but continue and thrive everywhere else. So it's a bit short-sighted to pretend that transaction fees do not matter.

Transaction fees. At the moment the transaction fee on bitcoin is lowish - about $0.08. But compare to Devcoin which has set it's transaction fee extremely low, so that it's about $0.000056. Once bitcoin hits $1000, some parts of teh world will be looking for something which is friendlier to micro-transactions.

Smeagol - is it possible you can add Amazon.co.uk to your site as well for those of us who are outside the USA and don't want to pay $25 for shipping stuff across the Atlantic?

Have been thinking about Christmas presents, and I think it would be more cost effective to buy some Amazon vouchers via your site with devcoins plus your small fee, than to trade on vircurex, and then trade on bitstamp and then pay my bank another fee for accepting SEPA. I'm sure I can't be the only non-American devcoin person.

Agree - and that other altcoin is Devcoin, which is perfect for microtransactions. Devcoin was deliberately developed with the decimal place moved (so 50000 coins generated each time instead of 50), and the transaction fee set to just 1 DVC. That makes the transaction fee $0.0000561, which is practically nothing, whereas Litecoin's transaction fee is a comparatively hefty $0.10.

It's interesting to compare the two coins - Devcoin was launched in August 2011 and Litecoin was launched in October 2011 - so they are near siblings, but they've taken completely different approaches.

The Devcoin community has focused on trying to reward doers (developers, writers and so on). Devcoin now owns an asset (Devtome) which is monetised with bitcoin advertising and Amazon affiliate promotions, which means hopefully a steady stream of dollars earned which then get converted into bitcoins and then devcoins. On the spending side, you can buy amazon vouchers for devcoin. The Devcoin community has mostly ignored the speculative element, apart from moaning about it from time to time.

The Litecoin community seems to have spent an inordinate amount of energy on MtGox acceptance - maybe because they see speculation against the dollar as a way to acceptance.

The speculative element can be destructive - IMO, having lots of alt-coins traded solely against Litecoin on Cryptsy is one the main reasons for the price dropping. Think - all those alt-coin miners really want to cash out into BTC. But Cryptsy forces them to buy Litecoins, which they then immediately sell for bitcoins. Cryptsy takes two sets of transaction fees, but Litecoin suffers a persistent selling pressure that wouldn't exist of the altcoin miners could trade directly into Bitcoin. Back in June there were maybe 4 altcoins being traded for litecoin, and now it's about 20 - and you can see the effect.

If the Litecoin community can step away from all the speculative element, and find a true raison d'etre (and it's not microtransactions, nor is it about ways of fixing parts of the crypto-economy that bitcoin neglects, such as ways to earn coins apart from mining - Devcoin has bagged both those elements). It has to be something else, something unique that no-one is offering.

(Disclosure: I hold some litecoins, just wanted some, "just in case")

MarkM - seeing as you were the developer for Devcoin, can I ask you a question? What was the reasoning behind issuing 50,000 coins per round instead of 50.

Someone on reddit described Devcoin as a "zimbabwe currency" - i.e. they looked at the number of coins rather than market cap, and decided in a split second that it was "zimbabwe" and therefore they didn't want to participate. I'm convinced this is the thing holding the coin back - it's not fitting in with pre-conceived ideas about how a currency should be.

If the original was produced by you (i.e. you own the copyright), you can post it in it's entirety onto devtome and list it as an "original" work in your profile.

Collated work is more collations based on "fair use" quotations - l would say no more than 5% from the original source, otherwise you get into the realms of plagiarisation, and always put the quoted bits in quotes, and add a reference link to source.

Wiser I think devcoin is either the third oldest altcoin or the fourth. Namecoin was launched in April 2011, and Devcoin was launched in August 2011.

I think there may have been some other coins in-between that didn't make it.


I found this thread on groupcoin

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67991.0

In that thread markm wrote the following:


but am not sure when it became stand-alone and stopped being a test for devcoin.

If they are your own pictures, place them in articles that you list in your profile as original.

Note that everything you put onto devtome comes is placed there under a creative commons licence - which means a third party can then legally take the material/pictures and place them on their own site.

Don't put other people's brand images on devtome unless you have permission. So with coca-cola - give them a miss (devtome can't afford lawsuits).

I don't think Fin was part of the pump and dump - he was as much a sucker as you. The pumper/dumpers live on twitter, and you can also see them chatting on the following site:

http://trollboxarchive.com/

Have a read of it and get an insight into their world, and then you'll realize that all this angst about writers causing teh crash or fin causing teh crash are wa off the mark.

The community is not in control of the price, the speculators are, and they're out to make money from us, they don't really care about the project.