My guess is it's someone who doesn't like alt-coins. Notice it's only the alt-coin exchanges that are being attacked. Maybe they think ddossing the exchanges is easier than mounting 51% attacks on the alt-coins

That follows if you have fiat to convert. But what if you are mining or earning your coins? Then the coins are your salary - maybe your only salary - and you need to decide whether to spend or save - if the purchasing power of the coins looks likely to rise due to the coin design, then the urge is to save.

If you are earning alt-coins - say merge mining an alt-coin along with your bitcoins - then the tendency is to save the bitcoins and use the alt-coins for expenses. But because no ecommerce site takes alt-coins, folk are forced to go to an exchange, sell them and then send the fiat to their bank minus hefty bank charges, to buy their dinner. So why not allow these folk to spend the coins directly, that way no exchange and bank costs.

The above scenario is pretty common - there are loads of threads asking why people merge-mine alt-coins - and the answer is that the alt coins pay for expenses. Now we just need an ecommerce person to exploit that...

People hoard their bitcoins. They are reluctant to spend because they think the price will go up and they don't want to lose out - they don't want to be that pizza guy paying $2million for his dinner.

Suggestion: why don't bitcoinstores and other ecommerce types add an alt-coin payment option to your sites? I know the devcoin community is desperately looking for stuff to spend their coins on. (Devcoin is not a hoarding currency, it's a spending currency in that no-one thinks the price will be massive in a few years, so no psychological barrier to spending).

Due to the way it's been designed, bitcoin will attract more hoarders and speculators as time goes on, as it has gold-like properties. The alt-coins are where commerce will be developed because most have not been designed for hoarding (eg much larger issue of coins etc)

Why don't we contact bitmit and ask them to add a devcoin payment option? At worst they'll say No - but they might say Yes.

Well, that's why I initially thought the price drop was down to new merge miners selling. From their point of view it's cost-free to merge-mine Devcoins, and when they have expenses to pay they sell their devcoins rather than bitcoins. According to someone on the old thread there was a sharp increase in the numbers of miners in May.

However, the price of bitcoin does affect the other cryptocurrencies. When bitcoin is in the press a lot there is huge interest generated, and some who think it's too expensive and that they've missed the boat pile into altcoins. All the altcoins rose in April and they've all fallen back as the press interest has waned. So the bitcoin price affects the altcoins indirectly.

Well I think he's an offbeat character who sometimes just gets carried away with his enthusiasm    I don't think there's any harm in him - I think he's promoting madly because he really believes Devcoin saved his life and can save others too. Unthinkingbit bit made him promoter after he'd done loads of threads singing the virtues of Devcoin!

My view is that we're not a business, we're a community and good communities tolerate off-beat characters. It's perfectly true that the other alt coins are more professional, and well, sales-aware - but that's because they really are about pump and dump and not being a pro hurts that, so they mind what they say. I like to think Devcoin is a little different and less cookie-cutter...

Regarding the price - obviously it's disappointing - but we just need to sit it out and wait for bitcoin's price to rise (which will pull the main alt coins up too). IMO nothing will happen till September/October - that's the traditional season for WallStreet to meltdown, and this year we have the added fun of Cyprus ending it's capital controls in Sept too - all designed to create renewed interest in bitcoins and cryptocurrencies in general.

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We first started noticing a slump in price on May 30th - see here on the old thread. That's when the price went from about 145 satoshis to about 105 satoshis. Most likely miners selling - though in this post Vlad thought it was down to the bitcoin price dropping from $130 to $118 - also a likely cause.  Since then the bitcoin price has fallen to $100 and devcoin has tracked it down. I doubt that is due to FinShaggy!

The price crashed way before Round 23 started paying out (which I think was FinShaggy's first payment), so it wasn't him (go back to the old thread to see when the drop happened - from memory it was late-May and the consensus was that a whole bunch of new merge miners were selling. And if you think about it for a moment, he's just admitted he's financially dependant on the price being stable, so why would he crash the price?

His hot words are simply the result of being constantly stalked and bashed and accused of pumping and dumping. Yes, very childish to respond with a "right I'll dump coins then" - but he's been goaded to that point.

I get that some don't like FinShaggy - but why don't you use the ignore button? Why the constant stalking and cyber-bullying? Haven't you got anything better to do?

Ranking is still largely about the links coming into your page. I understand that this faucet is about incoming links not the PR of individual devtome pages. The best way to assess incoming links is via pagerank.

Re the PR10 page being outranked by a PR0 page - care to share any examples?   I've survived Penguin and Panda and a whole host of algos and ranking is largely due to the strength of the incoming links regardless of the FUD put out by Google.

Don't be fooled by the FUD put out by Google Pagerank still rules. I have a lot of websites - and while their content is excellent they all need backlinks to rank, and high pagerank links too. Forget about domains - always, always assess pagerank by individual page.  Sure a PR0 page from a PR10 domain may be outranked by a PR0 page from a PR0 domain if the latter has better onsite SEO. But a PR10 page will always outrank a PR0 page unless the former has been manually penalised by Google.

I was proposing assessing the incoming links page by page rather than based on the domain.

With bitcoin ad networks, it's a chicken and egg situation. They can't pull in the advertisers until they get publishers. But the only publishers they've got so far are people who write solely about bitcoin.

Given that devtome has half a million page views a month on a wide range of topics, you should be able to approach some of the bitcoin advertisers and negotiate a deal that's better than what's being offered to ordinary publishers. I did a bit of Googling and found this list of bitcoin advertisers. I'm sure the owners of each advertising network are on bitcointalk and you could PM them to discuss a deal.

My gut feeling is that for devcoin to succeed it needs to remain within the cryptocurrency universe and not have to switch back and forth into fiat.

If we're talking about the value of backlinks, why not use Google's own metric, which is Google Pagerank? It's their measure of how powerful a domain is - Facebook has a pagerank of 10 while some minor sub-domain with no links has a pagerank of 0. It's an exponential scale - so a site with pagerank of 1 is ten times more powerful than a site with pagerank 0, a site with pagerank 2 is 100 times more powerful than a site with pagerank 0, etc. Also pagerank is calculated on a page by page basis (i.e. they don't just assess the domain. So you can look-up the exact page with a link to devtome.

See the following page for how to pull the api for Google pagerank:

https://code.google.com/p/seostats/

They shouldn't have set up the foundation in the first place - it just put a big target on their back. All these orgs are weak points.

OK i accept the need for some gateways - but they all need to be located outside the United States.

To deal with this all they need to do is formally dissolve the foundation and then they arn't breaking any law California has invented. After all Bitcoin doesn't need the foundation - it survived 5 years without it.

I would leave well alone, we'd be doing more harm than good.

Bitcoin has a public ledger - so as soon as the vanity address is published folk will be watching to see how and where it is spent.

Bitcoin is only pseudonomous as long as you don't associate an address with an identity. As soon as you (which is what people are proposing) you are out in the open with a spotlight on you.

Hopefully Snowden had the sense to switch some of his money into bitcoins before he gave his interviews. Otherwise he's better off with fiat in small used bills.

In other words the market is paying more for some things than others in the same way a ball point pen costs less than an iPad! No-one is arguing that a ballpoint pen should be priced the same as an ipad, so why argue that two pieces of content should be priced the same when their value to their audiences is different?

If Devcoin is going to get into advertising, people are going to have get to grips with different prices for different niches.

They judge from a mix of referrals (eg they can see if a page was referred from a link in the search engines or a link from another site such as facebook, reddit or a forum - bots don't show referrals as no cookie drops) and whether a browser was used, plus they know the ips of most of the bots (they've had to learn to stop their Adsense advertisers getting exploited) and automatically exclude them. That's why if you install Google analytics, the number of hits shown is way less (as in about just 10%) of the hits shown in your cpanel. That's because your cpanel is logging everything, bots and all, and Google Analytics is excluding bots.

One solution: just install Adsense on Devtome - that way Google decides the impressions and clicks, based on their vast experience, they'll pay in fiat, which can be used to buy Devcoins to distribute, which should help keep the price stable.

Just wanted to address this - it's not possible to write 12,000 words in "2 or 3 nights". It takes about four hours to write a good quality 1000 word article. Hemmingway used to manage just 500 words a day.

You might see people uploading fairly long stories - but it's unlikely they wrote it in a couple of nights - more likely they sweated blood writing it over many months and sometimes years, and then found they could publish on devtome so uploaded their existing work.

Regarding why Unthinkingbit rewards writers - I understand there is a project to develop online devcoin advertising. The idea being that the advertising revenue will then be added to the coins yield from mining - so that even though the number of share lines is increasing, the pot as a whole is growing too and not limited to what the miners produce.

Advertising has to be attached to content, hence the content development. However advertisers need eyeballs - they won't pay to advertise on a page no-one reads. Unthinkingbit has tried to address this with the marketing share - but that's limited to a few places. There is no bonus for a link from reddit for instance.

The simplest way is to switch to writing shares based on visitors. By definition if you have readers you have been doing some promotion. Writers of fantasy and fan fiction can promote on those dedicated forums. Article writers can try to get their pages ranked on Google, to get search traffic, and so on.

I guess there's no hurry to change the share model because the advertising network hasn't been developed yet. But the issue of visitors will become an issue once it does.

Most revenue-sharing sites reward per visitor, not per upvote or per word (the per word thing is a hangover from print journalism).

Upvotes can be manipulated (remember how the old Digg had cliques who upvotes each other's stuff to get to the home page).

The only reliable measure of whether a piece is any good is visitors - are people reading it, is Google featuring it in their search engine, are people sharing it on reddit? If you use an analytics package like Google analytics, which filters out all the bot hits and only counts the views from a browser, you can get a pretty reliable idea of which articles are popular.

This. And what's indisputable is that the value of the yen has risen since 1985. 1 dollar could buy you 250 yen in 1985 but only 100 yen now (and that's after the strenuous efforts of the Japanese govt to weaken the currency). That's a massive increase in purchasing power. Is there any other fiat currency that has been increasing it's buying power like that?

My feeling is that bitcoin will go mainstream in places like Argentina first, where the purchasing power of the currency is diminishing by the day, and Japan last.