I would not use that business for hosting actual cryptocoins, but that is just me. Cryptocoin wallets I keep right here with me behind my steel plated door and the household firewall, with no Windows boxes on the local network, and not accessed via the web. Third party hosting just does not seem wise for hosting cryptocoin wallets.

Other than that though, I use that hosting for everything else, such as my copy of DeVCoin's files of who gets the DeVCoins, and my web-based games that do not directly use cryptocoins.

It is good hosting, in particular the free hosting offer is good, I just do not like the idea of using *any* third party hosting for wallets.

Offtopic, it actually looks like winter here recently, seems like gloobal warming might not be a total myth though the last few winters compared to what I had learned to expect here. (Halifax, Nova Scotia, for any who did not happen to know.)

-MarkM-

I got the impression that it conveyed to me a decent gist of how it does consensus, except that it did not seem really clear on how to deal with someone trying to instantly doublespend such as by connecting to two nodes very distant from each other in connectivity telling each one a different place to spend the same coins to.

Thinking about it it seems to me it could be useful to flag the account doing the sends as somehow corrupt or problematic rather than to penalise other nodes for happening to prefer the spend they heard about first; otherwise both nodes might end up thinking they have the right one and the other has a wrong one.

So yeah I can see that some detail seems to be missing. I don't remember seeing anything about flagging accounts for such things, just about whether to trust nodes about items nodes have heard of.

I also agree that the desire to have their personal 20 billion ripples aquire value and their company's 80 billion ripples (minus however many it gives away) aquire value does seem decent motive for trying to establish "network effect" before all the altripples pop up.

As to the limit of 500 million accounts, that would only be if reserve requirement per account stayed at 200 ripples per account forever. Aren't reserve requirements, like transaction fees, modifiable?

-MarkM-

Its not about stability, its about saving your precious bitcoins and spending stuff that loses value constantly by design ("demurrage") so as to try to force it to be better for spending than for saving. (Everyone wants to get rid of it as it devalues b y about 5% per year. So give it out to the working class as pocket money for wages, let them (try to) buy bitcoins with it if they want to save, or food clothing shelter with it if they want food clothing shelter...

-MarkM-

Whoo, 5 coins is a lot compared to how many I have, thanks, here is my address:

147ToKc5EacoDCRZDLksXA8qVeFJFHqSVk

-MarkM-

The system turned out to have a nasty weakness, so maybe people are waiting to see if it can actually be fixed and not turn out to just keeping finding more problems before they bother to set up services that use it.

For trading back and forth with fiat maybe Ripple will soon be the way to go for any cryptocurrency to and from any fiat or any other cryptocurrency...

-MarkM-

Use DeVCoin or BBQcoin or whatever for copper, bitcoin only for gold?

-MarkM-

If you have it down to the minute details really all that is left is to crack a manual or make use of Google search if you happen not to know offhand what the exact syntax is in your chosen language for doing the exact thing you want to do, so really you might as well just do it yourself since even if you hire a code-monkey chances are they won't end up getting it quite exactly right so you'll end up having to dive in and tweak it yourself anyway.

Also you could start out by making the full site all laid out with all the graphics and the style sheets and all of that if a lot of the details you so minutely have in mind are more to do with appearance than with the exact formulae or algorithms or data items it is to deal with.

Basically by the time you get your specs down pat in minute detail you should find that you might as well have written them in machine-readable form from the start thus eliminating the need for a "translate your pseudocode to actual code" codemonkey stage from the get-go.

Also since you are the marketing guy you might as well also start polling your mailing-list subscribers to check the level of demand for the proposed site, start filling a new list even, a waiting list of people interested in being first in the doors as soon as the site opens. That way you can get a reasonable idea of how many users you can expect how fast before you even bother creating the site (as maybe you'll find out your particular subscribers are not afterall as eager for such a site as you hope/imagine).

-MarkM-

Maybe employers can use these purported "problems" of paying in bitcoins to argue that wages should be paid in freicoins, with the workers free of course to use those freicoins to buy bitcoins with if they choose to. Freicoin seems to need some lure to lure people into it, maybe employers would be good people to approach about the idea of using freicoin instead of bitcoin, if only for paying employees...

-MarkM-

I have been researching codebases for years looking for ways to do this kind of thing, but most free open source games either are not useable for lots and lots of players or are broken code, or even, such as in the case of a Travian clone I looked at, are actually pirated stuff. (The Travian clones all seem to steal the real Travian's graphics even if the actual code is new, and I think they maybe also steal all the code they can too such as .js and .css files.)

If you can point to some graphical game code that actually works and that includes free open source graphics to go with it not just the code like phase spae or crystal space or whatever its called does I'd love to take a look at it.

Meanwhile I figure we might as well go ahead with what we do have, such as text mode games and barely-illustrated web-based games. If the economic models can actually make profits they can buy graphic artists and musicians and all that later if they actually work, if they don't actually work all that bells and whistles are just a waste of money as well as a waste of bandwidth and processing power for both the server and the clients.

One thing I have been looking into is to not only throw out the "no buying and selling stuff for real money" rules but also the "no using of bots/scripts" rules: make it more like CPU-mining, where people are ideally running their characters or villages or nations or planets or whatever 24/7 thus obviously cannot be expected to be at the keyboard all the time thus are encouraged to automate as much as possible. That could even create a market for automation tools. We have already seen with bitcoins and the many altcoins that the idea of running something 24/7 that makes money even while you sleep is appealing to people, and running chracters in games might even be something CPUs can do better than GPUs or ASICs can do thus also serve the demographic that keep clamouring for ways to revive CPU mining.

I agree that monthly fees might not be ideal, for one thing I would prefer not to have to deal with such rapid recurrence of billing nor such short duration of subscriptions, also I think that if you do it by the year there could be a greater chance of more people wimping out before they hit their breakeven spot, for example if expected ROI timing is such that you expect it to take 9 months to recover the cost of creating a character a lot of people might nit stick it out long enough to reap the profits of continuing on after that for the three remaining months of a one year subscription. (In an business you usually don't expect to make money the first few years so even this 9 months initial time needed to hope to break even is very good compared to normal businesses, and of course you could make business the major focus of the game itself.)

You maybe also should consider whether you want vast numbers of players most of whom are just a waste of bandwidth or less players but all of them paying players. That might depend a lot on who your target players are, there are players who actually are even suggesting using auctions to price the creation of new characters because they are confident they can run characters better than most other players thus that the more money players are putting in the more money they themselves, as the best players, will be able to take out...

-MarkM-

No, that is just a warning, and its about the inclusion of main.h on line 11 not about the line the checkpoints are on.

However I am having trouble running a node from scratch to get the blockchain from my running node, because for some reason it keeps disconnecting from the running node and the running node's log isn't even mentionining there was a connection attempt. The new one connects, sends a version message, then disconnects. Since both are using the same executable it does not seem reasonable that they would disagree about what a version message should look like so I am kind of puzzled what their problem is.

Meanwhile someone out there is creating new blocks at a fast rate, its not me my CPU mining is only getting a small fraction of the blocks.

I am trying restarting my spare copy, its log says "Rescanning last 283474 blocks (from block 0)...", it already has a lot of the blockchain because I use it sometimes when I am worried I might run out of connections during the night as you cannot mine without conections, having a spare running makes sure I do have a connection. So I know that copy did used to connect ok to my normal running node.

My normal running node is also acting that way when it tries to connect to the IP address you gave me to -addnode with: I connect, send you a version message, then disconnect.

-MarkM-

That is the one that I am using, and the checkpoint you showed earlier was already in the older one that is also still on my sourceforge site.

I wonder if it is possible to put in a bad checkpoint and never discover the fact, that is, could it be possible that mine has never actually checked whether its existing blockchain that it already has matches all the checkpoints, even though I always use rescan every time I start the daemon?

I will try starting a spare copy with no blockchain so it will have to get the entire chain from my current copy, that will presumably make sure it really does check it all...

-MarkM-

Okay, I have restarted with your node added.

-MarkM-

Looks like someone started mining way back in the past, that checkpoint is from way back last year, current block number now is 283878

-MarkM-

I already wrote earlier that although the help output lists port 59333 that number is not actually found elsewhere in the code, thus presumably it actually uses some other port and who-ever changed the port did not change the help text to match.

-MarkM-

Actually some machines have firewalls on the machine itself too, so as well as checking router there can also be a need to to check the machine's own firewall o allow connections to the port.

Trying to find out the port number is getting annoying, in most coins I just grep for "fTestNet" and find a C oneliner conditional statement of the x ? a : b form that checks fTestNet and sets one port number or another. For some reason I am not finding that or equivalent in BBQcode so far.

I did getnewaddress to get a BBQcoin address for myself: bSPSqjm3PyjXoaGhBthbTTSjxMySUXMLrx

-MarkM-

Oh gosh we are gonna start using multiple different three letter codes per altcoin now?

I thought BBQ was the usual code for BBQcoin?

I guess I must have gotten lazy about writing altcoin names with their three letter code incorporated in the name by capitalisation to constantly keep people aware of them, like BiTCoin, DeVCoin, GRouPcoin, BBQcoin etc etc etc...

-MarkM-

Source code is in BBQcoin's subdirectory of my sourceforge download site https://sourceforge.net/projects/galacticmilieu/files/

Depending on which version of the plug and play router-control library you have installed (or whether you have even installed it at all) different altcoins can give problems compiling in the plug and play, as at some point the number of arguments one or more functions in the plug and play lbirary changed its expected number of args, so different altcoins, depending on the age of the bitcoin version they forked from, need different versions of the plug and play lib.

I do not bother to try to have two versions of the lib, if I find a given coin will not compile due to wrong version of that lib I simply compile without that lib. (Instead of setting USE_UPNP to zero or one you set it empty to not include that lib in the build.)

Compiling without the lib is fine for me because neither version of the lib has ever worked with my articular router, but obviously the more people who don't use the lib the more people will have to screw around with their router manually to get an incomping port thus, likely, the less incoming port equipped servers altcoins in general are likely to end up with.

-MarkM-

Make sure your router routes the port to the machine on your local network that runs the daemon.

What the port number is I do not know, help makes a claim that it is 59333, however grep finds no occurrence of that number anywhere in the code that looks like it is the actual setting of the port, so I suspect someone probably changed the actual port in the code but failed to change the number the help text outputs to match it. Once upon a time I made a list of the ports all the coins use but that might have been before bbqcoin came along, not sure, I cannot find the list now at home though I did also post it as a thread here once upon a time.

-MarkM-

It never died, as far I can know it just kept plugging away all along. Ignored coins are nice for people with low hashing power as they can occasionally get a block, thus enjoy some of the fun of mining. Even with just a CPU!

(I0Coin and GRouPcoin are getting that easy lately too, so if people do jump on BBQcoin making it too difficult there are still those, and those you can merged-mine so you don't even have to "divert" power to mine them.)

-MarkM-

The plug and play controls for routers do not work with my router so it is unable to set up an incoming port for me, it would probably be helpful if everyone who can makes sure to set up the incoming port so people who cannot do incoming can still find connections.

As it is mine can reach out and find someone if that someone has their incoming port open, but mine can only do outgoing connections.

I have compiled in another checkpoint, now I just need to package it up again to put on my sourceforge download site.

-MarkM-