As someone pointed out in the "kill RUCoin" thread, BBQcoin is indeed still running. Its difficulty is low enough that even just using its built-in mining on a CPU you can still find blocks.

About connections, yesterday I was seeing three, today only two. Difficulty was up at 0.0055+ with three connections, now down to 0.0011+ with two connections. I don't point GPUs at it, I just let it chug along using CPU with its built in miner, finding a block occassionally.

Basically it is to litecoin as terracoin is to bitcoin: a no-merged-mining clone so any hashing you use on BBQcoin isn't going toward litecoin just like hashing you direct at terracoin isn't going toward the entire family of merged mining you can do alongside bitcoin. That is why I just chug it on CPU for fun: my GPU is working on a whole bunch of coins at once.

EDIT: Updated sources are at http://sourceforge.net/projects/galacticmilieu/files/ as from time to time I add a new checkpoint to various low difficulty chains to help protect against any someday attempt at a massive-timetravel attack against them. I guess if people are starting to pick up on this coin again its about time to set another checkpoint...

-MarkM-

Yes, I tried that, but the step where you run grunt aborts, even with sybolic links put in place to make the grunt.js file also be regarded as Gruntfile.js or as Gruntfile.coffee as the latest versions of grunt apparently want.


-MarkM-

I also cloned the github repo of the client but its README says nothing aboyt how to build it and there is no obvious build system such as a Makefile or a buld tool's .xml file or anything really giving any clue how to build it.

I tried pointing a browser at its index.html but none of the links on that seem to do anything.

So any idea how to build the client or if its already built being a script language not a compiled language thus maybe just needed something to tell it where to build its data files or something? Could it maybe even just be a permissions thing due to root owning the git clone in /usr/src whereas browser is run by a normal user or should it look in browser user's homedir by default? Or what? Anyone manage to get it to work? If so how?

-MarkM-

So how do you / did you get them?

At ripple.com there is a link for asking for 300 or more but it just tells me my address and leaves it unclear who is intended to send them to me.

-MarkM-

I managed to create a test account at ripple.com but I don't see any way to tell it about a currency, it just has a list of ones someone else already invented, which does not include most altcoins - in fact it doesn't list any of the altcoins.

I thought this was supposed to be generic so one could even tell it about shares and community currencies and so on and create trust pathways denominated in them?

Also it has an option to have someone send you ripples but the link to email asking for some has no email address to send the email to.

-MarkM-

Altcoin *are* co-operation, or at least attempts at making something that can be co-operated alongside bitcoin, especially the merged-mined chains that co-operate in doing more with the same hashing-power.

Blockchain based currencies can be traded among much more conveniently than trading any of them with fiat, in fact at any point where you touch fiat you tend to run into all kinds of problems, so really it is the proliferation of fiats that the altcoins are competing against, fiat users already use something other than bitcoin, altcoins just give them something other than fiat to use if they persist in not using bitcoins.

Trading can be fun, the more altcoins there are the more interesting trading scenarios forex games can present without resorting to fiat and with the currencies they trade being usable across platforms just like bitcoins.

-MarkM-

It is only stop loss if there is a loss.

As someone already pointed out they went from $1 each up to $2 each, with a bubble inbetween. Any point inbetween where it was momentarily going down was a risky point where if you sold you might not manage to buy back in before it skyrocketed to $50 or $100 or more leaving you no opportunity to buy back in. Also, if one is buying with hash power rather than buying with fiat then you are basically buying 24/7 using hash/difficulty averaging so if difficulty goes down you buy faster if it goes up you buy slower.

Hmm, send money to some random scammer on the internet or buy more GPUs, let me think about that...

Plus we already proved it can go to over $30, even before it has hardly even started to catch on and develop infrastructure. Any moment people will come back to their senses and it will scoot up to $1000 or so, want to be the guy who just sold for less than $100 when that happens?

-MarkM-

Such ridiculously obvious ideas are patentable?

That is crazy.

-MarkM-

We tried that long long ago, remember? Presumably it is one of the ones that we never managed to get working?

Or it is the one that used to work before they put out new binaries that are not compatible with what that code builds.

-MarkM-

Hmm grep does find one mention of it in main src dir:

grep scrypt *
crypter.h:which may require more parameters (such as scrypt).
crypter.h:    // 1 = scrypt()
crypter.h:    // such as the various parameters to scrypt

-MarkM-

EDIT: I looked at the mining code, it definitely only does the normal old bitcoin style mining, no scrypt.

-MarkM-

How much more is "way more"

Is it more than you get by merged-mining bitcoin, namecoin, devcoin, ixcoin, i0coin, groupcoin and coiledcoin all at once using the same hashing-power?

-MarkM-

Are you saying RUCoin keeps making coins forever like devcoin and groupcoin, instead of lowering the minting over time until it eventually stops making new coins so only a fixed known in advance total will ever exist?

One thing I don't like about RUCoin is if they can one day arbitrarily paste scrypt in on top of the original plain old bitcoin style hashing they might as easily one day decide to create another couple of million coins for themselves in some special hard-coded block, or change the total coins that will ever exist, or basically screw with it any way they choose... Solidcoin comes to mind for good reason.

-MarkM-

The link "or you can grab the source from here" links to an ancient and non-working archive of code, I don't think that code even had both types of hashing, I think it was back when the thing was just normal bitcoin-style hashing. I already built that and tried it long ago, it does not work.

Checking my /usr/src tree though I also see I have a git setup for rucoin, and doing a git pull there just now it just pulled a bunch of stuff. Not sure yet where it pulls from, I don't even know offhand how to ask git where it is pulling from, will try guesses like git status or maybe resort to git help...

Hmm actually it seems to be coming from https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin so maybe isnt rucoin at all... It has local changes that would be over-written. I guess it is just a copy of bitcoin that I had started once upon a time to hack at to set it to the ports etc that rucoin was supposedly using way back then.

Definitely way back then there was no scrypt involved.

-MarkM-

So you have to install some specific version of some specific flavour of linux into a virtual machine in order to get it to run?

Where do you even get it itself? Does it include a whole VM image with all the right versions of all the dependencies or something like that?

I have to compile all the coin types myself because I use Fedora, and Fedora does not include elliptic crypto in its openssl, so I have to make a custom version of openssl that I compile specially to provide the elliptic curve stuff. Installing a virtualisation system and running a virtual machine seems like overkill security, how likely is it that running it as user "ruc" with no access to other usernames' blockchains and wallets could give it access to other coins' wallets?

-MarkM-

Hmm maybe it is more like bimetalism where the rich get to exploit everyone else by see-saw-ing back and forth between "Van Gogh is the best" and "Picasso is the best", having a choice gives them mobility so if the poor end up with 51%+ of any one thing the rich can pooh-pooh it as common and shift their focus to something more exclusive, as in something the rich own the majority of.

Maybe in a way no so very different from building factories out west to sell housing near them to workers who have to migrate from the east, meanwhile buying up the houses left behind in the east, then later move the factories back east and sell the houses there they bought cheap back to the working class that has to again migrate to "where the money is"...

-MarkM-

Consider someone who has a million or a few million bitcoins sitting arouind, and is thinking of buying a mansion or estate.

If they buy it with bitcoins, chances are a heck of a lot of those bitcoins will jit the markets, suppressing the price, and thus the perceived value to many people, of bitcoins.

Suppose instead they used their bitcoins as collateral for a loan, and bought the mansion with what they borrowed.

Again, chances are whatever they bought the mansion with would end up back on the market. If they use fiat, the fiat market is maybe huge enough that just one less than a hundred million dollar mansion or estate won't make a blip on the market.

But if there were enough alternatives out there so that one could use one(s) that are not as vast markets as the fiat markets, maybe their market(s) might blip, suppressing the price allowing the mansion-buyer to pick back up what they borrowed cheaper than the price is was valued at when they bought the mansion, thus effectively getting them the mansion cheaper than it would have been otherwise.

Meanwhile their bitcoin might be up another 25%, which they would have missed out on if they had parted with them...

A problem this scale reveals of course is that bitcoins are so cheap still that one cannot likely buy more than a few such relatively cheap estates without blipping the market.

(If "why not mortgage the estate itself" comes into it think shiploads of cocaine instead of estates maybe.)

-MarkM-

Borrow devcoins, buy bitcoins with them, use the bitcoins as more collateral to borrow more devcoins, buy bitcoins with them. When devcoins experience a dip to half or even a third of their value as measured in bitcoins, as has happened lately, snap up the cheap devcoins to pay back the loans.

Basically it makes no sense to borrow the, or one of the, fastest-appreciating assets with which to buy things, if instead you can borrow something that goes up in value slower or even drops in value.

Given that devcoins are now at about a third of the price they were at a few weeks or months ago, while bitcoins have increased maybe 30% or 1/3 in value over the same time, it makes a lot of sense to have been borrowing devcoins to spend instead of spending bitcoins,

When devcoins seem to be about as low as they are going for now would maybe be a great time to buy up a bunch to pay back the loans. This plan was massively profitable for those who did it, compared to spending their bitcoins.

-MarkM-

It is useful to be able to store value in bitcoins and use that as collateral to borrow something else to actually spend.

It is a pain having to have that something else lack the convenience of cryptocurrency, thus it is good to have several cryptocurrencies to choose among when picking what to borrow. You are looking for one that is not climbing in value as fast as bitcoins are, basically.

Thus I do not see multiple cryptocurrencies as "competition" so much as "symbiosis" or "enhancement". Using bitcoins as collateral to borrow bitcoins does not seem to make as much sense as borrowing something else, with which if more bitcoins is what you actually want you can then buy more bitcoins. Having to use fiat as that second asset is not as nice as using another cryptocurrency.

-MarkM-

The downloads section seems to only have a windows setup exe, no sign of source code so it can be built for other platforms?

Also it seems to be a -qt, no sign of the daemon.

-MarkM-

The way they do it seems to be working fine, do you see any problems with it?

-MarkM-