If it was merged-mine-able I would add it to my merged-mining mix but since it is not it does not make sense to me to mine it instead of mining many coins at once (including bitcoin itself) with the same hashing-power.

-MarkM-

If there are any three-character names not squatted then squatting has barely started. Are all the two-character ones squatted yet? Since in general shorter is better the fact you cannot think of anything offhand that some three characters is an acronym for doesn't mean it isn't a great acronym for something you haven't yet heard of.

-MarkM-

Since you seem really to be more interested in the initial distribution of coins than in the plain old securing of the blckchain long after all the coins have been minted and initially distributed, maybe hashing is not really necessary for your purpose.

Thus how about using non-simple games to distributed the coins initially, instead of using the same hashing (or proof of stake, or whatever) that you use for securing the blockchain?

Surely there must be games that CPUs are better at than GPUs are? Or are there? I do not mean simplistic games like poker or blackjack or maybe even chess, I am thinking of things like MUDs...

-MarkM-

Isn't this the kind of thing namecoin should work well for?

Put the IP address and port number for your torrent, or for a datafile about the torrent, into the namecoin dataspace?

-MarkM-

This was never intended as an exchange, the most interesting parts really were probably the mobile device banking and payments and the stuff for accepting payments on websites. Basically by having accounts denominated in coins one can do instant payments since the blockchains are not involved it is simply normal banking using accounts.

-MarkM-

I never saw their online demo it was not running or something.

All I did was rename the single currency provided to whatever name I wanted to use for a currency.

TO set up a second currency would be a lot hardewr as you would have to figure out what all the various types of transactions are for so that you can figure out whether your new currency actually needs each type, or you'd have to just blindly copy over one by one each type without knowing what they are for just in case you actually do turn out to need them. Possibly really you'd only need a few, but if so which ones?

I think most people using the thing use it for just one currency, their own made up local currency they are promoting, so that just renaming the built in one to whatever they want to call their local currency probably is fine for most of them.

Basically it is a bank not an exchange, so for example you could name its currency "devcoins" and let people use it as a devcoin bank, where all the accounts are denominated in devcoins; or you could call the currency bitcoins similarly.

But automating the creating of balances in the bank based on receipt of real coins on a blockchain is something you would have to add yourself if you wanted it, just like you would have to add in something yourself probably if you wanted to credit people's accounts when they deposit paper fiat money or metal fiat coins in some kind of deposit machine like an ATM that accepts deposits.

Actually I think usually fiat deposits are only provisionally credited anyway since until a person empties the machine and checks whether the deposit envelopes actually do contain what they claimed to contain it is mostly courtesy to pretend you trust the depositor to have deposited what they say they did. I suppose blockchains are actually an improvement on that, so hey if you want to go ahead and build a module that will somehow link a specified blockchain with a specified currency type and/or account type to automate deposits that would be great...

-MarkM-

They were not images of virtual machines, I simply ran three copies of the software on three different ports and pointed .onion addresses at them. By now there are probably newer versions of cyclos so might as well grab latest version if you want to take a look at it again.

http://www.cyclos.org/

I used the ready to run version that doesnt need you to set up MySQL etc to run it.

-MarkM-

No, it was just a test, anyone who was really interested move on with it already. It was on an extra machine too that I cannot keep running all the time until such time as it makes enough to pay for the electricity it uses, which wasn't happening.

-MarkM-

I don't know how or why devcoin.org managed to point to bitcoinaddict, I thought maybe it was a godaddy parked domain side effect or something, as last night I tried to use godaddy's domain control systems to point devtome.org at devtome.com and also to point devcoin.org there too. Maybe now it has propagated things will look different...

Hmm no, for me both still point at bitcoinaddict somehow.

Last night I even tried killing my browser in case it was not asking nameservice having already looked it up earlier, but I would have thought by now it should have picked up the new info since godaddy's tool seemed to claim it was giving a time to live of only one hour to the DNS records meaning all nameservers everywhere should not expect it to remain unchanged longer than one hour at a time.

Also strange is my commandline host lookup does claim to see the new IP address.

I had to direct the raw domains by using IP address of devtome.com because their tool would not let me set up @ as a CNAME type record; the www hostnames though I made as CNAMEs pointing to www.devtome.com

et my browser does not show devtome.com as being bitcoinaddict.

Maybe what is happening is the actual webserver at that IP address is using the name requested by the browser, instead of just the IP address requested, to decide what page to show, and has bitcoinaddict set up as the default when a browser asks for a domain that is not actually set up on that webserver? Basically it would be using name based virtual hosts instead of IP based virtual hosts, if that is the case then the decision as cto what page to show is up to the webserver, which also means that the redirecting of devcoin.org to point at the devtome page about devcoin, which is where Unthinkingbit actually wants it to point, is a task for the webserver admin, as is making sure that when browsers visit that page asking for devtome.org it ashould give them the corresponding page (the actual page they asked for) of devtome.com even though they actually asked for the page as if it were at devtome.org

-MarkM-

What I was actually looking for way back when I first encountered bitcoin was free open source general purpose trading software I could use to implement trading houses that warehouse virtual goods they and other players own, and broker trades. These warehouses were to be associated with a virtual geography so that in addition to the basic wheeler-dealer trading game they would in effect operate as they would also serve as infrastructure for a transport tycoon layer that would emerge once players hit the limits of the wheeler-dealing they could do using goods that do not move from one virtual location to another.

That is, initially players would be able to trade X amount of substance, item or commodity Y located at one "location" for V amount of substance, item or commodity W located at the same "location" or a completely distinct/separate/different "location". Once that was up and running hopefully it would create a market for "transport", that is, the ability to actually change the "location" of substances, items or commodities.

This is actually also why I got into the whole Open Transactions thing: it was the only thing I found that seemed to promise eventual generic markets. However my players actually were not all really interested in the kind of "market" in which "the house" passes on the arbitrage opportunities to its customers; some of them much preferred the idea that if they owned "the house" they would be able to sell stuff at the highest prices they could get for it while buying stuff at the lowest prices they could get it for, which struck them as a much more natural and normal way for a merchant prince to operate than admitting to customers "oh actually that is available cheaper than the price you are willing to pay for it", which is how they perceive the currently standard bitcoin exchanges as operating.

I am still slowly working toward these same basic functionalities, using whatever free open source code I can find. For example CoffeeMUD, due to its built in auction systems and the ability of played characters to learn marketeering skill thus becoming able to act like shopkeepers, is looking interesting / potentially-useful lately (especially so due to it also having routines for "producing" goods as well as selling them).

The initial case, in which trading takes place but not "transport", is similar to what happens when virtual goods are located in games that do not provide means of moving one game's goods to another game. The "transport" case could come into effect in such situations once a means of exporting objects from one game and importing them into another was implemented. Obviously this is not all that likely if the different games are operated by different administrations, but that just serves to motivate investigation and testing of all free open source games to try to find ones that actually work, so that as many different games as possible can be made available for eventual implementation of this "transport" functionality to allow actual shipping of things between games instead of merely "I will trade you X in that game for Y in this game" type trades.

This has proven to be a long and slow-moving quest but it is still ongoing. Unfortunately the testing part has discovered that a lot of free open source multiplayer game code does not really work, so it is also developing backlogs of "things to fix in various codebases if we ever get this going well enough to bother fixing them".

-MarkM-

If mining performance is poor though you are kind of making the players overpay if you do it that way.

It would actually be more efficient to get money from them by whatever means and invest that money into ASIC mining gear so you can merged mine efficiently instead of wasting player electricity inefficiently, and you could maybe even throw in a new additional merged mined coin in your merged mining mix that is specifically for the game and is the main one the players are after.

-MarkM-

I think something is wrong, the file my script generated looks like this:


Yet your recent post in devcoin thread seemed to say I am to get 12 shares for word count in this round, I do not see 12 shares in this generated file.

This is the script I use, I believe you said you also copied it to a wiki somewhere:


If the script is not doing everything it should, for how many rounds has it been skipping something it should have been doing, I wonder...

-MarkM-

Actually I am thinking more of cryptocurrencies in general, basically resources that you can take home from the game or even take with you into other games. A big problem with many games is stuff being worthless because endless amounts of it can be conjured from no-where; if each of the "resources" players use to "build" everything (stone, metal, wood, whatever, a few basic things everything else is built out of) was a blockchain based currency then the total amount of each that exists across all games that choose to use the stuff would maybe help combat "MUDflation".

I am far from convinced that bitcoin is the best choice of blockchain based currency for game use simply because so far it has been mostly anyone other than bitcoiners who actually get into the things. BBQcoin might actually turn out to be one of the best choices since it was created expressly for having fun with and it is noticeably neglected by "serious" folk, so maybe gamers can have fun with it without worrying, at least for some time yet, about some "serious" mining operation deciding to come eat up all the coins that are still to be minted.


I am definitely not looking for fly by night few minutes at a time people. I am in fact nowadays looking into a kind of "CPU mining" concept where we make CPUs be able to work better than special purpose circuits by making actual gameplay be a means of earning, with gameplay that is sufficiently variable that CPUs should be better able to play than ASICs or FPGAs.

The Ixians are a nice example, someone decided that Ixcoins sounded like a good kind of currency for a people known as Ixians to use, so has been creating Ixians in various games, possibly with some idea of relating it potentially to the planet Ix in Frank Herbert's DUNE series. Over the years maybe that faction might grow and end up making Ixcoins a widely recognised currency at least wherever Ixians are found.

-MarkM-

That law is for general purpose machines, in the supposedly "ultimate" robot story they actually dropped those laws when they went to special purpose machine such as robot earthworms and robot fly-catching birds and such, as they simply are not necessary for such special-purpose devices. So they are more like laws for CPUs than for ASICs.

-MarkM-

How does that script update anything? It looks like it just checks a charity file than recreates some already existing links if the charity file is new.

Don't the actual receiver files have to be built out of not just the charity file but some other files?

-MarkM-

Well here is one idea then... put them up for sale with the buyer not only specifying how many they will buy for how much each but also the charity to which the fiat they buy them with is to be donated. Still some kind of vetting of purported "charities" is probably needed though so people who have thoughtfully set themselves up nice cushy jobs as employees of self-created "non profit corporations" can't just use it as a faucet to help feather their nice little "non profit" nests.

-MarkM-

Since the minting phase of a coin is supposedly merely a convenient mechanism for getting coins out there preparatory to real use, the fact that the initially minted coins sell for a pittance should be seens as a good thing not a bad thing, and the fact that the miners actually do therefore put it on the market at all instead of hoarding it is also presumably a good thing. Tons of coins available dirt cheap should presumably allow more people to be able tp pick up a few so that once the minting phases is over hopefully lots and lots of people will have some of the coins, which is supposedly the purpose of handing them out by mining in the first place...

-MarkM-

I thought it requires a majority of the copies to agree with each other, thus with only two sites left running there is no two out of three agreement as to the correct value of the file?

Though indeed if the two copies is does have are identical that ought one would think to count. But maybe even though copies of the same build of the file were uploaded by all three uploaders, maybe of the two copies it is able to get one uses MSDOS line-terminators and the other uses Unix line-terminators, or something like that?

What kind of comparison between the files is it relying on, just the local contents as to how many shares each adress gets in what order or something that whatspace could make appear different to it?

Or is it simply just not even caring whether two of two agree since it lacks an odd number of sites and does not think to itself aha two of two or two of three either way is a majority... ?

-MarkM-

In other words banks already use Ripple, but they use a chickenscratches in clay / inkblots / pencil and paper era implementation of it...

-MarkM-

Hmm weird, offer on Vircurex right now says BTC/LTC    0.00581002 which looks to me as if it means one litecoin is 5.81002 thousandths of a bitcoin, and that is offer, not ask. SO I do not know how 170 litecoins per thousand comes out as in any way similar to one bitcoin per thousand.

But I am not really awake yet so maybe I am seeing it a wrong way round or something.

A bitcoin per thousand freicoin sounds like a decent enough price to me that it could pry a few thousand freicoin lose from my cold dead hands or even when I actually do wake up my warm ones.

-MarkM-