The fastest-growing coins lately have been the ones who protected themselves against the kinds of attacks blockchains are vulnerable to.

Open Transactions abstracts away all the technical stuff, allowing the user to deal with fiat currencies, grams of gold and silver and such, shares of projects corps companies and such, basically anything fungible and of value, and even non-fungible things are also on the roadmap, things that will involve deeds so that each individual one of  the thing (each house, each car, each ship, etc) can be different from other things of its type.

Thus it does not matter to the client whether any particular thing moves away from blockchain representation to protect itself from blockchain attacks, or moves back to blockchain format once it has enough transaction volume to attract miners or enough ASICs of its own to defend itself or whatever.

All users really care about is how many of what do they have and how much is that worth.

Having to run a whole bunch of different clients depending on which thing happens to use which format at any given moment is just technical crap that should not get in the way of the user being able to pick up whatever is growing fastest in value whether it happens at any particular moment to be a "currency", a "commodity", a "share", a 'bond", a 'fiat", a "blockchain coin" or anything else of value.

(Basically what a thing is, how it is implemented, etc are server-side issues; all clients care about is how many do I have, how much are things worth, and how many can I get of what in return for what.)

-MarkM-

Okay, so which as-is cryptocurrencies have servers that support thin clients?

Seems to me either a multi-coin thin-client-server is needed or for each currency a thin-client-server is needed.

Until servers exist to connect to clients aren't much use...

-MarkM-

So all the more reason to make Open Transactions clients more user-friendly.

All the technical differences between currencies, shares and other assets of value are abstracted away, letting the user deal with the two things about all such things that makes any of them of any interest: their VALUE and HOW MANY YOU HAVE of each.

-MarkM-

Most normal people apparently have trouble even having one blockchain, let alone several blockchains.

So probably you need one of the thin client systems adapted to be able to work with any chain, along with its server-side system.

Once such servers are present for all chains, having just one copy of its client be able to work with all the different chains' servers should be do-able.

Or you can go the Open Transactions route, letting people deal with many many many assets, not just cryptocurrencies but pretty much anything, all from one client. Open Transactions abstracts away the problem of having to deal with all the many different servers serving all the many different blockchains, letting folk just directly deal with accounts much like having bank accounts denominated in many different currencies. It also has markets, so any time you come up with a new currency you instantly also have markets for it against all existing currencies.

Many people might not even bother running an Open Transactions server of their own to handle their own accounts, they might be perfectly happy just using other people's servers, maybe spreading their balances around across many many servers to distribute risk.

-MarkM-

this hostile attitude is very bad for business.

Logarithmic-scale plot of how much other stuff is worth as measured in bitcoins:

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/plotbtc.html

logarithmic-scale plot of same stuff plus also showing bitcoins themselves, as measured in the highest valued one of the lot:

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/plotmbc.html

WARNING: the logarithmic scale makes skyrocketing exponential growth look like just a slight upward curve. Similarly it makes the decline of bitcoin value look like a gentle downward trend instead of a cataclysmic fall from heaven.

(On this second plot, bitcoin was top dog on the left, but has now been surpassed in value by four alts so far...)

-MarkM-

Are you assuming a person would be running damons for all the coins they are interested in?

If so, there is a start in the test gUI of the Open transactions project.

It could do with some integrating into the rest of the functions of the gui, but it does at least let you tell it the ip address, port number, username and password to use to connect to the coin daemon's RpC port so you can use it with almost any altchain or with bitcoin.

Markets in which you can offer to buy any asset using any other asset to buy with, and at ny power-of-ten scale, are also in that GUI.

Since fellowtraveler regards the GUI as only a test GUI, and he can now do at the command-line anything the GUI can do, improving the GUI is no longer a main goal for him, so it is time for people who can make it more user-friendly to get to work on it.

Screenshots and source code: https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Moneychanger

-MarkM-

Ahhh, I had forgotten that applying the merged mining patches is a breaking change! Apologies, and thanks for reminding me.

-MarkM-

That attitude has probably turned more capital away from bitcoin than bitcoin's current market cap, maybe several times its market cap.

For quite a while bitcoin was growing in value even despite such atrocious attitude, and the very fact it was growing in value faster than most alternatives made it reasonable and practical to use bitcoin as collateral against which to borrow something that wasn't appreciating so fast to use as spending-money (even to buy more bitcoins as more collateral to borrow more spending cash and so on).

Since bitcoin was overtaken by various alternatives it began to maybe make sense to use the even faster appreciating alternatives as collateral but still there are some that are not appreciating as fast as bitcoin so still bitcoin is maybe not the best one to borrow as spending cash.

Having alternatives is good. Maybe some day some of them will become relatively stable against certain brands of fiat even so that one could even begin to hedge against various fiats with them, though attempts so far to accomplish that failed due to their constantly rising above the value of the fiat, it simply became too expensive to try to keep suppressing them back down toward parity with fiat.

-MarkM-

Bitcoin cannot be merged mined as a secondary chain.

That seems to basically be deliberate opposition to people's ability to simply and easily keep all the secondary chains up to date with the latest fixes and code improvements in the bitcoin codebase.

So it looks like it is the bitcoiners who are the ones acting out of spite or hostility or somesuch, they seem determined to try to sabotage the whole altcoin field.

Next time someone figures out how to apply the merged mining as a secondary chain patches to the latest bitcoin to update some secondary chain, the patches should be incorporated into the mainline bitcoin code, hopefully along with also abstracting all visible to the user names and images identifying the specific chain/coin into one place for easy changing of that element of the cosmetics.

p2pool gives only the first/main/primary chain the benefits of mining as part of a pool, the rest of the chains in your merge are in effect solo mined. Thus being able to choose any of the chains as the primary one would let miners choose which chain they want the smoothed out variance provided by the pool on, the rest being a crapshoot as to whether a block will end up getting found in any given year or month or week or day or whatever.

-MarkM-

What marketplace tools have bounties created for bitcoin that are not usable with other chains?

For most chains all tht changes from a tool's perspective is the port number to make RPC calls to and the word, letters and symbol used to refer to the currency, so surely the bountying-up bitcoin did serves almost all chains?

isn't changing costmetics such as what word/name to display, and configuration settings such as what port to connect to so trivially simple that it is really just part of your desgner's work in putting costmetics on a tool for a specific company's deployment of the tool, thus pretty much something each end-user (marketplace) will need to do for themself anyway as normal part of 'branding'?

(e.g. your designer will want to edit look and feel anyway, so while setting font how hard is it for them to also set what word to use to refer to the currency???)

-MarkM-

If there are quite a few nodes running, and they are running updated code that includes a checkpoint that happened since you got your coins, then possibly your coins might be reasonably safe as long as an attacker does not publish a different copy of the node code that contains a different set of checkpoints that feature their fork of the chain instead of the version of the chain in which you got your coins.

Consider for example an Open Transactions server that obtained a bunch of coins many many months ago, and several new versions of the client have come out since then, each one adding another checkpoint which favours the chain in which those coins were obtained.

To reverse those coins would involve going massively far back in time and would be refuted by the last several checkpoints that are already hard-coded into the current batch of nodes that are currently running.

Possibly in that circumstance the tokens the Open Transactions server is backing with those ancient well established coins can be considered to be fairly securely backed by actual coins. Such tokens could even in some ways be considered more secure than any recently mined actual coins.

Still though if a time ever came when there was no more demand/need for the tokens, so that it was time to liquidate, deleting the tokens and sending out the actual coins they represent, an attacker would at that point have an opportunity to try to mess up the actual transfer on the blockchain of those coins. So the liquidation could take a while, involving sending out the coins then waiting a few hardcoded checkpoints before regarding them as having been reasonably securely sent to their new owners.

This is basically why I try to release new versions of node software from time to time with new checkpoints coded in. I hope that over time doing so will eventually make it reasonable to consider the coins backing my tokens as actually fairly secure in their cold wallets so that the tokens are somewhat securely backed by actual coins.

-MarkM-

Coloured coins are definitely looking better than more chains.

Marking more chains has already been tried, quite a few already found that even with merged mining it is not practical. You end up having to give away the coins to miners, in which case you might as well simply use a chain which already does that and actually has some miners because of it.

Coloured coins will be especially useful for tokens that are not being given away wholesale but, rather, are backed, like shares for example.

-MarkM-

You still don't seem to understand that using a proof of work based blockchain is horribly expensive. You need to solve the problem of how you are going to pay the huge cost of securing a chain. Compared to that creating a chain is already trivial. There are in fact already so many chains around that if you need one for something you can just adopt it, the hard part is securing it.

Coloured coins are actually looking much better for every idiot to make up some worthless crap tokens with, since at least they can be secure.

-MarkM-

That hardest part will be applying the merged mining patch to a recent copy of bitcoin, since bitcoin still lacks the ability to be a secondary chain when merged mining.

-MarkM-

Yes it does seem that liquidcoin is being described here. So basically this has already been done. How is it turning out so far?

-MarkM-

This whole argument seems a bit absurd since bitcoin the blockchain is itself in effect created credit and bitcoin the free open source software is a free to use credit-creation system.

Take a good look at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

I think maybe no one has yet. The figures there continue to amaze me.

Something somehow does seem to have been massively suppressing bitcoin exchange rates but fortunately it maybe also has diverted attention from some of its spin-offs.

If there are not enough bitcoins to go around, or, as seems to have been the case for a year or more, bitcoin is somehow failing to represent enough value to serve as a useful unit of account, make more spin-offs.

-MarkM-

How is it that you imagine Open Transactions in any way preventing you from doing what Nefario did?

Also of course if you wish to improve the documentation you are urged to do so, it is all open source afterall.

-MarkM-

The point is people are not trading assets in the first place.

It does not matter how many non existent assets are not being traded on the servers, what matters is actual assets actually being traded.

Demonstrate that trading is happening and doubtless more servers will spring up seeking some of that trade.

So far running a server it simply a financial loss, a cost with no income to offset it.

Generate lots of sales of your assets on Open Transactions servers and the usage tokens that brings in will doubtless inspire others to put up more servers to get some of those usage token sales.

But right now usage tokens even are not working so oops no income in sight yet at all for people running servers.

If you refuse to even demonstrate your assets on the demo server why should anyone go to the expense and trouble of setting up another server for you to similarly refuse to issue your assets on? You have not demonstrated a real willingness to issue any assets on any servers let alone that allowing you to issue your assets on a server would result in any income for the server. Show us some actual traffic, some actual trade in your assets. The more usage tokens your users consume trading your assets the more attractive your assets will be to more servers and maybe then competition for hosting your assets will arise among servers.

-MarkM-

There really is not much demand for Open Transactions servers yet.

Maybe once more people have working clients for it there will be some point in adding more servers but so far the two servers that already exist are pretty much sitting idle other than private person to person transfers between Galactic Milieu players/nations/corps.

Anyone who wants to issue assets can do so on the OTdemo server, for example, so there is no need for them to face the problems of trying to run a server and keep it up to date yet, instead they can first focus on getting adept at the actual issuing of assets part, which few people have managed to master so far. Presumably the point of setting up yet another server would be to issue assets on it? But so far no one has really even managed to issue any serious assets so even if they did fire up even hundreds more servers so what, they all would be sitting empty with no assets on them...

-MarkM-

Speaking of growth, I added some GNUplot plots to the tables at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

See for example the DVC based plots http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/plotdvc.html and http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/plotsharesindvc.html

-MarkM-