I still do not understand the puroose.

If it is to serve as a receiver file repository it should have a DNS name, putting IP addresses into the files that people will be using for years to come to look up the historical repositories of receiver files is not a good idea.

Even putting a host that was on DNS turned out badly because the guy flew by night within I think less than even a single year.

If it is not intended to serve as one of the repositories the clients consult to reach a consensus as to who receives how many shares of which blocks, then I do not understand why we even need to know about it.

-MarkM-

The premining controversy is easily solved, just use bitcoins for bounties like Unthinkingbit to get DeVCoin built.

This seems like more work than DeVCoin but still a few hundred bitcoins might well get the interest of a coder or two.

-MarkM-

All those things are what we try to simulate.

Maybe the word "simulation" might make the concept more understandable to you than the word "game".

You kind of sound a bit like a Private who refuses to take part in "field exercise" / "field training" on the grounds that there is no point "playing wargames".

Real world forces actually do "play games" as much as they can afford to, so that they can know whether their tools, equipment and people are ready for "the real thing".

Millions of dollars have already been lost due to people insisting on "going live" before their systems and people have been proven in "simulation".

It is not easy to get lots of people to spend hours and hours each doing testing; making a "game" out of it lets them at least get some kind of satisfaction/reward out of it.

-MarkM-

IP? Have you heard of DNS? What are we supposed to do with that IP number?

The whole point of DNS is so the number can be changed and everything still "just works".

If it changes often then dynamic DNS comes into play.

What is this so called "server" supposed to be, anyway?

I see you have receiver files there, the last thing we need is another fly by night receiver-file "server", people still keep having problems because we already had one of those way back when...

-MarkM-

An investment professional who can't do accounting-math. Just what we need more of around here, congratulations.

What university was it you learned this stuff in, again?

-MarkM-

Possibly you meant "bootyfull" ?

-MarkM-

Marketcetera uses FIX, I am trying to get that working on my machine now, last time I tried I did not succeed but this time I have at least some parts of it working.

For end-user GUI it uses http://www.marketcetera.org/confluence/display/PN/Photon which is the part I am having a hard time with. Apparently it works out of the box on Windows but on Linux its ability to use more than one kind of browser's underlying libraries for rendering causes conflicts so the one they provide for Linux crashes and so far so has every one I have tried to compile for myself.

I am glad to hear that FIX does have some kind of signing, even if "braindead", as I was worried that real world financial institutions didn't seem to be concerned about ever being able to prove who ordered what...

-MarkM-

Buying a coffee with bitcoin might not make sense at all once bitcoin is a high value per coin, and transaction fees might be aiming more to have such trivially tiny purchases move to retail-purchase merged-mined blockchains instead of cluttering up the international balance of payments settlement network that is the original bitcoin chain.

Merged chains could also become significant sources of revenue for miners, as every Tom Dick Harry Airmile and Walmart starts looking into establishing its own brand of Canadian Tire Money.

-MarkM-

YOu seriously don't see any connection between vrtual currencies and virtual worlds?

World of Warcraft god, EVE Online currency, Lindens, Litecoins, Bitcoins, BotCoins, etc etc are all virtual currencies and many of them situate much of their economies within virtual worlds.

All that is without even getting into the legal aspects, wherein games seem to be a lot safe places in which to situate stock exchanges than plonking then right inside the jurisdiction of the Earth authorities like GLBSE did.

Stock exchange and currency exchanges working with virtual world currencies are primage targets for any kind of integration with bitcoins and any other cryptocoins.

Another economic aspect is that spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on money-transmitter licenses stock broker licenses and so on might not make sense for any coin of which you are not doing millions of dollars of volume, so cranking up the volume in virtual worlds makes a lot of sense for getting security issues solved and software fully tested before even considering using the software for real world exchanges and stock exchanges and such.

Plus if it is useless even for games it is totally useless. Whereas if is is useful as a game currency it might, like other game currencies before it, become valuable in the real world too.

There is also the matter of backing. Game currencies have an entire world, or many worlds, of products ready to buy with them right off the bat, whereas currencies no games will accept likely also few or no sellers of anything else will accept either so they just end up as pump and dump schemes, trying to scam people into selling fiat for them.

-MarkM-

I do not recall even seeing any links to any proposals, I would have gone and taken a look I expect had I noticed one but I don't even notice any links in any of your posts to this thread so have no idea where your proposal's documentation might be found.

Engines to drive civilisations are of course always of interest to the Freeciv ("'Cause civilisation should be free!") scale aspects of the Galactic Milieu and thus also ultimately to all the smaller scales too once assimilated into the Milieu.

-MarkM-

The major strength of CPUs is forked decision-trees. If it is not known even which planet one might end up on, or even, without some analysis of price lists from various planets, which planets offer the best rates of return for a given set of skills and state of peace, war, alliance or whatever between planets and the nations on those planets, it is hard to hard-code a fixed set of actions that will work constantly.

I suppose though I am really meaning PC mining as in Personal Computer mining, since the ability to keep historic prices on disk to compute trends and so on is also something GPUs and ASICs are not optimum at.

Daytrading automatically would be an example of the kind of mining I am thinking of.

Basically it is a matter of teaching your computer to make money automatically 24/7.

Once upon a time posting messages worked well, gradually the rules posting had to follow got harder and harder, like instead of only post to no more than 5 newsgroups the same post, it started getting into whether the post involved products or services for sale.

Once upon a time generating web-pages worked. You could generate gigabytes of pages of Yahoo search results on a topic and Yahoo would rate it number one because apparently it thought its own results were the most relevant possible content about the topic.

Once upon a time simply having autosurf programs running 24/7 in browsers worked. Heck that one still works somewhat for some people it just takes a heck of a lot of pageviews to earn, so that the electricity and network-bandwidth cost becomes more than the thing makes unless the pages it is showing to other "surfers" suck the rare actually live human viewers of the occassional page (e.g. people setting up still thus actually seeing some pages other people are showing) into extremely efficient marketing-funnels.

And so on. Mining World of Warcraft gold is really just yet another "how to rake in money automatically" plug-in.

See Total Automation Project, which was known as Money for Dummies until the "xxxxx for dummies" corp complained about it:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040803020712/http://isp.knotwork.com/dummies/

See also Makemoney Knotwork: Toward a GNU "make money":

http://web.archive.org/web/20070429184251/http://www.makemoney.knotwork.com/

-MarkM-

The difficulty never changes, so the more hashing the faster the blocks and at some number of blocks per second the network cannot keep up the branches proliferate orphans abound and so on. Broken by design.

-MarkM-

Think of DIablo3, WoW, EVE Online etc botfarms as CPU mining.

http://devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=CPU_mining

Afterall with even litecoin moving to GPUs, miners still need things to keep their CPUs busy, right?

The page linked is a start at exploring such CPU mining. (You need unpredictable-path "random" stuff like scripted non player characters in multiplayer online games have to deal with in order to stay in realms where CPUs outperform GPUs...)

-MarkM-

Yes really. Also, the word "investment" is a dangerous one, all kinds of rules and regulations came up.

If one is actually just looking for finance games, there are lots of things one can play finance with using litecoins:

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

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

-MarkM-

Ahhh, it has a pool!

Good idea, the pool probably orphans all blocks attempted by solo miners so basically it is a coin with an issuer.

The problem with that of course is coins with issuers work mostly by people's confidence that the issuers will actually "back" them ("honour" them) since they are basically IOUs issued by the issuer.

I wonder how much "reserves" of other currencies the issuer of liquidcoin has with which to "back" liquidcoins?

Is there a limit to the number of liquidcoins that will ultimately be issued?

I ask because with DeVCoin and GRouPcoin you cannot simply add up their "reserves" and divide by 21 million to find the value represented by each coin like you can for bitcoin-like (21 million ever, or at least some fixed maximum number ever) coins...

(Of course with many chains you also cannot easily add up their "reserves" because their issuer(s) have no intention of "honouring" aka "backing" them thus don't bother even having "reserves" to do so with let alone providing information as to exactly how many of what their "reserves" consist of.)

(Look at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html ... Coins like GRouPcoin, DeVCoin, IXCoin, I0Coin etc that have no "reserves" or whose ratio of "reserves" to number of coins issued is not known / cannot be calculated are worth trivial amounts compared to coins whose issuers actually "honour" them...)

-MarkM-

There are several chains that have to survive on transaction fees.

So few people mined them that they were too vulnerable, thus only GRouPcoin stuck it out as a blockchain so the rest could watch how it survives as an aid in making their decision as to when to go back to blockchain form. Yet GRouPcoin does not survive only on transaction fees, so those that moved away temporarily from blockchain format are waiting not only for merged mining to be robust, as demonstrated to them by GRouPcoin's actual experience as a merged mined coin, but also for their expected transaction fees to be sufficient to attract merged mining.

Since GRouPcoin are not being valued very highly, the fact that GRouPcoin mints coins need not subtract from GRouPcoin's usefulness as a "weathervane" for deciding when/if it is "safe enough" for all the transaction-fees-only coins to move back to blockchain format, since the amount of value miners obtain by merged-mining GRouPcoins is hopefully, at its current low valuation, no higher than the amount of value the transaction fees alone of a more reasonably valued coin would be. (See http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html for relative values.)

-MarkM-

You seem to be confusing GRouPcoin with DeVCoin.

DeVCoin gives 90% of the coins to people who work on free open source projects. GRouPcoin was initially used to prototype various things on the way to developing DeVCoin but once the method to be used in DeVCoin was decided GRouPcoin went back to being just a slightly modified BiTCoin, its modifications being a more-adaptive (and timetravel bug fixed) difficulty adjustment and a constant 50 coins per block mining of coins.

(DeVCoin mints 50,000 coins per block and also never lowers the number minted per block.)

You seem to be talking about DeVCoin when you say it does not work. Did you put its receiver_*.csv files where it can find them? They are provided because one of the early websites, used for the early receiver files, no longer exists thus clients can no longer get a majority consensus of websites as to which versions of those early files are the correct ones.

-MarkM-

Now you sound like the Martians, Brits, Canucks, the Galactic United Nations and so on...

They argued from the start that money issued by people who have no intention of "honouring" it probably would not work well in the long run.

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html seems to be indicating their suggestions might have merit...

-MarkM-

Well maybe this coin's totally broken design makes it a coin to buy and to keep in third party wallets, thus a coin for the masses?

Since even for experienced miners mining it is just a mess of broken-ness maybe the only way to deal with it is to have one or two CPUs somewhere chugging away at it and an exchange where it is sold to the masses to put in their third party wallets?

Who is actually buying them though? Just sockpuppets of the dumper?

-MarkM-

There is always over the counter, too.

How many I0coin would you offer for an Ixcoin, or vice versa? Or for a Terracoin? How about some GRouPcoin? DeVCoin, maybe? You can exchange Ixcoin and DeVCoin to bitcoin at Vircurex still...

-MarkM-