LQC is broken intrinsically though as it never changes difficulty if I recall correctly?

So you just get more and more and more orphans and branches, it is a total mess.

-MarkM-

Maybe it was someone pulling a luke-jr... Deliberately orphan-ing everyone else for a while.

Luke did that to CoiLedCoin but not for long; CoiLedCoin is still chugging away along with the other chains that don't go crazy trying to make merging them more of a loss than a gain.

There are still more than half a dozen chains sitting back waiting for merged mining to prove itself before opening themselves up again to attack... One of the things tested with GRouPcoin was the idea of "licensed miners", a way of protecting communities happily chugging away using CPUs from being attacked by pools full of GPUs.

Have you really looked closely yet at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html ?

Maybe try looking even more carefully?

It find some of what it shows to be somewhat suprising, despite having been assured over and over by certain factions of players that that is exactly what would happen once their concepts were actually up and running.

-MarkM-

There are many coins that have been around a long time, so that anyone who wanted some has had plenty of time to mine some.

Many of them are even merged-mine-able, so anyone wanting some has had plenty of time to get them almost free.

There are even some that various pools have given out too, just in case the ones pool users have been encouraged to also mine haven't been getting distributed among enough people yet.

Some have even been mined almost exclusively with CPUs, somehow managing not to attract GPU miners; they have thus been able to continue chugging along slowly but steadily, with various website visitors CPU-mining them and stuff like that.

Are you aware that bitcoin can only be the parent chain of a merge, it cannot be a child chain? Thus that coins like Terracoin, beingsimple clones of bitcoin, cannot be merged mined alongside bitcoin?

Let us remember too that mining is not the only method of distributing coins. Merged mined coins are almost free, so giving them away to players of online games is a very affordable way of distributing them; a more-interactive version of a faucet in a way.

The 50 coins a block forever thing has already been done, that is GRouPcoin, and to this day it is still only difficulty 272. It has been running what, a year and a half or more by now?

I don't think it makes much sense to complain about early adopters having a big advantage when that advantage is being forced upon them against their will by the hordes of miners who refuse to pick them up almost free.

Really what is going on is vast numbers of people are trying very hard to be late adopters, and I don't think that really gives them good grounds for complaining about early adopters. Many are basically against adoption entirely, early or late.

With bitcoin we only have a century or so before the early adopter phase is over and everyone has to settle for transaction fees. With GRouPcoin centuries from now people will still be getting a full 50 coins per block and the coins mined in the first few decades will possibly have spread out due to miners who have more than one beneficiary in their wills.

Most altcoins are so incredibly dirt-cheap right now that quite likely who holds huge numbers of them could change massively within the next order of magniture increase in price and they will still be dirt cheap then too. People seem so determined to always "miss the boat" that quite likely another order of magnitude increase will be needed to actually get even the 'non-conscientious objector" deliberately-late people to consider adopting them. People seem to want to wait until at least a hundredfolk increase in price has happened before considering getting involved, and also seem so fond of complaining that it is as if the whole point of that waiting is so they have something to complain about.

It should be recognised though that what they are really complaining about is their own idiotic stubborn-ness, their own determination to wait until the the train leaves the station before running after it screaming how unfair it is that it left without them.

A great variety of opporunities have been provided, many of them as optional extras even, not requiring diverting mining power away from "the mainstream" in order to mine them. Some of them are never going to stop minting coins, but maybe that just encourages people to wait even longer, to be even more late.

If you set up a coin that people mine for the first two to five years without minting, why even bother mining it at all until two to five years from now? If you don't mine it at all for a few years the deliberately-late masses will still wait until a few years after it does "launch" just so they can kick themselves (while crying/screaming at others) for missing the boat yet again.

Fill up your merged mining as much as is currently feasible first before going on about the unfairness of being denied fellow miners, being left a tiny, maybe even "fringe" community while people wait a few years building up more and more "oh you are so unfair not to have forced me against my will kicking and screaming to mine your coin" ammunition by sitting back still day after day after day, week after week after week failing to set up p2pool and merged-mine...

-MarkM-

Doesn't Casascius have pretty pictures on his websites?

Don't these people have any imagination?

If they lack imagination you're dead in the water before you start, or if they are dull plebes who insist on holding something physical they won't be likely to actually move on it.

So show them the pictures and if you have any personal coins at all show them that they can give you fiat cash right there you send coins and presto, physical coins are on the way to them...

If you have no personal coins to do that then they should rightly ask how many days of no coffee no gravy no meat and maybe going to bed early to save on electricity it takes to save up enough money to buy a couple of coins, leading to why aren't you into the things yourselves if they are so great, and so on.

Going to spin some massive hard luck story or something?

Oh hey, great new spiel, "I would give a bad impression if I was broke so send me money because I cannot even manage to hang on to a couple of coins to rub together..."

-MarkM-

How many you selling, what coin you looking to be paid in, and how much of that coin per terracoin or how many terracoin per one of the coin you want as payment?

Adding coin types to either of both of the Open Transactions servers is not hard, but so far none of the users of either or both of those servers have asked to have this coin enabled there...

-MarkM-

I had only three miners in October, each joined the pool for only a very very brief time, one of them not getting any actually valid mining done just errors.

It isn't really worth my while to run through all these calculations so I guess I probably should hope no one comes along at all during November as this is pretty silly to bother spending time on.

But here are the figures anyway:


I do the figures by hand, and obviously there is no point bothering to develop software to to do it since there is no demand for the service.

No point developing software for doing the books of a service that no-one actually wants.

Siince we do it using p2pool anyway maybe that actually makes sense, since really p2pool is intended as a way to avoid centralisation thus basically to avoid the need for pools. Anyone interested in massively merged mining should just do it themselves I guess.

Notice I accounted the coiledcoins as being of zero value. There are no exchanges for them and most folks consider them dead and if not well hey I guess the pool can use them as its cut of the wealth.

-MarkM-

Having only one type of tradeable thing is not as good as having more than one type of tradeable thing.

A good example is one coin type that tends to go up in value and one that tends to remain relatively stable in value and one that tends to go down in value.

People looking for stable value can use the stable one, people wanting a store of value to use as collateral can use the one that tends to go up in value as collateral/reserves/savings, and people looking for loans can borrow the one that tends to go down in value (possibly using the one that tends to go up in value as collateral to secure the loan).

If only bitcoins exist, you end up having to spend bitcoins; with devcoins also existing, you can borrow devcoins using your bitcoins as collateral and spend the devcoins, thus avoiding digging into your bitcoin hoard.

-MarkM-

The server has been updated to the latest Open Transactions code, so you should now be able to export blinded cash purses to a passphrase instead of to a specific nym and to import purses that are thusly encrypted to a passphrase instead of to a specific nym.

This new version should also allow "usage tokens" to be assigned to nyms, ready for when we turn on the charging of "usage tokens".

There will thus be a grace period before the server starts actually charging usage tokens during which active nyms can obtain usage tokens free so that when we turn on the charging of them there will be some active nyms who actually have some.

Once the charging of usage tokens is shown to work, usage tokens will cease being free; how much they will cost we won't know until we see how many normal usage of the system tends to consume.

REMEMBER that Open Transactions has no percentage based fees; any API call your client makes costs a usage token, regardless whether the call is a request for information (your balance, the list of markets, the offers on a market and so on) or the making of an offer or the transfer of millions of coins or whatever. Currently an API call is an API call, they all cost the same: one "usage token" per API call.

-MarkM-

The method seems worse actually, since the money is owned by the browser the user connects from instead of being owned by the user.

So for example when you play from an internet cafe's browser either the money is lost due to such browsers typically clearing cookies and history before the next user starts using it, or the next user of that browser has the money (and if cookies were not cleared, likely also history was not cleared, so they can find the site and use the cookie).

TL;DR cookies do not belong to users, they belong temporarily to instances of browsers, between cookie-clearings.

(e.g. You fire up your anonymous browsing browser, go do something, and exit the browser; it automatically clears all cookies and history so next time you use it any sites you visit will not connect your new visit with your previous visit thus wont be as able to figure out who you are by when you visit...)

-MarkM-

Your argument actually says that dumpers are bad, not that hoarders are bad.

Dumpers are a superclass of hoarders, as to them hoarding is merely a word some people use sometimes to refer to the "prepare a big pile of stuff to dump" step, the prepare your ammunition step needed to prepare for one's next dumping.

So they are not really hoarders at all, they are simply folks who need/use an amount of ammunition that some folk, mostly smaller scale folk in terms of numbers of coins involved, consider excessive or recognise as potentially sufficient to accomplish an effective dumping.

TL;DR hoarding is good, dumping is bad.

-MarkM-

I do, I am gribble/freenode nick "knotwork" on gribble's WOT.

I also have Torchat, PM me your Torchat ID if you want to hook up in that.

I also am on RetroShare, which (unlike Torchat I think) uses GPG/PGP keys like gribble does.

-MarkM-

Yeah I see that now I made a sandbox to build and run it in.

How is its value looking? Compare for example to

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

and various other such tables linked to from

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

-MarkM-

So, who has vetted the source code to check it is not a wallet-strealing trojan?

From this section on the website "Currently, TerraCoin client does not differ from Bitcoin client excepting:" it makes no mention of having merged mining patches applied so presumably it cannot be added to one's repertoire of merged mined chains, so one would have to divert hashing from more than half a dozen existing chains at once just to mine this one chain. Hmm. Expensive to mine it...

Is it lower difficulty than GRouPcoin still or has it already skyrocketed to 272+ difficulty?

-MarkM-

If we ignore the suggestion of only issuing a thousand shares, I think we maybe already have a quality solution in the form of the namecoin blockchain and protocol.

It can already do what is needed, from the command line, manually.

Those who prefer a fancier user-interface are of course encouraged to make such interfaces, as fancy as they wish.

The important part, that is, the actual ability to register things and to send coins to addresses that own those things, is already done and has been for what, well over a year? Nearly two years? Maybe even more than two years?

-MarkM-

I have started adding to the Devtom wiki page about the server so that hopefully the wiki page can start to be of some actual use to users and potential users of the server.

Also in case anyone didn't already hear about it, I now also run the OTdemo Open Transactions server, which also has a a Devtome wiki page (which probably also needs more work done on it).

-MarkM-

Decentralising mostly means everyone can be either side of any trade.

When most people are shoppers and very few are shops, shopping can by some be characterised as at least somewhat "centralised".

When everyone can put a shopping cart on their eepsite or simply run it directly on port 80 of their machine with the incoming port correctly routed by their router, complaining that shopping is not decentralised amounts to complaining that most people fail to exercise the option of running a shop.

Since you want exchanges to be centralised, I am interested to know where you run yours? On a third party hosted website? A virtual server, maybe? Right on your own desk at home? Or on your 24/7-connected phone?

If you are not serious enough about decentralisation to at least do your own "bit" toward it taking you at all seriously starts to seem somewhat a waste of mental/emotional effort.

In a thread about a distributed "darknet" exchange someone just recently posted that having got it running he saw only two other nodes of it online.

When the use of RetroShare was proposed, it turned out over and over again that usually everyone is just not there. Possibly even the original proposer of the idea.

I set up Cyclos recently as a Tor hidden service so we could explore how useful it could be and consider how best to configure it and whether it could do with some added functionality and so far no one has even created an account on it.

So actually maybe there are only about half a dozen people who have any real interest whatsoever, 3 of them are on the darknet thing two or three sometimes on Retroshare and one still wandering around wondering where all the thousands of people eagerly trying out everything that sounds like it could give any clue whatsoever toward getting closer to such an idea are and why they don't have accounts in the darknet (I do, I just don't use it as evidently there is no demand for distributed exchange systems) and in RetroShare (I do, heck I notice its still running even. Once in a while I see a connection join, I might even have one connection most of the time now and sometimes maybe two.)

I also have Tor and i2p running, and normally Freenet though that seems to have died at some point somehow.

Which of those are you on?

(You are, presumably, on #bitcoin-otc on Freenode, with a WOT identity on gribble?)

Maybe all that is really happening is actually such a vast amount of distributedness that all the actual people interested in distributed exchange are themselves distributed between so very many methods of exchange that there are as many, or more, methods among which to distribute exchange as there are people interested in exchange?

(That maybe makes sense actually; if there are three people, there are only three ways of distributing two-party exchanges between them, but if there are four people, there are more than four ways of distributing two-party exchanges between them, and as the number of people grows the number of possible pairs of them grows faster in general...)

Also I do not think on small scales one needs large markets, since to figure out YOUR price that a coin is worth to YOU all that you need to know is how much fiat the merchant you want to buy alpaca socks from would take instead of coins for them and how much fiat one potential trading partner wants in return for the number of coins the sock dealer is asking. You don't need to know a "market price" just this "how much does each of the two parties (the who I get coins from and the where I plan to spend them) consider them to be worth?"

-MarkM-

Bitcoin is also "centralised", since what you seem to mean is that some people will only run clients not a full "server" setup.

It is much like bitcoin in that way: it is not expected that all users of bitcoin will bother to real a real full node just as it is not expected that all users of Open Transactions will bother to run the server side, they will just use clients.

Not bothering to become a server yourself does not really give you good grounds for complaining that there are fewer servers than clients (aka that it is "centralised".

Open Transactions is "centralised" in the sense that if you are the only person in your social circle who runs the server side, people in your social circle who choose not to use servers that are outside of that social circle could spread FUD about you trying to "centralise" by your evil tendency to fail to force everyone else to also run servers.

It is FUD: if they want to decentralise more, it is free open source code they are free to run themselves.

If everyone ran a server as well as a client, any two who want to execute a trade via a server can execute it on either of their own servers or split it into smaller transactions some executed on one party's server some executed on the other party's server, or they could even spread it out into many transactions across every server of whose existence they are aware...

-MarkM-

"Exchanges" seem to have a somewhat biased view of trading, maybe, as looking at things like this thesis:

fiximulator.org/FIXimulator_Thesis.pdf

and looking at the whole "marketcetera" platform, and at the FIX protocol for equjities trading, and such sources, it reads a lot more like a vast world wide distributed network of traders, with to some extent a "buy side" where fund managers and such see things from their side, and a "sell side" where middlepeople such as stock exchanges try to find buy side folk looking to buy different things and match them up, partly presumably by means of the stuff some buyers are using as wealth to buy stuff with happens to be stuff that other folk are actually looking to buy.

Or something.

Certainly it is not "centralised", heck not only do some nations have more than one stock exchange but there are more and more nations that have at least one stock exchange.

Some of this stuff makes it seem like the so called stock exchanges are just gaggles / mobs of  sell-side folk ganging up the better to out-do the smaller sell-side folk..

fiximulator.org/FIXimulator_Thesis.pdf

http://www.marketcetera.org/

http://www.fixprotocol.org/

-MarkM-

http://wxi2mgugw4732xs7.onion:8081

Its a start at least; it needs users in order to learn what it does not have that would be nice to look into adding to it...

...It is massively configurable so just setting up all the transaction types or whatever that the users find they need is going to take some time and some users. It is GPL'd free open source so the time users put into working out how best it should be configured and so on won't be wasted as anyone else can run the same code if one or more sites using it vanish.

So please do come help figure out whether it is useful and how best to put it to use...

-MarkM-

I don't touch Lindens, World of Warcraft gold, Runescape game-currency, Diablo game-currency, EVE Online currency and so on precisely because of that PayPal-like-nature they seem to generally have.

It seems to me that their currency is even worse than bitcoins stored at mybitcoin or bitcoinica because at least one "could have" withdrawn one's bitcoins from mybitcoin or bitcoinica (etc) to the safety of one's own cold-wallet wheres there is no coldwallet possible for these corporate game-currencies. Its like mybitcoin and bitcoinica issuing their own currencies: you know from the outset you don't really own the stuff, that it can be taken away from you arbitrarily at any moment, heck it is even worse than fiat in so many ways!

Such thoughts were why so many players wanted to create blockchain-based game-currencies way back when they came up with UKB, CDN, CZB, UNS, GMC, GRF and NKL: they were smart enough to anticipate that too many large game-companies had given too much bad reputation to game-currencies thus that the radical shift to p2p mode that blockchains seemed to offer was looking like one of the few possible ways that game-currencies might hope to someday try to outlive the bad taste left by the big well known games...

-MarkM-