Don't forget the Galactic Milieu, which is still heading toward using Open Transactions to enable players running civilisations to make the markets, banks and stock exchanges in the cities they build into actual functioning markets, banks and stock exchanges.

See http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html for the assets so far enabled on the Digitalis Open Transactions Server which is the prototype server where currently all the assets are processed until an "Open Transactions for Grandmas" is completed which will be easy enough to set up and use that it will become practical for players to set up servers representing the markets, banks and stock exchanges located within the cities they build in their civilisations.

The long term plan is, on the functional side, to eventually have such servers spawned automatically whenever markets, banks or cities are built, and on the costmetics side to use Open Simulator to generate three dimensional immersive virtual reality representations of the game, so eventually people will be able to walk their virtual reality avatar into a virtual market bank or stock exchange in a particular virtual reality city on a particular virtual reality planet and so on...

-MarkM-

Since all of those things are long known ideas surely the patents must be rejected, there is nothing new in them...

-MarkM-

Ah but I consider 10,000 way too low for IXCoin, even long long ago it was over 16,000 so anything less than that I consider underpriced.

Sure I expect IXCoin to rise higher than I0Coin, but that does not mean I should price I0Coin much lower than IXCoin, rather it just means I should be pricing IXCoin much higher than I0Coin.

The only reason I am selling any IXCoin for less than 16,000 satoshis is people are selling them to me even cheaper and I keep putting what I buy back onto the sell side to gradually grow it back up to where it ought to be...

So lets target 10,000+ for I0Coin and 20,000+ for IXCoin, eh?

I am just typing in my initial builds of the order-books so far, once people start buying from me and selling to me I will be able to tighten the gap between buy and sell.

I0Coin and IXCoin used to both be 16,000 to 18,000 or more once upon a time, so I want to at least build my sell side up to that kind of range before considering lowering its bottom end, as I don't want to not have sells sitting waiting when a big pump skyrockets the thing, its a pain when a coin skyrockets up higher than where you already have sell offers waiting...

Remember there are no more IXCoins being made, and damn few I0Coins. Both are still on the mmpool merged mining pool, and pools that dropped them will change their minds no doubt once the price goes back up or if the volume gets large. Though I don't much care about volume, more important to me is depth aka liquidity, as long as one could buy or sell a huge number if one chose to, whether anyone actually does it not importan, since most transactions can very well happen off-chain, we just need one exchange somewhere that establishes a price so people can create conversion tabnles to convert to and from other currencies off-chain.

I would not be surprised if some people whose debts are denominated in IXCoin and/or I0Coin have been dumping the coins on exchanges to lower the exchange rate then paying their thus-effectively-reduced debts in some other currency thanks to the use of exchange-rate-tables ( such as the one at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc ) by the lending institutions. I expect this should eventually cause the lending institutions to either insist on the debts being paid directly in the currency in which they are denominated or to start buying the coins in which they have debtors so as to keep the exchange-rates up...

-MarkM-

Aha, I finally managed to create deposit addresses on Cryptopia, have sent coins in, soon I should be able to start building nice deep order-books for I0Coin there...

Meaning for example on the buy side an order to buy 100 I0Coins at each satoshi of price from 1 satoshi on upwards...

On the sell side probably an order to sell 100 I0Coins at each 5 satoshis of price from 10,000 satoshis on upwards...

-MarkM-

I created an account at Cryptopia and tried to generate an I0Coin address to deposit to but it fails to generate an address.

So it looks like one cannot actually deposit I0Coins there.

Hack I just tried to generate a bitcoin address there and it fails too.

So much for Cryptopia, an exchange that actually works would be nice to have...

Good luck buying I0Coins for only 3000 satoshis. I still consider anything less than ten thousand a bargain...

-MarkM-

Vircurex screwed up, yeah. I0Coin is not dead, but the last bitcoins I sent to Vircurex, back in January or February, have still not arrived there and they still have not responded to emails about it.

I cancelled all my IXCoin and I0Coin offers there butmy last withdraw of I0Coins from there failed and who knows if they will fix that before they remove the withdraw option? So it looks likely they plan to steal I0Coins though dunno where they plan to seel the stolen coins.

Both I0Coin and IXCoin were on long term rise until Vircutrex screwed them both by preventing deposit of bitcoins with which to buy the coins.

I am still trying to get the latest versions of Open Transactions working so I can get my Open Transactions server accessible to folks again without their having to already have an ancient version on their systems, I am also looking into a so called distributed exchange system, which should work with I0Coin (though maybe not IXCoin) because I0Coin supports multi-signature addresses.

I was paying over 10,000 satoshis per coin for I0Coins and IXCoins by the time vircurex decided to screw them by not letting me deposit bitcoins to buy them with, how much were you thinking of paying for I0Coins?

-MarkM-

Changing the name seems like a stupid idea.

Its also not trivial, the name is riddled through scripts and documents all over the place.

Also if it is changed, some other coin will take the name, making the scripts etc even more confused.

Symbols aren't limited to Roman alphabet are they? I thought most use international font characters, so as to have various embeillishments like lines crossing them? I thought an I with one or two diagonal lines across it had already been selected long ago?

-MarkM-

Actually that is kind of what we tried to do on Open Transactions too, the default time to live for an order was 24 hours and the order matching code was set up to cancel your own overlapping orders rather than let you buy from yourself of sell to yourself so it was relatively easy to make order-placing scripts for each asset's main market-makers that would include the currentrates.inc include file and create buy and sell offers against each of the other major assets at three scales (lot sizes), marking up or down 1% per scale. For example mark up sell price 1% on the lots-of-100000-coins market, 2% on the lots-of-10000-coins market, and 3% on the lots-of-1000-coins market. When the current rates changed enough that today's sell offer is cheaper than yesterday's buy offer the offer-overlap safety feature in the code simply deleted the previous offer the script would otherwise having been buying from itself or selling to itself, and the fact that offers expired automatically meant no complex scripting needed to keep track of your previous offers and move or remove them.

This way we could keep both ways round of each main pair filled with offers at three scales automatically while leaving the trivially small scale markets untouched for retail businesses to play with, buying cheaper on the large scale markets and selling at retail scales to consumers or other small scale users.

At times we even ran the scripts three times a day, which would create ten lots for sale and offers to buy ten lots at each of the three scales three times over in a day.

Having different scales of market with different price markups might seem strange if you think of forex or shares markets, but remember that porkbellies, cans of beans and so on can also be assets, and it is certainly normal for things such as those to be cheaper per unit when bought in lots of many units at a time.

-MarkM-

Volume is important to exchanges, not to currencies.

Depth is important though.

A currency can get by quite well only performing one balance-of-payments exchange per year to balance up the international trade, for example if the Brits bought more stuff from the Canucks than the Canucks bought from the Brits during a given year, the Brits send some funds to the Canucks to balance their trade. Heck they need not even do an exchange for that, as when they do buy Canadian Digital Notes with which to make such payments they can buy enough for several years worth of balance of trade payments.

So what is important is depth: the ability to buy or sell millions of the 21 million coins of each type that exist.

Most of the time they can get by using the millions of each type of coin that they have in their treasury as "backing" for their own currency so that they are always able to buy back all of their own currency that is not currently in their own treasury.

So exchanges really have wrong incentives as far as the currencies are concerned; the currencies want places where for years and decades and centuries they can have offers on file to buy and to sell their coin, even if no exchanges actually take place in any given year or decade or century.

The main purpose of the exchanges, to them, is simply to establish a going rate of exchange, so that corporations banks whatever can consult an exchange rate table to conveniently accept various major currencies in payment for goods or payment of debts.

To establish price it is not necessary to have volume, just to have offers on both sides of the order-book, ideally massively more deep than anyone's normal day to day purchases, so that someone buying a few million units of a commodity need not concern themselves about depth of exchange rates just consult a price list of currencies because their purchase is trivially small compared to the vast amount of money in the forex markets.

(When a gas station says it will accept USD instead of CAD, for example, it does not look at a market for depth, it just looks in a newspaper to see today's exchange rate, and marks it up a little. Most transactions in the game similarly just look at the latest rates include-file, http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc or their scripts include the file, they do not go rooting around in exchanges to figure out what prices to charge in the various currencies. Look at the "prices of Deuterium in various currencies" listing for example at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/deuterium.html that is basically just using the latestrates include file exchange rates to convert the price into the various currencies/assets.)

-MarkM-

Well right now they have been operating in a universe or multiverse in which very few of the currencies/assets in use actually appear on any of the types of exchange altcoin users are used to, which is to say website type exchanges where the public goes to the website and trades on it.

(Most players would just visit their guild, chat with the guildmasters, find out what the going rates were, and have their guild officers execute trades on the Open Transactions system on their behalf.)

Most of the coins that were originally created as blockchains have long ago switched from using blockchains because even using merged mining it turned out that blockchains are not practical to secure; you cannot get enough merged mining pools to support your coins so you end up with so little hashing power the coin cannot possibly be viewed as secure.

That is why we moved to Open Transactions in the first place, there were a number of nations and corporations that had coins in which there were 21 million coins, like bitcoin, but in which long ago all the coins were issued so there were no longer rewards available to miners for mining them, other than transaction fees.

We can see from what is happening with IXCoin and I0Coin how that is likely to turn out, so we moved to the Open Transactions platform to avoid the need for miners.

So look again at two players, one of whom is a Brit, a member of Britclan, a user of Britclan's national coin, the United Kingdom Britcoin, and the other is a Canuck, a member of the Canuck clan, a user of the Canucks' national coin, Canadian Digital Notes.

For what do you propose they sell the useless-to-them platform coins, heck lets get specific and assume they do try to use the BURST platform. They want to buy coins that are used in their universe / multiverse, such as those listed at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

On the Open Transactions system we did actually have a platform coin of sorts, by turning on "usage credits" system we were able to prevent anyone doing any API calls without owning "usage credits".

But, the ":usage credits" on that system are deliberately not something you can trade, because another of their uses is as part of a Know Your Customer system; by having those usage credits available only directly from the system administrators Open Transactions enables system administrators to prevent anyone they do not know from using API calls. so that if they choose to do so they could refuse to issue any usage credits to anyone whose identity they are not satisfied with.

On Open Transactions you can pair any asset/currency against any other, and at any scale that is a power of ten, so you can have for example pairs at scale of millions where the governments and multi-nationals can trade in bulk with each other in "lots" of a million coins at a time, markets at scale of 100,000 where smaller players can break down a lot of a million into ten lots of 100,000 to sell at a profit, buying from the millions-scale markets, and so on down to markets where people can buy a single coin of a type at a time.

This was working very nicely actually, so much so that we are still looking into trying to migrate to the new Open Transactions system.

Maybe the problem with the huge numbers of platform coins is simply one of what is the saturation point at which the whales of the system will choke on the new incoming assets and find they no longer have enough platform coins laying around to be able to continue throwing them willy nilly at each new asset that comes along?

That is, maybe if I convince the nations and multinationals behind the major coins of the Galactic Milieu to each throw a few million of their 21 million coins into BURST, at a sufficiently high price in BURST, we can reach a point at which these whales that we fear have loaded themselves up with "enough" of each asset that they sit back and let some actual trading between the "new" assets take place?

But how much is this going to cost them in their own coins? I guess that is the problem.

It is possible that the real solution to all this is to clone one of the platforms and divide the billions or hundreds of billions of platform-coins among all the nations and multinationals that are behind our existing coins/assets, so that they themselves are the whales of the system...

Something like HORIZON might work if done that way, but, it would mean having to maintain the thing.

-MarkM-

Okay, so Burst is an asset platform, great.

I am looking around at asset platforms because Open Transactions changed the internal format of its contracts, nyms and such quite long ago now, leaving me orphaned with all my contracts even my server contract not able to work with the new formats going forward.

I have a number of assets, see some of them at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

So far I have had a couple of fairly major problems with the platforms I have looked at.

For one thing, other than Ripple many of them do not seem to allow asset pairs without crowbarring their platform coin into the thing breaking up all the pairs and, it looks to me, very likely thereby screwing everyone who actually tries to use them.

Consider for example two players, one having 100 UKB they want to exchange for 100 CDN, the other having 100 CDN they want to exchange for 100 UKB.

On a platform that crowbars its own platform coin into all pairs, they cannot actually offer to exchange their 100 coins for the other guy's 100 different coins.

Instead they each have to make up some number of the platform's coin that they want to sell their coin for, hopefully enough to buy the other guy's coin, with a slight fudge for some kind of transaction fees.

The massive elephant in the room problem is most of the platforms have huge huge piles of their platform coin sitting around, often held by some developer pre-mine system such as a "development foundation" or some such thing, often not merely dwarfing all coins held by anyone else but also even increasing all the time via "staking".

So imagine what is likely to happen: both players list their coin but are forced to say they will accept the useless-to-them platform coin in payment for it.

The whales such as the pre-mine holders snap up both of their offerings.

Both players have now lost the coins they had and are stuck with useless-to-them platform coins.

After being screwed like that obviously neither will want to list even more of the coins they actually value as for sale, lest they end up stuck with even more of the useless-to-them platform coins.

So both are now stuck with platform coins they consider useless, and cannot get the coins they actually wanted because no one who holds the coin they want wants the stupid platform coins so are not going to put more of their coins up for sale, as the whales of the platform can throw away millions or billions of the worthless platform-coins at any actual assets anyone is dumb enough to offer on the platform.

The second problem is that most of these platforms do not seem to allow building up deep order-books.

Or at least some of them.

I have for example seen at least one platform where you only get to have one offer per pair, whereas when I go about building depth in an order book it typically requires literally thousands of offers on both sides (sell and buy) of the order book, in order to make a huge pile on both sides, ideally with an offer at every possible price (each satoshi of price) to make a really solid, really deep book.

These two problems are why I have not started using HORIZON platform for example. I suspect a lot of other platforms derive from the same roots as HORIZON so not sure there is any platform yet that avoids these problems. (Well maybe Ripple, but it has its own problems...)

I have seen a system that lets you say you will sell up to so many of a thing at a given price, so it can keep selling whenever you have some on hand, so maybe some system would like to add onto that a price increment/decrement, so you can say you will buy or sell up to so many adjusting the price so much per so many?

-MarkM-

Since I0Coin supports multi-sig addresses, it looks like it maybe should be able to be supported by the "distributed exchange" system found at

https://github.com/pharesim/HZx

I am not sure whether non-main nodes of the thing just run scripts directly under PHP or require setting up a web-server for the PHP to run under, the idea of having to run a web-server kind of put me of from just setting the thing up and giving it a whirl.

-MarkM-

The .git/config says:


It would not be able to open a port already opened by another coin surely? It would just quit saying it cannot get the port.

-MarkM-

I tried to run KED, and gave up because it constantly clogged up its port, and that was just using its built in miner.

So I do not agree that there is no problem with KED, it in fact appears not to work, at least its miner appears not to work.

-MarkM-

Well this is really just a method for distributing currencies/assets, not for securing blockchains.

Ideally there would not be one central MUD, rather all the various groups and nations and clans and organisations and so on would be spread out over gosh knows how many MUDs, the Brits distributing their United Kingdom Britcoins on one set of MUDs, the Canucks distributing their Canadian Digital Notes on another set and so on.

-MarkM-

One thing CPUs can do much better than GPUs is the kind of "mining" described at http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=cpu_mining

There are quite a few currencies and other assets that have been running along those lines for years now, as shown at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

Bear in mind that in addition to discouraging GPUs it is also necessary to make it hard for botnets to play too, otherwise instead of losing out to GPU farms ordinary users lose out to folks who run botnets.

Thus it is best for not only the code required to involve a whole lot of decisions and branches and different possibilities but also for there to be an advantage to users who are at their keybpard relatively frequently, so that trying to run hundreds or thousands of "mining processes" tends to take more and more actual human intervention to keep them all running and to keep them all adapting.

-MarkM-

A lot of the "reasons" people give for why something like Bitcoin might not be "fungible" actually apply to dollar bills, hundred dollar bills and such too.

Because most of the arguments seem to be about the fact that there is a history, such that if you accept stolen coins or stolen money you could end up being accused of accepting stolen property / money.

The general idea is that a dollar or coin you receive from a terrorist group, or from a robbery, might not be as "valuable" to you, or even if not to you then to who-ever you would like to have accept it from you in payment for something, as a squeaky-clean dollar or coin  minted specially for you by some party that is imagined to be or officially purported to be in some way "cleaner" than a terrorist or robbery.

(Such as a government, a lot of governments like to purport not to be gangs of crooks with their hands soaked in blood...)

Actually you can even put aside any question of actual clean-ness really, and just consider that regardless of how clean or unclean a dollar or coin might "in reality" or "in some arbitrary or non-arbitrary moral or ethical system" be a dollar or coin the possession or which or the spending of which is going to bring armed thugs pounding on your door, or get you incarcerated, might not seem as "valuable" to you as one which does not carry with it such threats.

So in general, a dollar or coin or product which is under some kind of blacklisting or threat can be seen as less "fungible" than one that no one is going to threaten you or arrest you etc on account of if you chose to accept possession of it.

In that sense though of course fungibility can be said to be in the barrel of the gun of the threatening party rather than in the dollar or coin or whatever whose fungibility the gun-toters are trying to influence by means of their guns...

-MarkM-

Most coins use miniupnp for their UPNP sitff, local internet providers have never yet provided me a modem it works with. But then again I have also tried downloading other PNP programs to examine the modems and still never found any of the local providers modems to work.

Maybe your modem is even worse, and is being acticely screwed up by the UPNP attempts.

Most coins you can compile them with USE_UPNP= to totally leave out the UPNP support when compiling.

If the UPNP support is compiled in, usually there is a way to turn it off at runtime.

If you have not tried running it with no UPNP it is probably at least worth trying.

Basically the program tries to use plug and play of some kind to talk to the modem, assuming it understands some kind of plug and play protocol (which also you can usually enable and disable in the mode itself), it tries to ask the modem to open an incoming port for it.

If you want an incoming port you can set it up manually in the router, provided you also have the router assign the machine a known IP address instead of a random one, so you know which IP to route the port to.

-MarkM-

How many SPICE are there? The daemon doesn't seem to mention total coin supply...

Also does anyone have any they would be willing to sell for Cubits3? If so, how many Cubits per SPICE do you want?

-MarkM-

Will you sell Gold Pressed Latinum for Cubits3 ? If so how many Cubits do you want per GPL?

-MarkM-