I have mostly tried to focus on the merged mined coins, because Proof of Work without merged mining is crazy and/or scammy.

It is hard enough to keep miners hashing merged coins, which cost them hardly anything to mine since it re-uses their existing already in use hash-power; trying to do Proof of Work without merged mining splits the world's hashpower up, increasing the chance that less than half the world's hash power is securing a coin, thus increasing the chance that there exists more hashing power out there than the coin has defending it, thus increasing the vulnerability to attack.

If we would focus more on the merged mined coins maybe they would not keep slipping in value to the point that less and elss miners bother to merged mine.

Take a look at IXCoin and I0Coin (as well, of course, as DeVCoin), and while you are at it consider getting into GRouPcoin (for example my doing your mining at mmpool.org merged mining pool) before it gets onto an exchange; and even consider CoiLedCoin, which even mmpool does not include in its merge currently so is very low difficulty.

For a real challenge, consider GeistGeld, with its twelve second or so block timing target it is so fast it pushes the limits of merged mining, if you can solve that you can make a pool that merges more of the coins than any other. In the meantime its difficulty is so low you can mine it with a CPU to rack up a pile of them against the time when someone does do something about the fast blocks "problem".

(Consider how many coins came out with the speed of their blocks being their main hype, claiming to be the fastest while still not as fast as GeistGeld. Also consider the fact that without being on any exchanges all these years, and being able to be mined with just a single core of a single CPU all these years, it probably is one of the best-distributed coins of all, everyone and anyone having had years in which to pick up a few at almost no cost...)

-MarkM-

Even with merged mining Proof of Work is not always such a great idea, without out is stupid, it is hard enough to get enough hashing power to secure a coin if you do use merged mining, ridiculously unlikely without it. Part of what is so scammy about most new coins is the very fact the creators do not care about making it secure, they are just out to dump it, so they make it proof of work so they can instamine it and do not care about its long term security because they will not be in it long term anyway.

They don't like to start it with merged mining because then the big miners already set up to merged mine will get most of the coins, but look what DOGE did, no merged mining at first so the existing miners might not all jump on it, then merged mining later once they got their hoard of coins and actually decided the damn thing might be worth securing.

Meanwhile all these scams coming out without merged mining seems to be detracting from merged mined coins, as miners and speculators alike all jump on the latest scams each day instead of settling down to secure the few coins that we might actually be able to make secure by merging them all together.

Some day folks are going to realise that a currency needs to be secure, this storm of scams of the day surely is not going to forever be more profitable than actually securing a few blockchains for the long haul?

-MarkM-

I agree, avoiding IGotSpots coins is a good idea.

Dead coins are much better.

This coin is humming along fine, just let it ride.

-MarkM-

Come meet up with sci-fi loving folks at the Galactic Diplomacy Planet!

Fire up a Crossfire RPG client and tell it the server you want to connect to is the CrossCiv server:

CrossCiv.no-ip.org

To get into the sci-fi milieu instead of the fantasy milieu you will have to pick a non-fantasy character, which means no non-humans, no mages, no clerics, no paladins.

Something ordinary like a human barbarian or swashbuckler.

Barbarians don't start with literacy so consider trying swashbuckler - basically some kind of crewperson off of a starship.

Plain old warrior is kind of a special case, because they get Oratory which is kind of like a charm person spell, so although they ought in theory be the logical diplomats for the various civilisations to send to the Galactic Diplomacy Planet they do not usually get to start there, instead they usually get to pick a nationality and they start in a sketchy little map intended to be developed into the capitol city of their civilisation; once a number of people who all chose the same nation have worked out how they want to run their nation and who they want to choose from among them to become their delegate to the Diplomacy Planet will be time enough to see about getting them transportation to it...

EDIT: Hmm actually maybe that stuff about nations requires the ancient clients, where you choose professions on maps in the game; recent clients have you choose profession and such right in your client, so maybe you can in fact, using a modern client, get a plain old warrior/figher to the Galactic Diplomacy planet. Unfortunately you probably also cannot get to the national capitols anymore either thans to the new way clients handle character creation. Bummer. Oh well.

-MarkM-

It is still higher than I0Coin. Both coins are in use in the Galactic Milieu and with the resumption of the so called CPU mining that has proven so popular, maybe both will start to perk up.

The Milieu has been around for years, with far more development behind it than the so called "Crypto Kingdom" (that only uses Monero), and with actual 1991-style "retro" two dimensional graphics already too in the form of the Crossfire RPG interface. So however well Crypto Kingdom does, the Milieu can be expected to do much, much better...

-MarkM-

In games, in theory. You'd find some civilisation that uses the coin and do some kind of deal with them.

Or choose which one your civilisation is going to use and get active in game, making it known to other players which coin you use so even if you haven't yet heard who uses which, they will get to know which you use and maybe approach you and tell you which they use...

The Galactic Milieu uses Freeciv for handling planetary scale so does not really support alien species and races and such, but for humanoids maybe it doesn't much matter and you could still have Klingons, Ferrengi and such running around if you wanted to tie some of these currencies to the traditional civilisations intended to use them?

-MarkM-

What is different about Diamond's PoS system then that makes it not have the usual problems so many other PoS coins have?

Is it a matter of which original type of PoS a given family of coins was cloned from?

For example the setting your clock forward less than two hours but maybe close to two hours, that one is apparently quite widespread?

You do not come across as knowledgeable about these problems so it is not clear that you have enough knowledge of them to actually even have seriously examined your code to be sure they do not apply to it?

For example the recent coin Axiom apparently has the problems, they are claiming to be looking into fixing them.

It is not clear whether the recent coin NINJA has them or not.

So far I have not come across any coherent explanation of which ancestries of coins have them or if maybe all of them do.

The problems are ancestral, dating back I don't know how far, inherited by many coins as they keep cloning each other.

-MarkM-

Does diamond have any kind of fixes against the stake cheating that seems to be in most Proof of Stake coins?

Apparently there are a number of the problems but the only one people have described publicly is the one where you set your clock ahead.

What are the fixes and which ones does Diamond have in place?

-MarkM-

No. It is not an investment, it is a ponzi scheme, which is another way of saying it is an illegal scam.

-MarkM-

Seems a pretty normal ponzi site, such things are certainly not "investments" but some do think they are a legitimate "game for marketers" where the object of the game is to send enough new suckers into the sceme to enable you to get out without a loss and hopefully even at a profit.

If you do not have a big list of suckers who follow you into such schemes though, to in effect bail you out at their expense, you are kind of just gambling that he folks who do have flocks of suckers to bring in have not brought them all in by the time you join the ranks of suckers by putting something in yourself.

If you are lucky enough to get in soon enough, before they run out of suckers, it is possible you mgiht get some of your funds back, heck if you are a close relative of the core group of scammers setting up the scam you might even get in soon enough to turn a little bit of profit, which they hope will make you enthusastic about ponzi schemes and start setting up your own flock of suckers to come with you into the next one.

Because of course there always has to be a next one as these things cannot last. Also a lot of the suckers won't join next time around.

So its up to your marketing skills and lack of ethics: do you think you can rope in enough suckers with your marketing skills to keep you from making a loss?

-MarkM-

Thanks. So onward to next potential problem:

sudo apt-get install git gcc-4.9 cmake libunbound2 libevent-2.0-5 libgtest-dev libboost1.55-all-dev libevent-dev

Why boost 1.55 ?

(I am on Ubuntu 14.04 with libboost-all-dev (notice lack of insistence on a particular version) installed.)

I vaguely recall something I was thinking of trying wanted that version, not sure if it was Monero or some other thing. But normally this version of Ubuntu, and all the coins I have built so far (and I have built lots of them) are still back on an earlier version of boost, maybe 1.54 or somesuch.

Whatever it was that I previously ran into that wanted 1.55 I did not bother with, I think maybe I also ran into some warning somewhere not to.

What happens to all my normal builds if I install this new boost? Will they get compiled against it and maybe break?

Its possible one of them even specifically warned me not to go to 1.55, I can't recall quite what it was that led to me not bothering with whatever it was I saw before that was wanting to use boost 1.55.

I can't even recall if there was supposed to be a bug in 1.54 that necessitated using 1.55, or a bug in 1.55 that necessitated not moving forward to that version yet, or both.

Though everythign so far seems to be working normally while I have NOT gone ahead to this newfangled 1.55 thing...

-MarkM-

I came across https://antanst.com/blog/2015/05/22/how-to-set-up-a-monero-node-in-ubuntu-14.04/ and noticed it wants me to tell it my IP address, it looks like maybe that could be because it has I2P included in it and I2P needs it?

But back before I started using no-ip.org for dynamic DNS I used to run I2P precisely because it did NOT need to know my IP address, it gave me a way of reaching my machine without it or me having to know its IP address as long as I could use I2P to reach out to it.

So what is the deal with Monero needing a hard-coded IP address in its invocation?

Does this mean only people with static IP can run it?

I really prefer to run things that involve private keys at home, not out on the net on some third party hardware that happens to have a static IP address...

Days ago I figured I should set up a Monero node to check it out, but this has been a stumbling block as I want to run it at home not on someone else's machine in a datacentre.

-MarkM-

Woo hoo, this little bit of news has made an impressive impact, take a look at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/ingroupcoins.html !

-MarkM-

I do not follow your description of an asset you described above as somehow being a means of shorting CKG.

I am interested in general in the shorting of stuff, but more from the other side: I have often thought how handy it would be to loan someone a large quantity of something so they could sell it to me cheap on a market to momentarily put a dip in the market price, leaving me with my asset plus them in debt to me for the same asset they just sold to me cheap.

The problem has always been collateral; since I didn't really expect anyone would deposit a whole bunch of bitcoins as collateral I mostly pinned my hopes upon folks being able to build up sufficiently valuable piles of in-game assets that I could let them use their game-assets as collateral.

I had that simplistic view of shorting though: that I loan them the thing they want to short, and ideally I am also the buy-side of the market they dump it on.

-MarkM-

Bitcoin-cli is actually Command Line Interface. Once upon a time the daemon (aka headless server), bitcoind, also contained the code to be used as a command-line interface for sending commands to the copy that was already running as a daemon, but nowadays that part is cut out of the daemon to exist as the separate program bitcoin-cli.

The -qt is a Graphical User Interface'd version of the wallet, with still I think also the ability to act as a server so as to not have to run the bitcoind daemon to do the server duties.

-MarkM-

GRouPcorp's lobbying group has managed to wrangle enough influence to have just now caused General Holding Corp to issue an interesting announcement...

EDIT: Note that this news might well make a significant impact on the values listed at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/ingroupcoins.html

EDIT2: Yes, it made an impact alright! Check the values again now... quite an impressive rally for GRouPcoin!

-MarkM-

As you might or might not already be aware, General Holding Corp administers the interface between the Galactic Milieu and the underlying bandwidth, hosting, software development and so on that the game runs on.

A large part of the Corp's income is the fee per square mile that Freeciv scale civilisations are charged for the privilege of running a civilisation.

In casting about for some way to rationalise this "hosting etc" cost in game terms, the idea of having it be a cost incurred by the ruling political party, aka the government, rather than the civilisation being ruled, was somehow hit upon.

The idea here is that the accrued backlog of fees incurred by a nation that lies idle for many game-turns would cripple the nation if it was an expense incurred by the nation itself rather than by those who wouldst fain govern that nation.

Doing it this way means that the nation can continue to stumble along itself thanks to the "artificial intelligence" provided by the Freeciv software, without any worries about paying the fee.

Meanwhile though the task of getting one's political party (such as the Royalist Party, the Despotism Party, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Fundamentalism Party or even, if such a thing exists, the Anarchism Party) into power in that nation would become more and more daunting, thanks to the continued amassing of these fees plus the interest charged on outstanding fees.

So the upshot is that ultimately the hosting fees for hosting the Freeciv based worlds are being charged to groups, specifically the type of group that is known as a Party, as in a Political Party.

With this in mind, it is proposed that we tie these fees to GRouPcoin.

Initially the fees will continue to be computed in the same way they always have been, which is to say, in terms of "units of Deuterium", as listed at

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

So far it has been customary to allow these fees to be paid in any of the listed currencies, since of course Deuterium itself is a resource that exists in galaxies far far away and thus is not actually available, at least not in significant quantities as a commodity resource, among the Freeciv worlds.

(In fact technically that Deuterium pricelist page does not refer to the isotope itself wherever it may be found but, rather, to delivered units of it delivered to depots located among a certain set of Galaxies Far Far Away.)

However the plan is to first move to insisting that the hosting fee be paid in GRouPcoin, and then possibly, later, to computing it in the first place in terms of GRouPcoin instead of in terms of Deuterium.

Basically we convert Freeciv scale (terrain tiles 100 miles by 100 miles in size or thereabouts) into OpenSimulator scale ("Regions" 256x256 metres) by generously allowing a square mile to be represented by a four by four block of "Regions", thus 16 "Regions" to the square mile, which is where the factor of 16 comes from that leads to the hosting fee being 1.6 units of Deuterium per "square mile".

Political Parties thus pay thousands of thousands of units of Deuterium per real life month to control a large civilisation.

This could thus have a decent impact upon the perceived value, thus the price per coin, of GRouPcoin.

It should be noted, for Parties who might consider taking control of large civilisations, that of course the more shares one owns of General Holding Corp the less of a burden these fees might appear.

One little detail remains to be looked into though, which is whether there even exist enough liquid GRouPcoins to enable them to work for paying fees? Are there enough in circulation that it is practical for folks to be paying many millions of units of Deuterium worth of them every month? What will General Holding Corp need to do with them in order to ensure the coins taken in get back into circulation to be used again the next month to pay the recurring fees again? Hmm... Maybe in light of that thought it is a good thing that GRouPcoins continue to be minted at a constant rate?

-MarkM-

I found that KED would just hang, some kind of port problem, when I tried having it mine (with its built-in miner).

So I haven't done much with it yet. I have none to stake so it presumably wasn't the too many coins to stake problem mentioned upthread.

Wouldn't it be nicer to trade these coins in game between the civilisations that use them as their national currencies, and between characters who are citizens of those civilisations, before getting all tied up in all the planet-known-as-Earth crap altcoins tend to get subjected to?

Mot of the coins aren't even secure fergoshsakes. Even if one believed that Proof of Stake can be secure, some of the coins are only Proof of Work, and have far from enough work to secure them.

Maybe they should all be moved over either to merged mining or to proof of stake or both?

-MarkM-

In light of how active the Crypto Kingdom thread has been lately...

...A thread about the founding of one little town of Monero users, presumably on some planet somewhere...

I thought I ought to point Ixians at http://coinzen.org/index.php/topic,3649.0.html

It looks like Freeciv's web-based client is working nowadays, not as some third party thing no one else can compile but as part of mainline Freeciv releases.

So maybe now at long last people will soon be able to look at the Galactic Milieu through their smartphones, which might help get more folk interested in it.

As one of the original coins merged-mined alongside DeVCoins, IXCoins are of course well known in the Galactic Milieu...

Though as of yet none of the nations thus far set up there have specifically chosen IXCoin to be their national currency.

Hey, does that sound like opportunity knocking for some Ixian entrepeneur(s) ?

NOTE: Although Ixians have not yet set up on the Freeciv scale of play, there is a lone character named Ix in the Crossfire RPG interface to the Galactic Milieu, and a family-type clan of Ixians in the CoffeeMUD interface. They just haven't yet quite gotten ready yet to manifest on the Freeciv scale, for which they would need to form 10,000 characters into a Freeciv scale unit of "Settlers" that can land on a planet and turn into a town/city of size 1, which at Freeciv scale is a town/city of population 10,000.

NOTE2: Freeciv "turns" are one year of game time, so they would also need breakfasts, lunches, dinners, anti-scurvy fruit or juice, suppers, gear, and so on to last those 10,000 characters for one gameyear of travel to their new world. So a lot of room for farmers and preparers of meals-ready-to-eat to do some large scale sales of supplies to anyone who tries to put together a unit of Settlers...

-MarkM-

It looks like the primary reason for gaining attention here is the reader thinks it might be a chance to get rich quick.

There are plenty of technical innovations around, but the local corwd here keeps jumping on new coins, ninja launches, ICOs even if they are probably scams, and so on.

Most of them don't seem to care what the excuse is for pumping out yet another scam as long as they have a chance to get in on the ground floor and thus get to be one of the scammers, or at least to grab a share of the proceeds of the scam.

The way to make a coin worthwhile is to stick with it year after year, building up infrastructrure around it, growing its user-base, and, if possible, putting nearly all the proceeds of sales of the coin right back onto the buy side to build up a massive buy-side; ideally eventually you would get the buy-side built up so huge that every one of the coins could be dropped on it and still there would be buy offers sitting there forced to wait for those who out-bid them to decide to dump, or having to resort to offering more than those who out-bid them.

Take a look at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/inbtc.html ... scroll down to March of 2014. Batshit-insane values. Why? Supposedly because those folks "backed" their coins.

Look at those values. Aren't coins worth that much be "worthwhile" ?

They were not forced to throw away most of their wealth on "miners"; Proof of Work coins cost so insanely much to secure that they seem to end up throwing money away in effect, enriching power companies and mining-rig manufacturers.

-MarkM-