This is not really an abstract theoretical question, it is a practical question.

There are plenty of chains that are not currently being merged-mined much.

Some of them would like to find out how much it is going to cost them to correct that problem so they can properly set up business plans to include that cost.

-MarkM-

Sure enough that move did put GFC back on track, as can be seen from the figures online at

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

-MarkM-

I expect that it is likely the main differences among cryptocurrencies will be the uses to which they are put.

Bitcoin has been looking good as a store of value, but that creates a usefulness for something that is not bitcoin but which is liquid; something that preferably does not tend upwards in value as fast as bitcoin or possibly even tends downwards in value or maybe even has a value that is pretty stable in terms of its exchange rates against various fiat currencies, particularly fiat currencies that are widely used.

The biggest advantage I have seen in this so far has been for financing, since the existence of non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies allows people to use their bitcoin as collateral to secure a loan and take that loan in the form of a different cryptocurrency, one that they expect will not appreciate in value as fast as bitcoin has tended to.

This has let people leave their bitcoins securely locked away in capital accounts, collateral accounts or leverage accounts or however you like to term such accounts while still making use of their buying-power.

Of course it is also useful to have more cryptocoins not just two, because for example if people choose litecoins as their non-bitcoin choice and litecoins start going up in value, they will naturally be wanting to pick yet another type of coin to then serve as their "not going up in value as fast as my collateral does" choice.

The saga of General Financial Corp illustrates nicely how having a multitude of currencies to choose from can be useful, as well as illustrating how choosing one that does not suit one's purpose can be a problem. (Basically they had to keep shopping around for refinancing because of exchange rates between the currency they were loaning out and the currency in which their own financing was denominated. Though actually in the end they eliminated the currency exchange rate risk by finding financing denominated in the same currency they were loaning out. A currency that appreciates slower would have been better though.)

-MarkM-

I tried to visit the Ixcoin forum from the link on the ixcoin.org site but it seems to have been moved or taken down or something.

Since no-one seems to be interested in starting up businesses that are specifically operated in Ixcoin the fact that Open Transactions does not use one asset as somehow special/different so that all others must be priced only in that one, they might find it particularly useful as people who think of prices in terms of some other type of asset/coin can trade using their favourite coin while people who prefer Ixcoins can trade the exact same things using Ixcoins.

-MarkM-

Is anyone mining this one anymore?

I noticed that Vircurex is halting trading in I0coins but not in these, so presumably these are more alive than some people think I0coin is?

If I recall correctly these are the ones with not only a really fast block time but also no adjustment of diffuculty, so as more people hash you get more and more orphans from everyone creating blocks lightning fast instead of spreading them out more by increasing the difficulty?

-MarkM-

It has nothing you can merged-mine alongside it, so is less efficient at puting your hashing power to as much use as possible.

With bitcoin once you are alrready hashing anyway you might as well hash as many things as you reasonably can all at once using that same hashing, so it is in a sense more "green", you can "recycle" the "work" you spend on it by spending the same "work" on many blockchains at once.

This also means that various schemes to implement bonds and shares and so on can be done "on the side" instead of having to clutter up the main bitcoin blockchain; any of the merge-able supposedly-dead chains could be revived for use with any such schemes.

Basically the main practical difference is that litecoin tries not to share; it aims to eat up more of the world's energy separately instead of make efficient use of energy expenditures that are "already happening anyway".

-MarkM-

Cloning bitcoin you run into "51% attack" problems; securing a blockchain is not easy.

The missing function really seems to be offer matching.

You can technically issue and exchange assets using any number of existing free open source solutions, from online banking site type solutions to the Truledger system; the missing piece since when I went searching two years or more ago is the order-matching engine. The "market".

It is for that that I have been working with Open Transactions, however if you are willing to risk the seemingly vastly oversized attack surface you get by using the web, there are also at least a couple of free open source "bitcoin exchange" packages available now. YOu could cross out fiat and write your asset name in in crayon (so to speak) and presto, an exchange for your newfangled asset.

I have even looked at MUDs and other games for this functionality, since in many such games it is trivially easy for a gamemaster to create objects people can carry around, give to each other, buy and sell in shops and so on. But usually no "offer matching engine". (Though CoffeeMUD does have auctions, both in a form you can attach to a room or shopkeeper-creature and in free roaming form whereby at any moment one (and only one) auction can be taking place that anyone in the MUD can participate in. The problem with software intended for playing games though tends to be that things vanish; it tends not to take good care of balances. Easy come, easy go. Oh the MUD crashed and your million gold is gone, no problem, just go out and dig up more or kill more monsters or whatever to get more. Not good for preserving inventory records that you really care about.

I installed a full banking site system a while ago called Cyclos, but some kind of javascript problem or something tirvial like that made it un-useable from my (FIrefox on Fedora Linux) browser so I don't even know whether it would have worked to securely record balances robustly like Open Transactions has been doing for me for so long now, and of course again the missing piece was markets: order-matching.

Secure storage of ownership data is easy, you can even create one dot-bit name per share to have individual items/shares that can be traded on the namecoin network. Finding the best price anyone is willing to buy or sell for is again the missing piece with that approach too, though maybe the fact people can trade them directly without an intermediary does at least open the possiblity of using any platform they want to try to find buyers or sellers on, simply by placing ads anywhere they think they might find a trading partner.

What I was actually searching for when I came across bitcoin and Open Transactions was simply a generic marketplace system, something that would record who has what, where, at what price, maybe with optionally a shipping info handler to figure out how much it would cost to move the thing offered to somewhere else so it could change in location as well as in ownership and part of buyer preference could be where the thing offered is as well as what it is and what price it is available at in what quantity. I still have not found that; Open Transactions lets anyone trade anything for anything else but does not handle where the things are located and what it would take to move it from one location to another.

(I could create separate asset tokens for grams of gold on Earth, grams of gold on Mars, etcetera but it has no move the Earth ones to Mars or the Mars ones to Earth type of stuff in it.)

So overall yeah there is a huge gap in what is out there in the way of free open source software for trading stuff. I never did come across a decent general purpose auction site system yet for example.

So far I am still using Open Transactions.

-MarkM-

Before that someone should step up to grab the (185+ BTC) bounty for making a client for grannies. This current client is is a reference client, demonstrating how to code all the many things Open Transactions can do.

The bounty thread is at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=105506.0

-MarkM-

FellowTraveler is very modest about it. He has not officially characterised it as beta yet as far as I know.

I have been running a server a long time though and frankly i have never known any financial system so robust where it counts, which is in actually keeping all the balances correct. Seems like all other systems invariably get some balance somewhere wrong sometime. It always seemed to me the "trial balance" in commercial accounting systems was for more than just making sure the humans got their inputs right, not sure I have ever run anything before in which the balances and the overall balance was this robust.

So sure yeah the user interface is terrible, it needs to be made to handle more load, and so on and so on, but there is nothing quite like it for actually keeping track of actual balances.

TL;DR it *is* alpha, "officially".

-MarkM-

How about videos?

http://open-transactions-tv.github.com/

Here are some screenshots:

https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Moneychanger

There are also wikis:

https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Moneychanger/wiki

https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions

-MarkM-

So is this new Windows release working for everyone? For anyone? I am not seeing much sign that people have had much success getting it up and running?

-MarkM-

So, anyone having any difficulty getting the new WIndows release up and running?

I do not seem to be seeing much traffic at what is still the only server currently open to the public...

I was going to start setting up another server, but if no one is able to get to the one that is already online maybe it is a bit soon for that?

-MarkM-

That is no big deal, everyone still gets the coins as a side-effect of bitcoin mining so maybe it is just as well that they not be overly tempted to throw them away dirt cheap (dump them), we'll see in a few years when most of them have been minted whether everyone still wants to dump them or has seen by then the usefulness of having a large number of choices of cryptocoins to choose among and to long or short against each other and to play games with maybe if they can salve their conscience for spending money on games by arguing to themselves it is worthless money, play money, in the first place so it is okay to fritter it away on entertainment and so on and so on.

Really it is just a potential opportunity to pick them up cheap despite maybe not having gotten into them some time ago.

Also, I still have them listed on the Digitalis Open Transactions server, so trading them against any other listed asset there is still implemented. (No fiat is listed though; to get to fiat you might have to pick up something that does have a fiat exchange somewhere else and go to that somewhere else with that something else to get to fiat. Which is fine by me as fiat is what we want to distance ourselves from anyway, right?)

-MarkM-

That is only temporary. When we are all stinking rich we'll be buying stuff for satoshicents or less a pop.

-MarkM-

So about the same premine as RUCoin then it seems.

-MarkM-

So does it work? People willing to use command-line python script(s) can now issue bonds to each other and such?

-MarkM-

In that case the platform/house certainly should not cover it, and maybe should warn Bob against taking so much risk.

Maybe there is some middle ground between hedging versus loss thus not losing or gaining, and gambling.

-MarkM-

Huh? The change has been in since May or somesuch, it is merely becoming active soon.

-MarkM-

Check your "stake". Supposedly your coins turn into "stake" when used to create stake blocks, then turn back into balance 30 days or whatever later.

Any you do not want used as stake you can set a hold back value of how much to not use as stake and thus to keep as balance.

-MarkM-

Bulls profit if it goes up, It should be it going down that would be bad for Bobcorp.

But defaults seem to me to simply emphasise the need for collateral.

Tying up a bunch of your capital might be real bad if you are small, but maybe at some "too big to fail" kind of scale having at least half one's capital tied up as secure collateral might actually make sense, at least better sense than being leveraged so that the tipping point / butterfly's wing needed to bring your entire edifice and maybe much of the nation / society is operates in down is small/sensitive?

-MarkM-