In some implementations of Proof of Stake you don't have to leave the client running "all the time", it kind of tries to catch up when it does get run.

So with those maybe as long as small holders of the currency do fire up their client occassionally, even if just to send some pocket-money to a kid or whatever, maybe the fact it will have to catch up to the blackchain, and maybe doesn't ring an alarm when it does catch up, tends tleave it sitting there staking long enough enough of the time that such folk do actually stake without necessarily even realising it or planning to?

I envision someone firing it up to send some coin or check if they received some someone was going to send them, and realising it will take a few hours for the blockchain to catch up, thus getting distracted by something else; so that when the blockchain does catch up staking can start and it might be gosh knows how long before the user realises the thing did catch up thus is ready to do what they fired it up to do.

You might suggest that they could just send coins without waiting for the blackchain to catch up, of course; but I think a larger weakness is the kind of small holder casual user in this scenario is actually probably unlikely to even use a client that uses the blackchain directly, thus their coins would most likely be actually held by some third party, who could do the staking for them (a staking pool) or just take the stake earnings for themselves.

-MarkM-

What lasted a yhear?

If you mean Devtome, or the ability to earn DeVCoins by writing for Devtome, they are still humming along just fine.

I have no idea what happened to Jasin, nor the scrypt ASICs he at one point had claimed to be arranging.

DeVCoin and Devtome are doing just fine, though watching the Crypto Kingdom thread lately I kind of wonder why in all these years we have not seen much interest in the Galactic Milieu project that uses Devtome as its main documentation hosting site. The Crypto Kingdom sounds just like a new civilisation starting up un the Milieu, yet is so far, as far as I am aware, completely unrelated to it.

-MarkM-

I just checked my version 4 node again and now it IS forging. Maybe browser cache obscured it before or something.

-MarkM-

There is no mention of forging on any of the three versions I mentioned previously.

I do recall having seen it once long ago, but that might have been before creating any hallmarks.

All my machines now have hallmarks could that be disabling forging somehow?

I don't know where I read that that forging indicator had been removed from the node version.

But I had hoped/expected to see it by moving over to the none node versions.

But that isn't happening.

I do have in my nhz.properties


in all cases. (I copy over the nhz.properties as well as the database so all three versions have same of both (although the version 4 updated the database to a new type or something it started with same database.))

-MarkM-

I was using hz-v3.9.2-node but it had no option to "stake" or "mint" type of thing.

So I went to get hz-v3.9.2 and found latest is hz-v4.0e but that too had no staking/minting.

So now I tried hz-v3.9.2 andf that too does not have it.

So how does one go about it now?

Once upon a time one of my machines did have under logout an option to logout leaving the thing staking, but none of these three versions show that anymore.

ALso once upon a time there was a button to turn on staking, but I vaguely recally something about that being removed from the public nodes version, which is why I went for the non-node versions but none of them has it anymore.

Is there no staking / minting (making blocks) anymore or what?

Also, can you enter hostname (host.domain.tld) instead of IP address when making hallmark?

-MarkM-

Great for games though.

Alchemists could sell Potions of Longevity, aka Booster Spice, for Spice coin without worrying about people who don't even play the game messing with the price through some exchange that isn't even located inside the game.

Hmm, might even be worth implementing ageing into games that don't have it, just so as to sell longevity...

-MarkM-

The buys and sells of 100 are me, I had to go to cryptsy to do it because back in Jan or Feb or so Vircurex failed to credit me 2 bitcoins I sent them, and to this day still has not, so I am unable to provide buy support on Vircurex. After many many months of building up support they screewed us by prventing me sending in more bitcoins to continue providing support. So maybe they are in on it too.

Thanks for all the cheap IXCoins over on cryptsy But I dunno if I can do it on cryptsy, part of why VIrcurex was the place to use was all the bitcoins tied up in the low end of the buy side earned something at Vircurex. Building the buys all the way down to be bottom is just money sitting idle on Cryptsy, at leastg until someone dumps all trhe way to the bottom anyway.

Bear in mind that there is a whole faction that call themselves Ixians in the Galactic Milieu. (Which, I just noticed I have not made a Devtome page for, I should do that sometime to earn some DeVCoins.)

Take a look at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/inbtc.html

Scroll down to March of 2014.

CDN, GMC, GRF, MBC, UKB and UNS are basically IXCoin clones. That is, there are 21 million coins and no more being minted. That was true for them all along.

Not being minted means no miners out there dumping them, no new ones being made that have to be bought to keep the price per coin from falling.

Now I am not saying that the Ixians are as powerful as the Canucks, the Brits, or even General Mining Corp, but still... The batshit crazy values those folks' coins attained in March of 2014 are totally batshit crazy. 1/500 of such prices would be crazy. But who knows how powerful the Ixians would become if you lot were in the game with them ingratiating yourselves with all the high mucky mucks on the Galactic Diplomacy planet and so on? Who knows how much the Ixian currency, IXCoin, would be worth by now if you had all bought a few CDN, UKB, GRF and such using Ixcoins years ago, and used them to "back" Ixcoin?

The big problem is the dumpers: people who are not themselves Ixians but, due to IXCoin having been mined by non-Ixians, being in possession of large chunks of IXCoin. Thus being able to devalue the Ixian currency by dumping it.

Ix needs to buy back its currency and back it with the full faith and resources of the planet Ix, or the Ixian nation, or whatever their basis is. Heck just the Ixian clan or whatever.

Maybe they should consider buying 100 player accounts and using them to put 500 workers into the fields or mines just to pile up materials with which to "back" their currency?

Basically once the dumpers are gone, so that Ixians pretty much own their own currency again, they ought to be able to do well with it like other nations / clans have already done in the past.

-MarkM-

The ssl bug again? I thought they just gone done fixing that! Arg.

Just as well we didn't instantly throw money at taking the fix and putting into all the merged mined coins.

I thought though that bitcoin fixed it then namecoin replicated the fix, did they fail to replicate it properly or is bitcoin not fixed afterall?

EDIT: See http://coinzen.org/index.php/topic,3938.0.html - I am urging DeVCoin to whip up bounties for getting fixes done for all the merged mined coins.

-MarkM-

I0Coin and DeVCcoin are actually still massive difficulty compared to hundreds or thousands of coins out there that people keep throwing money at.

So I think we are far from dead yet.

Though not being able to buy ASIC mining gear is painful. All the makers of ASICs keeping them to themselves instead of selling them.

I wanted to keep adding more mining power precisely because I did not trust run of the mill miners to actually stick to the job of mining all the merged mined coins so figured I would need to mine them myself, and in general that anyone using merged mined coins would want to and need to mine the lot of them themselves.

The inability to actually buy mining gear is a massive blow to such plans...

The bastards who stopped mining IXCoin likely have some private access to mining gear that we cannot buy so cannot even take up the slack.

Efficiency loss from a merged coin should be tiny. Maybe their pool code is just not very good at its job. Most pool code doesn't really do merged mining well at all.

Point all your miners at pools that do merge all the coins, or as many as any pool does. Check out mmpool.org for example maybe. Though they have been under DDOS attack. Maybe someone is seriously attacking merged mining in general.

-MarkM-

Yeah I see hash power has dropped now since last I looked.

Maybe one of the big pools that had merged IXCoin has stopped doing so?

-MarkM-

What are you looking at?

I looked at the difficulty and mining hashpower listed at Vircurex when you posted earlier then again now and see no change yet...

-MarkM-

Your thinking seems in some useful / important ways similar to that of the folks who had me create national / company currencies for them. Good.

For example you back your currencies.

They from the get-go said the problem with bitcoin was the miners do not stand prepared to buy back the bitcoins they sold.

They claimed that a currency ought to be backed, not just spewed out aka minted by irresponsible parties who have no intention of buying it back.

Their whole expectation of being able to make their currencies work was based on kind of regarding the coins as IOUs in a sense: each coin they had not yet bought back would represent some kind of obligation, if only in their own minds. They always apparently intended to be buyers of their own coins as a major part of how their coins would come to have value.

-MarkM-

That heads rapidly off topic I suspect.

But to try to stay on topic, suppose Crypto Kingdom were to position itself, or be positioned, within the Galactic Milieu metagame framework:

Battle for Wesnoth would be used to create playable historical dramas, holo-docu-dramas as it were (except that here on the planet known as Earth we have no holobarracks yet), since currently Battle for Wesnoth is basically a computer-aided-learning type of tool, a tool for presenting media mediated by multiple-choice questions, but with the ability to insert game scenarios so some of the multiple choices can be things like "did you win the scenario" and suchlike choices. (It can also be thought of as a storyboarding tool, a tool authors can use to create interactive storyboards for potential moviemakers / holodrama makes to get the gist of the plot and characters and alternative plotlines and the decision points and such.)

For example the story of how Crypto Kingdom came to be could be documented as a Battle for Wesnoth campaign. For the entertaining game/battle scenarios that help draw readers through the educational spiels you could maybe make some fun little games where various Cryptonote coins recruit spammers, trolls and suchlike "units" to battle for the altcoin section, or whatever. The real purpose of the battles, since the player has to win them to continue through the campaign aka to continue through the educational material / story / documentary, is to punctuate the lecturing with recess breaks intended to be fun, or, in the case of hard-fought battles, to provide the student aka player with a hands-on "feel" for how hard a battle it was, how unlikely it was that the heroes managed to come through and create history-as-we-know-it.

As to how coins come into existence, how you obtain them and such, that naturally varies. Crypto Kingdom uses Monero and Crypto Kingdom Gold. Where do they come from? How are they obtained? The Galactic Milieu does not prescribe such things, rather one should get involved in the Crypto Kingdom itself, or investigate it, to learn such things. Thus, similarly, if you want to know about Martian BotCoin, go ask the Martians. Oh you don't know any Martians? Well what planets do you have characters on, do any of the civilisations on that planet have contact with Martians? If not maybe you could have your civilisation build SETI city-improvements, or send out exploratory starships? Or maybe there is someplace you could create a character that would have more chance of discovering such things, hmm, I wonder how a player gets to have a character who is a Martian?

Well how does a player get to have a character who is an inhabitant of or expatriate of Crypto Kingdom? Can a player become an inhabitant or expatriate of various other civilisations via that same method, or does that method only result in Crypto Kingdom characters? (Are there neighboring Kingdoms one could obtain a character in? Are there portals supporting creating characters in a wider selection of kingdoms / games / civilisations / etc? Has anyone built a Starport in Crypto Kingdom yet? Would building one be feasible to you using your existing Crypto Kingdom character(s) and resources? Etc...)

Really, part of the Alternate Reality Gaming background in which this all can be viewed kind of serves to help keep games for gamers, so that the principle shareholders, stakeholders and such controlling the physical platforms on which games are played, the servers that serve them and so on, can be the players themselves, not just a bunch of corporations and suits that don't even play the damn games!

So discovering how to get to play various parts of gaming is part of the whole gaming process, the process of being/becoming a gamer, of having characters in games, who can learn from other characters in games of other games those characters can migrate to or themselves create characters in and so on...

If you install a Crossfire RPG client, for example, you might find that CrossCiv.no-ip.org is not shown on their list of gameservers (not sure why that happens but it lately always seems to have happened), but nonetheless if you tell the client to connect to CrossCiv.no-ip.org the resulting rabbithole is said to be one of the rabbitholes into the whole Galactic Milieu metagame framework...

EDIT: Oh one more thing of course: is Crypto Kingdom free open source? One limitation that Galactic Milieu does kind of have is that it is kind of intended to be Free Open Source and constructed out of / embedded with Free Open Source components and subgames and such. If you are Free Open Source then cool, I wonder what galaxy you might be in, and on which planet of that galaxy? If you are on a planet at all, that is...

-MarkM-

They are bitcoin clones. That is, twenty one million coins each.

Oh except for bitNicKeLs (NKL), which have 20 times that many coins, which was intended to make them worth 1/20th of what the others were worth. At least initially at startup.

When first they came to me about making coins for them I simply hacked at the -testnet part of the bitcoin code, so that for each nation there was a bitcoin client whose "testnet" switch made it use that nation's blockchain instead of bitcoin's testnet blockchain, so that they could use bitcoins and their national/company coin with the same client. (This was way back in the beginning, even before namecoin maybe. Before merged mining came along too of course. It was what I learned of the code doing this stuff that led to Unthinkingbit hiring me to help him figure out how to create DeVCoin.)

The massive problem with Proof of Work blockchains though is they are insanely expensive to secure. If any enemy had discovered their handshake bytes (magic bytes) and port number to connect to, they could have been attacked by anyone with more computer power.

In the game of course we can simply stipulate that only the hypothetical "Ancients" (represented in off the shelf Freeciv software by the Antarcticans) and the Hackers (from whom the Martians claimed to have obtained blockchain technology) are likely to be able to out-compute the Martians, who quite likely could out-compute even a combined alliance of the Brits and Canucks. But of course since the national currency of the Hackers is bitcoin, of course the bitcoin miners could out-compute the miners of any of these game-currencies. Even if we can get them to be merged-mined, the bitcoin miners have more hashing power than the most-hashed merged mined coin (namecoin) and a heck of a lot more than a less-commonly-merged-mined coin such as I0Coin. So I do not think we can reasonably expect to be able to secure these national/company coins by proof of work mining. Plus, of course, they already mined all their coins long ago. (The Martians developed warp drive centuries ago, it has been more than 140 years since their blockchain started.) So no minting to pay miners.

Now that things like NXT are coming along though, maybe the nations and multigalactics will be able to create such a network of their own, purely for game-asset purposes, on which to run all these game-coins as assets...

-MarkM-

That Gorilla social thing does not seem to have a login of its own? Some kind of two step twitter?

Not sure, but I tried both facebook button and twitter button with no luck.

The twitter button it did get as far as twitter's login but failed coming back to Gorilla.

Facebook it failed on way to facebook, lack of credentials apparently?

-MarkM-

I dunno, something about "no inflation" has a certain, oh I don't know... something?

High difficulty is nice, too.

Plus it is a lot cheaper to buy up lots of coins when the rest of the world is turning a blind eye...

Oh I get it, you want it to get even cheaper so you can belately buy in! Ha! Sneaky!

-MarkM-

Game currencies do some weird ups and downs.

I never would have dreamed, back when the bitcoin and the martian botcoin were at parity at $5 each and united kingdom britcoin, canadian digital notes, united nations scrip and such were only $1, that they would ever surpass bitcoin. Yet they did, staggeringly so.

I wish the GNUplot plots Ubuntu makes worked (they worked fine back when Fedora was making them) so you could see easily by using the plot pages, but the raw data is in the tables:

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

Take a look at Asset values expressed in bitcoins: http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/inbtc.html

Scroll down to March of 2014. Totally batshit insane.

-MarkM-

Or one person with a Jupiter or using part(s) of a Neptune. Actual hash power is still so low that a 51 GHash Butterfly Labs miner can still get blocks.

-MarkM-

There are over two million coins already out there.

If coin age doesn't count at all things are even worse, but if the first day of age does count, meaning a stake cannot be re-used for one pretended day, counting each block as five minutes, then each 288 blocks those over two million coins all are able to stake again.

So when you do find a coin aka block using PoW, you have less than one in two million chance, and getting lower all the time, of finding a PoS block.

So it is pretty hopeless. Might as well chalk it up as yet another pre-mined coin, and buy it at the IPO (aka "when it gets on an exchange", which in effect is its IPO if it pretends not to be an ICO or IPO coin) if you really want some.

-MarkM-

The point of the insta-mine arranged by putting a "bug" into the code and not telling any nodes.

It is pretty much a pre-mine, probably only the original gang who were already mining by the time "post" was pressed on the announcement have more than a trivial number of coins.

The faster anyone tries to catch up by proof of work mining, the faster the "days" of coin-age build up for the stakers, most likely (didn't check code to see but seems likely a "day" is pretended to have passed per so many blocks, without consulting any actual timestamps? So that every so many one-coin blocks a miner gets, every coin the cabal has magically "ages" a day so it can be staked again.)

-MarkM-