A Windows version of the Open Transactions GUI, "Moneychanger", a version that supposedly "just works", has been made available:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.msg1216747#msg1216747

It includes the server contract for the Digitalis Open Transactions server so hopefully will allow Windows users easy ability to trade on that server.

-MarkM-

I think using bitcoin as collateral would work better for this.

Put a bunch of bitcoin in a collateral account, borrow some altcoin or other against that collateral, sell the altcoin at an altcoin-to-fiat exchange and buy real stocks from a real stockbroker...

General Financial Corp is thinking of setting up some kind of collateral (aka margin account?) system that ought to work for this kind of thing. (Using bitcoin as collateral and borrowing an altcoin or other asset...)

-MarkM-

CPU mining is really only useful before the GPU people start to take a coin seriously, so it is best used on coins they never bothered to mine or coins they have given up mining. It is a "just for fun" thing, serious miners use GPUs or even-more-specialised equipment.

Some of the ancient CPU-oriented coins might still be mine-able for example, or of course since this is just for fun anyway the recent just for fun coin BBQcoin would work. A whole lot higher difficulty but still within a range where CPUs can still get some coins is GRouPcoin, but as that is merged you might as well point your CPUs at the Massively Merged Mining project, so your hashes would have a tiny chance of getting a block on other chains too and you might even see some tiny tiny amount of bitcoin from the p2pool front end.

-MarkM-

There was an e-gold type of place once upon a time that was anyonymous too. Ran for years I think it was before eventually running with the gold.

-MarkM-

After the dot-com crash it turned into a useless cost year after year. I keep the domains, and even point the subdomains places from time to time, but eventually the extended-HTML webserver I used got hard to update too so one year I figured its just not worth the hours it would take to get it all working yet again on yet another new machine. Archive.org is actually better in some ways than running a site myself, it is one thing to write on my own page I've been around a while, quite another to get archive.org to verify that.

The only websites I have on my domains right now is in my .sig, http://hosting.knotwork.com/ which just points at an affiliate site and http://mudgaard.knotwork.com:27744 which is a CoffeeMUD instance.

I have my Open Transactions server at ot.knotwork.com

Not that any of this is really on topic or anything like that, of course.

-MarkM-

Yes! Thank you! It is small, but even so it is legible. See you there.

-MarkM-

Pick a legible theme at least. That outer menu thing that looks like a frame eats up so much space then you use a tiny font too maybe simply because it has to fit in the space left over. And its not even really a frame, if it was I could load just the forum without all that wasted space around it.

Basically its still illegible, which is weird for phpBB as usually phpBB forums are great.

-MarkM-

You seem possibly to be implying that Mircea Popescu's Options Emporium is not usable for this task?

-MarkM-

MirceaPopescu.com, who seems to be an artist.

Remember that anyone who is logged into any google service is going to have google results personalised, maybe google knows which Mercea you visit most or something? Or is that artist site correct?

-MarkM-

I suspect loaning them to yourself-on-some-service as collateral might be the new "thing" to take its place;

that is, instead of loaning your bitcoins, using them as collateral to borrow other things.

That way you need not lose out on the gains in value your bitcoins make while "using" them to invest in other things.

-MarkM-

Mining is not at all a form of gainful employment. In fact it is all too likely to become just another black hole to throw money into.

It is a zero sum game; everyone is fighting for the few coins that will be minted, and others have you outnumbered and outgunned.

You'd be better off buying yourself a good resume and interview-outfit and a bus pass so you can get to interviews and spend your time out there finding employment.

-MarkM-

Its a pretty stupid way to do it though.

Any Tom Dick or Harry who wants to sell or use other people's identities merely has to claim the government insists people have to send them to him else he can't let them in on the awesome 7%/week business opportunity he is offering...

-MarkM-

So the attacker posed as 22 distinct separate entities?

If you allude to the thoery that an attacker could simply pay miners to hash the way the attacker wants, I don't see that ASIC has anything to do with it, unless the mind control beams they emit slacken miner morals more than the beams emitted by GPUs do?

-MarkM-

Where do you see mortgage in the plan other than the possibility the property is cheap due to some else having reneged on a mortgage? (I thought it was renege on taxes offhand but maybe you think it was mortgage?)

I had the impression this was a buy houses with cash and sell them for cash deal?

EDIT: Ah maybe you are saying this deal itself is something akin to a mortgage (and thus implying maybe a real lien on the properties would be a good idea as part of verification)?

-MarkM-

That problem keeps on coming up, that is part of why I made tables using different assets as the one to express values in; the idea was to try to get an idea which assets seemed least volatile so as to be able to pick such an asset rather than a rapidly appreciating asset or a rollercoaster up and down in value asset to denominate things in when wanting to use a less volatile unit of account. I actually only recently bothered to add "expressed in bitcoins" to the tables simply because I figured I already knew bitcoin was one of the more volatile ones. The tables I made so far are at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

-MarkM-

The whitewashing the fence scene in Tom Sawyer, maybe?

Let you whitewash my fence for free? Are you kidding? No way, if you wanna whitewash my fence you gotta pay me...

-MarkM-

The way Open Transactions handles multiple offers made with the same assets is to check the offer when someone clicks on it, to see if the person offering still has enough balance to execute the offer.

That way a person with for example 100 bitcoins could make 100 bitcoin offer on every market of every asset, but as soon as one of them is taken up the rest become vapourware that will vanish as soon as someone clicks on one to see if it is still good.

This is kind of a compromise between allowing people to express an interest in "whichever I can get first out of all these possibilities any one of which I will accept" and allowing those who care whether an offer they see in the orderbook is real or not to be able to check by forcing it to go look whether it still has funds enough behind it to make it real.

Since it is in any case extremely inefficient to have people constantly polling the server asking what offers exist most likely a ticker will be added so that offers can all be published somewhere other than the server's own API to take the polling load off of the server, whereupon the concept of "depth" will in any case become moot since it can be expected that most offers that would otherwise be on the books will instead be out in the wild watching the ticker ready to respond to any offers that appear on the ticker that they like.

-MarkM-

Sounds like a hacker with a nice attack-via-browser setup just needs to hack blockchain.info and wait for you to expose your browser to the attack...

Of course the owner of blockchain.info will claim it wasn't them, they were hacked, afterall that is standard procedure for bitcoin services offered as websites so no surprise there...

Just how much coin are you planning to put on your windowsill like that to tempt hackers?

-MarkM-

Well I wasn't' so much thinking of computing the value as of simply a generic app for trading the things.

If the assets involved are like in Open Tranactions. simply hashes of contracts/descriptions, the app need not have any concept of that exactly the two assets involved actually are, all it would need to do is enable people to set up the use of one asset to buy sell or trade futures of another asset.

Free open source futures trading app kind of concept. How many icecream cones will you pay for a right to buy how many sticks of bubblegum at X number of icecreamcones each. Asset-agnostic code.

-MarkM-

http://web.archive.org/web/19981202132656/http://www.knotwork.com/~markm/

-MarkM-