Bitcoin is going up faster than normal deflationary currency as imagined by the deflation enthusiasts, isn't it?

Basically we are still in the price-discovery phase, we should be way up over $100 per probably since last last year but the constant cries of "oh I got hacked", "oops I lost everyone's money" and so on have been taking their toll.

Even with all that slowing the process down though it is hard to keep up. I added tables expressed in bitcoins to my data at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html so I could check my feeling that most things were not keeping up with bitcoins, and it looks like I was right.

Essentially right now bitcoin is itself an investment. Once its value has been discovered and stabilised, when we are beyond the initial huge ramp-up of getting it into general circulation, will be time enough to consider it just another deflationary currency. For now I think its best to think of holding bitcoins as an investment in the initial ramping up of the concept.

-MarkM-

Interesting. DeVCoin based corps have been doing rather well on the Digitalis Open Transactions server too ( take a look at sGDC, sGFC and sGRC in the shares sections of http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html )...

-MarkM-

If it works with p2pool you should be able to merged-mine the full array of coins the Massively Merged Mining project mines and even more (there are some it dropped due to their being too resource-intensive, such as geistgeld).

-MarkM-

Are we talking about the scammer who agreed when providing his ID that it would be made public if he scammed/defaulted/(de)frauded?

-MarkM-

Browsers actually include gopher still don't they? Wasn't one of the selling points of the early browsers that they did all the usual stuff like gopher and ftp plus also had this newfangled web thing too? Did they ever drop gopher support?

-MarkM-

Nothing has improved upon IRC yet as far as I know, except maybe MUDs with channels between them if you like MUDs.

(Sure a MUD adds a whole bunch of crap many users might not have use for, but at least it does that at the server end not, like browsers, hogging the user's resources.)

-MarkM-

Do your FPGAs work with p2pool ? If so they should have no  trouble doing Massively Merged Mining.

-MarkM-

Yeah I realised that within minutes of posting.

Not sure how sophisticated the technology is, like can one modify any part of the recorded info in the jar or only either zap it empty or write onto the end of what is already there, whether ambient info in the place this all takes place could be chatting away with the instances of the app in its vicinity all the time while people are there and on like that. (The local ambient wifi for example could be constantly updated about all the tips by the tipping app, each time it talks to a jar it could announce to the room at large what was in the jar before and after, etc...)

-MarkM-

Maybe a better way than a blacklist would be to allow people who want this to simply publish their addresses along with their contact information, so that if any of their addresses do ever turn up in the course of tracing coins they can be contacted to ask them who exactly they got those coins from.

It would also help for givernments to issue signed PGP identities people can use to sign things in a way that proves it was them that signed it, so anyone concerned about this can simply insist on a signed transaction record as a condition of accepting any coins, so that when the tracers of stolen coin do come knocking on their door they will have good proof that the person they received the coins from really was who they claimed to be thus that they accepted the coins in good faith...

</tinfoil>

-MarkM-

That is silly though, the value of a day's nutrition remains the same, one day of staying alive, regardless of whether bitcoins skyrocket to millions of dollars each or drop to a penny each.

You are looking at the price in some specially volatile unit of measure, not the value.

If bitcoins go up in value faster than stocks or bonds, invest in bitcoins instead of stocks or bonds.

But don't claim e.g. a pound of gold has gone down in value just because you have changed the yardstick you are using to measure the value.

You might just as well measure it in kilograms and complain that it was worth one (measured in pounds) yesterday but only worth a fraction (measured in kilograms) today.

This so called bitcoin you are using to measure with has changed, it was a pound yesterday and a kilo today, good for you if you hold bitcoins, why waste your bitcoins buying something that is not getting heavier as fast as they are?

-MarkM-

Maybe you should not be alerting the sender that you realise the coins are stolen, instead you should quietly call the cops. Rejecting the coins could tip them off that the jig is up so they run away before the cops get there...

-MarkM-

TL;DR: usually we only know someone stole some value; claims that some coins on the blockchain were stolen are usually being made by the primary suspect, that is, the person who is refusing to pay people owed money and claiming coins on the chain are somehow an excuse for not paying people what he owes them. ("Someone stole from me so I am now going to steal from you (with no proof anyone stole anything from me)...")

For example we have no way of proving any coins were stolen from bitfloor at all.

They could have been stolen by bitfloor.

I suppose in both cases they are stolen though so watching them to see if they ever fall into the hands of any friend or relative or business associate of bitfloor could have merit... until a thief figures that out and makes sure to use them to implicate a victim.

About the only cases in which you actually know coins are stolen is cases like this, where you do not know whether the person claiming they have been stolen is lying or not, all you really know is that person owed money to people. Given fungability, it is not really any particular coins that have been stolen, all that has been stolen is value, and the person who stole that value is claiming some coins on the blockchain represent that value.

It seems wrong to screw around with those coins, we have only a suspect's word for it that he is not the current owner of those coins.

Better would be to consider who owns which coins currently irrelevant to the fact that he owed people a certain amount of value.

-MarkM-

You're going to start up with GPUs this late in the game?

Heck even FPGAs it is arguably way late to be starting now, but GPUs seems crazy...

-MarkM-

Realpra, would the fee system used by Open Transactions work better for you, where there are no percentages involved just a straight charge in "usage tokens" per API call you make?

That includes of course all API calls, not only ones that move assets around but also things like asking whether any assets are for sale and so on...

-MarkM-

Has there even been any "theft" yet that was not basically some idiot or incompetent basically throwing coins out a window because they couldn't be bothered to secure them?

If people are going to be more motivated to do something after a theft than before it maybe we should just automatically steal from everyone once to motivate them and provide more info on preventing loss?

-MarkM-

The app could by default exclaim in surprise if the jar is empty, so that the performer puts a penny in it before passing it around the crowd so that the next tipper after the thief will notice the theft.

-MarkM-

It doesn't usually make much/any sense to invest bitcoins in stuff anyway, you are almosts always (maybe absolutely always?) better off investing fiat, and even then only usually fiat that for some reason you do not want to invest directly into actual bitcoins per se.

-MarkM-

Bear in mind too that a huge percentage of the mining power currently deployed is totally, and in some cases quite deliberately, not merged-mining a full panoply of alternate blockchains.

Depending how many FPGAs are actually out there that would get on board with Massively Merged Mining, who knows how profitable some of the chains could become, and how much additional revenue all the chains that have had to go into hiding due to lacking enough hashing power to secure them could end up adding?

-MarkM-

Looking over those expressed-in-bitcoins tables it seems clear that just keeping up with bitcoin's rate of gain in value is hard, let alone beating it.

About the only reasonable candidates that jump out at me so far for possible assets to spend precious bitcoins on are three of the shares over toward the far right of the shares table, General Development Corp shares (sGDC), General Financial Corp shares (sGFC) and General Retirement Corp shares (sGRC).

It looks like holders of any assets other than those would be better of holding bitcoins instead, which in turn maybe ought to lead to some tendency to try to trade them in for bitcoins. I had kind of suspected all along that bitcoins probably gain value faster than most other things, which is a large part of why I have thought ever since bitcoins started going down in price from their $30+ high that they are very undervalued...

-MarkM-

I guess we need price discovery to find out how much each additional merged chain will cost to have it added to the merged mining repertoire of the typical miner or of 51% or more of mining hash power that is out there.

Quite a few chains are sitting in the wings waiting for some reasonable assurance that they will have enough mining if they come out into the open.

Hmm I wonder if assurance contracts can help them with that?

-MarkM-