So was that tablet the big chinese tablets-with-bitcoin deal rumours were flying about a while back?

Or is the tablets in china thing real and still on?

-MarkM-

Well duh, bitcoin is an arm of the New World Order, and GLBSE a central linchpin in the associated power-apparatus, of course he pays taxes like any other major New World Order power-elite institution does.

-MarkM-

You are using simulated money to simulate stocks and bonds on a simulation of a stock-exchange; that much is obvious from the fact that you are not violating sheafs of laws by offering real securities and charging real money for them.

That view is part of why I took the approach of first creating an entire backdrop universe in which to situate simulated stock-exchanges; because once your offender is a simulated person in the same simulated universe as the simulated stock exchange, with simulated collateral seizable by simulated troops or nuke-able by simulated nuclear weapons or vaporise-able by simulated death-stars you do have the ability to strike back, because anyone who has enough collateral to secure funding from you has to have either invested many years or at least many thousands of hours building that collateral, or to have "cheated" by spending Earth money to "buy their way to success in the game"; either way they have something you can have your nation go to war against their nation to strike at, or a character your assassin character can sneak up behind and kill, or whatever.

But continue along this road farther... Remember the guy in the U.K. that got nailed for stealing simulated (virtual) poker chips from an online casino?

It so happens the chips used to simulate money in our simulations are stealable, due to the manner in which they are implemented.

When people pay real Earth money to get ahead in the game, they often do so largely by buying these chips, known as bitcoins.

So these chips have an established value...

In the U.K. at least, stealing them should be clearly a  crime just as stealing those poker chips was.

Not sure what precedent applies in other places, though urban legend has rumours of Habbo Hotel furniture theft having been prosecuted somewhere...

-MarkM-

I have finally gotten around to adding bitcoins (BTC) to the asset value tables at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

I had not bothered in the past since bitcoin was so volatile and what I wanted to see was which assets were tending up or down over time. Using a volatile value asset to express values makes that harder to see due to not knowing which is really changing, the asset you are looking at or the asset in terms of which the values are expressed.

-MarkM-

The fork to always generate 50 coins per block instead of halving the number of coins from time to time has already been done.

It is not a big hassle change with miners breaking each way since it can be merged-mined.

There is not even the big hassle of which chain your coins are on since you can very inexpensively spend coins of the old, original "bitcoin" chain to join this particular member of the group of bitcoin-like currencies.

It is known as GRouPcoin.

It is obviously far, far superior to the original old bitcoin if you are among those who believe not halving coin generation is far, far superior to the old original bitcoin's periodic halving.

-MarkM-

Actually we DeVCoiners already get 90% of the generated coins sent to ourselves, so bitcoin is already obsolete for that kind of grabbing, if you want (a share of) 90% of the coins just use devcoin instead of bitcoin and you're done!

(Apart from a few minor technicalities such as developing open source stuff, of course, but everyone already does that anyway, right? )

-MarkM-

Surely your motivation if you somehow allow the value (NAV I think its called?) to fall should be to get it back toward growing?

If doing that seems so hopeless that the idea of getting pay again when you get there does not motivate you maybe closing down is better before it loses even more?

Its probably bad enough that you can cause it to lose value by giving good deals to some sockpuppet company or companies people don't know are also related to you with undercover deals or whatever, without also getting rewarded for leeching the value out of the investors' capital?

-MarkM-

So if the value of the company goes down, you get a 5% management fee?

Yet supposedly in the event of a loss you don't get a management fee?

That is confusing. A loss of value is not a loss?

-MarkM-

Everyone who wants to buy could send their actual transaction to the exchange instead of to the p2p network.

For example for each offer of fiat for sale, the exchange can publish a bitcoin address to send offers for that block of fiat to.

Everyone who sends an offer can watch that address, waiting to see it receive coins.

That address could in fact be the actual address of the seller of the fiat, not an address the exchange controls.

When you see that some offer other than yours was published sending bitcoins to that address, you know your offers was not the one accepted, so you send your offered coins somewhere else, that is, to another address of your own.

Once a block is published containing a payment to the offer address, you can start counting blocks for how confident you are that the offer published by the exchange really is going to go through.

You can also watch to see if the exchange publishes your offer in addition to someone else's offer, and to see when your coins not accepted do make it safely back to you.

(You need to sweep the address(es) you sent the offer from if the offer is not accepted, to minimise the window of time during which the exchange could accept multiple offers for the same block of fiat).

There are more-sophisticated things that could be done with multiple signature required transactions and such too probably of course.

-MarkM-

GLBSE is maybe not the best venue for such a project.

I think in principle such a project ought to be feasible given the right platform.

For example maybe you could get a "margin account" type of thing as I have described in other posts, an account which allows you to buy assets that are on the account provider's list of assets approved for use as collateral and to borrow up to lets guess about 50% of the assessed value of that collateral for the purposes of buying more such collateral.

You could prove your fund-management skills by picking and choosing from among the approved assets which to buy and how many thereof.

At the end of the semester or school year you could publish a summary showing how skillfully you grew the account, and at the start of the next semester or school year hark back to that in proposing taking on investor funds being as how you handled your own funds so well during the first run.

The account could be set up to allow withdrawal only by closing it down with all proceeds being divided among shareholders. The first run, you would presumably be the sole shareholder, or possibly you, your teacher, and your parents, basically the folk who helped you get initially set up.

The second semester/year/run, if you did well with it, it could be opened up to more shareholders in an IPO...

-MarkM-

Yes, exactly. And many many napkins have been used on it already, lots of threads on all aspects of it.

Maybe part of why you aren't seeing the problems with it is they are way too big to fit on a napkin.

-MarkM-

Medium risk? How do you get to medium, its a "sure thing", look at the numbers! You don't get that many decimals of surefire accuracy with "medium risk", the more times you throw the dice the surer you are to get closer to those figures, surely?

-MarkM-

That sounds like the makings of an interesting thread of its own.

I am particularly curious whether/how retaining such earnings versus paying dividends would affect that since so far on my server everything is NAV based, nothing deployed there so far has any current intention of ever paying any dividends.

-MarkM-

I suspect that investors are important to miners and miners are important to investors.

For each its probably better to have lots of the other than lots of the same.

So maybe each should be saying the other is more important.

-MarkM-

Well there is General Mining Corp, but it is not yet a mining corp as you are thinking of them, because they along with British Mining Corp and Canadian Mining Corp are all waiting to see how ASICs come along before expanding into cryptocoin mining; so far the are really more to do with mining of metal, crystal, deuterium on the intergalactic scale, the various resources you can mine in CoffeeMUD or pick up and carry around and store in the CrossCiv server at individual characters scale, and in the case of Freeciv worlds the generic "resources" that freeciv abstracts all such things into.

Once ASICs are out though doubtless the use of ASICs to mine cryptocoins, probably via the Masively Merged Mining project, will be an important aspect of how players and games go about enhancing the perceived value of their various in-game resources, possessions and currencies.

You can view some figures about some of the assets currently deployed on the Digitalis Open Transactions server at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html ; the actual contracts, likely including some contracts for assets not yet shown on those tables of figures, are in the digitalis-assets.tgz file downloadable from https://sourceforge.net/projects/galacticmilieu/files/

-MarkM-

Oh it was you that killed it, eh?

Great, maybe we can fit you into game mythology osmewhere.

Once upon a time, because Dungeons and Dragons currency was insanely inflated compared to regions far far away from the "dungeon" village players originally started at, back when we stopped using random Panzerblitz boards to create different random "wilderness" around the village each trip out of the village, all the goldpieces turned to silverpieces, all the silverpieces turned to copper,pieces, and the copperpieces vanished.

Maybe the theorised alchemist imagined to be behind that strange occurence was named "Greedi"? Hmm. Is it a trademarked name?

-MarkM-

Wow, really down on people having fun, eh? Sheesh.

If you don't want them give them to someone who does.

-MarkM-

We gave up on using testnet for games a long long time ago, because of a chain-restart.

It does not matter if the game-coins in a game-character's pocket are worthless, but having them vanish from their pocket is not acceptable.

This is why we are trying to only use coins that are already secured by one or more hardcoded checkpoints. Antique coins of a "dead" (aka "darknet"?) chain are great for game use, as the more hardcoded checkpoints that have gone by the more confidence players have that if enough hashing power can ever be mobilised to bring them back out of the closet the coins their character has will still be in the blockchain.

-MarkM-

So, anyone actually got any coiledcoins left?

Luke-Jr, how about you? Presumably you racked up quite a few of them during your attack?

Since dirt cheap cryptocurrencies are really fun for gamers to have fun with, players are interested in how much these things go for nowadays...

-MarkM-

So, Original Poster, how are your friends connecting to each other? Are they running as a darknet not revealing their IP addresses on IRC so that Luke-Jr won't notice them having fun?

Are there any particular games / kinds of fun you are using them for that game-players might be interested in?

Would you please issue a version that includes a recent checkpoint so players having fun with it can feel more confident that the coins they are having fun with are protected by a checkpoint? I can do this myself if you prefer, it is pretty simple, but putting a new checkpoint into your distribution of it might be handy even if I do it too, because some people might grab new version(s) from your distreibution instead of mine.

Luke-Jr, your attack involved mining coins, right? How many do you have, and how much fun would you be willing to trade them for? Various kinds of fun including MUD gold, CrossCiv gold, and various other "dead" (read: darknet?) cryptocurrencies might be gatherable for such a trade.

Players are interested in how many coins are out there and what kinds of fun (especially games) people are having with them, and of course in actual prices as in what kinds of in-game items one gets in what kinds of games for how many BBQcoins...

I have not set up a contract for them yet in the Digitalis Open Transactions server simply because for low-hashpower chains I prefer to ithat tokens in the server be backed by coins that are secured by at least one checkpoint in the blockchain... Hence the request that you put in a more up to date checkpoint (or, as I said, I will release my more recent checkpoint version).

EDIT: I have put my updated-checkpoint version of BBQcoin, bbqcoin-15-Sep-2012.tgz online for downloading in a new folder named BBQcoin in my Sourceforge files download page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/galacticmilieu/files/

-MarkM-