For whatever reason it is defaulting to some tiny format, occupying only maybe half or so of the width of my browser window with text too small to be legible.

I expect there is some kind of zoom I could do in my browser but have always tried to avoid that in case it might make other things not appear at their default sizes, so basically for me this was a take one look and leave site.

-MarkM-

Sounds like this would be a useful feature for grandma's Open Transactions client to include, though maybe filed under "advanced features" in the menu...

-MarkM-

Then count in, also, all the three bitcoin an hour or so time you put in back then...

Or go back farther, imagine all the 10,000 bitcoin pizzas the early CPU miners ate instead of doing without and buying bitcoins instead...

-MarkM-

The thread title specifies GLBSE, so what applies elsewhere is maybe not particularly relevant.

Since MPEx being exacting was mentioned though I will also point out that in Open Transactions an asset is identified by the hash of its contract, thus any change in the contract results in a totally distinct asset. Since all asset accounts incorporate the asset's ID (that hash) all accounts of the previous asset are also distinct and separate from any asset accounts created for the "new" asset described by the "new" contract.

That is, thus, even more "exacting", I think.

Presumably any negotiation could in such a system take place in the question of whether anyone chooses to exchange any of the old asset for any of the new asset; I suppose one could even make several variants of a contract, thus making several variant new assets, and people could choose which if any to exchange their units of the old asset for...

-MarkM-

Actually there is some useful distributed computing that can be done for some games, and that is "artificial intelligence" for "non player characters" (NPCs).

By farming out the running of characters to third party computers, in particular to small scale third party computers such as individual gamers's personal computers, the game gains the possibility that from time to time some of the characters that normally are controlled 24/7 by scripts will be directly played by a human player.

That happens partly because some of the people running the characters will run afoul of situations the scripts cannot handle and some will hopefully even be actively working on scripts thus be right there watching how the scripted character behaves and thus possibly able to be lured into over-riding the script to control the character manually if approached in the right way with the right offer by some other played character.

If vast numbers of characters are thus deployed, vast amounts of crafting, mining, fishing, armoursmithing and so on and so on can be done even if there are few actually live players actually playing at any given moment. That in turn allows larger scales of play to be zoomed into; for example a village of a hundred inhabitants that in some other representations would not actually consist of a hundred individual characters, instead being a mere abstraction, could actually be walked around in as an individual character and each individual inhabitant be interacted with individually.

The bandwidth requirements for this are not high at all; a personal computer could run a hundred characters using less bandwidth than one three dimensional graphical view from just one of those characters' point of view would take, since the scripts have no use for graphical views, all they need is a simple textual description of the situation the character the script controls is in...

-MarkM-

Bitcoin you can merged-mined at the same time as namecoin, devcoin, groupcoin, i0coin, ixcoin, and coiledcoin, so you get all those other types of coin as little perks on the side. Litecoin does not permit merged mining, not even alongside bitcoin, so it is kind of out alone with its own little cadre of miners hoping the botnets choose to just exploit it for profit instead of attacking it for profit (by rejecting everyone else's blocks like Luke Jr did to coiledcoin and someone or someones did to BBQcoin (which is another out there on its own refusing to co-operate with others in merged mining variety of coin)).

-MarkM-

I thought javascript can find out the IP address the browser is at, thus is an absolute no-no when visiting DEA honeypot sites and the like?

-MarkM-

On the internet porn has always been an option, so surely any comprehensive emporium of options should be expected to carry it?

-MarkM-

I think secured loans might work. How does this sound...

1) We take custody of some collateral, such as, for example, some DeVCoins or some shares of DeVCorp or some GMC (General Mining Corp scrip) or some GRF (General Retirement Funds scrip) or some UKB (United Kingdom Britcoins) or some CDN (Canadian Digital Notes)... in general probably most, maybe even all, of the assets listed at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html would be eligible for use as collateral.

2) That collateral secure, we risk loaning you some percentage of what we think that collateral is worth (see http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html for what we think various assets are worth), for simplicity let us guess, for the sake of the example or argument, 50%. But, and this is possibly the crucial part that makes this possible, we do not loan for random purposes/purchases. Just like Ford might loan you money to buy a car, we would loan you money to buy things we consider to be acceptable collateral for use in step (1) above. This helps us grow our business, as it ensures that your holdings of assets eligible for use as collateral in step (1) would be increased by taking such a loan.

3) Both to avoid the vagaries of the moment to moment fluctuations of the markets and to help us keep our bitcoins in our own hands rather than the hands of others, we sell you the assets you are borrowing bitcoins to buy ourselves if we have them on hand. This helps avoid bleeding out our (necessarily limited, if only by the bitcoin code itself) supply of bitcoins to third parties, or to put that another way, it helps to ensure we can in fact continue to loan you more and more bitcoins the more collateral you commit into step (1).

-MarkM-

Yeah it paid them to attack it. Real smart eh?

-MarkM-

Hit it with sheetloads of hashpower to drive up the difficulty then abandon it to months of more difficulty than its remaining hashers can lower (due to it taking umpteen blocks for it to change and it taking them huge time to complete each block).

In other words possibly the current difficulty of coiledcoin does not reflect the hashing currently directed at it; possibly it could take many months or even a few years for the few people still hashing it to reach the block number at which its difficulty will adjust.

-MarkM-

Its good for mining and bitcoin-gambling and of course "gold games" aka HYIPs.

But for Diablo's plan, of building a datacentre with a solar power farm, it is not so good.

Although conceivably had he put it all into mining as cost-effectively as possible from the start, in a couple of years when bitcoins are worth thousands of dollars each it could have picked up the datacentre and solar out of the amount the mined coins appreciated if at the right time he had stopped putting it all into mining gear and instead just started hoarding the mined coins...

-MarkM-

Okay, sure, GM and Toyota might not, but Henry Ford is a visionary. Maybe after faking his death he studied at a tibertan monstery to learn the secrets of personal longevity then re-emerged as Satoshi Nakamoto and can well afford to loan people enough bitcoins to afford a new car.

-MarkM-

You guys just don't get it / just don't read, do you?

It wasn't "my oncle could be Satoshi" it was "Satoshi could be my oncle".

Afterall, Satoshi had to go somewhere when he vanished, right?

So why not off the oncle and take his place?

Who would ever suspect it was Satoshi?

-MarkM-

Re manufacturer extending loan:

Sure its a gamble, but then too interest rates are, accordingly, high.

So hey, if you want to buy a 100 bitcoin virtual mansion on 2%/week credit, hosted on my own server so I can repossess it any time you miss a payment, what the heck...

-MarkM-

So basically you offer loans to people who cannot qualify for a "payday loan" and break their legs if they don't pay back by the end of a week?

-MarkM-

I expect with bitcoin and the similar coins manufacturers are in a better position to provide loans than banks are.

Want to buy a 2013 Ford for bitcoins? No problem, Ford loans you enough bitcoins to buy their 2013 model, on condition that you use it specifically and only for buying that item. It is a secured loan and does not require them to have any bitcoins on hand initially themselves at all...

That is how General Mining Corp and General Retirement Funds did startup loans: wanna buy our stuff then fine we will loan you the money to buy it. Wanna buy someone else's stuff go talk to them about a loan.

-MarkM-

Its not really a deliberate attempt at secrecy just a lack of job offers I guess.

It probably does not help that a lot pf players are used to being able to walk into shops in games and ask how much the shop will pay for each item the player is carrying, as a first step toward deciding what items to go out and get to bring to the shops to sell to the shops.

Also the first question a designer asks when considering implementing money, even before working out "sinks" (ways to get money back out of the possession of the players once the players have some) is where are players going to obtain money in the first place since unless you equip them with some there is no need to provide "sinks" aka ways to get them to part with it.

I guess with PPCoin we have equipped a bunch of players with the stuff already so the next question is what are the "sinks" that will convince the specific players who have been equipped with the stuff to part with it and how are those players who are not being equipped with it by the current means of providing it to players to obtain it? Maybe with also some glimmering of a dream that possibly those players not being equipped with it by the current method could become "sinks" toward those who are equipped with it, that is, that the players who have it could maybe be convinced to become the providers of it with respect to the rest of the players.

I still think though a lot of it is just "where is the careers board where I can look up what careers these new coins are hiring in?"

-MarkM-

Actually a common complaint I get about the alt currencies is that you can't sell anything for it currently, or at least if there are people who have an altcoin budget to buy something or other with they are being extremely secretive as to what exactly it is they are looking to buy how much of for how many of which altcoin.

It is apparently daunting to try to figure out how to establish a cashflow of an altcoin when the people looking to provide altcoins (that is, to spend altcoins) are not revealing what exactly it is that they are willing to provide them in return for.

If for example someone making enough PPCoins daily that they think they ought to be able to budget a cup of coffee a day with those coins, it would be nice if they would reveal that fact, so that people looking to obtain a cashflow of PPCoins can look into whether providing a cup of coffee daily would be, to them, a reasonable method of obtaining a steady daily flow of coins.

Basically I guess what they are in effect asking is what exactly the folk who already have an altcoin income are looking to hire people to do in return for such coins, and at what wage. Though usually they express it more in terms of their becoming independent contractors or businesspeople rather than wage-slaves.

Suggesting that they go buy the coins they seem to consider kind of silly, their retort being along the lines of "if I already managed to get some money, what for do I need their altcoins? I want their altcoins because I want money and their coins purport to be a form of money. So I am not looking to trade money I already have for them, I am looking to obtain them in order to have money, which in turn I of course would prefer not to then go and spend to buy some other kind of money..."

It seems a bit of a catch-22 or something. But if you have managed to obtain an income of altcoins then it does seem reasonable in some sense to enquire what exactly is that income earmarked for; what is it that you went out of your way to set yourself up an altcoin income to buy instead of setting yourself up some other currency of income to buy?

This is all rather awkwardly expressed, but maybe what it boils down to is that like the Internet Marketers like to point out most people think in terms of being employed by someone else to do something, not in terms of being self-employed or creating an entire business of their own. So maybe it makes sense that most of them are looking for where are the listings of how much of each coin folk who have various coins are looking to pay people to do and what is it they are looking to pay people to do.

(Though even when they do think in business terms they tend to be asking okay how much of what do you want produced/manufactured/provided and how much per what quantity are you offering...)

-MarkM-

Maybe not always. Unthinkinbit suggested that buying DeVCoin is an investment in free open source developers/development, kind of like making a donation by buying the coins and getting part of, the whole of, or more than your donation back when you sell them.

This is because by buying them you establish that they have value, which helps developers also sell some thus being able to finance their development efforts in at least some small way or part.

-MarkM-