Hmm evidently it was not clear that it is in the context of running an accounting/inventory system (server) that I want to avoid having anything to do with fiat. Killing people* to loot their corpses for coins the local magic-shop will sell you magic wands for just seems a whole lot less fraught with regulations than does killing people* to loot their fiat currency.

(* By "people", I of course here mean "people's characters/avatars in the virtual environment presented by their computer".)

Similarly, playing poker with a bunch of ogres and goblins to win coins to buy magic wands with seems also less fraught with regulations.

Being a magic-wand transmitter or even a coupons for buying magic wands transmitter seems to have less regulations around it than being a "money transmitter" in a context where what is meant by "money" is "fiat money".

Even merely offering any player who manages to accumulate a certain number of wand-tokens an ounce of real physical silver delivered to them via snail-mail might have regulations around it in some jurisdictions on the planet known as Earth...

-MarkM-

Anyone selling PPCoins for DeVCoins? If so, at what price per thousand PPCoins and at what price per ten thousand PPCoins?

-MarkM-

Your focus seems somewhat self-defeating in a way then, because if litecoin does in fact follow in botcoin's footsteps, becoming such a reliable long term growth of value asset that it outpaces silver, it seems rreasonable to think your success in accomplishing that will also result in lack of interest in your offering.

Thus to me it makes more sense to offer a silver asset to a panoply of all the currencies aka assets that happen at the time to not yet have reached that point where they are outpacing silver.

My primary problem with holding physical silver myself is I am worried that, due to its long history as a form of money in much of the world, it might turn out to be as fraught with ghastly legal minefields/regulations as fiat, making all the effort of avoiding having anything to do with fiat moot. (I do not want to deal with the stuff if it is so close to fiat itself that dealing with it is as much of a can of worms as dealing with fiat is.)

-MarkM-

From the sound of it his biggest mistake was to issue his shares on a platform that forces everything to be denominated in, and traded in, bitcoins.

His goal seems to be to build something of real actual usefulness type of value, not to play exchange-rate games to make things look useful by looking at them only from the viewpoint of the bottom lin e of one single currency's accounting of the venture.

Bitcoin seems to be a particularly bad unit of account to be using in fact, because it is itself an investment that is likely to out-perform most markets. It is quite likely that simply buying and holding bitcoins is better than almost any investment other than ones in which someone has been talked, convinced, fooled or suckered into using bitcoins as a unit of account thus ends up owing the investors more bitcoins than were invested rather than merely more buying power than was invested.

In fact his overall operation seems like the kind of thing where the "sysbucks" I used in my Internet Provider Utilities toolkit could be useful, as the "sysbucks" serve as a currency specific to the range of goods and services provided by the provider independent of how many of some other currency the sales staff manage to sell "sysbucks" for at any particular point in time.

-MarkM-

Understood, it just seems a pity if there is a safe reliable silver vault in the cryptocoin community to limit its usefulness to just one type of cryptocoin.

If there is in fact a lot of interest in precious metal assets in the cryptocoin community I guess I should re-evaluate whether to start stashing such metals in a safe deposit box or vault myself so I can add such assets to the repertoire of my Open Transactions server.

(I already rejected the idea of using some kind of e-gold / pecunix / liberty-reserve type service as back end for such assets, hence the need to have actual physical metal holdings of my own in order to offer such assets on my server aka exchange.)

-MarkM-

Is this to be a dividend-paying asset?

If not, I do not see anything other than possibly the limitations of the trading platform that makes it anything more to do with litecoin than with any other asset, be it bitcoin or fiat or icecreamcones or packages of chewing gum or grams of gold or devcoins or groupcoins or whatever.

Once someone has some of these grams of silver, why should they not be free to sell them for devcoins, or groupcoins, or bitcoins, or anything else they would like to buy with them?

Possibly you are letting the tunnel-vision of some existing trading platforms blind you? A general purpose platform such as Open Transactions for example has no prejudice as to which two assets users can choose to trade, among all assets that the server has contracts for...

-MarkM-

Don't such sites already exist, in the forms of the securities section, loans section, and long term loans sections of these forums?

-MarkM-

This sounds much better than the silly assertion that the right this moment highest bid is the value, since somehow in the days before 24/7 trading stocks and bonds didn't drop to zero value during the hours exchanges were closed nor did money drop to zero value outside of business hours (except maybe in munchies-value to middle of the night stoners thinking the stuff is useless since it cannot buy munchies right now).

Isn't this part of what the concept of "liquidity" is about?

Just because I cannot sell a hundred million dollar estate at midnight in the middle of a bank holiday weekend doesn't mean the estate is worthless, it just means such estates have somewhat less liquidity than, say, munchies or hits of "acid"...

-MarkM-

You're soliciting bids? Sheesh don't be so coy, just tell us outright your price (for doing something unethical...)

-MarkM-

It is not dead yet, although its reported "difficulty" : 6340.40526376 is possibly more to do with having been attacked like namecoin than with currently being mined a lot. (I think it maybe lacks the faster-adapting difficulty that some coins introduced following that namecoin attack.)

-MarkM-

tl;dr paying $500/day to people in a $2/day region is known as financing terrorism...

-MarkM-

Unlike fiat, bitcoin is freely copyable - free open source.

So unlike fiat, with bitcoin anyone who produces a bunch of widgets could also produce a bunch of widgetcoins, fully compatible with bitcoin handling systems merely by choosing a different port number to connect to for each such currency whose daemon you want to talk to for a particular transaction.

Thus any time a whole bunch of new value is created, a whole bunch of new currency can also be created, and like the new goods its issuer offers in exchange for it it is plainly something new; it is not snuck out of other people's purses nor does it sneak extra, un-earned value into the purses of the hoarders of the older varieties of coin.

Canadian Tire, Walmart, Macdonalds, and such are probably in a good position to issue new coins, but wait, do they actually create new goods? Maybe having the retailers issue currency is just yet another usurping, a step closer to the actual producers maybe than the banks but still, maybe it should be the factories that issue the new coins? Hmmm...

-MarkM-

This is why having a multitude of alternative currencies can be helpful, since not all of them need be so closely tied to fiat; at least some of them can delegate the whole can of worms that is "the interface with fiat" to bitcoin.

Part of why the Canucks, Martians, Brits, (Galactic) United Nations and so on felt they had to issue their own coins was precisely to be able to take a step away from fiat, enhancing the value of bitcoin by making bitcoin the primary gatekeeper between the fiat currencies realm and the alternative currencies realm. A lot of the alternative blockchain currencies like to throw up an exchange where people can dump them for fiat, but some saw the value in bitcoin as a layer of insulation from the whole fiat realm. In fact from the figures at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html it looks to me as if eagerness to dump your coins for fiat leads to a lowering of value of the coin being so eagerly dumped.

-MarkM-

Well yes, of course, obviously.

Just trying to use bitcoin as a unit of account for accounting something tiny and local such as the current price/value of the downtown of a small or medium sized city, let alone a more reasonable sized local matter such as assessing the value in bitcoins of all the taxable property in the city and its associated/surrounding county you should immediately realise that it at first glance seems to add up to to many many many more bitcoins than will ever exist, thus that actually, come to think of it, something about that just doesn't add up...

-MarkM-

Nonsense! The proper way is wait until all the folks auctioning them off have run out, then observe that the one the bidders failed to bid high enough to convince you to sell is obviously worth more than any of them actually bid, if only to you...

-MarkM-

In fairness, I can also see how/why some folk might choose to consult the Pet Rock index instead...

-MarkM-

People keep getting seduced by all the goodies being offered for fiat, and throwing away their bitcoins for a pittance.

There are lots of people who do think bitcoin is valuable and thus are not willing to spend it until some day when they will be able to get their bitcoin's worth for it instead of being offered insultingly low prices for it.

Its as if the fiat folk think we bitcoiners are a bunch of idiots who have no idea how much a twentyone-millionth of a reasonably sized market actually adds up to; they are trying to get them off of us dirt cheap on the excuse that they don't cost much to create. So basically they are trying to keep our attention on the supply side, oh look, it costs less than three digits in dollars to make a bitcoin. But that is only because supply is right now, the boom years when bitcoins virtually fall off of trees, it is raining bitcoins right now. Demand, on the other hand, is in a few decades when these windfalls people are virtually giving away now will be our inheritances passed on to our posterity.

If only twentyone million people used bitcoin and only to buy a morning coffee on their way to work each day how likely is it the coffee grower will sell the bitcoins back to them instead of sending it off to a coffee grower to order up more varieties of beans, and to the landlord they rent their retail space from and such?

What happens when fortytwo million people choose to buy their morning coffee with bitcoin?

Just make up your own mind what your bitcoins are going to have to be buying you in the way of a retirement lifestlye and don't part with them for less than that!

(Only got one bitcoin right now? DIvide that by the number of retirement years you want to live, presto, that is how much one bitcoin is worth. Got two? Lucky you, bitcoins are worth half as much to you, you can afford to blow one on a trip round the world before you retire... Got three? You are rich! You can send your kids through college and still get that trip round the world before you retire. Got four? Wow, an education fund for the grandkids on top of all that! Etc... )

-MarkM-

For the trojan case in the original post, what stops a trojan for waiting until the user is ready to commit a withdrawal and changing the address the server ends up being told to send the withdrawal to?

Also, I thought the whole point of two factors is that both factors are so distinct and separate that if only one of your machines is controlled by the attacker any action that requires the second factor is pretty much beyonf the attacker's ability to authorise?

For withdrawals presumably this means once a withdrawal request has been submitted the second device is contacted by the server with details about the transaction requested, and the user must confirm with that second device that the request is indeed the one they intended to make?

-MarkM-

Take a look at http://devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Devcoin

-MarkM-

This is the World of Phaos / World of Kallen free open source code, though maybe not exactly the same version as the one I set up long ago at http://fantasy.mygamesonline.org/

People here showed no interest whatsoever in it, so it has pretty much sat unused as far as I know.

How you played it enough yourself yet to discover some of the problems with it?

Have you found for example that the weird way the map tiles are hooked together has led to some strange distortions of what is actually in which direction?

Are you doing debugging/development of the code?

-MarkM-