Martian BotCoin (MBC) is already doing quite well in its earthbound prelaunch phase: http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

-MarkM-

And I as a server operator am free to turn off the ability of users to issue assets, which is what I have done on my server.

-MarkM-

There are separate bounties for different businesses/models. A mining company has its own bounty, a non-mining company yet another.

As to calculating the divvying up of coins, I too worry about cheaters, that is why I would have preferred to be able to know how many bitcoins p2pool had given out to each miner, since that counts work that actually resulted in coins, presumably. I worried that some malicious folk might hack a mining program to only submit solutions that are difficult enough to qualify as a pool share but not difficult enough to be acceptable by any of the merged chains.

Possibly though p2pool is itself vulnerable to such attacks, or some other kinds of attacks, so that merely looking at how it assined bitcoins might not really reflect how much work miners actually did.

I am seeing someone now who seems to be on again off again a lot, I wonder is that maybe someone who is doing some kind of hopping.

Once you have to number though to use as what fraction of the total work was done by each miner, it is not a complicated bit of math to divide what is in the wallets accordingling. And the long you wait before doing so, the closer the amounts in the wallets will tend to have come toward being an actual average amount for that amount of work.

(For example if you pay yearly, in the course of a year likely the number of coins of each type will have averaged out about right. Though then of course difficulty might get significant and people who mined early while difficulty was lower would suggest that an equal amount of work done later wouldn't've brought in as many coins as the work they did early on...)

The main thing, I think, is to be sure to pay more than any pool that is only mining a few coin types, otherwise it isn't likely to be perceived as worthwhile to bother doing Massively Merged Mining.

Even though NKL is not moving back to blockchain format yet, it is being used for the "nickel-ing and dime-ing" in the Open Transactions server in that it is what the "usage tokens" will be priced in, so I think even though we aren't actually "mining" NKL, nonetheless it would be good to award miners some NKL or at least, some of the "usage tokens" that are normally bought with NKL. Depending on how much the nickel-and-dime-ing tends to add up to for people who use the exchange, that might actually turn out to be a nice little perk for miners.

-MarkM-

Converted to DeVCoins and sent to the miner's bitcoin address, since devcoin address and bitcoin address are the same.

In principle other means are technically possible but this is the simplest most straightforward method.

If that method does not suit you, then it is probably a good idea to try to get an Open Transactions client set up and running so you can make use of my Digitalis Open Transactions server, which handles so far all of the currently merged chains except for coiledcoin (which might, arguably, be dead) and also all the chains that decided, in the face of the massive hostility being shown to merged chains, to retreat to Open Transactions format leaving GRouPcoin still out in the world as a blockchain so they can watch how GRouPcoin gets along and use it to guage at what point it will become reasonable to move back to blockchain format.

-MarkM-

Sharing out the merged mining proceeds is actually pretty easy. Just compare how much is in all the various wallets since last time you paid, and how much mining each miner has done since then.

Or, even compare how much coin in total has been paid to how much mining each miner has done in total then deduct for each miner any payouts that miner already took.

I had figured the so called "area" on the graphs is probably the simplest measure to us for how much mining people have done.

The problem with using DeVCoin as primary chain is BiTCoin does not work as a secondary chain, so 90% or more of the income a miner could make is lost if they drop bitcoins from the mix. Considering how little interest miners have shown in mining even a full gamut of coins at once, it seems unlikely in the extreme they will go for spending their hashes on a mix that leaves out BiTCoin entirely. It simply does not make economic sense; BiTCoin needs to be made capable of being an auxiliary chain if other chains, such as DeVCoin are reasonably to be useable as primary.

-MarkM-

I am not really clear on it either. A long time ago I set up my p2pool so that it was open to any miner to mine there, No one did, even though it mines pretty much all the coins that can practically be merged-mined. It never did get the bounty, I guess simply because no one actually bothered to come and mine until the 23rd of this month?

-MarkM-

Part of the purpose of the tables at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html is to make it easy for companies to accept any of various different currencies.

For example although GMC generally expresses prices in terms of its own currency (also known as GMC), and GRF does likewise with its GRF currency, it is common nowadays for the folks selling stuff to them to ask to have their pay applied against their debt; and ever since General Financial Corp came along refinancing of that debt has become commonplace.

Thus quite often when GMC or GRF buys stuff the price paid is to be applied not against debt the supplier owes to them but, rather, debt owed in CDN to the Canucks or in UKB to the Brits or in UNS to the (Galactic) United Nations or in DVC to GFC, DeVCorp, GDC or GRC.

Markets would just make that way too complicated, so instead we have these tables. The supplier tells them please apply my pay to my DeVCoin-denominated debt that I  owe to GFC. GFC looks at how many GMC is being paid against the debt, multiplies it by the number of DVC those tables claim GMC is worth, and apply that number of DVC against the DVC-denominated debt.

The fact that the interest rates on the debts are usurious helps, of course, against any "currency conversion risk" using such tables might expose the corps to.

This all means though that as well as the deliberately/specifically DeVCoin-oriented corps DeVCorp, General Financial Corp, General Development Corp and General Retirement Corp accepting DeVCoins, the two massive multigalactics GMC and GRF who have their own currencies are also able to accept DeVCoins, as are the Brits via their corps such as British Colonial Enterprises, British Colonial Investments, British Mining Corp, British Retirement Funds et al and the Canucks via corps such as Canadian Mining Corp, Canadian Retirement Funds and so on. Basically all the major players are quite used to the galaxy having multiple currencies in play and well adapted, at least as long as those tables continue being available to them, to accepting them. (The Martians also have similar corps but seem to have been staying more behind the scenes so far and their corps do not have contracts on the DIgitalis Open Transactions server yet due to there having been a typo in the Martian Retirement Funds contract which derailed the process of getting contracts onto the server for their bunch of corps similar to the Brit and Canuck corps.)

-MarkM-

Are you clear on what Icoin is doing? You are counting as "a pool" a pool that does not actually let miners mine there, instead simply is a mining operation using its own hardware and allowing people to buy shares in the operation? Thus no help at all to existing miners looking to mine devcoins?

So all the mining companies on GLBSE can get this bounty simply by also mining devcoins and paying devcoin bounties?

That seems to me to be a distinct thing, maybe it should have its own separate bounty "operating a mining shares security that pays in devcoins"...

-MarkM-

FTFY

-MarkM-

Probably not, since it is pretty much self-explanatory to me. It'd be like someone explaining to you how to play the flute as "you blow across one end and move your fingers up and down the outside".

The general idea dates back to the Digitalis D'ydii Cluster game, in which players could choose what to use as the unit in which to display price-lists. Want to see how much everything costs in tons of fuel? No problem. Prefer to see prices in tons of gold? No problem. Pick the item in terms of which to express the prices of everything else.

I have so far picked just a few sample items in terms of which to display the prices of the other items, as this is not some generic CGI script but just a few little shell scripts I used at home to create HTML pages which I then uploaded (because I hate navigating my local disk with a browser plus hey this way I can show the numbers to other people in case I might not be the only person curious about them).

-MarkM-

People who don't want to go through verification can simply run their own issues on their own server, even from home behind i2p or Tor if they want to. The main thing preventing that so far has been lack of free open source software to do it. That is being remedied rapidly.

-MarkM-

EDIT: In fact, the default setting for Open Transactions servers is that anyone can issue an asset. So basically even if you don't want to run one yourself to issue your assets on, chances are you will be able to find one with that setting and issue as many assets as you wish as often as you wish...

-MarkM-

Heh there are more out there than you probably realise. Take a look at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

-MarkM-

What miners onnect to is, simply, p2pool, I have not modified p2pool it is standard version fresh from github.

I do not know whether what I read once upon a time about Butterfly Labs products not being p2pool-friendly was true or not, nor whether, even if it was true once upon a time, it is still true now or will be true by the time ASICs are delivered to miners.

Also, p2pool is not straight PPS, I think? I think it is same first letters to start, but more letters than that in the acronym for what it does use? Some kind of pay for last X number of shares or something?

-MarkM-

We have them, but nonetheless Gox gets most of the business. Why is that, do you think?

How many exchanges do you think can eke out a living on the percent that isn't Gox?

-MarkM-

The sheer security-holes-hell of using the web is a huge barrier to entry, I can understand MPEx's approach of only using the web as a way for people to paste PGP-encrypted instructions because of that.

I am hoping though that Open Transactions will lower the barrier significantly, since asset issuers do not even have to trust the server operator and the actual assets, be they bitcoins or bars of gold or whatever, do not even have to ever be anywhere near the server that is used to trade in them.

As I have already been operating an Open Transactions server for quite a while now, and have server machines sitting idle waiting for a time when they can pay for the electricity they will consume when powered up, I am basically ready to fire up Open Transactions servers at any time; I simply have not been motivated, by actual offers of actual bitcoins for doing so, to do so.

When I first went looking for software to run stock exchanges the plan was that eventually every stock exchange city-improvement any player built on any planet of the Freeciv Galactic Milieu could be actually implemented for actual trading, so I had all along been heading toward a proliferation of exchanges; I had been thinking that it would be players of the game paying to host an actual exchange to make their city more interesting to other players who would pay the hosting/bandwidth costs of running them, but hey, if anyone else is interested in proliferating exchanges that is fine too...

-MarkM-

Promoting high risk, unverified securities is probably a high risk activity (though I am not sure how verified/verifiable that assertion itself actually is).

However, situating such an exchange behind Tor and/or i2p creates sufficient barrier to casual entry that it might also permit dispensing with the security worries associated with using webservers and webbrowsers; people who are willing to get Tor or i2p running can maybe also handle using an Open Transactions client instead of a web browser.

What exactly is the job of the exchange? Are they supposed to promote/market for you or is it fine that they remain as unknown as possible to everyone other than to your shareholders and your potential shareholders: the people to whom you the issuer of a security choose to reveal the means of contacting the exchange your issue trades on?

I have been thinking it might be better to simply have experienced traders equipped with Open Transactions clients bundle managed portfolios of things as GLBSE assets to cater to the browser-addicted crowd, or maybe even set up websites of their own for interacting with their customers.

Admittedly I might be overly influenced by an old, obsolete model: floor trading / seats at the exchange; does the New York Stock Exchange run a website now so anyone can trade directly on it, or are there still remenants of the old days when only brokers / brokerages actually dealt directly on the exchange, the public dealt with brokers?

-MarkM-

Actually it seems like the most famous ones only keep it near zero by massive, rampant inflation. (WoW gold, Lindens, EVE isks...)

Take a look at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html sometime...

-MarkM-

Are vanity addresses squatted much?

Even firstbits vanity addresses?

-MarkM-

It is also not what the DeVCoin mining pool bounty is about.

-MarkM-

For "end users", ultimately maybe the solution to all problems of this type will be copy-and-paste routines that copy and paste not only the displayed visible thing the user sees and performs the copy on, but also the actual data that visual cue represents.

Sort of like how web pages have a whole URL, possibly with extra fields such as whether to open a new window, in their links and modern software often copies the URL along with or even instead of the human visible tag the user clicks on when the user copies the link.

Really the cases where label collision actually matters might get less and less, since labels can become more and more a user-side thing; what I mean on my computer by "coke" might not be same thing an organised crime lord in bolivia or an executive in a cola company likes to use that word as a convenient human-readable label for.

Even things like telling someone over the phone where to send you money we see nowadays phones are no longer limited to just a low bandwidth human-audible-sound channel but in fact have things like drag and drop, so maybe you'd just drag your receiving purse onto the icon you click to phone the person and presto, their phone, next time it connects, will know your recieving purse...

-MarkM-