One percent per day IS a hideously usurious interest rate, but it has so far it seems turned out to be do-able for over a year on a limited scale under certain circumstances.

Obviously whoever is paying such a rate is going to be trying hard to get refinanced at a better (meaning lower) rate, unless, maybe, operators of ponzi schemes have strategic or tactical reasons (such as marketing/propaganda) for staying at such a high rate.

So the trick is to figure out the right set of circumstances, situations in which someone actually can eventually pay and ideally will actually pay but is somehow unable to find a lower rate of interest.

I have been watching an actual empirical test, in which more than forty entities were given secured loans at 1% per day. I took about a year for refinancers to step in and start refinancing them at half a percent a day, and at time of writing not all of them have yet obtained such refinancing.

So far I have learned that although it is hard to find exactly the right debtors, thus that there is very much a limit on how much capital such high interest secured loans can absorb, if you can find or set up the right circumstances it is doable, at least for a year and a half or so so far.

What I expect to see happen though is that as more and more capital becomes aware of how secure such debt actually is, more and more of it will get refinanced at lower and lower interest rates.

-MarkM-

There is a growing number of blockchains that would like to be mined, all of which can be merged-mined.

How practical would it be though for them to co-operate to set up Masively Merged Mining pools that, for example, pay out "pool mining shares" to miners, which shares can then be traded on an exchange into whichever type of coin each miner happens to prefer?

I am concerned that malicious miners could deliberately hack their mining code to, for example, only submit shares that barely meet the difficulty required for a pool share but never meet a high enough difficulty to actually work as a solution on any of the many merged chains the pool is actually trying to mine?

Are there statistical anyalysis scripts etc out there that are designed to discover this and other forms of "cheating"?

I am thinking of simply using p2pool, with commission set to 100% so that no direct payouts to miners are sent out, and then take its stats on each miner's performance to compute miner rewards somehow... Is that practical?

I prefer p2pool since the object long term is to get massive mining power to apply to umpteen alt chains at once and I prefer that massive mining power, in general, be distributed. Thus p2pool.

-MarkM-

No web page, but the API has such info, and the java GUI client shows it per each asset pair at each scale.

So far though there are very few trades, most transactions happened off the markets, there are not a whole lot of people who have Open Transactions client so far, and there is no automation of the "bailing in" and "bailing out" of assets to/from the vaults or cold wallets where assets reside and the issuing of the asset tokens onto the server.

I have started making some simple HTML tables of asset values, at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

Those are the values my offer making scripts are using to place offers in the markets, basically offering to buy for less than those values and sell for more than those values. The purpose of the tables so far is to try to get an idea as to which assets are trending up or down relative to which other assets.

-MarkM-

Does bitparking no longer give you devcoins, ixcoins and i0coins in addition to bitcoins and namecoins?

Also, my p2pool mines even more chains than bitparking does so maybe should be able to pay more, unless merged mining actually does lower one's take instead of increasing it. In the past I had seen posts claiming mining at bitparking was more profitable than elsewhere.

Unfortunately my pool pays out in devcoins, trading all the other coins in for devcoins, as it was set up that way in accordance with a bounty paid me by the devcoin project.

But, my exchange (my Open Transactions server) has no commission charge on trades, so switching the devcoins back to any of the other types of coins would not incurr any overhead...

I guess I should figure out how many devcoins 0.0000224797 BTC is and beat that, eh?

(Oh weird, ten decimal digits, its in hundredths of a satoshi eh? Ah well, luckily devcoins are smaller than bitcoins...)

-MarkM-

They won't be printing money as it suits them, they will be minting tokens and then going out into the marketplace looking for ways to trade some of their tokens for some bitcoins, oops, I mean, for some money.

Thus in effect they will be creating more things people can spend bitcoins on, things that are easy to buy with bitcoins; plus, in order to try to make their tokens seem to be worth something they will create things for their tokens to be spent on, and since bitcoins are so very compatibile with their own tokens it will be easy for those things to also, or instead, be sold for bitcoins. So overall, in addition to promoting the bitcoin codebase and the bitcoin blockchain concept and the general idea of cryptocurrencies of which bitcoin is the shining crown achievement, they will be bringing users closer to having the skills, knowledge, and understanding to use bitcoins. All of which should help bitcoin adoption.

-MarkM-

Yeah, some truth there. I tried once upon a time to get a definite formula to code for a proof of stake and it all vapourised, turned out there was not yet any actual concrete design ready to code.

-MarkM-

There would no doubt be some interest in different nations using different currencies, but i don't think any of them would really take off. Maybe 1 or 2 other nation's currencies would gain some traction, but I imagine the cost of maintaining a separate software, financial and user base ecosystem would keep their user base limited (not to mention the network effect).

-MarkM-

IMPORTANT BUGFIX: See [Full Disclosure] CVE-2012-2459 (block merkle calculation exploit) for info about a bugfix which I have just now applied to devcoind and devcoin-qt

The devcoind is on github as https://github.com/knotwork/old-devcoind

The devcoin-qt is on github as https://github.com/knotwork/old-devcoin-qt

Both are also available in the DeVCoin subdirectory of my Sourceforge file-download site

https://sourceforge.net/projects/galacticmilieu/files/

They are there as devcoind-22-Aug-2012.tgz and devcoin-qt-22-Aug-2012.tgz

-MarkM-

GRouPcorp hasn't really done anything yet.

DeVCorp though was instrumental in getting a whole bunch of stuff done, mostly through the General Financial Corp which DeVCorp was the main driving force behind.

As you said there really isn't much of a line you can draw between "real" and "non-real" currencies, contracts, trades, deals, and so on. In many ways the whole edifice of "unit of account" games known as "finance" is kind of unreal.

People who get right into some particular activity might find endless fascination in it, but one thing abstract finance seems potentially to offer is a way for all kinds of people to interact with all kinds of stuff in totally abstract ways where all they care about is some particular market, whether it be dollars for magic swords or pineapples for spaceships or whatever pair of assets catches their interest, possibly only because of the ups and downs of its chart without any interest whatsoever in what the actual things are whose relativity in that market has caught someone's attention.

Thanks to DeVCorp, a whole bunch of compound interest denominated in DeVCoins is coming the way of various entities; the main reason GRouPcorp has not done much the same for GRouPcoin yet is I have not been able to issue people their groupcoin tokens yet...

-MarkM-

Right, which is why merged mining is still useful. Re-using already-spent energy is about as energy-efficient as it is possible to be.

-MarkM-

I have uploaded groupcoin-22-Aug-2012.tgz to the GRouPcoin subdirectory of my Sourceforge download site

https://sourceforge.net/projects/galacticmilieu/files/

It is the same as the groupcoin-09-Mar-2012.tgz that it replaces, except for the addition of a new checkpoint and

application of the important bugfix disclosed in the recent [Full Disclosure] CVE-2012-2459 (block merkle calculation exploit) thread.

-MarkM-

Unlike some people their goal does not seem to be to rush to market to make a quick buck without full peer review of their proposals and maybe some kind of ultimate settling upon exactly which approach to implement (or possibly even to try both, in which case which one being tried first would best move forward the whole matter of whether either are quite right enough yet to be ready to move to implementation.


Merged mining. The energy is already spent, it is not going to stop being spent, so it makes more sense to do more with it than to come up with more ways to use more energy.

Properly set up proof of stake + proof of work combo should adequately protect it from being victimised by merged miners compared to the way some chains have found enabling merged mining led to their being attacked rather than secured.

I do wonder though how effective proof of stake can be if stake is obtained by using work to mine. Seems like miners maybe can retain superior stake simply by only selling a minority of coins...

-MarkM-

Hmm okay, then maybe a nice upgrade to BBQcoin would be to put back in the ability to at least be the primary chain in merged mining.

If they used a recent bitcoind and added in scrypt maybe it already has that; but if they simply copied litecoin instead of using latest bitcoin with all the latest fixes, then like litecoin presumably it doesn't have it.

Maybe when it is the primary chain lots of other scrypt chains merged mine with, BBQcoin will experience more usage...

-MarkM-

BBQcoin has supposedly been abandoned by its creator so maybe it rather than litecoin should be used for experiments like this?

Time enough to think about whether it has proven itself well enough for the actual litecoin to consider adopting it once it has shown itself a good idea in BBQcoin or some other "orphaned" altcon that uses litecoin style hashing.

Also, as long as the topic of making changes to litecoin has come up, does it include merged mining support at least to the extent bitcoin does, that is, even if for some arbitrary political / propaganda reason it wants to be elitist like bitcoin by refusing to be any but the primary chain when merged mining, does it at least do that much, so we can add proper full merged mining to other scrypt chains and mine them alongside litecoin?

-MarkM-

Aha, you changed block format?

Maybe that is the only reasonable explanation for the massive amount of hardware errors DiabloMiner gets mining your chain using exact same settings that work fine mining umpteen merged mined chains at once?

-MarkM-

Yeah but the weighted sum of both work and stake on each block means to doublespend you need lots of work and lots of stake, having just one or the other is way less likely to succed? Maybe Meni and Cunicula can weigh in on this, though likely they figure it was all thoroughly explained in their wiki entries and all the many many threads that argued it all out back and forth to lead ultimately to the wiki entries?

Where were your weird out of the blue approaches during all those months of deep work on how it can be done right?

-MarkM-

Scored zero what? Work? Why have proof of work blocks if their work is irrelevant?

Are you adding up some kind of weighted sum of work plus stake for the proof of stake blocks?

Why do you even have tow types of blocks if indeed you are implying some blocks are proof of work and others are proof of stake?

Shouldn't each block have both work and stake, each weighted somehow into total of how much that block counts toward being a longer chain?

-MarkM-

Experts have gone over this proof of stake stuff for what, months for sure maybe a year or more?

Did you read their wiki pages?

They already solved this didn't they?

What you say above still sounds like you are just cementing in place the ability of stakeholders to periodically do a double spend?

-MarkM-

As you may already know, I operate an Open Transactions server.

Basically it lets people trade tokens that represent assets.

The actual assets include such things as bitcoins, devcoins, namecoins, groupcoins, ixcoins, i0coins, litecoins...

I am not eager to spend all day processing bailing-in of such assets and bailing-out of such assets.

Thus I am interested in establishing market makers... people who buy tokens from users and sell tokens to users.

This is quite a normal arrangement, e-gold used to do it, I think Liberty Reserve does it, basically it lets the vault concentrate on being the vault, the transaction server concentrate on being the transaction server, and the market makers concentrate on getting people into and out of the market.

Established, trusted people in this particular subforum seem the likeliest candidates among the denizens of these forums so I thought I'd enquire here first. Mods, feel free to move the thread to a more on-target locale.

Does this seem like a reasonable idea?

Is it something the "bankers" here might be interested in?

-MarkM-

Minting the same number of coins per block has already been done, not only by GRouPcoin which is otherwise basically a clone of bitcoin, but also by DeVCoin which also incorporates some other innovations such as mining 1,000 times as many coins (to avoid having to move the decimal point so soon, as bitcoin looked to be climbing in value rapidly when DeVCoin was initially created) and distributing coins to developers of open source software, hardware, firmware, music, literature, art etc.

So no need to screw up bitcoin by messing with its block reward schedule, those who want inflatacoin already have GRouPcoin and DeVCoin for that.

-MarkM-