Using just half the hashing power of my 5870 I got a block in minutes, I wonder how it decides how many coins to assign though, look at how many I purportedly get:


-MarkM-

I haven't read anything about it being merged-mine-able, yet it claims to be energy-efficient.

I don't' see a lot of efficiency in requiring the use of more electricity instead of simply adding it to one's merged-mining lineup...

So far it thus looks less energy-efficient than Namecoin, Devcoin, Groupcoin, I0coin, Ixcoin, and Coiledcoin, all of which can all be mined at once using less added electricity in total for the lot of them  than this newfangled thing uses...

-MarkM-

Look what happened yesterday, the price jumped to $15.30 or so then back down to $10 or so.

That kind of volatility, happening that fast, seems very likely to cause disasters to anyone providing significant leverage.

Since speculators love volatility, I don't suppose there would be much interest left if some kind of volume-averaged price was used as strike price or price used in margin calculations or whatever, would there?

As I now have scripts for working out the actual value of a portfolio of assets, I have been thinking of offering lines of credit secured by assets, so that people can borrow for any purpose, even for the purpose of shorting. I would protect myself somewhat against volatility by only considering somewqhat less volatile assets to be suitable for collateral, or by lowering the amount of collateral an asset is evaluated at for use-as-collateral purposes if the asset is quite volatile.

Thus basically people would deposit in a margin holding area hopefully-not-very-volatile assets, some percentage of the evaluated value of which would be useable as collateral to secure loans.

This breaks the shorting/leverage problem down, separatign the loan aspect from any worry about what people might actually want loans for. It would be none of the loaner's business what people do with what they borrow.

Since speculator around here seems mostly to really mean gambler, I am doubtful such a service would be popular... I expect some kind of "contract for difference" system would be more popular, but it seems only a matter of time before rollercoaster price movements throws such things off their rails... Heck the fiat markets are usually a lot less volatile than cryptocoin markets yet still every once in a while they need bailing out due to some disaster or other they evidently bring upon themselves (or maybe are trying to bring upon others but get sucked into themselves along the way?)

-MarkM-

EDIT: It occurs to me it might not be at all clear where the "leverage" comes in with my loaning concept. Basically it would be incremental. Say you can borrow 50% of what your collateral is evaluated to be "worth". You can thus buy more collateral. Provided what you are buying to use as collateral is indeed good picks, that go up in value, you could end up growing quite a large pile of collateral. That would be your leverage, come some day you decide to take a gamble on something you think you might be able to make a profit shorting...

I think I can handle the getting hacked risk using Open Transactions, but I am not yet convinced that any of the leverage/shorting services were actually viable; possibly people keep finding out its a recipe for disaster thus pretend to be hacked as their excuse for failing horribly.

I would very much like a very sure and certain and clear method of how exactly to safely and securely do it.

Right at the start the very idea that someone is going to loan you their precious bitcoins for you to use to force down the value of bitcoins seems somewhat weird...

-MarkM-

Technically it is not "necessarily" the developers who make the decisions, as anyone who is already on the recipients list can apply to become an administrator type. On the one hand we theoretically need more administrators to make it more diverse, less centralised; but on the other hand how many stomaches does a committee need before it ends up as the proverbial beast with umpteen stomachs and no brain? Larger numbers of admins might make for more problems not less, who knows?

ANyone who is working ten or more hours a week on open source stuff, whether it be hardware, firmware, software, music, literature, or whatever, can apply to get on the list of recipients. A lot of developers I have suggested apply have not bothered to do so; some even disparage the idea.

FellowTraveler, author of Open Transactions, is on the list. So am I. So is at least one other person working on Open Transactions. I wonder why the bitcoin devs are not on it? Hmmm...

-MarkM-

Yes, it does, it takes a long time as it loops again and again and again gradually converging as each adjustment of what each Corp is worth changes what all the Corps owning shares of it is worth, which in turn loops through again if both own shares of each other, etc. So converging to an accurate (to eight decimals) solution takes a lot of computing.

-MarkM-

It is great that people are getting this extra chance to pick up coins cheap, but its a pain having recalculated all my asset values based on bitcoins being $15 or more only to find almost as soon as I had finished the calculation that the price is back to $10-to-$12 or so.

Since we already saw that we are finally on our way to recovery from the big crash last year, hopefully people who are not panic prone will realise this is a brief respite allowing them to stock up on coins ready for the climb...

-MarkM-

Its not as if there is any urgent need to get such people on board, lets see how they feel when the block reward goes down to 12.5...

-MarkM-

Well obviously they aren't going to want to drive the price up with hype until they've picked up a big stash of coins, duh...

-MarkM-

Yeah I fired up minerd on it too, though I only have four cores and already have two minerd's working (all under "nice" aka low priority), one on BBQcoin and one on a p2pool-for-liteccoin.

Since it is officially a collector's item now I guess I might as well see if I can stick with it long enough to at least get a block for my altcoins collection.

-MarkM-

For a moment there I thought maybe you'd out-collector'd me, but turns out I do have a tenebrix client so I am trying to fire it up now to see if I ever actually managed to get any coins into its wallet...

Nope, sorry, I don't have any. Maybe I can mine some though if it finds a connection or I bother firing up a second copy of it so it has someone to talk to so it can mine... Oh hey, it seems to think it has one connection! I wonder if that will actually pan out... Maybe it is you?

-MarkM-

To be the largest holder you likely need to buy at least a million of whatever type of coin you choose, and possibly several million.

If you don't like the BBQcoin price you've been offered for 25,000 good luck getting people's half million or few million of them...

(DeVCoin are so cheap lately on VIrcurex though you could maybe pick up half a million DeVCoins for half a bitcoin, but, there are a thousand times as many devcoins as there are of most other coins so still good luck becoming largest holder. Its not dead though so luckily its not a candidate.)

-MarkM-

"Them there ain't dead, them there is antiques!"

Why buy them, their difficulty is probably low enough you can mine them, even with a CPU...

-MarkM-

Maybe it would be helpful to actually specify an alt chain you imagine to be dead?

-MarkM-

The long delayed debut of GRouPcorp, the GRouPcoin-promoting Corp along the lines of DeVCoin's DeVCorp, is finally coming back on track.

The initial offering was 1,000,000 shares at one GRouPcoin each, however only 22,000 were bought before we ran into a snag: it turned out that the issuer account for digiGRouPcoins (dGRP) on Digitalis Open Transactions server had gotten "out of sync" way back when during one of the major upgrades of the Open Transactions software, preventing us from issuing any more dGRP tokens.

This not only led to people not being able to receive these tokens, with which to buy shares, but also it interrupted me in the very process of recording the assets of the GRouPcorp Corp; all the asset valuation stats at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html have been showing a ridiculously small value for sGRP (GRouPcorp shares) because I had not gotten around to recording the fact that the Corp still owned 978000 of its own shares.

I have now corrected that omission, so the next run of the valuation routines should show the correct valuation for those shares.

However the issuing account for dGRP is still out of sync as with the further upgrades of the Open Transactions software the old sync script we used in the past to correct out of sync accounts is now out of date so we are waiting for an updated version of resync before we can resync the account and issue people the dGRP tokens they have been waiting so long for.

-MarkM-

I finally noticed that the valuations shown for GRouPcorp shares (sGRP) in my Digitalis Open Transactions server assets stats pages

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

have been out of whack all along, due to my getting interrupted before recording the fact that it still owns 978000 of its own shares.

The valuations so far had been based only on the relatively small amount of "miscellaneous assets" the Corp owns.

I have added the un-issued shares into its assets now, so from here on it should correctly reflect the value, assuming it does end up selling those shares for what the valuation routines calculate them to be worth (which seems at present to be just a little more than the one GRouPcoin per share they were initially offered at).

-MarkM-

If you are actually interested in something that has been and still is taking its time to try to get it right, check out https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0

-MarkM-

GLBSE seems to have some ability to reverse stuff. Open Transactions does not, I suspect, since there is no way that the server can force someone to sign a balance that person does not agree with.

So basically if you want the nice warm fuzzies you get from your cute bank teller or well dressed stock broker, you can use skype or whatever to chat with such a person, who will use Open Transactions on your behalf and charge you some small nominal fee of only maybe a few times minimum wage or maybe quite a few times minimum wage for being conveniently available for you to chat with.

There is apparently no security in using certificates for websites, since the certificate issuer is a man in the middle, though maybe with a self signed certificate you can avoid that, but who wants the inconvenience of having their browser claim the certificate might not be trustable? Heck it should be more trustable than one bought from a professional man in the middle but that is not the impression those professional men in the middle pay the browser manufacturers to project.

However with good quality video via skype or some such you can maybe do very thorough watching of body language etc to feel sure your broker is not under duress etc.

The problem though again is reversibility. Such a broker is likely to get pressure from clients to reverse stuff, yet cannot actually do so maybe once an instant non reversible transaction has been processed by a transaction server.

Basically if you want all that warm fuzzy crap you probably do not want irreversible transactions, since likely most of your warm fuzzies derive from knowing nothing you say really means a thing, you can backtrack any time and reverse it all, screwing the other parties you pretended to transact with...

-MarkM-

I have been collecting asset value statistics for a while now, and created some very primitive HTML outputs of that data, and just now have finally gotten around to adding an index page providing links to the various stats pages:

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

Also, I have now created fresh new "mints" for the currency type assets (not shares type assets), so now the untraceable Chaumian-blinded cash system for all the currencies should now work. (And if not, well we are in process of making sure it does, so please try it and let us know if there are any bugs.)

-MarkM-

What exactly do you mean by two factor?

Once upon a time I put some money into a forex site to set it to follow some "great trader"'s trades.

Once day I went to get my money back and could not because I have never had a mobile phone.

Eventually I could not even find that forex site anymore and still have not got that money back nor got a mobile phone.

So if by two factor authentication you mean hold people's money ransom blackmailing them to go get a device they have no desire to own, then I do not think it a good idea. I have no phone, I have no mobile phone, I have internet.

If by two factor you mean I should have to send them not only a PGP signed request but also some other form of signed request then maybe, but I expect a lot of people object to being required to learn to use PGP too...

Personally I am going with Open Transactions, but there too I see problems already, with various people complaining they will not use it until it has some kind of website method of using it, thus basically insisting the security be broken and the man in the middle people known as certificate authorities be given access to their funds. Weird but true.

-MarkM-