What a lot of altcoins have done is to move to an Open Transactions server for now, so they can go ahead and build up trade and alliances and cashflow and so on hoping that if they do in fact turn out to be successful they will eventually have enough transaction volume to be able to attract enough miners to secure a blockchain. At that point they might even decide that the overhead expense caused by miners is not worth paying, but if it is worth paying, at least they will be in a position to pay it.

Since the original plan was in any case to be able to allow each Freeciv nation to launch its own "national currency" if it wished to do so, the whole matter of how exactly to launch more and more currencies into the mix is still being actively explored by players; some interesting ideas have come up and it does still look like it might well be worth a "nation"'s while to at least consider launching a currency of its own.

(For one thing, bitcoin (and probably some other chains too) retains the "feature" local exchange networks do not like: the tendency to flee the market precisely when most needed...)

-MarkM-

I am not surprised that the hacker sent the money to Zhou, as soon as I heard that USD had been moved out my first thought was that the obvious place to move USD was to some sucker you want to incriminate, being as how USD is not all that easy to hide the movements of. Surely no sane hacker would move the USD to their own account? Maybe to some stolen accounts if they have a bunch, but do stolen accounts last long enough to move USD through them? Seems dubious. Far better to send them to Gavin's bank account if you know it, or who-ever's you do know that would be really lulzworthy to incriminate...

-MarkM-

Actually what they mean by "foiling" the "scam" is probably more like taking all the coins themselves while blocking anyone else from getting any or even from doing transactions.

Its just a way of making sure they get the most coins once the whole attack crap dies down.

It is a denial of service attack, which likely does make it illegal in many jurisdictions. I am not a lwyer though so consult a lawyer in your jurisdiction about denial of service attack legislation in your area.

-MarkM-

It still doesn't matter. They can use greasemonkey or MUDclient type stuff to bake pies or weave shirts or dig up gold or whatever, and trade that in for litecoins at a trade centre / market / shop. If there is too much dug up / woven / etc then the number of coins customers will offer them per pie or shirt or nugget or whatever will be lower. There is no fundamental problem there.

In fact the game can decide ahead of time exactly how many grams of gold exist on the planet, how much in astroids, how much on other planets in the starsystem, and whether it will become possible to reach other starsystems. So again, no problem.

-MarkM-

People can mine coins or gold or metal or whatever for themselves in games anyway if the game wants them to, its not as if they need some special weirdness to do it really, heck using greasemonkey or on MUDs a MUD-client they can even do it in games that DON'T want them to do it. So it seems like a non-existent problem. Just leave your character digging or killing monsters or whatever.

(Anyone got a MUD-client or greasemonkey that runs on GPUs? )

-MarkM-

I have set up evaluation / assessment scripts that add up all of a Corp's assets, deduct its liabilities, and divide the result by the number of shares.

Their findings for General Retirement Corp (GRC) are that its net worth is 1407.85789473 DVC per share.

That is pretty good for a Corp that launched so recently at an initial offering price of 20 DVC per share.

Note that it is not the last traded price nor the lowest or highest or average traded price but simply an actual accounting of the assets held by the Corp and the liabilities of the Corp. Whether anyone who picked up its offering will part with any shares, and if so at what price, is entirely up to them.

Initially this Corp was mentioned in the DeVCorp thread; thanks are due to General Financial Corp for its essential help and contribution to GRC's setup, launch and success.

-MarkM-

I have set up evaluation / assessment scripts that add up all of a Corp's assets, deduct its liabilities, and divide the result by the number of shares.

Their findings for General Development Corp (GDC) are that its net worth is 1305.39473684 DVC per share.

That is pretty good for a Corp that launched so recently at an initial offering price of 20 DVC per share.

Note that it is not the last traded price nor the lowest or highest or average traded price but simply an actual accounting of the assets held by the Corp and the liabilities of the Corp. Whether anyone who picked up its offering will part with any shares, and if so at what price, is entirely up to them.

Initially this Corp was mentioned in the DeVCorp thread; thanks are due to General Financial Corp for its essential help and contribution to GDC's setup, launch and success.

-MarkM-

I have set up evaluation / assessment scripts that add up all of a Corp's assets, deduct its liabilities, and divide the result by the number of shares.

Their findings for GFC (General Financial Corp aka Galactic Financial Corp) are that its net worth is 3762.33578947 DVC per share.

That is pretty good for a Corp that launched so recently at an initial offering price of 20 DVC per share.

Note that it is not the last traded price nor the lowest or highest or average traded price but simply an actual accounting of the assets held by the Corp and the liabilities of the Corp. Whether anyone who picked up its offering will part with any shares, and if so at what price, is entirely up to them.

-MarkM-

I have set up evaluation / assessment scripts that add up all of a Corp's assets, deduct its liabilities, and divide the result by the number of shares.

Their findings for DeVCorp are that it its net worth is 1303.11736842 DVC per share.

That is pretty good for a Corp that launched so recently at an initial offering price of 20 DVC per share.

Note that it is not the last traded price nor the lowest or highest or average traded price but simply an actual accounting of the assets held by the Corp and the liabilities of the Corp. Whether anyone who picked up its offering will part with any shares, and if so at what price, is entirely up to them.

-MarkM-

Okay lets walk through it.

I start a nice little 1%/day HYIP, minimum "investment" $1000 USD.

Say I get only 1000 takers initially, thats only $1,000,000 USD.

1% for 365 days multiplies that up to $37,780,000.00 USD.

Now if I have been using all that money to buy bitcoins, how much would bitcoins be worth by then?

(I am assuming here that I actually rake in $37,780,000.00, on the greater sucker theory. That is, each $1000 someone wants to withdraw is obtained by selling another $1000 unit to someone else, so no withdrawals happen and the basic $10,000 raked in does grow up to a full  $37,780,000.00 raked in and turned into bitcoins.)

Now continue into a second year of operation... Bitcoins would have to go up in value in order for me to have raked in an additional 1% per day for another year and bought bitcoins with it all...

-MarkM-

The hashing devoted to holding names will be that much less hashing power available for securing the entire portfolio of merged-mine-able blockchains though, presumably? Since if you let people use merged-mining to secure their names, all the big pools already merged-mining will have lots of "free" hash-power to use to secure names.

Well maybe that (merged mining to secure the names) isn't really a problem? Maybe all it means is more income for miners at pools as they get shares of what people who value names are willing to pay pools to find them low hashes to secure their names with?

-MarkM-

According to the linked thread it was changed to #litecoin-dev

-MarkM-

Users of online wallet services, exchanges, pools etc without bothering to run a client at home don't count?

-MarkM-

About time! People have been darn near throwing them away ever since way back last year...

-MarkM-

By deployment of exchanges I meant a person thinking of deploying an exchange; how is such a person to trust others to issue assets, or not end up being seen simply as an enabler for scams.

So basically it is not about how to have others trust the asset-exchange, it is about if you run an exchange how can you insure yourself against becoming an enabler of a bunch of scammy "assets".

I had originally figured I just would not let anyone else issue any assets on my server, or possibly I could open a wild west server separately with a "buyer beware I have no idea whether any of these assets are scams or not" policy.

This underwriting concept seemed it might offer a way to "vet" folks who want to issue an asset on my server.

-MarkM-

I am not sure what is up with LiTeCoins, my Open Transactions server has supported them for a long time already, with the ability to trade them directly for any other supported asset type, but there are no LiTeCoins in play there whatsoever. So from there LiteCoin seems more dead than NaMeCoin, I0Coin and IXCoin all of which have a thousand to twenty thousand or so of their coins on the server.

-MarkM-

I suspect that in the early stages the main benefit of accepting bitcoins will accrue to those who already hold bitcoins. Basically the more places that accept them the more likely they are to succeed thus the more they are likely to be worth. Thus if you do much business, get a lot of the public walking through your store or browsing your site, it might be worthwhile to stash a bunch of bitcoins while they are cheap and start accepting them to help build up their popularity.

-MarkM-

Bitcoins will likely be the first of the blockchains to get hit with all kinds of rules and regulations, because it keeps trying to be "real money" and if it succeeds in becoming that, it will suddenly suffer all kinds of horrible disadvantages due to various rules and regulations applying in various jurisdictions.

Blockchain based tokens that are NOT "real money" have real usefulness because people can play all kinds of fun games with them without having entire in-game economies attacked by and possibly crippled by rules and regulations from the planet known as Earth, a planet which all or most of the population of the game considers to be a totally fictional planet and even if by some weird quirk of fate it did turn out not to be fictional certainly to have no jurisdiction over them.

-MarkM-

Maybe altcoin values aren't going down a whole lot lately or something? It seems quite possible that a lot of the interest in shorting is not really an intent to drive down the value but just to profit from the already lowering value. So maybe it is more a feature for opportunists than a feature for those who actually want to try to drive down the value of something.

Part of the interest in it on my server is from debtors. They heard that shorting can somehow sometimes drive down the price of something, which got them interested in trying to drive down the price of whatever their debts are denominated in so as to make the debts easier to pay off.

-MarkM-

Because bitcoin has no "backer" on my Open Transactions server, the scripts that figure out the value of an asset by examining its reserves, its accounts receivable and so on  (the assets its backer owns with which to "back" the asset by buying it from the markets) trying to figure out how much it is worth becomes an exercise in having faith in the valuations placed on it by others.

So instead of looking around locally to see what one could buy locally with it, one is forced to throw out all the usual "evaluation from fundamentals" and rely on other markets' valuations in terms of something that is in some way at least somewhat evaluable in terms of something you do have locally.

It might seem strange that way until one bears in mind that if we used some kind of USD token on the server we would have exactly that same problem trying to evaluate USD, as again it is backed by some external entity who does not have sufficient assets locally (on the server) "backing" it to permit evaluating it in terms of how much actual local stuff it has in its vault to "back" itself with.

-MarkM-