Actually it looks like the purported "spooky action at a distance" in the quantum realm might well simply arise from a failure to take into account the topology of space. Joy Christian has written quite a bit on that and seems to have a pretty good point.

-MarkM-

One of the easiest places to start is with virtual goods that sell for far far more than what producing them actually cost. However even there you run into the nagging question "why not buy bitcoins with fiat you sell goods or services for instead of giving large discounts to those who pay in bitcoins?"

Another possibility might be very large ticket items. For example if you are selling a fifty million dollar estate or island or something on that kind of scale, how many bitcoins could you charge and how many dollars would that look like to a purchaser who simply looks at recent MtGox rates to figure out how much a bitcoin is?

-MarkM-

Probably few squatters but squatting many domains.

-MarkM-

There is a thread somewhere way back when in which my facebook, myspace, linkedin, sourceforge, realname@yahoo.ca, realname@gmail.com, G+, github, WHOIS (knotwork.com, knotwork.net), etcetera etcetera etcetera (did I mention #bitcoin-otc?) identities are given. I am far from anonymous and the RCMP knows full well who I am. (Which probably means CSIS, MI5, CIA, FBI and gosh knows who else does too.)

Oh gosh maybe though it might have failed to give my Amazon identity, which since Goddess Knotwork (Goddess.knotwork.com) was the site I first put Amazon ads on is goddessknotwork.

-MarkM-

People are still going to have to mine 100 years to get a sword of uberness no matter what weird new coin you invent, in fact they will probably have to mine even longer mining some previously unheard of coin no-one except those players has any use for than mining bitcoins or litecoins etc.

Bear in mind too that by having them mine at your pool, they can mine Bitcoins, Namecoins, Groupcoins, Devcoins, Ixcoins, I0coins, Ixcoins and Coliedcoins all at the same time, plus if you wish a whole bunch of strange new coins no one ever previously heard of.

In fact if you can get enough players to actually make a chain secure - that is, get enough mining power to secure a chain - they can also mine Britcoins, Botcoins, Canadian Digital Notes, CZech Bitcash, General Mining Corp, General Retirement Corp, bitNicKeLs and United Nations Scrip. All at once courtesy of merged mining, with still the ability to add more to the repertoire.

That is because if you can get enough mining power to secure a chain, all those chains can move back out of the Open Transactions format to which they retreated in the face of the hideous expense of securing a blockchain to a blockchain format the amount of mining power players of games are able and willing to provide.

If you still insist on discriminating against people using GPUs, you could also look into applying merged mining patches to litecoin and other "CPU friendly" coins so that all of those can be mined at once. How to make them even more "CPU friendly" is something all of them are presumably interested in so if you do figure out some way their anti-GPU bias can be increased they will probably all be interested since that is afterall their own reason-for-being too. They are thus striving to be the coin you are looking for and merely await your upgrade patch to bring them into line with your goal while also thereby brining them back in line with their own goal.

It seems though that you are basically just uttering self-contradicting bullshit to try to justify yet another pump and dump since unless many many many more computers than just those actually playing the game mine some new shitcoin it will be far too vulnerable (*) but the more people that mine it the less uberswords each one will be able to buy with the generated coins.

How many uberswords per block are to be mined? Or how many uberswords per week? Or how many uberswords per month or per year?

(*) You could however read up on solidcoin and the various threads on "stake" to see how a spectacularly shitty series of shitcoins secured chains despite almost no mining power and how some theorists theorise a newer better solidcoin using distributed consensus instead of divine right to allocate special powers could work.

-MarkM-

Ok then it makes no difference whether you use bitcoins or litecoins or any other coins that you have existing exchanges you can turn them into fiat at.

People with GPUs and botnets and so on can mine anything they can sell and make money, and you already sell in game items for money.

So, there is no worry about people who can mine more massively, any more than there is about people who have higher paying jobs than other people. People who are rich can buy more uber swords already, which algorithm miners use to mine coins doesn't change that.

As long as whatever it is that people are doing is something you can sell to make money you are in effect charging money, and you already do charge money anyway. So the fact that some people are better at making money than other people is irrelevant to the game, or more correctly, that fact is already affecting the game in the fact that some people are richer than others already.

So all you need do is just provide something for players to run that you will give them in-game gold or whatever for - whatever players normally use in the game to buy things in the game. The fact that the company happens to be able to sell that work for "real" money is its own business the players need not care, like you said it could be protein folding work the company is selling or bitcoins or whatever. You could in fact take the BOINC source code if its open source (it is, isnt it?) and use that so you can change what exactly the players' computers are doing for you based on which task pays more at a given moment.

Think back to that sword of uberness. People who make more fiat can buy it easier already. Whether they do so using bitcoins you sell for fiat or litecoins you sell for fiat or protein folding solutions you sell for fiat is irrelevant. So what that they can buy an ASIC that will earn the sword over time or buy the sword directly? People who don't have jobs enough to earn enough money to buy the sword will have more time to play, so can contribute more play to make the game more interesting to attract more people who have jobs thus cannot afford to play much so will maybe buy the sword instead of spending hundreds of hours "earning" it by play and/or keeping their computer busy while they play. Its all good. The company should WANT more money, thus actually PREFER to have people with super-hardware mining on their pool, not try to prevent such people mining for them, especially when they are willing to sell the sword for fiat anyway and the guy with the super-hardware can get plenty of fiat mining lots of merged chains at once and selling the resulting coins.

If you are trying to create a welfare system to distribute uberswords to the destitute, you could just get people to send in a witnessed notarised note from their welfare office stating they are on foodstamps or whatever and award them an ubersword. No need for all this circuitous nonsense.

You haven't even mentioned all the chains that WERE set up as game currencies and WERE only mined by the players of the game. They shifted from blockchain format because it takes a vast amount of hashing power to secure a blockchain. Even though no one other than the players had any real interest in the coins, as soon as someone found a connection to the network it could be taken down by a botnet or whatever just for the luls.

Finally, YOU COULD JUST PAY EVERYONE THE SAME PER HOUR THEY MINE whether they have a supercomputer making you dollars per hour they mine or an old clunker making you pennies.

-MarkM-

I have no idea whether anyone else has any ideas nor what ideas they do have if they do have any.

If you trust the Brits, and know they trust my server to run their Britcoins, maybe the problem here is you have not chatted with Blloyd's of Blondon or whatever the Brits call their most reputable insurance company, or something?

Maybe Britcoins are just not 'up your alley'? Do you trust the Canucks? If not maybe Canadian Digital Notes are not 'up your alley' either.

Maybe you are just not being specific enough in identifying who exactly are the "people" you refer to? Do you consider the Brits to be "people"? How about the Canucks?

Well I can't blame you, basically if you aren't into the game why concern yourself about its institutions, such as stock exchanges existing on various of its planets.

How much of what is issued is probably part of what the audit systems planned for Open Transactions are to cover. Heck it is even planned to have the ability to fire off copies of all receipts constantly to third party persistent remote storage, maybe something like Freenet, GNUnet, maybe even optionally to anyone's own tahoe-lafs grids if they chose to subscribe such a grid to such a data-stream. Maybe it will have Really Simple Syndication streams of them among the possibilities too. But I am not sure I would use that feature simply because I am not sure my users would actually want copies of all their receipts broadcast all over the internetz like *coin blockchains are for everyone to see how many of what which nym sent to which nym...

-MarkM-

How about identify your blocks so that you need not offer any game benefits for sale for coins that were not mined using your pool, associate each miner account at the pool with a player/character in the game so anyone wanting to pass of a GPU as ten CPUs or ten CPUs as their normal-player normal-consumer one-CPU per player would need ten characters or ten player-accounts and thus also ten characters active in the game at the time time, all able to respond to human conversation and in-play interaction (effectively, Turing tests), and cap the amount of such coins one is allowed to earn per hour.

That way GPUs and botnets and other forms of cheating all become from an anti-cheat point of view just another bunch of in-game play-bots, to be opposed by the same anti-bot patrols that combat normal straightforward play-by-bot.

The coins are still useable anywhere as they are still normal bitcoins or litecoins or whatevercoins which already have exchanges and so on. You still get the coins anyone creates for you by cheating, it only they who do not get them. Anyone can tell by tracing coins back to the block that mined them which coins are valid within your game as bonus points for players of your games. Presumably therefore everyone is happy?

-MarkM-

Personally I do it by not allowing other people to issue assets on my Open Transactions server.

I suppose how other people stop me from doing it is by threat, whether of loss of reputation, loss of liberty, or loss of life or limb...

-MarkM-

That could be another area where altcoins could be useful. Hopefully bitcoins will be worth huge sums of money per coin by then. People will be able to have a lifesavings bitcoin account they hopefully won't have to worry about accessing until they retire, or until the beneficiaries of their will want to break it up, and use some cheaper coin with a blockchain still small enough for general users to run the full client for everyday transactions.

-MarkM-

If you use a blockchain how will you get enough mining power to secure it?

Having all the coins "pre-mined", as the miners like to term genesis block / first block coins, has not, historically, added to miners' enthusiasm for a blockchain...

...That is why Botcoins, Britcoins, Canadian Digital Notes, GMC, GRF, bitNicKeLs etc etc etc all moved to using Open Transactions until some time (if ever) when their transaction volumes would generate enough transaction fees to attract miners.

-MarkM-

He didn't just reject transactions, in fact I don't know if he rejected transactions at all. He "killed" it by rejecting blocks he didn't mine, so no one else could mine blocks.

Most other miners dropped out, I see only two connections since long long ago, one of which might be him. However I do not have an incoming port routed so it is possible there are other miners out there that also have no incoming port thus that I cannot attain a connection with.

I have been getting blocks for a long time, but not many since Elgius (or whoever it is that is still mining it) has a lot more hashing power than I do.

-MarkM-

As far as I know he switched to just plain old mining it. Using his pool's users' hashing power, of course.

-MarkM-

Hey if someone is paying to have a cyptocoin made for them just make the damn thing if they are paying enough per hour for the hours it will take, and argue down the "feature" set if they are asking for more hours than they are willing to pay for.

It is irrelevant whether the thing is any use to anyone as long as it meets the specs and they pay the agreed rate for making it meet the specs.

-MarkM-

If the coin is to be a new coin why does it even matter if GPUs mine it faster than CPUs? It can only be spent at the one company's site(s) / game(s) so no one other than that company's players have any incentive to mine it, so why not just make a clone of litecoin, change the port numbers so it does not conflict with litecoin, and use it? Why would any botnet or litecoin miner bother to mine it? Remember that litecoin has no merged mining. Miners thus have to split their mining power between litecoins and all the other varieties of coins that also are slightly CPU-friendly, incuding if this approach is taken all the various coins used by all the various games or game-companies as game currency.

As soon as you open the thing up to being a general purpose currency used outside of your games for purposes unrelated to your games your players are sure to be disadvantaged compared to professionals.

Heck even without opening it up, even if only people actually playing your game can create your currency and even them only within the actual game itself, they are at a disadvantage compared to professionals since professionals can afford to buy with some generic currency as much of the game currency as they have wealth to spend to convince people who have the stuff to yield it to them.

So professionals have an advantage regardless. Even if you try to make it against the rules of the game for people to use "real" wealth to influence in-game events, buy in-game items and so on plenty of people break such rules routinely, as seen with WoW and EVE Online.

It is pretty much a fact of life that the rich are rich and that being rich is advantageous.

So just go ahead and use litecoins if it is desired that exchanges exist whereby the coins players produce can be sold for other currencies.

If the intent is not that players be generating something that can be sold for other currencies, the whole blockchain / cryptocurrency concept is a pointless waste, you might as well just record what they generate in the game where it is actually useful in some way.

-MarkM-

Since it has to run in a browser anyway, then you might as well require the browser to be pointed at a certain URL, or at least to be pointed at a URL located on a domain controlled by the game-company.

Thus there is no need for the whole mining concept, nor a blockchain, all that is needed is for the webserver serving that URL to maintain a connection of some kind (websocket, even, maybe, if that is what it takes for server to detect whether the browser is still on that page).

Then simply credit players for staying on the site.

Even simpler, and allowing games not to be tied to browsers, would be to credit the player for time their character is in-game instead of for time the player has a browser running, unless ads are to be shown on the browser (like in the autosurf idea).

Basically the only reason to bother with the whole "mining" and "blockchain" concept would be to mine an existing coin the company could then turn around and sell on an exchange.

The only kind of work the players of a certain company's games can really be relied upon to be better equipped for than professional workers (such as cryptocoin miners in the case of cryptocoin mining) is work performed within the game, possibly by game characters or units and possibly having in game effects such as digging up game gold in game mines or killing game monsters and so on, and even those professional scripters / automaters might have an advantage if helped in their development efforts by players familiar with all the kinds of tests a scripted unit or character might run into in a given game.

So rather than only show players one method of earning money that they could spend on game items and then complain that some folk other than the players of the game might be better at that specific method of earning money than the typical player of the game is, maybe it is worth considering showing the players as many methods as possible of making money, so that for any given player there is a greater chance of their finding among them one that they are relatively good at?

-MarkM-

It is getting to be time to consider upgrading to a newer version, hopefully you will find it has improved.

The latest addition is keyring support, which hopefully will make it possible to resume the use of scripts to test the system.

The Digitalis server is now running the latest code, I am about to start trying to get keyrings set up to see if they will indeed let the testing scripts start running again.

Meanwhile an interesting proposal for "underwriters" of Initial Public Offerings has come up, see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=92725.0

-MarkM-

An interesting (to me anyway) approach to certain concerns regarding trust in the deployment and use of exchanges has been suggested, which I have written up on the Devtome wiki and am interested in commentary upon. I am considering adopting the policy for my Digitalis Open Transactions server, so although the wiki page places it in the context of the Galactic Milieu game it is potentially not restricted to use in games.

-MarkM-

Luke's pool mines many chains without his users apparently caring which chains he mines with their hashes nor whether he is attacking those chains or mining them normally. Possibly the users might get a cut of the namecoins, I am not sure of that, but I am pretty sure they don't get cuts of any of the other chains. If I recall correctly the chain he outright attacked (and, as far as I know, still mines albeit normally) was coiledcoin. (? DId I remember that correctly?)

-MarkM-

Usual players do have browsers, so a solution that has proven very useful and effective in the past is to have them run autosurf traffic-exchanges.

Basically you can use autosurf credits as the points people use to buy things in the game.

The specific past case I am thinking of ran their own autosurf so they could directly access players surfing statistics but that may not really be necessary, depending on how easy it is to find useful autosurfs that allow players to transfer credits.

Interestingly a lot of the money came from the players themselves buying things the game operator advertised in the autosurf. Specifically he put some Amazon ads in there and ended up selling a surprising amount of cameras and such to the players thereby.

-MarkM-