People arguing that it would be screwed if bitcoins went up a lot in vas you had bought gear priced in dollars do not seem to have thought of how many shares might have been sold by that time. If there are only ever 1 million shares, and they all sell for only one bitcoin each regardless of how much fiat one bitcoin happens to be selling for on markets at that time, then people who buy shares while bitcoins are cheap should be gaining if bitcoins skyrocket due to having gotten shares cheap compared to people who have to buy bitcoins at much higher fiat prices to buy shares with.

Sure the existing hardware would only be worth as much, or less, in fiat than the early buyers paid for their shares, but they are getting one millionth of whatever the end total will end up being come some hypothetical date when the initial one bitcoin each shares have finally, eventually managed to get sold.

So I do not think it is quite as simple as look how much hardware their initial fiat bought; rather, one would look at how impressive the resulting operation is compared to how much bitcoins themselves are worth.

Admittedly one could consider simply buying and holding bitcoins if one expects them to go up in value, but how much does one expect them to go up in value if no efficiencies-of-scale sized mining operations manage to get started? Might this operation itself enhance the value of coins, resulting in their now appreciating as much if this thing is not done?

-MarkM-

What, you're not running an Open Transactions client yet?!?!

-MarkM-

Well I was assuming that even if we did pay for software we'd be releasing it as open source, at least once the massive bulk production run of chips has been done.

-MarkM-

eldentyrell said something in another thread about his improved FPGA design being potentially portable to some type of ASIC process, maybe it would be worth working out the costs of going that route and see if it can be crowdfunded, with the aim of producing huge huge numbers of small checp consumer-applicance mining-appliances? Also selling the chips in large numbers to people who want to make larger applicance involviong several chips?

-MarkM-

It turns out that the CoffeeMUD engine supports having your own unique tailor-made currencies for each "area" of the MUD, so despite the high likelihood that like most other games it will turn out people who use bitcoins have no actual interest in actually playing, every area in MUDgaard.i2p has been set to use millbitcoins as the base currency with bitcents as ten millis each and bitcoins as one thousand millis each.

If as past tests have indicated bitcoin is not actually a good choice for use in games due to the lack of interest on the part of the kinds of people who actually like and use bitcoins, it will be simple to chance over to whatever currency's users are in fact actually into games. Tests so far indicate that might end being devcoin or groupcoin, although britcoin and canadian digital notes are also still contenders.

As I mentioned earlier, MUDgaard.i2p is now a web-type destination, you can visit it directly with your i2p-enabled browser, the play now link provides a web based client that offers up to ten tabs of clients all on the one play now page.

Note that this means the banks, loan sharks, monsters, shops, everything all is denominated in millbitcoins, bitcents and bitcoins. Check out the loot and prices and see if you think we should increase or decrease the scale (such as to use satoshis or nanobits or whole bitcoins or whatever as the base unit).

-MarkM-

I tried "friending" people a second degree of separation away from me in Retroshare.

Surprise surprise I *still* ended up with zero connections.

Its not just bitcoiners but also their contacts that simply are not online thus are not viable for p2p networking, it seems.

I friended about 27 bitcoiners and same number of connections they were shown as having.

Useless, total waste of time, pointless. Sorry. Its amazing the bitcoins themseves manage to network at all really I guess.

-MarkM-

TL;DR: Bitcoiners have a real financial reason to have machines online 24/7 yet even they are useless for finding connections for another p2p use...

Yes it works pretty well now, you should be able to go ahead and try it now, the actual server and client work, next update is just migrating the latest application-level communications protocol/handshake type stuff to the scripting system so the scripts can enjoy the new robustness the client's communication with the server now enjoys.

-MarkM-

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77301.0

Open Transactions is getting pretty robust now it seems.

-MarkM-

The Second Life project sounds interesting, I hope I'll be able to get a client working to see it when it is running.

Meanwhile the MUDgaard.i2p was re-arranged slightly so it is actually now a web destination with a MUD client (the play now link) that can run up to ten clients for you over your web browser.

-MarkM-

i2p or Tor are probably best for the initial core teams, simply because anything that is going to end up as a multi million player empire of games is going to be worth a lot of money. If you don't want to get crushed out of existence before you ever even get off the ground its probably best to stick to such networks for the real stuff.

However, I anticipated from the start that not everyone has the same taste in game-interfaces and in fact many who are really just interested in the finance and trading aspects would prefer not to have to "actually play the games", instead simply speculating on all the various resources and corps and even the games themselves. Hence the Open Transactions server. No need to create a character and have it find or fight its way to some place where it can access a stock exchange or commodities market, instead you can simply directly speculate on the markets using Open Transactions directly with no worries about thief and assassin and mugger characters lurking in back alleys to jump you on your way to the market...

-MarkM-

Simple steps:

Install i2p.

Create a tunnel to MUDgaard.i2p

Telnet or MUD-client through that tunnel.

-MarkM-

DeVCorp's aim is to increase the value of DeVCoins, so it will do whatever it thinks will accomplish that goal, within the limitations imposed by the resources at its command,

General Development Corp is I suppose in a way a kind of "me too", anything DeVCorp does that actually seems to turn a profit, General Development Corp is likely to also try to get its fingers in the pies. However, General Development Corp is more about actually directly making profit than about increasing the value of DeVCoins. It also is not so insistent on using DeVCoins for everything, for example it is quite willing to develop stuff for groups, such as clans, fellowships, theocracies et al, who prefer to pay in GRouPcoin. For example GDC already helped one Fellowship negotiate the development of a Clanhouse and the installing of it in a selected/negotiated location. That is actually something GRouPcorp had been hoping to do, but GRouPcorp is still in the process of being set up.

General Financial Corp aims at the finance field, from trading the various currencies through owning shares of any other corps it feels worth owning shares of to running of banks and stock exchanges.

General Retirement Corp is a "me too" smaller-time imitator of GRF (General Retirement Funds), smaller-time in that it doesn't run its own entire currency like GRF does, it just has a million shares issued whereas GRF kind of has 21,000,000 shares issued except that GRF's 21M GRFcoins are not really shares, unless maybe you view them as preferred shares, since GRF operates them as just another currency, with no actual voting or sharing rights accruing to the holders of GRF coins. Like GRF, it will be into real-estate a lot since a lot of retirement involves having a really nice piece of real-estate to retire to; and the running of really nice retirement homes. Dabbling in politics in matters of interest to retirement-age types of people is also part of what GRF does, but GRC might not really get into that part as much being more of an actual for profit corporation than a huge mysterious multigalactic corporation of shadowed/hidden history and assets and so on like GRF is.

-MarkM-

That bit about catering to the needs of gold-farmers is interesting. Reading up on the art of scripting a whole bunch of characters it seems one is recommended to whip up about ten characters at once to run through your scripting, so allowing at least ten characters per player seems reasonable; and scripting something graphical like the Crossfire RPG is much harder than scripting a MUD, since MUD clients are in any cased intended for doing scripts. (Crossfire RPG clients do support scripting, but trying to figure out the geography on a tile by tile bases by which images are used for the tiles is a lot harder than dealing room by room with room-descriptions with listed exits as in a MUD.)

A CoffeeMUD has been set up at MUDgaard.i2p (a telnet tunnel, not an HTTP aka website tunnel) as a front end, yes its not as convenient as plain old internet but plain old internet is not secure and trying to get ordinary people to use secure connections such as ssh is likely to be just as much of a challenge for them so might as well go direct to i2p for this. It is intended as just a first start and front end anyway, as it is expected that a number of MUD servers will be needed anyway to cover things like inability to chat and teleport between worlds or galaxies or planets or whatever, levels of difference at which player versus player combat is enabled and so on and so on.

We have had problems with any games we mass-advertise of having the vast majority of people who create an account never actually playing so this should help keep out those non-starters too, since what we need initially are "serious players" who plan to build a presence they can leverage into actual income once we do start setting up access points where "the masses" can come have a look and, like as not, do nothing like they usually do.

This ia quite a sophisticated system, better than farmville in its way,  you can forage and farm and mine and dig for gems and so on, do al kinds of crafts like pottery, blacksmithing, armourer, weaponsmith, sculptor (sculpting things like ovens and stoves and forges and jacuzzis and such not just ornamental stuff), construction, masonry, and on and on. It also has quite a sophisticated real-estate system so players can rent or own "rooms" or entire "areas", and a really sophisticated clans system featuring several different "government types", a whole range varying from all members voting on everything through the head honcho calling all the shots. Once your clan "conquers" an area, it can get the inhabitants working for it mining, foraging, scavenging, farming, weaving, carpenting, even making wagons and weapons and armour and so on.

Encouraging the use of cryptocurrencies, allowing several characters per player, and encouraging 24/7 presence with scripting should be a good start toward "catering to the needs of gold farmers", yes?

Give it a try... Set your i2p to provide you a telnet tunnel for your telnet client or MUD client to the destination mudgaard.i2p ...

-MarkM-

I am running 64 bit but I ran out of connections. If all the coins are going to run into this it might be they try to keep entire blockchain in RAM or something? If it is something all will eventually run into I guess someone will fix it in one of them sometime. In meantime I had to shut down GeiestGeld for now.

-MarkM-

But we don't actually know each other, any of us could be narks, we'd be deliberately making direct connections to some nark, putting them right into our darknet. Taking one's chances with the random connections one normally gets seems maybe even safer really than that.

-MarkM-

f you are going to rely upon using a computer to turn the passphrase back into a key anyway, then mightn't it be nice to make it take a bit of computing to do, like maybe take the hash of the hash of the hash, 10,000 or more deep? You'd memorise the phrase and also remember a favourite number or something, which, multiplied by 1000, or 10,000, or 100,000 or whatever, will be the number of times to iterate the hashing. This kind of multiple hashing is handy in general anyway for passwords, to make sure it takes a while per attempt. In act Unthinkingbit's bounty for a DeVCoin exchange explicitly requires the passwords have to be hashed at least 10,000 times (I think it was?) just so as to add this little bit of extra work anyone trying to brute force attack them will have to do.

-MarkM-

Well it wouldn't if its just a normal bitcoin minimally hacked to put out the free two million coins in block one and to use the different ports and handshake.

But if that is what they are now using, I guess they just don't want to be merged-mined, which probably severely limits how much mining will ever happen on their chain. Oh well, if they don't want people to get involved thats their choice. Too bad, I was going to set up trading of it on my Open Transactions server but not much point if they are deliberately making it so vulnerable to attack (by discouraging people from mining it).

-MarkM-

If you want constant creation of new coins, GRouPcoin and DeVCoin both already have that so basically that feature is already out there.

-MarkM-

Do you mean "edition" rather than "version"? As version numbers don't seem to look like that?

Also, where are you finding it? And is source code available yet?

I have been merged-mining a long long time now but still not one transaction, even an orphan, showing in list transactions.

-MarkM-

Is there a need? Isn't Freenet already well-connected, so if we are already on Freenet at all we can communicate over it, without any need to link our bitcoin forum identities to our freenet identities?

Maybe just mention bitcoin in a Sone, so people can search in the Sone system and find people who have mentioned bitcoin?

-MarkM-