It is still running, but the exchange is an Open Transactions server and Open Transactions is still having some growing pains, another round of deep improvements to the code that might make all of the existing stuff we set up in the exchange have to be re-done from scratch. We are still trying to work out whether our data will need re-doing or not, as the latest round of changes are still in progress.

Once it is working, Open Transactions will be a great platform for trading all the cryptocurrencies and also a whole bunch of shares in various corps. It is a general purpose platform that can do currencies and shares and eventually also other assets such as real-estate. So although it has taken many months already working with it, the work should be well worth it once we finally get through al lthe changes we found had to be done to make it a realistic platform.

If you want a GUI, you can compile with wxWidgets, same way bitcoin used to since it is based on bitcoin code. Most people using it are just really using tokens of it, through various kinds of bank-like systems such as their clan accounting or even, for clans that don't have their own cryptocoin daemons set up, a clan account with some clan or nation or planet or whatever that does have a daemon or that got an account on the Open Transactions server during periods when it was up and running, or that use person to person accounting in any of the various MUD or Crossfire or whatever servers.

-MarkM-

You keep saying bitcoin, instead of some newfangled coin.

Bitcoin is not very likely to devote half of all mined coins for two years to one thing.

However, in general I do not see how a collective having a certain size of stake / income of coins differs from an individual who owns just as large a stake / income. If an organisation could be put together that controls as many coins as Satoshi does, why would it be more likely than Satoshi is to do something calculated to increase the value of the coins?

Maybe it is naive to imagine that part of the usefulness of having an early adopter phase where a few people rake in vast numbers of coins is precisely to create a bunch of people who ought to be highly motivated to try to ensure the coins become valuable?

Is the problem that they don't have an incentive to ensure the coins *remain* valuable, instead having more incentive to pump and dump than to pump and keep pumping?

-MarkM-

It is also not a no-profit coin, in the right hands. Obviously you are not going to get a good profit selling altcoins at bitcoin-exchanges whose customers are mostly people looking to get rid of altcoins; what you need if you want to get the best prices for your altcoins are markets catering to people (such as players of various games) who actually want some specific type of altcoin for some specific purpose. (Such as for some quest in some game, or to buy some special equipment only sold by a race class or nation that only accepts that type of coin... Best of course is to either create your own such, or similar, specialised market(s).

-MarkM-

Yes, exactly, GRouPcoin is what we built on the way to creating DeVCoin. We tried some approaches toward how we thought we might be able to do DeVCoin, then once we settled on how to proceed we went ahead and made the actual DeVCoin.

Since the things we had been trying were things that turned out not to work, they were removed or turned back off, leaving GRouPcoin as just a simple inflation-forever coin, that is, a coin that keeps making 50 coins per block forever.

It also has the difficulty adapting fixes various coins adopted after seeing namecoin get left at high difficulty for months by being abandoned by miners, and the timetravel fix that prevents the timetravel exploit.

So it is just a nice simple example of a coin that keeps making new coins forever, which some people once upon a time thought might be better than designed-in deflation. I guess the people who used to argue against deflation, in favour of some kind of forever-minting coin like this one, maybe weren't really all that serious in their proposals since they do not seem to have made much or even any effort to actually pursue the experiment to see whether in fact not building in deflation is better than having deflation designed-in.

Nonetheless the experiment continues, and the coin is also being considered by the various Repossession corps in various games for adoption as their own currency, which they would then tend to refer to as Galactic RePo coin (also known as General RePo coin)  instead of GRouPcoin, retaining the GRP symbol but re-purposing it.

-MarkM-

EDIT: For the Repo corps to use an inflationary coin is kind of ironic given that the existence of such corps in the first place is itself a move against the inflationary nature of new-player-startup-stuff in games, whereby games can be spammed-full of free stuff simply by having lots of new players joining the game and being automatically provided with various startup items and/or resources and/or places/villages/planets/etc.

It is built from old bitcoin code, so the wxWidgets GUI is in there, presumably that should still work on Windows as well as bitcoin's wxWidgets based GUI ever did.

There is also devcoin-qt, but mining cannot be done in the qt version, there seems to be some problem with qt threads or something.

Basically to mine you should use the daemon, devcoind. Again since it is based on bitcoin it should be able to be compiled for windows just like bitcoind was.

I do not do windows, so I am unable to compile for windows. I have no idea how hard windows makes it to compile things, it always seemed to be aimed more at people who do not know how to program or compile so as to make them dependent on other people for binary versions of stuff.

-MarkM-

An ever increasing number of games, since unlike most game-currency this is one the players can take home with them so they can take in to another game.

-MarkM-

It seems to work fine with merged mining, so I am still mining it alongside bitcoin, namecoin, groupcoin, devcoin, ixcion, i0coin and rucoin.

It looks like it should be quite useful as a game-currency.

-MarkM-

Actually, proof of stake can solve the initial distribution problem in a way, simply by initially issuing coins to the stakeholders.

Have proponents of proof of stake put up wealth, in return for which they are provided with, between them, the sum total number of coins ever to be minted. Like, say, have 210 stakeholders and issue to each of them at the start 10,000 coins.

Actually I guess they maybe don't even have to put up any wealth to get those initial coins unless there is enough competition to become an initial stakeholder that making them sacrifice some wealth to get to be one is necessary to avoid six billion people all wanting to be initial stakeholders.

-MarkM-

Hopefully only merged-mining operations will need to deal with such volumes. Client-oriented systems would be able to focus on just one blockchain (or just a few blockchains). A faster blockchain than bitcoin could take up much of the small-value transaction volume, leaving the original bitcoin blockchain for large high value transactions. Hopefully bitcoins will be worth about $40,000 or more each, and maybe not used much in day to day transactions, which would fall to one or more of the lower-value blockchains...

-MarkM-

Only if people are actually online. Most of the time I ojnly saw 3 or 4 people at a time online out of 24 people who posted to this thread.

It needs at least a backbone of machines that are usually on 24/7

-MarkM-

I updated my block on first page of thread too, as it didn't include my dynamic DNS hostname that tracks my changes of address.

I added your updated info but still am not connecting.

-MarkM-

Well look at the addresses you gave: --LOCAL--0.0.0.0;--EXT--0.0.0.0;

Those are useless. Even if you have your port fowarded by your router no one knows what IP address to try to reach you at.

My router does not do UPNP properly it seems so most likely my port is not forwarded.

-MarkM-

This is kind of pathetic... out of 24 "friends", I would see only 3 or 4 online. Now after having to mess around with re-doing ATI Catalyst drivers all day yesterday I am back up and even having added this 25th person I am getting no connections at all.

This kind of network doesn't work very well if you don't leave it online 24/7, guys...

-MarkM-

The difficulty it reports is definitely suspicious, yes. I also see crazy figures in p2pool for what my local hashrate is, minerd claiming 405 MHash or so yet p2pool claiming 15000 KHash or so, things like that. So I don't know how the calculations of hash rate and difficulty are being done. I do get blocks though, I even got a block of namecoin. So however it is working, it does seem to be working.

-MarkM-

Adding GeistGeld to the mix doesn't seem to be a big problem as far as I can tell. I have been doing it a while now and it seems to work fine for me with p2pool. However I am only running one 5870 card, maybe its worse when you have more hashing power?

-MarkM-

You mean, like, maybe if he himself had a stake in it people might take the idea more seriously? By his theories that might make sense, afterall if he has no stake maybe he is just gaming us?

-MarkM-

Put the receiver_1.csv, receiver_2.csv etc files into the ~/.devcoin/receiver directory.

It looks like some of the hosts that used to have the files are gone now or have removed the files, but I included them all in the .tgz so you should have them?

-MarkM-

That presumably isn't counting all the altcoins you can get alongside bitcoins by merged mining though, right?

-MarkM-

How would bitcoin be different from the Euro? Either one is an external currency they have to buy, whereas their own local currency is simply credit they can give each other "out of no-where".

Also, their own currency doesn't have foreigners all over the world with hoards of it that could be used to disrupt the local economy or buy everything and ship it out or whatever.

Even if you give them a million bitcoins they can then give to each other to represent credit, chances are someone among them will sneak off to an exchange and cash it in for Euros or USD or something, taking it back out of the local economy... All of which kind of defeats the purpose of their local currency, doesn't it?

-MarkM-

I don't think its about efficiency.

Ultimately a whole lot of the spoils/fruits of efficiency are in any case to get more inefficient things done that you want done than inefficient things other people want done or even want to do.

There are lots of inefficient things people like to do, want to do, or want others to do for them.

A huge amount of what the people who use efficiency as a mantra actually want is to be able to get other people to do inefficient things for them.

It would be great if we could let everything get done by mega multinational utilities using robots so humans hardly ever have to work at all and with such excellent control interfaces that almost any volunteer can enjoy the feeling of doing some of the "work" themselves instead of letting robots hog it to themselves.

But these "efficiency" touters don't want that, oh no, to them it is inefficient not to force everyone else to be their houseservants or something, no way they favour other people having leisure unless that leisure costs plenty payable to them...

Maybe some people would rather do each other's laundry plumbing whatever than suck the dick of some billionaire for the protein in their emissions while robots owned by the billionaire do the laundry plumbing etc...

-MarkM-