Free sites with PHP and MySQL: http://hosting.knotwork.com/

-MarkM-

The link you provide has no way to know which of the miners use the server that is looking to pay its miners, in fact the vast majority would go to miners who probably never even knew the server existed let alone actually used it.

Thanks for testing one of my ports. I'd still like to know about the other too but it looks like maybe some kind of hole punching must be responasbile for my incoming connections.

Strangely though, litecoind itself was also getting incoming connections, unlike any of my other coin-daemons. So I thought maybe the litecoin authors had done something to make litecoin different. If they didn't I wonder why it *is* behaving differently from the other chains in that respect.

-MarkM-

I am sure something could be worked out, provided the botnet has enough hashing power to be worth accommodating. About how many connections are we talking about, at what average hashing rate each? I wouldn't expect anyone already running methods of accommodating botnets will want to publicise their details so I expect negotiations would typically be on a botnet by botnet basis and of course you'd have to take the chance that it is a honeypot operation looking to find botnets...

-MarkM-

I wanted to pay out more than 100%, that is, to use a negative fee, because I merged mine numerous chains and that seemed a simple direct way to reward users for helping my merged-mining efforts. However it turns out that simply using a negative amount for the fee does not accomplish what I intended. Maybe it would be useful to cause it to do so, as others too might like to thusly enable their users to benefit from the fact they are actually mining a number of chains at once?

-MarkM-

I would like someone to test mine to see if it actually can be reached from the internet, because the miniUPNP used by coin daemons does not work with my router but whatever p2pool is using does seem to work but I have not yet proven that it works. I supposeduly get incoming connections, but maybe those actually result from some kind of hole-punching rather than from actually managing to set the router correctly.

The hostname is ot.knotwork.com, the ports are the normal default ports for bitcoin and for litecoin (I run both). There is NO FEE on either currently. Once we see whether they can in fact be reached I will have to put a fee on litecoin because I have nothing I can merged-mine with litecoin. For the bitcoin though I wish I could set a negative fee, that is, pay out more than 100%, because that way users could benefit from the many other things I merged mine alongside bitcoin. However I looked at the code, and it turns out trying to put a negative fee would not do the trick. Which I should now take up with the author of p2pool in another thread...

Location is Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

-MarkM-

This is the value that Bitcoin provides to all the other non-reversible currencies: it is the curtain behind which the whole can of worms that is the fiat system is hidden behind.

Only the people who are stuck with fiat, and the people who are willing to take the risk of accepting fiat, need worry about it. It is the users of fiat who don't seem to realise how untrustworthy their currency is, the irreversible currency users are well aware that fiat should be avoided unless some huge markup, presumably about what money-laundering usually goes for probably, is offered by those who wish to divest/launder themselves of fiat.

Really the overheads associated with accepting fiat currency are so ridiculously high that it should not surprise anyone that money-launderers thieves crooks etc are the folk most likely to be able to afford such overhead.

Put simply, fiat currency is so fraught with problems that it is worth far less than irreversible currency.

A DollarCoin thus needs to cost far far more than a dollar IF it is paid for using reversible fiat currency.

Maybe a Reversible Assets asset could be set up in which all reversible assets get put, then people who have irreversible assets can place offers so the market can discover how much people really think such reversible assets are worth. Bear in mind that the largest inputs of reversible assets to such a pool/fund will probably have the highest likelihood of being scams. So presumably it should come back again to the number of units in it that are more than six months old divided by the total number of units as the average value per unit. Interestingly that should result in an asset/fund that goes DOWN in value when units are put into it!

-MarkM-

EDIT: Hey that actually makes sense, as putting more paper printed by the fed into it is simply inflation just like it already is in the outside world when such paper is printed in the first place.

Matthew seems to have cut directly to the simple straightforward solution, if there was a wallet "account" per user. Just send back to each user what is in their wallet-account. It doesn't matter how many withdrawals, or when, they did to reach the current amount they have left, what matters is getting back to them what they do have left.

-MarkM-

As far as I can tell no LiTeCoin users even tried the game I recently set up, so I think maybe they are just not the right kind of people, games do not seem to interest them in the slightest.

Mind you it is my intent with all these games not to force people who play the game markets to have to actually play the games in which the items on the markets are actually used, so maybe its no big deal that LiTeCoin users have no interest in games. Maybe it will suffice that they can buy and sell game items commodities stocks bonds shares and currencies without ever having to enter any of the actual games whose items commodities etc are being traded on the market. Afterall the main advantage blockchain based assets have over assets that exist only on the game's own servers is this very fact that people don't have to enter the game to use them. They can trade them among themselves without ever having played the game, and they can do so purely on the basis of "technical analysis" even without knowing or caring anything about the assets other than how they perform on the markets.

Since the currencies are totally independent of any one game, it is really up to the players which such currencies they choose to use. The games simply provide venues in which trading of game items and game accounts are not against the Terms Of Service, so that players can trade freely without concern that the game management will confiscate their game assets if they do engage in such trade.

So far more players in the various games have been trading IXCoins than LiTeCoins, simply because IXCoin has a character, "Ix", who is actively seeking to establish trade using that currency. So far no player/character has emerged as a champion of LiTeCoin so IXCoin is pretty much the default cryptocurrency the players think of trading in as they know there is a trader who is will buy them and will sell things for them. WIth LiTeCoin there is so far no-one that comes to mind as the go-to character for buying stuff from with them nor for selling them to. I suppose that could be charaterised as an opportunity, but it does not seem to be an opportunity that LiTeCoin advocates are interested in pursuing.

-MarkM-

It also maybe doesn't make a whole lot of sense to try to peg the value of a real actual transfer of value to a pretend, play-acting, maybe it might turn out to be real but we won't know for six months unit of purported value.

I once thought maybe the simplest approach would be to make a PPUSD-fund of which the actual number of USDs that actually lasted the full six months without getting reversed would be kept track of, so that one could figure out the average actual value of each PPUSD currently in the fund and either value them at that average each or only value those that are over six months old.

I thought maybe it could work with things like game subscriptions. Have games people subscribe to at, say 10 PPUSD per month, and in the seventh month and thereafter they start to receive some blockchain based currency coins in addition to whatever the usual perks people who have not been in a full six months might get. (An allowance of game-gold for their character? An edifying newsletter all about the wonderful world that will open up to them in six months time... five months time, wait for it... three months... etc...)

-MarkM-

I thought the 80% / 20% proposal was in this thread or the other, certainly I read it in this span of being awake. But I cannot find it.

Thanks for the link, I will go check that out.

Things I saw while looking for the 80% / 20% thing though made me realise there probably are a bunch of complications that will pop up in actually trying to code though. Not in the code itself initially but in all kinds of sneaky problems that need to be thought out.

One thing I liked about the proposal though was it scaled so that pooling together basically ended up increasing the stake you'd need, so you might as well solo mine with a tiny stake or maybe even no stak in coin form (hashes count) instead of ganging up with others to pile up a stake between the lot of you. It seemed that might actually even potentially be able to be tuned to address the LiTeCoin people's concern that the little guy keeps losing the ability to make a few pennies at home over and above electricity costs.

-MarkM-

Oh thats just more dysfunctional thinking again. Social peer to peer values shipping out free ASIC modules to everyone's tent will cause a field day for the botnet people.

-MarkM-

No problem, it is CRCoin not RCCoin I am thinking of first off anyway, since the 0.8 & 0.2 proposal seems concrete enough and simple enough, gosh knows how complicated whatever you want to "collect signatures" for will turn out to be. I was thinking of going really simple, the address the reward is to go to either contains enough stake or it doesn't, no licensed miner / licensed mining, just put the reward where the stake is if there is enough stake already there or invalidate the block.  Maybe make sure at least stake plus reward is still there 120 blocks later or don't mature the reward.

-MarkM-

Aha, of course! Sneaky of them to have CSIS handle the "revelation" of their ASIC capability for them through that Vancouver front-corporation, eh? Only 25 available, eh? Oh yeah, sure... to the public...

-MarkM-

Actually there has already been a rush to implement pretty much "anything", ha ha.

I want to push merged mining further, it seems to me I could mine at least a few more chains than I am currently mining, so given a choice between this or just a bunch of boring old identical clones this concept might be worth trying.

We have a bunch of pennystock-like chains already, lets see if a penny-CRCoin can beat out the other penny-chains.

If it can emerge a clear leader "in its class" then that should lend at least a couple of pennyweights to the theory, yes?

I don't expect you to write code, I don't expect Cunicula to write code. It was a very very pleasant surprise to me that Unthinkingbit does write code, in fact a whole lot more of DeVCoin's code than I wrote. (Heh "than I hacked a little" is more like it, I didn't really "write" anything, I just hacked away some at what was already written, enough to get it to at least look like it runs.)

So don't worry about coding. We can bribe codemonkeys with DeVCoins, or just make up the code, it doesn't sound real hard. And it sounds like an interesting idea.

-MarkM-

P.S. Hey maybe we should also accelerate the decay of the block-rewards in it so we can get to the juicy bits sooner?

Ha ha, good luck with that without proof of concept.

So, back to proof of concept... I do not want to detract from bitcoin with altchains, so we can maybe make sure it is clear from the outset that if it takes off too darn well Bitcoin itself is free to set some block number at which it adopts a similar system.

But to drive Bitcoin to do so, we really should demonstrate that failing to do so could indeed prove a competitive threat to Bitcoin's value rather than being a harmless companion-coin or hanger-on or, indeed, merely yet another of the many currencies used by various civilisations of the Galactic Milieu.

I am losing track, are you both in favour of making such a change to Bitcoin on purely theoretical grounds, or is at least one of you at least a little more empirically oriented than that?

-MarkM-

Thanks! So then maybe we call it CMRcoin or MRCcoin? (Cunicula/Meni Rosenfeld or vice versa; I know normally it'd be just one initial for each of you but I have this bias for three-letter currency-symbols...)

-MarkM-

EDIT: Oh wait, duh, CRCoin or RCCoin (Cunicula-Rosenfeld Coin or Rosenfeld-Cunicula Coin).

Hmm I guess SolidCoin's take-away from your proposals was proof of stake.

Somehow I don't think he quite got it right, though.

This 0.8 / 0.2 you propose doesn't sound particularly difficult to code, but if yet another altcoin is to be launched to implement the concept the coin or chain should have a name...

-MarkM- (I hesitate to suggest CUNcoin, though maybe it is kind of an easy one to arrive at...)

Didn't you know? Satoshi cut his teeth in dentistry before taking up economics and finance.

He doesn't often pull teeth, but when he does he defangs entire financial systems.

-MarkM-

Not fully utilising the full merged-mining capacity seems like a tragedy too, maybe it is not technically exactly a tragedy of the commons per se, but all that open potential being dog-in-the-manger fenced away from the commoners instead of being expansive and accomodating as many chains as it can seems not unlike some steps in how commons got fenced off.

We're lucky we even still have rights of way along rivers and beaches in some juridictions let alone any actual commons.

Its my power, mine to waste, I profit by denying it to others... Familiar tune.

-MarkM-

Proportional to the total ever minted doesn't sound right either; proportional to number actively circulating sounds more apropos maybe. Maybe plus dark pools, but maybe activity can help guess which are lost and which are merely dark pools that have not made any moves in the last few generations or years or centuries or whatever.

-MarkM-

EDIT: Remember, I am pointing at aux chains, increased reward can arise by increased number of high difficulty chains. Whereas you seem to be imagining your proposed chain is the be all and end all, hogging all the hashing power to itself, refusing to share the bountiful potential of merged mining...

Bitcoiners sound much like all the prervious entrenched monopolists sometimes. Oh gosh we cannot allow hashing power to be spread out, we have to let it go to waste to maintain our monopoly...

I thought breaking monetary monopolies was supposed to be a good thing, that bitcoin is here to help accomplish...