Maybe we could do a pawnshop using a blockchain for its pawn tickets, so people can come visit the shop to see that we have all the goods that "back" the tickets plus after some period of time possibly restricted by law we would be free to turn those assets into cash or whatever else in order to have more room in the shop for more bars of gold or whatever, putting the cash into a trust account etc.

Is it illegal to trade pawn tickets in barter transactions?

Or we could have DryCleanedGarmentsCoin, backed by drycleaned garments, and have blockchain based laundry-tickets redeemable for the garments, and people could barter those?

-MarkM-

A hash that evaluates in very large integers as being a larger integer than the modulo used in the signing algorithm is an error. There is some workaround you are supposed to do for this, some kind of padding or something.

DO enough transactions, and eventually you generate a message whose signature actually needs this padding or whatever it is, so we were getting bad signatires on some of the client<-> server messages when doing large numbers of messages.

It was feared that changing the signature code to do the correct padding or whatever to prevent this error would result in all signatures being different with the new code, thus all previously signed things having to be re-signed, which in the case of things like asset contracts would change their ID, which in turn would change IDs derived from them like account IDs, so, basically, all the data would have to be done over again starting with signing all the asset contracts and even the server contract itself with the new code. It would have in effect been a different server even, as its ID, which is the hash of its signed contract, would have been different.

Luckily it turns out that all the non-error signatures already done on the past continue to work fine with the new code. It seems it only affects the cases in which the error would have happened. (Assuming, that is, that it has in fact prevented the error from happening anymore. I should go check account inboxes now that the batches of market offers I made yesdterday or earlier will have expired. In the past all the large batches of offers caused glitched inboxes due to at least some of the messages having the error. If it has indeed been fixed I should now be able to process all the offer-expired messages. So I shall go try that now...

-MarkM-

It occurs to me that it might be useful to be able to allow "stakeholders" to vote by using value-holding addresses to sign ballots.

But, is this idea confounded by the possibility of moving value from address to address?

It would seem that some kind of timestamping would be needed of the signing, so that one can track back to make sure the coins weighting the signed ballot were not already used in the same election/decision on some other ballot...

-MarkM-

@Cunicula:

Your idea has its problems too, as I am sure you know.

Thanks for posting so I can post again though, because I wanted to add that blockchains can be used to do voting just like shares, anyone can verify with the block explorer how many coins each address has on balance thus how much voting weight each address could have if it signed a voting ballot.

Thus first I shall address your post, then add on this voting concept as a possible way to handle some distributed decision-making (even if not necessarily actual distributed execution of the decision).

This combines your idea of bitcoin having a central importance, if we use bitcoin for the voting.

Using bitcoins for the voting means it is not unreasonable to propose that IF you legitimately have a stake in actually knowing whether I have a certain amount of a certain type of fiat, THEN you can simply buy that amount of fiat from me with bitcoin.

If you do not have enough bitcoin to buy my entire stock of that type of fiat, I simply snub you as being of too little account for me to worry about whether you believe I have the fiat.

If you *are* of sufficient account though, you CAN buy my entire stock of fifty five Canadian Pennies three Canadian nickels and a tooney that my reserves listing sheet claims I have.

You and everyone else will be able to see on the blockchain that I THEN have enough bitcoin to buy that much CAD.

We could even, you being such a massive shareholder and all, have an agreement whereby I will buy those CAD coins back. We between us will have testified (they have to trust that you really did receive the CAD coins and aren't merely colluding with me) that I did have the CAD I claimed to have and now presumably have it again.

Now you maybe express doubt that I have a one kilogram brick of platinum?

Send me the bitcoins and maybe I can buy one and pretend I had it all along. Or I can maybe point at a pile of bitcoins I prove I control and say to you hey that there IS a brick of platinum any time today at today's spot price, lets do a shareholder vote to see if the holders would like me to have such a brick in my reserves.

So I agree that the transparency of blockchains is very useful, but at the same time it might be useful for the stakeholders, as you seem to like to call them, to be able to decide that actually the way such and such a fiat is fluctuating as compared to bitcoins might make it worthwhile to hold fiat instead of bitcoins at some points in time, or to hold a certain percent of each. Since lately, if you look at which fiats fluctuate a LOT compared to bitcoin you might almost be tempted to claim it is not the fiats that are fluctuating it is bitcoin that is fluctuating.

We could build code that can measure signed vote ballots that are signed by bitcoin addresses to allow bitcoins to act as voting shares...

Then vote on how much of our theoretical 21,000,000 units of currency we should hold as bitcoins, how many as dollars, how many as yen, how many as CAD and so on.

We could maybe start with pennies, try to acquire 21,000,000 pennies, in order to be able to say we at least can back each unit with a whole actual mostly-zinc early 21st or late 20th century penny...

Or try for NicKeLs, like bitNicKeLs aimed at, they aimed to be worth an actual made of nickel old style nickel from back before the nickels got debased...

-MarkM-

This is why I liked the "Freeciv Nations' National Currencies" concept.

We could back DigILire with real Lire, Canadian Digital Notes with CAD, United Kingdom Britcoin with GBP and so on for every national fiat currency.

No more need to worry about selling some of your only one type of coin for CAD, some for USD, some for GBP and so on then have a "run on the bank" in which everyone demans CAD or everyone demands GBP or whatever. Having one type of coin for each type of fiat means you can always have exactly the right kind of fiat in reserve to exactly back each coin regardless of what kind of fiat someone chooses to buy cryptocurrency with. You give each customer cryptocurrency that explicitly specifies which type of fiat they bought it with aka provided the reserves to back it with.

-MarkM-

Hmm, lemme think... print money... earn money... print.. earn...

If I had a printer this would be a much easier decision. But if we s/print/issue/ then its easy.

Which would you prefer, to continue earning money in your day job or whatever, or print it?

-MarkM-

Cunicula is the one who keeps wanting to back the hypothetical stable cryptocurrency with bitcoins, and even he sees that bitcoin's instability of price causes problems with that idea.

I have problems with the idea of backing them with anything other than what you sell them for, since anything else might well fluctuate in value compared to what you actually sold them for.

Thus my bots were designed to stash anything anyone bought one type of currency from them with in that specific currency's reserves, not to be used to back (aka buy) any other currency with.

Even that could have problems, since any "run on the bank-aka-reserves" might pick any of the things in your reserves as what everyone suddenly wants. For example if I sell ten CDN for some UKB and another ten CDN for some BTC and another ten CDN for some UNS, what happens if all those customers all turn up wanting to turn the CDN I sold them into UKB? Sorry, I only sold ten for UKB, I can only buy back at most ten with UKB, the rest you'll have to accept BTC or UNS for as that is all I have to back them with once my UKB reserves are expended...

Tracking customers suddenly starts to seem tempting, as I can look you up in my records and find out what exactly you paid me, and if you never bought the things yourself I could then even say sorry, I did not sell you those, here is my list of people I sold to, go find which of them bought these ones you want to sell and have *them* buy them back from you, its not my problem as you were not my customer...

(Bye bye fungibility...)

-MarkM-

It will bug the heck out of "them" that all transactions *are* tracked but conspicuously fail to tie identities to the tracking.

Bills have serial numbers, main reason cash registers don't track them individually yet is probably because they don't, economically/feasibly, *yet*.

The way the U.S. has been "lately" it gets harder and harder to believe they won't force tracking at cash registers pretty much as soon as they can.

Probably the only reason they let citizens own gold again lately is so they can sell it to them, having completed the process of first confiscating it from them. Once they sell it all they'll likely make it illegal to own again so they can confiscate it all back.

Can credit card operators and banks get away with only reporting deposits and withdrawals not account to account transfers?

-MarkM-

By the way I was still editting my previous post, a bad habit I know.

Would it do any good to use force of law in lieu of trust, such as by making an IOU coin, which like a cheque the giving of it into another's custody constitutes a commitment/debt to them?

This would bring us back to the often mentioned ripple concept, but as legally binding tokens of indebtedness...

(Mining would itself be contractual, IF you choose to have the coinbase of a block you mine include coins, THEN you are by the act of mining them commiting to redeem them...)

-MarkM-

I meant Drakahn's not actually visually bulleted in the markup "bullet points".

But once the issuers have sold all 21,000,000 coins and their price keeps going up, they might not be able to afford enough of a stockpile of the actual coins they propose to back to be able to throw enough on the market to keep their price from going "too high".

Thus the introduction of a new, "only a puny fiat dollar per coin" chain at such a time, relegating the old "only a puny fiat dollar per coin" chain to "oops, valuable blockchain coins, hoard them along with your bitcoins to back these new ones with".

(Using identical APIs for them all should keep it pretty trivial for commerce software to use the new coins, possibly just needing to know port number change and coin-name / symbol change.)

Re Edit Two, I have never seen any nation issue anything other than multiple pegged currencies. For example, pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, dollars, fives, tens, twenties, etcetera, all pegged if only to each other...

RPG players seem to expect currencies to be pegged, like ten silver to the gold, five gold to the platinum etcetera. They actually find it kind of weird to think the number of one coin type you get for another coin type might change from shop to shop or time to time.

They actually seem to find the idea that a groupcoin is worth a thousand devcoins quite reasonable for example, being as how both produce the same number of coins per block forever but one produces a thousand times as many per block as the other.

-MarkM-

There are what, six billion or more people on the planet, any of which can develop a cryptocurrency simply by telling some code-monkey what name they want it to have, how many coins total, how many per block, how long a time between blocks and such?

So even if these monkeys are last among the top billion or so they qualify as among some of the best...

-MarkM-

I think we might already have a lot of those bullet-points with Bitcoin.

What we don't have though with bitcoin is the price not going way up above $1 *then coming back down*.

It almost seems as if with Bitcoin our main method of ensuring it never goes below a dollar is to keep it far far above a dollar so that even when it makes huge shifts in value those shifts happen way up in the $2 to $30 range, or like more recently, in the $3 to $8 range.

I think if we are merely wanting to trust they will be worth at least a dollar we have already had that for quite some time now. (Past performance, future performance gotchas of course might well apply...)

The plans my "national and multigalactic currencies" folk have been thinking of never planned to keep their currencies from going higher in value than the value they initially back them at at startup. Their idea had been that once all coins are sold the value could or should or would continue on up by market forces, eventually making their puny initial backing of only one fiat dollar - a value that grows smaller all the time - per coin become more and more irrelevant... Or they could then start to be thought of more like non-voting shares maybe, and be backed by 1/21000000 of the actual assets, including the cash reserve warchest of hopefully umpteen other currencies by then.

We have not yet tested how many blockchains one can "reasonably" merged-mine at once, so it is not yet clear when they would hit a limit of number of coin types if every time they ran out of one type, resulting in its value going over $1 per coin, they simply start a new chain they will back at $1 while continuiing to let the older ones grow in value, strengthening their reserves if they start using the older types as reserves.

In such a scheme your suggestion of using bitcoin as reserves is simply an example of using a/the older type as reserves for the new cheaper type.

-MarkM-

I do not understand this fixation on size of warchest.

2.1 million currencies each of which only ever sold ten coins at $1 each thus resulting in $10 warchest is still 100% backing, how does it matter how large your warchest is other than in proportion to your outstanding (not bought back yet) coins???

If you only ever sell zero coins, then a warchest of zero dollars should suffice. If you only ever sell 100 coins, a warchest of $100 should suffice AND need not exist until the coins are sold.

-MarkM-

Martian Investment Bank.  

-MarkM-

EDIT some of the assets offered are in digitalis-assets.tgz file found at https://sourceforge.net/projects/galacticmilieu/files/

SEE ALSO https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0

Good idea! Make sure to base the bank in a corporate-welfare state of course...

-MarkM-

Okay, so suppose we have a number of blockchain-based currencies, each of which would like to achieve some stable value.

Suppose we also have some secondary asset that might possibly be able to be Bitcoin but if Bitcoin gets too hot/dangerous to use, then some other similar asset that, like Bitcoin's current status, does have some way of turning it into fiat.

The currencies trying to achieve stability would issue all their coins in the genesis block or first block to their issuer.

Each of these currencies thus has one entity we have to trust to back their coins, but the larger the number of such currencies maybe the less we need to rely upon any particular one of them's backing entity.

Also the larger the number of them the less of a loss it would be to the others to pick up the slack if one of them's backer stops backing their currency for some/any reason.

Do World of Warcraft have to provide Know Your Customer and Suspicious Activity reports when characters amass or transfer large amounts of WoW Gold? How about EVE Online? Or Linden Dollars? If I wanted to cash in a few lindens would I have to go through the whole notarised ID thing that Mt Gox apparently now demands?

Lindens might be particularly relevant since they explicitly are exchange-able out to fiat.

There is still interest among some Galactic Milieu nations in selling their coins at relatively stable prices and at least exploring the concept of also buying them back at close to what they sold them for instead of telling players "oh well too bad, tough luck, you have to use them in the game, we cannot buy them back"...

-MarkM-

Wow, old thread. Did they use MyBitCoin and lose all their donations?

-MarkM-

Hmm, I don't think this thing is really actual Ripple-per-se, it seems to be a somewhat hacked up / dumbed down version of it.

For example I don't see any accounts nor ways to create accounts, nor ways to designate types of things you are crediting people with, such as BiTCoins for example

I had thought Ripple was a system whereby you could for example send me 0.2 BTC and/or trust me for up to 0.2 BTC, so that we could set up a network of credit/debit denominated in BTC. Then presumably also set up some other thing, like maybe some kind of fiat, similarly, in order to be able to do exchanges.

They might have hacked Ripple code to make this thing but I don't think it is relaly representative of Ripple.

Here is all I could find out about my "account": http://villages.cc/?u=knotwork

As it does not seem to have any way we can tell it about btcoins I guess you'd need my bitcoin address if you wanted to send me any, and would have to send them outside their system rather than simple as credit inside their system. I guess this address should be find for such uses: 1EHdHpY5K1RYjnABC4RMK3NNDDm92E8ayG

-MarkM-

I am pretty sure the MiniUPNP lib does not work with my router, so I probably do not have incoming ports. However if you don't have IRC turned off presumably my client should see yours in the IRC channel and call out to it.

Maybe though they forgot to limit the number of IRC channels, leaving a vanishingly small chance that any two clients happen to randomly choose the same channel, or maybe some versions use one IRC network and others another.

...There are five channels, 00 through 04, so only a one in five chance we land in the same IRC channel.

There probably should be a commandline and/or config setting to fixate on a specific channel but I do not think there is.

Maybe also it should check the channel actually has clients in it and if not try another.

Maybe whoever runs the main nodes the fallback methods use has shut down or something, I wonder if they have a DNS thing set up for finding fallback nodes, or a list or something?

If you have an incoming port, I can tell mine specifically on the commandline to connect to yours, most of my shell scripts for startign coin daemons have a few nodes hardcoded into them.

While we're at it, if you can open incoming ports, maybe you could run GRouPcoin too, the people who had that runnign in EC2 instances to be used in such hardcoding in scripts seem to have shut down their GRouPcoin daemons...

Both DeVCoin and GRouPcoin could also do with having the DNS system set up, problem with both is I haven't yet any list of reliable nodes to actually plug into DNS for them...

-MarkM-

Maybe you could start of by having your Freeciv nation - since all nations are represented in Freeciv and if yours is not then that should be rectified anyway - issue a blockchain game-currency and participate in a multiational game with other such nations' players, establishing your currencies in the game to such an extent that, like WoW gold and EVE whatzits and various other examples Google might well be able to tip you off about, the currency starts being used in applications beyond the ["alternate reality"] game...

...Continue, demostrating whatever form of patriotism your "planet known as Earth" nation-mates find appealing and championing their national myths dreams and ideals in the ["alternate reality"] game realm, until your "game currency" becomes so well established and so dear to the hearts of the V people that it is a "real contender"...

-MarkM-