Interesting, but why isn't the secondary asset a fiat currency? Purely the logistics of zooming such stuff around the net?

Now how about if there were 'n' blockchains, each of a fixed number of pre-mined coins, each agreeing to trade 1:1 with the others and some target fiat currency?

By 1:1 I mean close to 1:1, such as "we will buy 1000 of x for 999 of y and/or sell 1000 of x for 1001 of y" and so on... 10000 of one for 10001 of another; 100000 of one for 100001 of another...

-MarkM-

Yes, that is probably much more of a problem than any "technical" issues.

Kind of weird that the west painted the Soviet protection of their citizens from alien currencies yet oops looks like the west plans to do much the same itself. The fourth wall becomes an Iron Curtain?

-MarkM-

Actually I was thinking central bank style, but the "warchest" would simply or mostly be what coins were sold for. If no-one buys any, no warchest is needed. If someone buys five for $5, right there is sufficient warchest to back those five coins. If all 21,000,000 get sold for $ each, right there is the $21,000,000 to back them with.

The main problem seems to be having enough transactions happening to make merged mining seem worthwhile, which presumably means enough fees to pay the bandwidth the disk storage and some actual profit for devoting bandwidth and diskspace.

-MarkM-

Maybe peg it at first, then let it float once all the coins are in circulation if demand then drives up the price?

-MarkM-

Yike the logs were over 32 megs, I emptied them in case sheer size of log was causing some of the problems I am seeing.

Git pull claims I am up to date with github.

The other day I saw litecoin has 124 or more connections, and killing it suddenly made my bandwidth stop lagging, so I figured its huge number of connections must be what was throttling my internet connection.

I set maxconnections=8, and it seems that is what has led to p2pool getting disconnected, since it gets 8 outgoing connections and subtracts that from total to see if it can also fit any incoming connections.

None of the other *coin daemons show any signs that the UPNP stuff works, plus in any case getinfo claims its not activated. So I wonder if my bandwidth was mere coincidence and actually my litecoind is not more reachable from the net on its p2p port than any other *coin daemon and maybe p2pool was somehoe those 116 or so incoming connections?

I am trying again now with maxconnections=9

I am also seeing old share over an hour old errors...

2012-02-26 02:31:41.256425 >     raise ValueError('old share an hour after switch time')
2012-02-26 02:31:41.256481 > exceptions.ValueError: old share an hour after switch time

All this is mining litecoins, the merged mining looks fine.

-MarkM-

Hmm heading off to check log, I just noticed I am now constantly getting "2012-02-26 01:51:47.863969 Bitcoin connection lost. Reason: Connection was closed cleanly." and/or not cleanly. Often its non-cleanly once followed by cleanly twice. This is with my instance that is mining litecoins and no merged ming so there aren't three daemons its talking too it must be makign and breacking connections to litecoind over and over very fast or something but neither the litecoind nor the minerd outputs show any inidcation they thing anythign is wrong.

Hmm where does p2pool put its log? Offhand I don't see one in the current directory of the tasks running it nor in its own directory nor in /var/log ...

(It is running in screen, which doesn't seem to have scrollback so all I can see of its output is one terminal windows worth at any given moment.)

-MarkM-

I have two CLC connections too, and presumably luke-jr is no longer merged mining it with Eligius miners' hashing power as I have also got some confirmed blocks. Hmm or he is and I too am on a fork?

Maybe you are one of my two connections and I am one of your two? 142.177.234.* is one of the class C networks my ISP assigns me an IP on, and is the one I am on right now. Got a connection from that net?

-MarkM-

I am merged mining, BTC, NMC, IXC, I0C, DVC, GRP and CLC all at once.

I0coin has a much lower difficulty than IXCoin, yet I am seeing IXCoin blocks but no I0Coin blocks.

Does it actually submit the work to all the daemons it has enough difficulty for?

-MarkM-

My hosting's PHP setup is global across all the subdomains, so when I activated a Zend optimiser / decrypter thing in order to test out a "membership site" system, all my sites on that host gained the Zend functionality.

Now the Villages Online system has suddently started gettign errors it did not have before:

Fatal error: Cannot run code from this file in conjunction with non encoded files in [snip]/villages.mygamesonline.org/Templates/Build/avaliable/availupgrade.tpl on line 14

I tried using the "file" program to find any Zend stuff by magic numbers, but it does not detect and of the files as Zend.

Nonetheless I suspect one or more of the "skin" javascript things are probably triggering this, which probably confirms that at least some of the code is stolen code from the commercial "Travian" game, not actually free open source code at all.

Thus, it will be shutting it down. I have been testing the genuinely free open source Villages game "Devana", and so far it seems to be working, so I will move that onto the Villages subdomain and get rid of the Travian-clone at last. It had in any case turned out to be broken in many places compared to what it ought to have had according to its blurbs instructions and so on.

Meanwhile I have also been checking out 2moons, another Galactic mining system. It seems to work much better than the Xnova Redesigned. It also has a larger selection of ships, basically continuing up past the largest ships the Xnova Redesigned has, and its user interface is not so over-designed as to make it crazy-hard to add more buildings ships technologies and so on.

This of course means that fleets developed in 2moons could be even more of a threat to the central civilised worlds of the Galactic Milieu than the fleets of the Xnova Redesigned system. Thus the Xnova Redesigned galaxies will still be retained as galaxies closer to home, and the 2moons galaxies will be situated beyond those of the Xnova Redesigned system, as an even farther-flung set of defences. Thus the lack of combat in the Xnova Redesigned galaxies can be consideres deliberate, the robotics corporations providing the technology deliberately keeping mining operations so close to home from being armed, at least until some farther threat is discerned which might justify arming the inner set of mining operations.

The 2moons system will be outer defenses, hopefully ready and able to take on any even farther out potential enemies of the homeworlds of the Milieu.

This means that the 2moons galaxies will be even harder to get started in than the Xnova Redesigned galaxies, which already had to stop allowing ever tom disk and harry to start up a mining operation. (Too many "players" simply never did anything, leaving the financiers who financed their startup gear in the lurch, and we were running out of capable CEOs for repossession corps to take over such abandoned operations.)

Most likely people will only be able to start operations in the 2moons galaxies once a jump gate has been built in the Xnova galaxies to enable ships to be sent that far.

-MarkM-

One essential feature that probably will NOT be a priority feature for Bitcoin is sheer official worthlessness, like baseball cards before they took off, like comics before *they* became collectors items, worthless game-tokens that game-players can have fun with and maybe, many years later, find are worth some silly amount of money possibly for quite silly reasons.

Bitcoins are more and more unsuitable for games the more they try to be "real money", because the more "real" the money the more "gambling" type fuss gets dragged in to spoil the game(s).

We *need* poker-chips that don't turn any and every game that finds some use for them into "gambling" merely on account of the chips happening have the word "poker" associated with them in some way.

-MarkM-

I am thinking that LiTeCoin could maybe benefit from an FPGA mining farm that mines all the merged-mining GPU coins and uses all of them to buy Litecoins. Basically the same thing I want to do for DeVCoin except that LiTeCoin won't be one of the coins mined, unlike with DeVCoin, which itself can be GPU mined with merged mining.

The idea basically is to create things that will buy the coins, thus presumably helping to keep them sellable and maybe / hopefully even increase the price they sell for.

I'd do it the same way: have a "corp", LiTeCorp, just like DeVCorp but with the objective of promoting the value of LiTeCoin instead of DeVCoin. Preobably pretty much any approach DeVCorp comes up with for increasing the value of DeVCoins, LiTeCorp can probably apply toward improving the value of LiteCoins.

Millions of DeVCoins have already been committed to DeVCorp and other DeVCoin-oriented "corps", but the people putting in those coins mostly do not have any LiTeCoins at all so I have no idea whether LiTeCoiners would be as interested in such approaches as the DeVCoin holders have shown themselves to be.

I have created an asset contract for my Open Transactions server to support the trading of LiTeCoins, but didn't create a LiTeCorp shares/stocks contract yet mostly due to no actual LiTeCoins having been put into the system yet, unlike DeVCoin of which well over a hundred million is already in the system.

-MarkM-

Thanks! I hope it works better, as the -qt one doesnt seem to mine when gen=1, it detects my CPUs but shows 0 hash rate; and even getting the tenebrix-specific copy of minerd, that doesnt work either, keeps getting error 500 from the tenebrix RPC port.

I did manage to communicate with it, using -daemon=1 and -server=0 on commandline of copy I used to talk to it.

I also tried fairbrix, which seems just as bad but also has no connections. At least tenebrix I do see three connections.

-MarkM-

EDIT: Actually, connects has dropped to zero again. It did that before but found 3 when I restarted. SO basically it seems to find some at first then later drop them all.

The link in my sig is a web-based client that gives access to a number of servers, you could try selling loot on any of them for litecoins.

On my server. the one listed as "CrossCiv" server, there are already a number of players who are interested in a bunch of the cryptocoins. I don't know if any of the other servers would be friendly to the idea of selling stuff for litecoins, you never know, some games frown on players selling stuff to each other...

-MarkM-

I am trying to check this coin out to add it to my system, but there does not seem to be any tenebrixd daemon, so even if I keep the GUI version running as server, how do my shell scripts and so on actually talk to it? Usually they use the daemon of each coin to communicate with the daemon that is acting as server. But without an actual daemon to compile its not clear how to do such communications?

-MarkM-

Some deep fixes to Open Transactions crypto, that we thought would probably cause al lthe existign contracts and such to have to be signed again and change their ID hash and such due to fixes in the signatures, are now in place and they seem to be working fine with the existing data. So it looks like we maybe don't have to create all new contracts and such after all.

SO trading is back on again at the Digitalis Open Transactions Server. Grab the latest Open Transactions and its java client, "Moneychanger", from GitHub and the digitalis-assets.tgz file of contracts from http://sourceforge.net/projects/galacticmilieu/files/ and come try it out!

-MarkM-

Wow, we now have in place a bunch of deep fixes to the crypto that we thought would result in having to create all the contracts and so on over again as we thought their signatures would change from fixes to the signature system, but all the existing data seems to be working fine!

SO grab the latest Open Transactions and Moneychanger from github and come check it out!

-MarkM-

Well having just seen a proposal for an FPGA mining operation I thought it might be time to start floating my DeVCoin based "DeVCorp" concept.

It would be really nice to be able to take advantage of bulk prwices for FPGA gear. For example. to be able to buy 30+ Icarus boards in one order. When BiTCoin was somewhere over $5 USD it looked like that ought to cost somewhere around 3000 BiTCoins.

I have merged mining working using p2pool to mine BiTCoin as primary chain, with NaMeCoin, IXCoin, I0Coin, DeVCoin, GRouPcoin etc (where etc is not yet in play but hopefully will include UKB, CDN, UNS, GMC, GRF, NKL and so on) as merged aux chains.

DeVCorp is to focus on the DeVCoin. Mining will not be all it does, it will be a general "try to make DeVCoins go up in value" institution. Shares will be initially issued in return for DeVCoins and mined coins of vall the various merge-able chains will be sold for DeVCoins.

Since this is an initial Request For Comments (RFC), here is a specific such request: I am concerned as to how important using a "dividend-paying" format is? I prefer that the corp simply buy back its own shares are growing prices per share rather than going through the whole rigamarole of divvying up dividends. It means that cashing out involves some loss of percentage of the corp the person cashing out holds, for example. It avoids the need to round off divisions of arbitrary quantities. It prevents the share price from aquiring a sawtooth pattern as it drops right after dividends are payed then grows again until the next time dividends are paid. All in all, it is just plain simpler.

But is it reasonable? Are "dividends" pretty much the whole point from the perspective of most prospective buyers of shares?

-MarkM-

Read further... this is not a purchase of the hardware, the hardware is merely being LOANED!

It is probably a crazy-high price to buy used gear, to pay it just to borrow the gear is what? Reasonable as lease of hashing costs more than outright buying used gear? Crazier because buying used gear might be a lot cheaper depending on how much it costs to maintain it?

If the gear fails, do the founders it is being leased from guarantee to replace any missing MHashes by for example leasing some elsewhere at their own expense to make up the shortfall?

This kind of plan could be a great way to put some used FPGA gear on a local market for easy convenient purchase, notice the founders can force the thing to shut down and sell its assets (which do not include the initial hardware, which is merely leased/"loaned") for the founders to pick up cheap without even shipping costs...

I want to put together a shares setup for buying FPGA gear but I certainly don't plan on this kind of piracy, heck I didn't even imagine for a moment one would have any chance of getting away with it, as in actually selling any shares. How gullible *are* the buyers on GLBSE?

-MarkM-

Well did you check the list(s) of bitcoin businesses? Or did they get vandalised off the wikis or something? There used to be a bunch of third party sites listing bitcoin businesses too not just the wiki.

Maybe though if they no logner appear on such lists its because they closed down, and if they did one might wonder why before jumping into the niche they chose to vacate...

-MarkM-

Are the services that used to do that no longer operating? I know there was at least one, but thought there were two or more?

-MarkM-