If you are looking to actually develop stuff instead of using already available free open source software, maybe DeVCoin would be worth looking into.

You could get some funding for developing, provided you make it free open source.

About the mining, you could pool all the coins mined, then use the total per period of time to determine how much loot is available to be found per unit of time.

Or you could plan on "MUDflation"... assume that more and more loot will basically appear out of nothing thus that the price in cryptocurrencies of such loot will inevitably go down and down and down constantly as the rate of loot production out-strips the rate of loot production.

In my web based online games players have starting equipment, so unless they bought it in some other game and had it shipped over to the game they are now starting it is assumed they must have taken out loans in order to buy or lease their starting gear. The MUDflation one can normally expect in games that create stuff out of nothing implies that the amount of loot it is going to take to pay back the startup loans is going to grow and grow and grow just from the MUDflation let alone of course the one percent per real-world day standard interest terms the financiers charge for such loans.

The production an active player can churn out far out-strips the interest on their loan but if MUDflation is expected to be caused by an ever increasing amount of loot offered for sale by an increasing nu,ber of increasingly well equipped players it might be possible that the MUDflation will have far far more impact, causing far far more challenge in trying to repay one's startup loans, then that interest on the loans.

Unfortunately the financiers eventually had to shut down this approach, largely due to a shortage of CEOs for repossession corps sent out to repossess startups whose CEOs basically just borrowed, created a startup, then vanished never to be seen again.

Nowadays those extremely lucrative financed-startups have been discontinued, so one has to start as a single individual character in the CrossCiv server listed in my .sig and work your way up to enough power and/or loot and/or influence to manage to swing such a loan or finance such a startup out of your own pocket.

-MarkM-

A big problem with multiplayer games is often when a player starts into the game various items or places get created for that player to start with and start at, but the vast majority of players started end up not doing anything.

That results in floods of new "stuff" appearing out of no-where, and often also makes being online in the game 24/7 even more advantageous compared to good strategy and such than it would be without such a constant "random" influx of new stuff to grab/loot.

When I first came across HYIPs I naively thought they could provide a solution, since you could require a deposit from new players sufficient to ensure they are likely to at least try pretty hard, having something to lose. The benefit would be that when you finally return the deposits they have gone up in value.

Well of course it turned out that was a bad idea, but seemingly only because the HYIPs were scams. Had they legitimately actually served as trust accounts that yield interest that maybe would have worked quite nicely.

Maybe cryptocoins can work for that though, since at least the coins do not vanish and given how little they tend to be worth early on they might well be worth more by the time deposits get returned to the players.

Deposits would be useful in the case of Monopoly for example, becuase in addition to each player's starting cash Monopoly also assumes a bank.

Monopoly has money appear out of no-where at times, such as passing "go" and the bank error in your favour and your bonds mature type of chance and community chest cards; and it also has money vanish into the bank, such as when properties are initially purchased.

You could either have people only get to use their initial 1500 cash, so all play on an equal footing, all equally rich or poor, or allow people to pour as much money as they choose into the game.

The Galactic Milieu is the latter kind of model: there is no fixed amount people can pour into the game.

I really do not like though the amount of "cheating" that many online games have built into them in the operator's favour though. For example Travian-esque and O-game type games often have an NPC merchant "feature" in which you pay the operators of the game and in return a magical "merchant" whose stockpiles of resources cannot be raided and whose travel time to come pick stuff up and drop stuff off is zero will trade resources with you. Such things are unfair competition for players who wish to act as traders, unfairly beating their possible delivery/pickup times, fuel costs of pickup/delivery, and vulnerability of stockpiles to looting, as well as the counterparty risk in whether they will deliver at all.

Do any of the "accept payments at your website" services include Litecoins among the currencies they allow customers to use yet? I would like to have my web based games accept litecoin and devcoin as wqell as whatever other coins such a service supports, but am not aware of any such services that accept either litecoins or devcoins yet, let alone both... along with I0coins, Ixcoins, and others too would be nice, much like PayPal allows customers to use any of many different currencies.

-MarkM-

Since its just gambling anyway, with no actual stocks or shares or metals etc changing hands, you might as well just play the the "Insider Trading" stock / forex / commodities / etc game, and then you will be able to actually cause effects in markets because you will be able to hire terrorists to attack cities where stock markets are located and fun stuff like that if you feel that might be more fun than sitting around waiting for your blue chips to slowly go up in value or hovering over tickers all day trying to perfect code for your trading bots or just doing manually what such a bot would do if only it perfectly represented your style and instints and ... insider connections with the folk who actually run the nations whose currencies you use to buy the stocks and commodities and hire the terrorists or pay the shipping to strategically move commodities or whatever...

-MarkM-

Nice!

Now how much are we bid for a SolidCoin User version?

-MarkM-

Surely it will be almost trivially simple to start a p2paltpool, a p2paltpool2 and so on from time to time as needed to keep each p2pool network within reasonably nice share-difficulty range?

It looks as if p2pool might, unlike bitcoin and the altcoins based on it, be succeeding in talking my router into opening its incoming port.

It would be nice if someone could check that, if it is so then my merged mining, no-fee p2pool should be reachable at CrossCiv.no-ip.org:10332

If it is opening the port maybe I can get the UPNP folk to look at its code to try to make UPNP also able to talk to this type of router.

If mining a whole bunch of altcoins in a multiple merge can pay for the load on the bandwidth and machine there should never be any fees and might even end up being kickbacks in various altcoins or maybe in DeVCoins since all the others can likely be used to buy DeVCoins...

-MarkM-

I just read a comment in another thread claiming one could point p2pool at a merged-mining pool.

Would it work?

I would like to get work from mmpool at bitparking, that merges several chains, and also merge on my end locally a bunch more chains that mmpool has not chosen to support.

Is that at all likely to be possible?

Would it generally work on most pools? Or would a pool have to be specially modified to make sure it allows its miners to add in the hashes/merkles for more chains than just those the pool itself already merges?

-MarkM-

If I run p2pool myself, merged mining all the alt chains I want to that mmpool at bitparking does not, can I also point my p2pool at the mmpool that already merged mines several types of coin?

Won't the headers sent by the merged mining pool be expected back un-messed-with by the merged mining pool, so that your addition of more chains for your own merged mining might make the pool reject your blocks/shares?

Maybe it varies from pool to pool, what kind of checks they do on your blocks/shares, like whether they only check that the merkles are there for the chains they are merging or also in the process check that you have not added more chains's merkles there?

I had thought I would have to merge for myself all the chains the mmpool does and stop using the pool, but if I can use the pool but still add on a bunch more chains the pool for whatever reason has not seen fit to merge yet that would be great...

-MarkM-

The point is that if you do have a bunch of dollarcoins, the issuer has the bunch of dollars that you or someone else bought them with, thus can buy them back from you. There will of coruse be a slight overhard, but there always is in financial services.

The important thing is not to have random miners minting coins they have no itention of buying back.

You issue all the coins to the backer at the outset, and no one else ever gets any except by buying them for at least a dollar each or some kind of transaction fee for merged-mining them, which will only be available if/when a transaction actually happens.

So the main obstacle is in getting to a large enough volume of actual transactions for their transaction fees to be sufficient to motivate people to merged-mine the chain.

-MarkM-

Is it open source?

If not, maybe consider http://www.openclonk.org/

Also, is there any truth in rumours that HTML5 might make it possible soon to run desktop apps as web apps?

-MarkM-

How about a friend-to-friend arbitrage-bot network?

If it is to at least some extent true that a person's income tends to correlate to some extent with those of their friends, then maybe it might be generally not too horribly unreasonable to hope that for normal day to day amounts normal people might normally like to exchange it will turn out that at least some of their friends will have about as much spare wealth lying around as they do, thus that their arbitrage bots will be able to handle some amount in not too different order of magnitude as their own aribitrage bot can handle.

The basic theory here is that if you tell your bot to value a particular currency a little higher, in general via the arbitrage network it will tend to find that currency flowing toward it. If so, then the more of a specific currency you want, the more you have your bot bump its value by.

This assumes everyone involved has a pool of spare wealth they can plop down initially into their arbitrage bot and that they can leave it there without caring a whole lot about which of hundreds of fiat and non-fiat currencies it happens to be held as at any particular moment, until they happen to want to convert some of X into some of Y. At that point they dump the X they are looking to get rid of into their bot and tell it to lower the price of X slightly, and also tell it to raise the price of Y slightly.

Via arbitrage this should lead to X flowing away and Y flowing in...

Note that I say FRIEND TO FRIEND for this network in order to reduce the whole trust thing to simply trusting your FRIENDS to settle up any differences in total debts between you whether you end up owing each other a few each of a few hundred different currencies or a few of some specific currencies. Also because hopefully at least some currencies you actually like at least some of your friends actually like. (For example, some of them might live in the same nation you do, thus might have use for the same kind of fiat as you do...)

This is basically ripple-like, but instead of contemplating a transfer of X amount of Y to person Z, it contemplates shuffling around the type of currencies people's wealth is stored in the system as at any particular moment to bias it in such ways that people interested in currency X end up with more currency X and people interested in currency Y end up with more currency Y.

-MarkM-

Splitting the market is actually quite extreme in my Open Transactions server, because not only is each pair a market, and each pair able to appear both ways round without the two acting as one market, there is also the scale factor that separates each permutation into scales. The available scales have been limited to integer powers of ten but still this makes for a heck of a lot of completely distinct markets. I hope that this will simply lead to the deployment of smart bots that will in effect become the "missing" connections between the scales and the mirrored pairs.

-MarkM-

Is there an exchange that, like Vircurex, features most altcoins, but which has Solidcoin as the backbone currency against which all others are paired?

-MarkM-

I don't think this is happening only to LiTeCoin, but generally to most alt-chain coins, it least on Vircurex exchange.

I thought one might be able to shelter in altcoins from the recent drop in prices of bitcoin, then move back into bitcoin later. But the altcoin markets seem to be so stagnant that they are not adapting. The price of altcoins seems cheaper and cheaper as bitcoin drops, thanks to Vircurex seeming to only have coinpairs in which BTC is the first item of the pair, but if the prices are not adapting there seems no reason to expect to be able to move back to bitcoin later at a gain.

As was already indicated earlier, the coins do not seem to have found their market yet, none of them except devcoin seem to have any particular purpose, they are basically micropenny-stocks in pointless corps that have no real functions assets or markets. In a way this section of these forums is like a very abstract version of the Galactic Milieu, with a larger number of "nations" and/or "corps" issuing their own "national" or "corporate" currencies, but without the actual backdrop of planets owned, colonies mining resources, fleets of starships ready to transport resources or attack or defend holdings and so on.

Maybe it would actually be helpful to create a Freeciv nation per each altcoin and get it into the Freeciv distribution so that it can be a civilisation in the Galactic Milieu and maybe thus convince other entities in the milieu to make it part of their "reserves" with which they "back" their own currencies.

-MarkM-

For low trading prices, trading on Open Transactions servers might work. They do not even have mechanism in place for taking a percentage of trades at all, the only support they have for fees really is "usage tokens" against which all API calls are charged.

On first glance it seems as if this should help for reasonably-sized trades, but hinder stragegies that want to make many API calls per trade.

I have not checked yet whether the API calls themselves are reasonably "priced" in terms of the usage tokens, such as whether one can get a huge mass of data in one API call instead of having to make one call per market or suchlike.

I have set up my Open Transactions server to use integers for all assets, deliberately to help encourage volume trades. (As to get three digits of price granularity you'd have to use 3 digits of scale, like "100 of this for 101 of that".)

On the other hand I am not a fan of high frequency trading, I have often thought of actually bundling all offers within a half hour or so into one batch clearing run that processes them all at once, specifically to keep bots from butting in between a matching pair of offers to grab most of the difference that otherwise would have gone to the up-front "honest traders" who admitted what they wanted instead of lurking in the background "sniping".

-MarkM-

The Brits and Canadians in the Galactic Milieu keep coming back to this idea, except they are thinking GBP and CAD, respectively, instead of USD.

The main problem is having such a low budget for securing the blockchain, because it is not really economically practical to let random miners out on the net create dollars or pounds out of thin air thus the coins have to be issued initially only to the "central bank", the issuers, the people who are committing to buying them at very close to the price of a CAD dollar or a GBP pound.

In these two cases, their blockchains are just like Bitcoin's will be at some future date: about 21 million coins, all issued, with mining being paid for only by transaction fees.

The theory seems to be that if all the coins do eventually get into circulation, then it should be possible to allow the price to start to float higher, if the market chooses to let it do so, but the backers will always stand ready to buy back each and every coin at very close to the price they sold it for.

Think like maybe sell them for 1.01, buy them for 0.99, something like that.

Initially the General Mining Corp (GMC) and General Retirement Fund (GRF) coins seem content to follow along with this as if their coins are only worth the same as a CDN (Canadian Digital Note), so they have scripts ready to keep putting inn orders to buy 100 CDN for 99 GRF or GMC and to sell 100 GRF or GMC for 101 CDN, and also for higher scales too like 1000 GMC or GRF for 1001 CDN and so on.

Thus they too hope to maintain a stable target price for their coins.

No USD has been contemplated yet mainly because the "American" civilisation is not yet an active player in the Galactic Milieu, but since Freeciv includes nearly all currently existing nations of "the planet known as Earth" it is hoped that this approach can eventually lead to having a blockchain currency standing ready for each nation on the planet for its in game game-citizens to use even if here on that actual planet that nation chooses not avail itself of the opportunity by declaring it not an officially valueless game-token but, rather, an actual currency...

-MarkM-

Can Liquidcoin be merged-mined iwth other coins that use the same cpu-friendly hashing algorithm?

If so, is there a chain-ID number we need to know to set up merged mining?

Also, has anyone started using p2pool with it yet?

-MarkM-

How does p2pool know the index/code/ID of each coin type in the list of merged mining hashes?

Does its call to get work for merged mining to the coin's daemon tell it that? As I don't see you telling those numbers in your example of how to start merged mining...

-MarkM-

Its not just a matter of not keeping records, its a case of not being able to identify the coins/assets involved in any transaction thus not being able to keep records sufficient to trace the cash in the first place.

It is one thing to claim you keep no records, quite another to do things in such a manner that even if you did keep records the cash still could not be traced.

-MarkM-

Any Open Transactions server that has an asset type for bitcoin-tokens or satoshi-tokens or millibitcoin tokens or suchlike can already do this just as a natural side-effect of using Open Transactions.

The selling point the Open Transactions "cash" has that MtGox's doesn't is it cannot be traced. That is, when a voucher is presented to the server to be redeemed or re-issued or whatever the server does not know which cash it is, as in to whom it issued it originally. It is "blinded" using "Chaumian Blinding".

-MarkM-

I don't think it is at all obvious that it is a donate button.

A donate button in English probably should include the word "donate"...

-MarkM-