It doesn't actually cost you stake to do proof of stake mining though, does it?

So can't you spawn billions of alternates each hoping to get lucky with the same stake?

Alternate timelines kind of thing?

-MarkM-

If you are going to update/change the code, you should make it able to be merged mined, so miners need not switch coins at all, just sit tight 24/7 mining all the scrypt coins that can be merge-mined...

-MarkM-

The big problem with trying to equate in-game currency directly with a cryptocoin is that games do not have reliable accounting.

There is almost always some bug or glitch or race-condition or suchlike that eventually ends up making two copies of something.

Like maybe a player carries stuff, drops it in a room, leaves the room, the system crashes and not all those changes got to disk so you end up with the things being both in the room and on the player.

For this reason it is much wiser to have conversion back and forth between the in game currencies and actual cryptocoins be via markets. That way if some glitch does suddenly drop some huge amount of game currency in the game all that happens is it inflates the game currency making it worth less cryptocoins, instead of placing the game operator in the untenable position of having twice as many game currency units to cash out as they have cryptocoins to match.

I had considered making for example tickets players could carry that had serial numbers, like actual bitcoin addresses printed on them. But even then, when suddenly one gets cloned there will be ill will among players and maybe admins too as who-ever moves the real coins from the address listed on the ticket first leaves all the other copies of the ticket un-backed by real coins.

I have been using not just MUDs but also the two-dimensional Crossfire RPG and, for whole world at a time scale stuff, FreeCiv, with various civilisations favouring and using various cryptocurrencies, but have deliberately avoided trying to directly pin any of the game-currencies to any of the cryptocoins. Games just do not do the kind of absolutely reliable accounting you need for real life financial applications.

Heck even normal accounting software has a trial balance before the month-end because they do not expect to actually balance without some human messing around correcting all the expected errors! It is standard business practice to run a trial balance then manually make corrections, over and over again until it actually balances! So do not expect game code to do reliable accounting!

(The stuff I have been doing all falls into the overall project known as the Galactic Milieu.)

(The MUD codebase I have been using is CoffeeMUD, I had a hard time finding MUD code that permits itself to be used for anything that could conceivably make money, so many all derive from old code whose author(s) specifically forbade using it for commercial/profit type uses.)

-MarkM-

That was not really true, and was CoiLedCoin not GeistGeld.

GeistGeld is its own worst enemy really, as its blocks are so insanely fast no major merged mining pool wants to deal with them.

When it was at the point that my mpool was the only pool merging them I found that each time the pool screwed up, allowing their difficulty to drop, it could not get the difficulty back up because it choked the operating system asking for hundreds or thousands of connections due to the rapid speed.

I had to bring the difficulty up solo mining with smaller mining-machines first so the pool wouldn't find itself trying to insta-mine umpteen blocks per second.

So what is needed is a spread of small pools all mining it at first so when one craps out the others still keep the difficulty up.

Possibly it is also worth seriously considering scheduling a block at which to have its target number of seconds per block increase.

The other problem I had is p2pool just could not seem to work with my KnCminer Neptune machines, they were supposed to get 3.4 terahashes but could not get past one terahash on my p2pool, even after removing the faster block coins from p2pool's merge. So it will need professional-grade pool software too probably. Even then I think pool operators figure most miners do not want to be getting new work every few seconds...

(...Even though it means getting new block-rewards every few seconds? Hmm...)

-MarkM-

So distributed, not decentralised. Centralised distributed computing...

-MarkM-

I used to do a lot of developing, but I have over time moved more and more toward using existing free open source code as much as possible instead of writing new code from scratch.

The problem was that technology moves too fast, by the time I had a universe running nicely for a single-line BBS (Bulletin Board System) on dialup, TCP/IP was coming along and everything would need to be re-written to handle multiple simultantously-online players, stuff like that.

So what I try to do nowadays is find any and all multi-user online free open source games and, if they actually work, which many do not, try to find ways to fit them into a larger schema, a metagame so to speak. So that ultimately they all become different views and interfaces into a common multiverse.

It looks like you are already addressing one of the biggest problems, which is that games tend to become holes into which you throw endless money until you run out and cannot keep the game online because there is no money to pay for bandwidth and such.

The top page of documentation of what I have been working on for many years now is at http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=galactic_milieu

As you can see from that page, part of how I discovered cryptocurrencies in the first place was as part of my search for solutions to the place where the rubber hits the road, the point at which to have a game, with accompanying in-game economy, at all you have to have some way of paying the bandwidth bills on the planet known as Earth.

If you do manage to do that, then probably you also run into the problem that even in galaxies far far away, to which Earth is considered a myth if it is known of at all, currencies in use on Earth acquire crazy proportionate value due to the "possession" of inhabitants by the minds/spirits of people (aka the players of the game) who actually live on Earth...

One way I have tried to approach addressing this problem is to try to include individual character scale play inside the same universe(s) used for much larger scale play. The idea in this is that if, say, players living on Earth are willing to pay, say, $0.01 for a magic sword this is, say, 3 pounds of metal, ought they not consider it reasonable to pay much, much more for a Deathstar that is many millions of pounds of metal?

That is, we tend to see in games that players will pay some dollars for something of a certain amount of power in the game, regardless of the actual purported scale of the game; a player willing to blow $10 on something of use in a game might equally pay that $10 for one sword in an individual-character game or for an entire spaceship in a spaceship-oriented game. Those games being entirely separate obscures the weirdness of three pounds of metal worked into the form of a sword being apparently worth just as much as many thousands of pounds of metal worked into a spaceship.

By trying to have all that exist within one over-arching metagame it is hoped that maybe some better sense of scale could result, whereby a Deathstar you need to melt down a billion swords to build might actually end up fetching a lot higher price than any one, or even several thousand, such swords...

-MarkM-

The main niche for such coins is probably as botnet coins, things that botnets can mine.

Ordinary home users cannot really do well with such coins because unlike the botnet operators they have to pay for their equipment and electricity.

-MarkM-

This all sounds very similar to what we are doing with MUDgaard and such, except that MUDgaard and its ilk are a little closer to the cryptocoin-mining experience in that just like you start a mining machine or program and leave it running 24/7 to mine cryptocoins you start a character or characters and leave it running 24/7 sleeping when it is tired, eating when it is hungry and so on, mining stuff or harvesting stuff or making stuff or heck even conducting campaigns of aggression.

That is, in our approach the player's computer takes on the burden of controlling the player's characters, instead of the server-side doing all the character-control logic for you while you are offline.

(The civilisation-type-game aspects of the Milieu we handle at a different scale, by using FreeCiv to run an entire planet per FreeCiv instance providing the larger-scale backdrop in which the smaller scale can be placed, such as by using MUDs and Crossfire RPGs and such to allow individual characters to visit on the small scale cities and such that on the larger scale are part of a FreeCiv planet.)

-MarkM-

That makes sense to me.

Like scamcoins in general affecting bitcoin, maybe. Every time someone gets their scamcoin accepted on an exchange that offers to exchange it for bitcoin, they dump the scamcoin for bitcoin then dump the bitcoin for fiat, thus driving down bitcoin prices... Maybe?

-MarkM-

Provide liquidity, especially buy-side liquidity.

I consider this extremely important.

Consider for example if when 10% of all the coins a chain will ever contain have all been sold for $0.10 each all that wealth used to buy them had been put back onto the buy-side, it would have been enough backing to back all the coins ever to exist all at $0.01 each.

So basically as coins sell for more and more each, the floor backing could constantly grow.

If when bitcoins had been selling for $1000 10% of all bitcoins ever to exist had been bought for that much, from someone or someones willing to actually "back" the currency, that would have been enough dollars in the system to "back" every bitcoin ever to exist at $100 each, basically gaurantee-ing a floor price of $100 from then on.

With coins such as DeVCoin, which continue to mint coins forever, providing such cast-iron floor price by means of deep solid buy-side order-books is harder. But maybe worth attempting regardless.

Basically I consider the ability to reliably "back" a currency to be one of the very few "advantages" of a centrally-issued currency. The issuer gets all the wealth used to initially purchase the currency thus is in a position to "back" the currency.

Everyone with long-term interest in a currency should probably consider trying to "back" it to whatever extent they can afford...

-MarkM-

This stuff is starting to sound interesting enough that it might even be time to go digging around in old archives looking for those Protoshares wallets that we were all mining into long long ago that purportedly were going to give us all shares of all these new developments.

Is there some kind of import functionality in one of these new wallets whereby once we manage to find our Protoshares wallets we can tell these new wallets the filepaths to our Protoshares wallets and have them import or whatever it is that they do to get our appropriate shares?

I seem to recall though some flurry of noise/rumour some time back claiming that the developers had done some kind of ripoff or dilution or breach of agreement or something so that maybe our Protoshares are not actually worth much if anything anymore? The percentage they were supposed to be of the new chain(s) was changed or something maybe?

It was all kind of hard to follow, let alone to figure out which was trolls and which was genuine bad faith by the developers, or even whether in fact any dilution did actually occur.

Which is why it seemed best to just archive all the wallets until some future time when things became clearer and some clear path to moving forward to the newest systems emerged...

Has that time come yet?

Have Protoshares (or more correctly, the value they give in all the later chains derived from them / following them) finally become worth enough that it might be worth someone's while to look into moving forward with them into the new systems?

-MarkM-

Highest buy price on the books vs lowest sell price on the books.

If you sell to the existing orders instead of listing your coins for sale on the sell side you dump them to highest buy order on file, which tends to be quite low, especially since the bitcoins I sent to Vircurex have not arrived despite emailing them about it for several months. When I was able to keep sending bitcoins to Vircurex daily or even several times a day I was able to keep replenishing the buy side, but until the last bitcoins I sent there actually arrive I am not sending any more. So people keep dumping on me at lower and lower prices.

Similarly on the other side, if you simply buy from existing sellers instead of just placing your buy order on the buy side to wait for someone to dump on you, you get the lowest current sell offer price, which tends to be quite high.

There tends to be a huge gap between the highest buy offer and the lowest sell offer, and the usual robots do not attempt to close the gap unless they battle each other, since they just place buy offers as low as they can while still being top of the pile (aka first in line to be taken) and sell offers as high as they can while still being lowest offer aka first to be taken.

The sell offers not coming lower is probably due to dumpers not being willing to place their coins at a price and wait for a buyer to meet that price. They just throw away their coins at the existing buy offers, thus do not help build up the sell-side order-book.

I guess it is possible too that I might not be the only person who is no longer sending coins to Vircurex due to waiting still for bitcoins sent there many months ago to actually arrive there...

I keep wondering how anyone is buying stuff with bitcoins on Vircurex at all, maybe deposits of bitcoins are working for other people or maybe they have to sell something for bitcoins first before the have bitcoins there to buy anything with...

-MarkM-

The pretty "features" are aimed at adoption usually.

The flaw in using cosmetics to try to drive adoption is that you are then basically putting lipstick on a pig. If your primary skill/feature is user-interface, making it easy and pretty and fun for users to run the program, then you might as well put all that fancy user-facing stuff onto a real coin like bitcoin, instead of wasting it on yet another garbage/scam coin.

Such "developers" are basically trying to scam people with illusion/appearance instead of applying their artistic skills to making something real and useful more attractive.

If they really think their cosmetics will cause massive adoption they should go long on bitcoin and release a wonderful easy to use pretty fun bitcoin client and rake in a fortune from the resultuing increase in bitcoin price...

That they prefer to create a whole scam to put their lipstick on kind of shows a lot about them...

-MarkM-

I have it working on Ubuntu 14.04, if you believe your problem is the BDB version used, you maybe should install the version that it does use?

A lot of old coins do not use the new BDB, heck some of them maybe do not use the latest Boost either. Nor latest QT for that matter.

Just install whatever packages the stuff you want to compile wants...

ldd isn't showing any BDB at all, so I guess I must have neglected to hack the makefile to make it link such things dynamically, so I do not know what version my build happens to be using. But whatever it was, I installed it using the normal Ubuntu get-and-install-packages system.

Do you have BDB 4 installed? I vaguely recall at least some of the old coins wanted that?

-MarkM-

I claimed mine and dumped them as soon as I heard about them, they were worth something then.

Back in the day it seemed like most core bitcoin people were saying any such forked coins they would promptly cash out of.

Even if they skyrocket I will have no regrets as I am not really keen on profiting from sticking poor sods with garbage.

-MarkM-

It does not appear to be about Proof of Stake.

It looks more as if, like Ripple, a whole different system of consensus was come up with, probably because they realised Proof of Stake was no good so tried to come up with something better.

-MarkM-

Most people do not have the skills or even the inclination to code an exploit, so the initial coding of an attack routine is a bit of a bottleneck admittedly.

Way back when PPCoin came out though didn't someone demonstrate?

You run into all kinds of bullshit claims of purported solutions but so far bullshit is all they are, as far as I know there are no proper scholarly whitepapers, peer-reviewed journal publications nor the like yet on any actually real solution. Just propaganda spam from bag-holders / stakeholders / scammers / partisans and the like.

The "New York City has not been destroyed by any nuclear bombs therefore New York City is actually less vulnerable to atomic bombs than e.g. Hiroshima" is a particularly bullshit type of argument that one sees all too often.

-MarkM-

Pure proof of stake is not secure, because somewhere in the workings of it there has to be some kind of random or pseudorandom number generator used to decide which staking client wins the/a stake on any particular block.

Someone with more computer power can explore multiple possible futures, generating billions trillions quadrilions etc such random or pseudorandom numbers, massively increasing their chance of having their stake, of whatever size, "get lucky".

This is pretty much a pure nature of the problem kind of problem, not only has it not been solved it probably is not solvable.

That is why proof of stake coins that make even a token, propaganda-style pretence of being in any way even slightly secure (such as ppcoin for example) have a proof of work element in them, they are not pure proof of stake and admit that it is because pure proof of stake cannot be secure that they are a hybrid, having proof of work as well as proof of stake.

Worrying about how to initially distribute coins you know a-priori are never going to be able to be secure is basically a waste of time, a mere thought-experiment about an inherently useless and pointless "product".

You might just as well work on how to distribute sewage to as many individuals as possible, or how to drop a brick on the head of as many people as possible etc.

-MarkM-

Maybe a more sophisticated method of drawing up conversion rates would help?

The rates I post at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html do not take volume into account, so when for example mining corps ship fifty million units of "Deuterium" to a depot it seems very likely that for some currencies/assets the prices listed are not really reflecting very well what would happen if you actually went to an exchange and tried to buy or sell that amount of that asset.

Also of course the mere fact that conversion rates exist at all insulates the exchanges from such conversions; many debtors whose outstanding loans are denominated in DeVCoin have been failing to impact the exchange rates due to the accounting between the corps they sell raw materials to and the corps they owe DeVCoins to being mediated by "conversion rates".

The corp buying the deuterium and the corp holding the miner's debt both use the same conversion chart, the one at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc (which incidentally has not been updated in a while so is actually somewhat out of date today).

For example suppose 50 million units of deuterium is delivered to a General Mining Corp depot today. General Mining corp pays, at today's listed price (which actually dates back to May 1st, as I mentioned these tables have not been updated frequently lately), 0.07731018 GMC per thousand units, which is listed in the same row of the table as being equivalent to 88495.57522123 DVC per thousand units.

The thing is, GMC does not go out to an exchange and buy (88495.57522123 x 50000 = 4424778761.06150000) DVC to pay to the loan-holder as payment against the miner's debt. Rather, they simply pay the loan-holder the supposed equivalent in some currency they find more convenient, which of course for General Mining Corp (GMC) quite often turns out to be GMC coin. So they send the lender (0.07731018 x 50000 = 3865.50900000) GMC instead for example, and the lender credits the miner the supposedly-corresponding number of DeVCoins, that is, 4424778761.06150000 DVC, against the miner's loan. (Minus any transaction fees or service fees etc of course.)

Of course when the miners who at some point chose to switch their debts over to a finance corp that allowed them to have their debts denominated in DeVCoins, this same kind of conversion took place. For example General Finance Corp did not send General Mining Corp hundreds or thousands of billions of DeVCoins (there are less than ten billion DeVCoins in existence so far as I write this) when it bought the GMC-denominated debts of certain miners, instead it bought them using GMC coins.

Considering that just one shipment of fifty million units of deuterium turns out to be a more than four point four billion DeVCoin value transaction, it seems clear that the liquidity on exchanges or sheer number of DeVCoins in existence needs to be way the heck higher so that miners and corps can throw such numbers of coins around just in the course of their day to day delivering-stuff-to-depots OR DeVCoins need to be worth a whole lot more deuterium per coin before the exchanges are likely to be of much use in conducting such business...

-MarkM-

Part of that is the big delay in the "Open Transactions for Grandmas" project, since people found Open Transactions too hard to get up and running.

For years Open Transactions was coming along nicely, but at some point they finally made some code change that made all existing server-contracts, aset-contracts, user-pseudonyms, accounts and so on obsolete, so that in order to move forward it would have been necessary to starta whole new Open Transactions server using the new system and gradually migrate all the assets and users and accounts over to it.

Then on top of that, the new stuff seemingly does not work yet.

We have been able to keep running using old code, but by the time the problem came out the java-based graphical client was already out of date compared to the last working version of the old server, so now all the operations are being done using the text mode commands, which discourages even people who might have used the java GUI if they could have managed to get it installed.

All this bascally means that the whole "stock market" and "devcoin based asset markets" system is mostly only being used via brokers, the brokers mainly being those guildmasters who have taken the trouble to learn the text mode commands for Open Transactions so that they can execute trades on behalf of their guild and its members.

So basically we are still waiting for an Open Transactions client useable by grandmothers, that is, easy enough to set up and use that even your granny could use it; and even when that comes out we will still then need to migrage all the contracts and accounts and pseudonyms over to that new system, which will be quite painful.

In the meantime maybe contact your guild's officers and see if they are able to execute Open Transactions orders for you or if they have some deal with some other guild that has the capability.

-MarkM-