I am working with FellowTraveler to try to get Open Transactions actually tested. TO me it has looked like what is needed for a long time now, but even just actually trying having a third party pour contracts into its end and try to issue them to a server has exposed some pretty trivial little glitches that just had not really been noticed a lot when one person is doing all the testing the same way on the same architecture with the same "how to do copy and paste" habits (include the linefeed at end of file or not, for example).

Finally we are zeroing in on this kind of "oh was I meant to / not meant to include that whitespace" type of detail in how different people and maybe even different architectures (linefeed? don't you mean carriage-return?) handle minutiae of what exactly is the payload that one is to hash.

I am really hoping that this time around we can get Open Transactions to a useable state quite soon, at which point I would not be surprised to see it used for a new generation of stock/commodity/forex markets/exchanges and gosh knows what else.

Yes ripple has nice concepts, but for some time it has seemed to me that such parts of how ripple works as eventually will maybe get incorporated into Open Transactions; or a using of OPen Transactions to do some of what ripple bank to bank systems wouyld probably like to do/have, has seemed more likely sooner than waiting for ripple itself to become our solution of choice.

-MarkM- (See OT-server alpha testing thread at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0 )

...And a corollary, it seems likely, would be once an official ruling *is* made on *Bitcoins* it might turn out to be time to focus more on alternatives on which no official ruling exists... (How far would one need to slip on which slippery slope to achieve that, hmm?)

-MarkM-

There is a slippery slope in virtual goods and how difficult they are to "make" and how many (and which instances) of which might turn out to be valuable.

If I run "make" on a Makefile that generates individually distinguishable magic swords or game tokens or orcish slaves or whatever, that might take less resources per item to "make" than if my Makefile fired up a merged mining of all publicly known blockchain currencies plus a few hundred private ones I figure I might as well merge into the merge just because I can, as speculation, on the off chance that someday I might find a buyer for some finite quantity.

Once upon a time a magic sword sold for lots of money.

Years ago legislators were trying to argue that if your character happens somehow upon a magic sword, you maybe ought to be taxed as if it were worth money, because historically once upon a time one magic sword sold for quite a bit of money. (Maybe also, many magic swords have some times sold for some money.)

If my makefile makes MAXLONGINT magic swords just by filling sizeof(MAXLONGINT) bits with 1s instead of 0s, and one player one day buys one for some amount of money, are all the others worth that much each?

So it is very slippery. There are some DeVCoins on sale on an exchange. Suppose no one buys any at the same nanosecond as you find a block. Does that mean they were not saleable at that nanosecond?

What if none sold that week? Month? Fiscal year?

There might be some point where the number of coins minted per fiscal period falls below the amount sold in that fiscal period, which for bitcoins might be in the past by now but for tomorrow's new coin offered on a new exchange might take forever to reach.

As long as less are bought than are made, it surely is unreasonable to claim any that were not sold were or are worth as much as those that did manage to find a buyer.

If I put hundreds of hours of my time into programming something and don't sell it, how much is it "worth"? Can the fact that a very similar in function sequence of bits sold by a competitor sold for lots of money and sells for lots of money regularly indicate that mine is worth just as much?

If the order book has only X number of orders wanting to buy, only that many in total are presumably worth that much. Whose unsold ones will be assumed to have been the ones that could have fetched that price? Who ever does jump in and actually accept that as the value has filled all demand at that price, leaving everyone else's unsaleable at that price.

Such reasonings seem to have led most Canadians I have consulted on the matter to figure if what you make doesn't manage to get to the market and get bought, then it is just hypothetical speculation that some day you or your heirs or assigns might convince someone to buy it.

Thus so far the theory I have been using here in Halifax Nova Scotia Canada is all the many permutations of bits that I crunch in my computers are just bits of data, and only if someone pays me to manipulate those bits or set or unset those bits or transmit or process those bits are they income - and even then they are not income, they are proof of work - proof I performed a service. It is when they pay me actual real tangible goods or real legal tender that I have income...

-MarkM-

(I guess when I give someone bitcoins for something, that thing is income to me; and some day someone will give them something for them, maybe, if anyone still likes them by that time, in which case they get some income, and the net effect is they gave me something in return for someone else giving them something, which might all some day come around in the course of going around...)

P.S. I could argue that the ones *I* make are worth *millions* of dollars thus that is why I have not sold them: lack of a buyer willing to pay that much for them. SO like a novelist making little this year while not having sold the novel, my potential income from creating it is in the future: I am making bitcoin futures for myself, not bitcoins being sold this year... I guess we should compare to futures market instead of today market? Hmm. Thus most folks consulted throw up their hands and suggest if I sell, when I sell, then I'll have something to be taxable... meanwhile I incur research and development and tool and utility expenses like any other author of sequences of letters glyphs bits words stories chapters novels etc... Until I sell I am running at a loss in fact...

Yeah, I can basically do preferred shares with it already, and common shares but await the planned voting and dividends subsystems...

-MarkM-

I was told there is one. Very ugly apparently but I think its open source so you can pretty it up to suit your own tastes as you choose.

Meanwhile, we found there is a problem with clients adding whitespace to contracts on import that makes contract hashes wrong when client is used to import. So all the currency contracts will have to be re-imported once that is fixed, they will have correct hashes that wont match those used in any transactions that used the broken contracts caused by the whitespace.

Ah well, that is why I labelled current stage as alpha.

-MarkM- (Looking forward to seeing what you do with the web interface... )

Does the timetravel thing let people undo historically archived before the last checkpoint or even before last umpteen checkpoints blocks?

I figured on only issuing Digi*coin tokens backed by coins that are in historic blocks that predate last checkpoint of their chain.

So if anyone screws with blockchains, an archived chain up to a checkpoint later than where the coins backing the tokens are can be redeployed once whatever their exploit was has been fixed.

Thus maybe allowing the tokens to be in some sense potentially safer than the coins that back them.

(SInce time travel might undo whole chain back to block one, but, once exploit is fixed, and for any newly set up clients that actually check the chain from scratch making sure all checkpoints are correct, the coins backing the tokens will be in the correct/valid blockchain as they always were.)

I only had maybe 7000 or so I0coins a few months ago, so will only issue up to 7000 DIgiI0C, until I am sure any coins I mined or received more recently have been checkpointed in the latest client releases.

-MarkM-

In new news, I now have added Namecoins to its repertoire of currencies.

I'd be willing to add Pecunix Grams of Gold if anyone actually has some they'd like to bail-in to the system, currently I have no Pecunix AUG so no reserves, I am starting with the currencies I actually already have some (if only small in NMC case) reserves of.

I will also be adding some in-game commodities of various kinds from various games, as I already have players wanting to offer bitcoin and/or devcoin for various such things.

EDIT: I have edited the first post to also mention that you need currency contracts too, the server does not "advertise" what currencies it supports. See first post for where to get the server contract AND various currency contracts.

-MarkM-

I just now added I0Coin to the exchange I am doing initial alpha testing of. This is the third coin type added, so far it thus offers exchanges between BTC, DVC, and I0C. YOu get to specify the granularity too, like buying/selling 1 at a time, 10 at a time, or whatever number you choose. Each granularity is treated as basically another market. Thus the market for buying 100 coins at a time might have a different price per coin than the market for buying only 1 at a time.

See the exchange / Open Transactions server's own thread at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0

-MarkM-

Thanks!

I now have a BTC<->DVC (and vice-versa) exchange implemented, simply by creating DigiBTC and DigiDVC contracts for Open Transactions, simply assets backed by actual BTC and actual DVC. (I actually have more BTC and much much more DVC than I have issued as assets on the Open Transactions server so reserves are not a problem.)

Now I jsut need to keep going, making (very) similar contracts for umpteen other "alternate cryptocurrencies" to make an exchange that handles many of the current currencies...

Read about the exchange / Open Transactions server in its own thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0

-MarkM-

I now have a DVC<->BTC (and vice-versa) exchange set up, in the form of an Open Transactions server that has currency contracts for DigiBTC and DigiDVC tokens and issuing accounts to issue such tokens.

I have only issued 100 DigiBTC and 10,000,000 DigiDVC so far even though I actually have more than 100 BTC to back the DigiBTC with and far far more than 10,000,000 DVC to back the DigiDVC with.

I figure by never issuing more DigiDVC than there are securely checkpointed actual DVC as reserves, even if people manage to mess with the DVC blockchain the tokens should be fine, as we can be pretty confident we can save/restore the reserves.

So trading the tokens might be more secure than trading the underlying actual coins on the blockchain.

Read about the exchange aka OT-server in its own thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53329.0

-MarkM-

Yes but a client for a coin someone somewhere tried to merged-mine using some arbitrary parent could not verify that the parent chain actually accepted the work if they did not know how to connect to the parent chain and get from it the required evidence.

Someone said earlier you can use pretty much any chains, but I do not think that seems likely. I suspect the clients would have to know how to work with the specific parent chain that any merged miners use, otherwise they cannot validate the blocks that were merge-mined.

-MarkM-

Actually the Open Transactions server seems to also function as a generic "exchange", and with a very nice feature that none of the "exchanges" I have come across so far include: the ability to offer different prices at different volumes of stuff traded.

For example one could offer a cheaper price for 100,000 of a thing bought in one purchase than you offer for lower-volume purchases, thus allowing people to buy wholesale quantities of things and re-sell them in retail quantities. This could be particularly useful for people who are really not interested in selling fractions of a bitcoin at a time, or are willing to pay a premium to obtain some certain quantity of something but really have no use for less than that quantity of it.

For example game tokens are often sold at lower prices per token when you buy more tokens at once. So simply being able to offer a million of them at a millionth of a bitcoin each would not be as useful as being able to offer a million for one bitcoin, a quarter of a million for half a bitcoin, a hundred thousand for a quarter of a bitcoin, ten thousand for an eighth of a bitcoin or some other wholesale-discount type of pricing structure.

The types of markets we have usually been seeing almost do the opposite of wholesale discounts, prices sometimes get higher the more you try to buy. Which is also possible of course. The basic nice additional feature not seen in other exchanges is simply the ability to specify the chunks, the number-at-a-time: the granularity.

EDIT: I have made Open Transactions currency contracts now for DigiBTC and DigiDVC, so now just that easy I have a BTC<->DVC exchange set up.

EDIT2: I have now added I0Coins to its repertoire of currencies.

-MarkM-

Surely if merged mining happens, all clients have to know how to verify the work that was purportedly done, so all clients have to know how to get in touch with the parent chain to get the "proof of work".

So I do not get how everyone can choose some totally different chain to use as parent when they merged mine?

Surely they would at least be limited to choosing a parent chain that the majority of hash power worth of clients know how to look up the proofs on?

Otherwise I could claim I used some fictional chain of my own as parent, and not have it online to connect to anywhere. A client would not accept that would they? They would want to check the pparent blockchain to make sure it is itself a valid chain, that the purported proof happened on a part of it that has not been orphaned, and so on?

-MarkM-

If you allow proxy voting as in "just count me down as voting the same way that guy there votes" then you could issue one babyvote per birth certificate issued and one per verified baby-who-turned-18 or whatnot, and simply not care who they (or their parents in the xcase of babyvotes maybe) end up passing along their proxy to. Hmm might lead to oligarchy though if you can't figure out which votecoin corresponds to which actual living person in order to cancel theirs when they die. SO might want to jsut put a time limit on it. Maybe issue decadeofvoting tokens that expire in a decade.

The main point being, blind them so you don't know nor care whether the entity it was issued to chose a republic style (voting for representatives intead of directly on issues, implemented in this simply by giving your vote to your "representative" to cast on your behalf as they please) or a democratic style (hold it yourself, cast it yourself, instead of giving it to a rep or trading it for a bowl of porridge or whatever).

Open Transactions planned voting system could maybe handle that kind of approach.

-MarkM-

With heroic support from FellowTraveler I now have an Open Transactions server up and running.

Once you let private keys leave your house, you really cannot know whether/when some hacker group has managed to get some employee of a hosting company to slip them a copy, so I really do not want to set it up on third party hosting.

We used to run an ISP from this house I am in, we can easily expand operations right here where we know exactly who can get at the hardware and what their technical skills are.

I have placed the server contract in the same SourceForge download-files directory as the devcoin and groupcoin releases, its filename when in actual use is a hash of the signed contract, which would not mean much at a glance to a human looking for the contract so I have made it available as

https://sourceforge.net/projects/galacticmilieu/files/DigitalisOTserver.otc

I have learned that the server doesn't tell you about currencies it has contracts for, you are expected to go get currency contracts yourself. So the

https://sourceforge.net/projects/galacticmilieu/files/

directory now contains .otc files (Open Transactions Contract files) for various currencies as well as for the server.

(They are in the digitalis-assets.tgz archive file.)

I currently only have a 64 bit Fedora Core 17 machine running, so can only make binary archives of the client for that platform currently. Luckily, making the client is nowhere near as much of a challenge as creating a working server, so maybe we can get client binaries made for other platforms.

-MarkM-

P.S. I should probably point out that this is heavily bitcoin-oriented and that bailing bitcoins in in a way that allows only a number of servers all agreeing to determine where they should be released to is part of the Open Transactions roadmap. We want to get set up to work with bitcoins using Open Transactions and get Open Transactions servers well tested ready for when it will take several, maybe even many, such servers to decide the fate of any bitcoins bailed into the care of federations of such servers...

Is there genuinely any real interest in this or is it just empty B.S. ?

Ryzom has released all its source code plus its art assets, so there is now an engine available that does include art assets.

But is anyone actually interested? In particular does anyone actually want to *play* games that involve bitcoins or other blockchain based currencies?

-MarkM-

Okay, Unthinkingbit has come up with a fix: basic transaction fee is now ten times as high as it was, plus also any multi-part transactions always incur a small fee per part. I have uploaded new source to the sourceforge site.

-MarkM-

What does bitcoin do about it? As devcoin has basically the same fee structure as bitcoin, multiplied by a thousand since devcoin generates a thousand times as many coins as bitcoin does. Has bitcoin been experiencing the problem? Has devcoin? (I have not noticed such a problem in bitcoin or in devcoin.)

-MarkM-

Who is actally running devcoin with incoming port open?

I just got rid of my three spare computers thgat had all been running all the various blockchains, and now, without other machines of my own for my devcoind to talk to, I am only able to mine for about an hour or less before devcoind starts claiming to have zero connections.

I stop it and restart it - am thinking of using cron or just a timing loop to do that automatically even it seems so reliable - and get 3 or 4 connections, but within an hour or so it is back to zero and I have to restart it again.

What could cause that? Are the other machines out there only tolerating a connection from me for a while then rejecting me or what?

Or is no one running 24/7 with an open port so they can be connected to?

It seems weird, if it is just random coming and going of people who only appear on the IRC channel briefly then leave or something, that I can so consistently get 3 or 4 connections again when I restart. I do even manage to get a block sometimes before the connections evapourate.

Would having more 24/7 nodes with open port help, or are the connections going to keep evapourating regardless?

I have not noticed this yet with any of the other blockchaisn I have been runnning, but I haven't actually gone through them all checking yet either.

-MarkM-

A major difference from fiat currencies is the seeming lack of anyone who is actually determined to see to it that the currency does actually have value.

Although fiat gets pretty vapourish, it used to be that some kind of reserves or something backed it up.

If someone who had a huge amount of bitcoins had held as reserves everything they ever managed to buy with them, we'd be able to make a pretty good estimate of the lowest value/price just by looking at the reserves.

For example if someone had managed to sell one million bitcoins for USD$21 each back when the going rate was $1, ***AND*** they held the resulting USD$21000000 as reserves to back bitcoin, we could figure that even when all 21 million coins have been minted they should not be worth much less than a dollar each simply because we know there are 21 million dollars, minus maybe some costs such as security arrangements, banking fees and such, ready in safe storage (aka "reserves") to buy back all the coins for dollars.

To me it has always appeared that the biggest problem with bitcoins is the miners seem to be trying to get rid of them instead of treating them as a valuable token they are committed to always being ready to buy back for close to the price they sold them for.

The money would be in the transacting, like it is planned to be once all the coins have been minted.

Since miners seem generally unable to afford to back the coins, having so much expense for rigs and power, maybe it will fall to the exchanges to aggressively buy up all the coins, maybe allocate some portion of their fees as funds with which to buy up reserves of fiat currencies and precious metals and stocks and bonds and so on with which to be able to stand ready to buy up any coins that fall below some percentage of the price they sold them for.

The mentalist though seems to be to just get rid of all the coins then start up a new currency; there does not seem to be any significant number of people who are determined to buy back any coins they sell for not a whole huge amount less than they sold them for. Even something simple like "any we sell you we will buy back from your for 90% of what you paid us for them if you fail to find another buyer within X amount of time after buying them from us".

But what reserves do bitcoins have? How much of what people have spent on bitcoins is in various hoards ready to buy bitcoins back? Does anyone acctually have a "vested interest" in bitcoins or are bitcoins just something to get rid of as soon as possible to stock up on valuables to eventually buy some better-backed currency with when some better-backed one comes along?

-MarkM-