Hey now be fair, it is only armchair critics who have been speculating that Ixcoins are only worth 0.0001 of a Bitcoin.

For all we know the holder of the initial 580,000 plans to "back" them with 5800 or 58000 Bitcoins once the exchange opens.

It would be useful though to know ahead of time what exactly the amount is at which he plans to buy early coins, so we can maybe plan to open the exchange with his hoard of Bitcoins already in place ready to buy more Ixcoins than anyone but him actually has, so as to establish a clear floor on the value.

-MarkM-

Maybe such people are what futures and options are for?

If you want a loaf of bread in five years time, and are not sure how the price of bread might fluctuate by then, you buy a five year future loaf of bread.

If you want a loaf of bread anytime during the next five years but are not sure exactly when during that span of time you will want it, you buy a five year span open option on a loaf of bread.

Is that not how futures and options work?

-MarkM-

No need, this is the condition in which GRouPcoin has ended up now that DeVCoin has sprung from the tests done using the GRouPcoin code.

Of course it is still feasible to use GRouPcoin to continue development of some of what DeVCoin no longer bothered trying for once it realised what it actually wanted was possible. But in the meanwhile GRouPcoin just keep chugging along as a blockchain different from Bitcoin only in that the 50 coins per block never changes and never ends.

-MarkM-

Edit: oh wait, no ceiling on number of coins? That would have to be settled. I don't think we messed with ceilings yet, and int64 only goes so high in any event so would itself impose a ceiling...

No, he is quite right, it is like that evil Santa guy, draining vast amounts of resources from grownups to finance a bunch of stupid toys for children, when children don't even have jobs for gosh sakes so are the last people on earth that deserve any resources! Sheesh!

-MarkM-

Joel you're a frikkin genius! Brilliant.

-MarkM- (No more "its one of Mr Wilde's", in future it'll be "its one of Joel's" )

(His majesty is like a stream of...)

So how much are they worth currently anyway? 0.0001 BTC each? How much is that in NMC? In GRP? In DVC? In MBC? Etc.

Will be good when there are more exchanges that ignore stupid fiat crap in favour of exchanging actual bitcoin-type currencies.

-MarkM-

It sounds as if whatever it is that your coins are "shares" of has no assets.

If a corporation, for example maybe General Mining Corporation, actually owned assets, such as, for example, a bunch of mines, a bunch of mining rigs, or even a bunch of shares in various publicly traded sold, silver, platinum, paladium, iron, copper, etc etc etc mining corporations, and used a blockchain whose genesis block issued all coins ever to be issued of that blockchain, issuing them to GMC's treasury... then GM could use its actual assets to buy back any GMC coins it had issued at the same price it had issued them at or close to that price.

-MarkM-

As the fees on .0001 BTC would be ridiculously high relative to the total purchase, can you offer instead 960000 IXC for 1.0 BTC, or accept some coin whose transaction fee on the purchase would be a lower percent of the total due to the coin in question being evaluated by you as lower in value than a bitcoin?

-MarkM-

I have been getting some familiarity with what one needs to change to make a new block chain from an old one, and used diff to compare the source with devcoin source.

You seem to have added a get block RPC but apart from that your changes look pretty normal, except that you seem to have neglected to change the four-byte hello sequence that protects each variant from chatting pointlessly with some other variant when people start using patches that allow them to run on non-standard ports.

As long as people stick to the hardcoded networking port, fine. But as soon as some user of mainstream bitcoin hacks his bitcoind to use some weird port that happens to be the port Ixcoin normally uses, you will get told of thousands of nodes all of which will be happy to flood you the same way if your code too is willing to try connecting to a port other than its hardcoded normal port.

So I'd suggest maybe picking a hardcoded hello string for your main net and your test net and get them in use quick before there are so many nodes it is a bit late for such a change.

I went with the idea a human maybe should be able to read them when watching packets, so I used DEV: and dev- for devcoin main and test nets, GRP: and grp- for groupcoin main and test nets, though doubtless there are people who can pontificate all day about why those were bad choices. (If you go for IXC: and ixc- they can yell at you too hahaha.)

-MarkM-

Finally, someone figured out how to store coins in a place safe from net-based hackers!

How many can I buy for a groupcoin, I left my bitcoin wallet on my other computer.

-MarkM

More likely they are raping the low-difficulty to stick you with a subsequent long period of no blocks made, like has been happening to namecoin lately.

-MarkM-

We can find that out easily enough with any of the chains that issued all their coins in the genesis block so start out from scratch with no minting of coins.

-MarkM-

Hi, I am interested in possibly buying some Ixcoin. Do you accept GRouPcoin? DeVCoin? Martian BotCoin? General Mining Corp scrip? General Retirement Fund scrip? Canadian Digital Notes? United Kingdom Britcoin? Etc?

-MarkM-

"Early adopters! Its not fair! They should make sure all miners know about the proposed new blockchain and set a start date in the future for the date its genesis block is to be created so miners can be ready to start mining it the moment its genesis block is created!" - Anon

-MarkM-

Yeah but I guess the conflict basically is were/are you actually interested in devcoin, which it seems is quite a well defined project roadmap Unthinkingbit already has laid out, or in some hypothetically or even superficially similar project that might or might not interest those of us who are working on devcoin?

-MarkM-

Use my bank! 3/4 held offline! Why settle for only 1/2 back when you might get 3/4 back if I feel like it!

-MarkM-

I think coins for entertainment are particularly useful, because if people know from the outset that they are playing with a person to person equivalent of EVE-Online currency, for the purpose of attacking it and its users in all the ways one can in EVE-Online, they maybe would not cry so hard when one of the attacks happens to lose them some of their coins. Or at least even if they did cry just as hard the media would realise hey these people lose some game currency in a game, whoop dee doo, guess what game it was folks.

Best types of game to start with would have been anarcho-capitalism games like EVE and Organised Crime turf war games.

Headlines! Crime Family in person to person distributed online game loses ten million omertacoin in virtual shootout!

Heck most players nowadays are such pathetic wimps it would also have to admit "the capos killed lost not only their cash but three points of strength and one of long-rifle accuracy, when interviewed they said "next time the other guy will be the one short some attribute points!" instead of "the players of the slain capos lost an average of ten thousand robot-hours each: the average number of robot-hours invested in developing the permanently-dead capos."

-MarkM-

The biggest problem with Bitcoin is the extent, if any, to which it is not backed.

That is the same problem that fiat currencies have and that stocks have and that bonds have,

Even precious metals have that same problem, that is how the ancient two-metals system worked to rip off money from the masses aka suckers.

You pump silver while dumping gold, then pump gold while dumping silver, and so on back and forth.

Anyone who for whatever reason either cannot afford to or is not smart enough to hold waiting for the peak of the next pump cycle in whatever they are holding stands to possibly lose worth/value if they release some of what they are holding at a moment when it buys them less of what they buy with it than they would have if they had bought at some other time.

If what they buy is a perishable then maybe there is also the factor that what they buy is not something they could have held so they save the cost of developing and powering a stasis field that would have preserved the thing they actually wanted as evidenced by what they finally did buy, whether it be brread or a trip to a circus. On the other hand the quality of bread or circus-performances might be better if innovation has continued in those fields.

How much will Bitcoin need to be worth in order for it to be more profitable for the pump and dump operators to pump some new scam while dumping Bitcoin and not bother going back to Bitcoin on the next cycle, instead moving on new scam two to pump while dumping new scam one?

The harder Bitcoin resists their dumping the more like a long term store of value Bitcoin will seem, which might make it have some appeal to go back to, picking it up at a low and pumping it while dumping new scam one instead of proceeding with new scam two.

If Bitcoin remains the highest difficulty blockchain, providing all lesser blockchains their security via the merged mining approach, the more derivatives - blockchains merged-mined along with Bitcoin - there are, or maybe more properly the value of such derivatives, should (maybe?) provide more and more evidence that someone somewhere maybe has some vested interest in buying back Bitcoins aka "backing" Bitcoins - demonstrating they have value by offering value in exchange for them.

Even then though miners could at any moment create a whole new chain specifically for the purpose of serving as the parent chain to all the derivatives and abandon Bitcoin, leaving it unable even to process transactions promptly, like they already have demonstrated the ability and willingness (and maybe also intent) to do to namecoin...

I had hoped Bitcoin would become the super-valuable blockchain, the coin used mostly only by banks and nations, people who actually find it useful to use a coin worth so much that even its tiny relative to one whole coin transaction fee migt be hundreds or thousands of dollars in fiat due to the value of one whole coin being very very high. All the lack of ease of use by grandma would be largely irrelevant then, as the hundreds of dollars of transaction fee should easily cover smilieface tellers to perform the transaction on grandma's behalf. ("You can afford to transact in actual Bitcoins, gramma? Heck we'll send someone out to your house to help you with that!")

-MarkM-

Enclosing the air sounds like a possibly useful approach. Suppose we set up a bottling factory to just keep on bottling all the air that enters our airspace. If anyone tries to coplain that we are bottling their air, they will have to prove it is theirs that we are bottling, whereupon we can check for pollution in the bottles they claim contain their air, so we can countersue them for polluting our air.

Would what we get from them for polluting cover what we might have to pay out to others for "stealing their air"?

If we bottle enough, maybe demand for air will increase, driving up the price...

-MarkM-

Use multicoin-qt and multicoind would probably make sense to pick up the parameters from config file stuff, also the merged mining if that is working for them now.

Exchanging to fiat currencies is a painful can of worms, part of the need for lots of different blockchain based tokens coins whatever is to get away from fiat currencies and all the crap associated with them. If only a few of the blockchains bother to maintain an exchange directly to and from fiat and being able to exchange to and from fiat is so darn important or valuable then those that do might find their exchange value tending to be higher than that of ones that do not. That is fine. When I stumbled upon bitcoin in the first place I was looking for software that would allow players to buy and sell things located in different places, and most of those things were expected to be in places where the planet known as Earth is thought to be a myth, so it was quite expected that most of those places would not be featuring currencies from planet earth in their "stock exchanges" (where by stock exchange is meant generically the forex, commodity, bond, stock etc market; prerequisite facility being bank though interestingly maybe not market so maybe commodity market need not be assumed).

Leaving fiat out of it is great, it is part of what makes bitcoin and namecoin stand out from the crowd, as those two become gateway coins or tokens, the "chips" players who are planning to "cash out" are likely to value more than various "chips" players who are in for the long haul or in for reason other than to suck the livelihood out of the peasantry, using currency to exploit them and import all of value from them and export any famines and droughts to them and so on.

Some people actually prefer that value be acquired locally within a world or nation or community instead of being beamed in from firstworldia by aliens/foreigners who never come right down in the trenches / dungeons/ paddies getting muddy / killing monsters / planting rice and pulling weeds with the locals on an equal bases of an equal among equals. For this reason (though admittedly also others) one already sees some worlds / universes whose players/inhabitants are told by their rulers / power that be / oppressors not to sell local valuables in return for fiat currencies from the planet known as Earth.

-MarkM- (Like the Iron Curtain but maybe Iron Screen? Glass Screen? Glass Wall? Fourth Wall? Virtual Curtain?)