What is the best safest easiest most trustworthy browsing-appliance for non-techie?

Are those routers that include an entire website right in the router as hackable as Windows?

Or does the requirement that non-techies find an appliance easy to use automatically mean that appliance is not secure?

Why is it that windows and macs are claimed to be wonderful for non techies, being so easy to use with all that lovely eye candy GUI and so on, yet somehow seem not to be secure?

Is it more like asking what is a secure lunchmoney purse for preschoolers to take to preschool to buy their lunch with, that is more about the user than the tool?

Or have windows and mac simply failed to actually produce the use-ability they tried to promote themselves as having?

"Presumably" someone should be able to simply click on an install things icon, click on a servers section, select webservices, and pick a home finances app to run on their home webserver, maybe being prompted to dock their portable device so it and their webserver can co-ordinate their certificates to be able to recognise each other?

That not happening I used to think in the old days was because ISPs didn't want people to actually be on the internet so tried as hard as possible to keep home servers from being the norm. But maybe people truly do not want home internet-appliances / ability to access their home systems remotely over the net?

-MarkM-

Merged mining seems promising, however to do it without messing with the existing bitcoin might or might not end up happening, as that would involve adding a new hash value into the bitcoin blocks.

A meta-chain though could maybe do it: a chain specifically for the purpose of being the most difficult chain of a potentially large number of merged chains, the place you go to when you want to be yet another merged mining chain.

Two of the currencies my IRC bots work with are at least somewhat commodity based: GMC and GRF (General Mining Corp and General Retirement Funds). They are not really directly a commodity peg though because the corporations promoting them have not really settled yet on whether to charge interest on loans of these currencies or to simply increase the amount of a commodity they will buy per unit of the currency.

For example instead of charging miners 1% per day interest when loaning them GMC and/or GRF as capital for setting up a mining operation they might simply keep increasing the quantity of mined commodities each unit of the currency will buy, so that the currency goes up in value 1% per day. Here I mean value as in how much of a commodity they will buy per unit and also how much of that commodity they will sell per unit.

Obviously the catch in such plans is who will "honour" coins minted by miners who are not part of the corporation; thus the interest in "licensed mining" and the current practice of having customers use "thin" clients such as the IRC bots instead of having "full clients" such as the corporations and their agents (such as IRC bots) use.

It will not be until the problems around these two currencies are adequately solved that these corporations will look seriously at per-commodity currencies; the GMC and GRF currencies are more like abstractions of baskets, or a kind of "share of the commodities the corporation has available for sale".

Part of their interest in interest is the thought that possibly some of the market demend for a currency might possibly be able to derive from interest denominated in that currency being offered on bonds/loans denominated in that currency. (As they are able to charge quite high interest on loans, they could offer somewhat less interest on bonds aka loans-made-to-them.)

-MarkM-

I would be using Open Transactions by now but for three separate relatively minor problems.


tl;dr I do not find it too complex etc, I merely find it is not yet ready for use.


One, his docs claim the actual math currently used is not secure enough, that it all needs to be re-done with more bits in the algorithms. If this means all accounts set up using the current number of bits would have to be scrapped that is useless for my purposes as my "players" would want any "test system" to grandfather in as "real", not be scrapped as meaningless test data like happened to testnet. This is due to using games as the "tests"; non gamers might like to think of game currencies and accounts as meaningless but gamers often don't.

Two, no markets yet. I was specifically looking for market software when I first came across Bitcoin and Open Transactions, so its not actually being able to do markets yet put it on back burner.

Three, cheap hosting often does not allow having daemons on arbitrary ports. This is why my first code toward using Open Transactions involves making a TCL library for use in eggdrop IRC bots. I was heading toward using IRC as a way to be able to run from home without incoming ports to work around the incoming ports problem which for me applies even at home not just at hosting places.

Of course there is also the problem that I do not at all like the idea of hosting financial applications on machines I do not physically control. If I manage to come up with a business plan that can reliably pay I would probably try to get internet access from home of sufficient quality to allow running a server just so I have physical control of the machine the money is on.

-MarkM-

Heh so it works without reading the INSTALL file and, as it instructs, putting the receiver_*.csv files into the directory that is the "current directory" (Present Working Directory) you are in when running devcoind? Cool.

-MarkM-

The makefile defaults to making the wxwidgets GUI version.

To make the daemon try make -f makefile.unix bitcoind

Or to not use upnp, try make -f makefile.unix USE_UPNP= bitcoind

Or to not only include upnp but default it to being active, try

make -f makefile.unix USE_UPNP=1 bitcoind

-MarkM-

A trusted third party holding gems that can be shipped on demand could be useful, compared to some game merely claiming that they will ship actual gems to players.

-MarkM-

This could fit really nicely with a roleplaying game in  which played characters could happen upon precious stones.

If a mechanism existed in the game whereby the character could arrange for a gem to be shipped to the "mythical" planet known as Earth htat could make the game quite interesting.

Of course it would also require that the game have some revenue with which to finance such "shipments"...

-MarkM-

Actually, bitcoin creates an entire new 21 million bitcoins, and the software can be used again and again and again to create more and more newfangled coins. Devcoin creates 50,000 devcoins per block! Namecoins are being created even as I type! Groupcoins also are being created! Beertokens possibly have already been created. Gosh knows how many WEEDS there are. And so on.

So it is kind of disingenuous to praise bitcoin as a solution merely because the number of tokens it creates out of thin air are limited. They still came from no-where, and limiting them actually proposes to cause them to suck up more previously-existing tokens of other kinds than it might if it created more.

Of which was more created, monopoly money, totopoly money, mine-a-million money, transport tycoon money, world of warcraft gold or EVE ISKs? How much does it matter?

I am not down on bitcoin, nor its spinoffs such as devcoin and groupcoin and Martian BotCoins etc etc etc. But just aware that creating tokens from nothing is still creating tokens from nothing however much you argue the relative difficulty of the various nothings.

-MarkM-

Would you pay a premium to get larger coins, like to get one entire bitcoin instead of 100,000,000 individual satoshis?

Isn't there some premium you pay in fees if the 100 bitcoins you bought actually turns out not to be 100 bitcoins but, rather, a few million fragments of bitcoins?

Maybe if these tiny trades are to be present, customers should be permitted to specify the denomination in which they wish to buy, so they can buy larger fragments only, no puny ones; or whole bitcoins only; or only coins worth at least 5 BTC each, etc?

-MarkM-

That seems absurd because unless it takes close to the age of the universe for the less than 10% to become more than 10% the whole thing falls apart; if we can go from under 10% to over 10% within even a mere few centuries the initial premise seems doomed.

-MarkM-

I wonder if soeone simply domain squatted figuring they will try to sell the domain, or what?

It had not even occured to me to look up such a domain. What indication is there, if any, that it has anything to do with Unthinkingbit's groupcoin/devcoin project? Did they also register devcoin? Are they registering all three and four letter permutations with coin suffix? I believe there was some domain years ago called bitcoin, so what? It had nothing to do with bitcoin did it?

I don't understand what your point is? Are you implying the domain might be for sale? Why would we even bother buying it?

Is there a trademark involved or something like that?

-MarkM-

Well lets start with virtual nations then.

-MarkM-

Where is the micronation-market? I'm interested to see the prices, maybe daytrade them or something.

-MarkM-

Auxilliary blockchains are endless in number, the parent blockchain they look to will have more and more and more such blockchains's data in its coinbase transactions.

So it would probably be better to make a blockchain specifically for the purpose of being the parent of a potentially quite large number of auxilliary blockchains. Then bitcoin can decide whether it wants to be an auxilliary to such a thing itself or continue on its own even when possibly this metachain might become even larger in hash power than bitcoin (theoretically, as more and more chains, some possibly of some actual usefulness or value, are added to it).

-MarkM-

Doesn't the new html make it no longer necessary to use flash? It can do all the 3d graphics and so on and so on?

-MarkM-

Actually GRouPcoin keeps pouring out 50 coins per block forever so all those who want inflatacoin can come on over there its already up and running.

-MarkM-

Well lets implement your awesome new variant. The longer we delay in doing so the longer the world will remain deprived of its advantages.

So far we have at least done the constant creating of coins part, in GRouPcoin, which will keep making 50 coins per block forever.

-MarkM-

If people want to miss out on the awesome advantages of your scientifically social-planned by economics experts currencies merely because few people use them, that is their problem. Skillful economists with the intelligence to perceive its advantages can then keep its amazing advantages to themselves and profit from it themselves leaving the unwashed masses in the dust.

-MarkM-

If we simply have a number of different types of coin similar to but not quite the same as bitcoin, wouldn't market forces balance them out, taking as much advantage as needed from each variant to achieve the purposes of each market participant?

-MarkM-

An MMORPG is a big big project. I have usually found it simpler to adapt something that already works instead of starting from scratch. That is how I ended up with my CrossCiv server for Crossfire RPG to provide dungeon-crawling scale for the alactic Milieu instead of contemplating starting something from scratch. Good luck, you have a lot of work ahead.

-MarkM-