Most variants are simply different, they exist not because bitcoin has flaws but because bitcoin works just fine thus they hope that variants will also work. Is it really necessary to take the position that bitcoin is flaws in order to "justify" a variant?

-MarkM-

You can have a fork of the kind you seem to want easily. You simply grab the existing bitcoin blockchain up to whatever specific point you want to fork from to use as blockchain for your own new vurrency so that you have an existing bunch of stakeholders, everyone who is rich in bitcoin being rich in your new blockchain too.

-MarkM-

Yeah but if all the accounts game players set up are going to be trashed when the real hashes etc come in, they wont like that. Gamers are fine for testing stuff but not if you plan to deliberately pull the rug out from under them after the testing is complete. They like the test system to survive as the working system, not to trash all their work and start over as the real system.

-MarkM-

It is looking as if there isn't much one can do to forestall "early adopter problem" complaints.

Basically the very same people or kind of people who end up making the complaints seem apparently pretty much determined to set themselves up to make such compliants later, simply by refusing to adopt things early.

Simply making sure they know about new blockchains being launched has not been working as a means of getting them onboard early to forestall their later complaints.

Looks like they deliberately wait until the train has left the station so they can then complain that the train left the station without them.

So their complaints about early adopters of bitcoin are pretty much moot: it seems evident they would deliberately have avoided adopting it even if they had known about it.

-MarkM-

Last time I looked at Open Transactons it said the size of keys it uses is too small for real use.

So I guess first thing everyone is waiting for is the right size to let them use it for real?

-MarkM-

It is true that games already out there probably won't allow it.

So it will probably be games intended for the purpose, in which case we should build APIs into them instead of wasting bandwidth sending out full GUI user-interfaces for the bots to try to decypher.

I was just being lazy, http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/ doesn't have an API so I wondered how easy it would be to use some kind of already existing web-game-botting tool to bot it in the meantime. The more bots actually using it the incentive there would be to come up with an API for them so as to save bandwidth.

I already have bots for the Crossfire RPG, not as sophisticated as the famous NPC dragon bot someone runs that goes around looting and so on but just simply ones based on the small amount of bot code that someone actually published.

-MarkM-

Its called open source.

We simply start different blockchains fixing different imaginary and/or non-imaginary "problems", catering to various whims and so on and so on, and let the market decide.

("Heck if your kind had their way Satoshi would've bought shares of PayPal or something and made ad-hoc "adjustments" to "the system" instead of writing bitcoin..." )

-MarkM-

What is a funny-money scheme?

-MarkM-

There are plenty of blockchains waiting in the wings, as soon as aux blockchain mining is worked out and debugged and understood there will probably be quite a few chains looking to be aux chains.

So please help them understand!

-MarkM-

Does this cause some kind of delay in processing blocks of child chains?

If for example my combined hashing power manages to snag me a block on the parent chain once a month or so on average, so that I am able to insert some kind of merkle or hash into the parent chain, how will my child chain proceed during the month or so until its miners succeed in inserting another block into the parent chain?

-MarkM-

Yeah but what the heck, the trust issues in currency are already huge.

How many wheelbarrows full of paper does it take to buy a loaf of bread?

Adding all the audits and "legal requirements" doesn't sound that great an idea when I think about the purported agency of MtGox's big recent problem (an auditor) and the agencies of the wheelbarrows of money to buy a loaf of bread scenarios (the lawmakers).

Nice thing, purportedly, about free markets is anyone and their dog can put a currency of their own on the market and the market will decide whether the dog's currency or the anyone's is worth anything.

In the Galactic Milieu, the Hackers, being possibly about as mythical as the preposterous mythical planet known as Earth, are reckoned pretty amazing so their currency (Bitcoins) is reckoned pretty valuable. The Martians are not reckoned as advanced but are thought to be mighty in war so theirs too is reckoned maybe ok, maybe especially if you think "sending in the Marines" might some day be necessary. The Brits and Canucks are held in reasonable esteem among Democratic nations so theirs too is widely traded. And so on.

A big question is whether the major holders of bitcoin who picked up huge quantities early on did so in order to be able to build reserves of fiat to uphold bitcoin's value or are just ponzi players cashing out and leaving bitcoin in the dust.

-MarkM-

CHeck out the GRouPcoin->DEVcoin project. We are currently developing and testing code aimed, apparently, at funding developers and thus, presumably, development.

Also, come up with a name for your new currency, one that can be nicely represented by a three-letter code (e.g. BTC, CDN, UKB, NKL, UNS, GRP, DEV, etc etc etc) so we have a name to use as we prototype it.

-MarkM-

Well get it down in code and when all the features you want are in the code we can fire it up.

EDIT: we already have 100-block bonds! The 50 coins a miner mines do not mature for 100 blocks. Maybe you could start by making use of those to establish that there is in fact a market for coins that are not yet mature. If there is, then maybe in your blockchain you could simply have the time to maturity increase each block so that eventually miners will be mining long term bonds instead of the current 100-block bonds?

-MarkM-

This is why some of the groups creating or thinking of creating their own currencies have been thinking of issuing half their coins up front.

Basically unless the issuer is the speculator, the speculator's warchest of the cryptocurrency can only exceed the fiat warchest of the issuer if the issuer fails to retain as reserves the fiat that the speculator, or who-ever the speculator obtained the cryptocurrency from, paid for the cryptocurrency.

How can someone possibly obtain more dollars worth of what you sell than you have dollars that you sold it for?

Only if you cash out instead of acting as a responsible backer holding what you sold it for as reserves with which to "back" it.

Such considerations have led to the current work that is being done on implementing "mining licenses".

EDIT: Consider PayPal, issuing database entries of PayPal Dollars (PPUSD). If they fail to have enough actual dollars to "buy back" those PPUSD with, they are acting as a "fractional reserve bank", which might be beyond their mandate/license (or might not?)

-MarkM-

The only clients on there for downloading are GRouPcoin and a play by mail thing that looked like it might potentially be able to be made use of with some work but that never resulted in any actual emails arriving at the order-submission address.

If it simply throws up a splash screen and exits I guess that explains why no actual play by email orders ever got submitted.

It worked for me, I would not have uploaded it otherwise. But it seems to be pretty much a failed experiment.

The real concept is not to need its own special clients. People wanting to control events on a planetary scale use Freeciv as a client, equipping it with the Galactic Ruleset which is available on the Freeciv forums. People just wanting a playable storyboard history of some portion of the events of the past use Battle for Wesnoth, downloading the "campaigns" from the add-ons system already built into that "client". People liking a more interactive, and single-character viewpoint use a Crossfire RPG client to connect to the CrossCiv server. Etc.

-MarkM-

By forking, do you mean everyone who owned coins prior to the fork owns coins in both resulting forks?

If you simply mean starting a new blockchain-based currency with a new feature the original Bitcoins do not have, that can be done and there are those who would welcome it.

You could even pick yourself a nation in the Galactic Milieu to play, whose currency will operate in the way you design.

-MarkM-

Bitcoin turned out not to be great for microtransactions afterall.

But it is not the technology necessarily that causes this. At least not in the MMORPG field, where people can already be seen to operate at a financial loss, in fact fully expect to operate at a financial loss.

So my take has been that Bitcoins can take on the ghastly can of worms that is the interface to fiat currencies, freeing other blockchain-based currencies to do some of the things that the kind of fiat-currency-interfaces adopted by Bitcoin make difficult to do with Bitcoin.

The Galactic Milieu has already spawned a number of spinoffs of Bitcoin, not just to allow transaction fees to remain small in proportion to the prices paid for things but also because some "nations" want to float their own "national currency" on the "galactic market" and some players want to be able to actually play the forex markets and stock markets of the Milieu.

I have also set up a game that can serve as a distribution system, distributing virtual assets even to players who do not pay to play.

Not using Bitcoins directly gives a further step of remove from fiat currencies and all the hassles they can entail (accusations of being "gambling" for example) as well as a way to avoid the relative-to-prices "high" transaction fees of actual Bitcoins. (If you mine millions of tons of resources a day, and pay less than a bitcoin a month to play, each ton is worth only a tiny fraction of a bitcoin, but individual characters might only need to buy a few kilograms to forge a sword from...)

-MarkM-

You are simply being negative, maybe out of sheer laziness.

You don't need as vast a jump in value of the next few blockchains you get into early because you can instead get into more of them, get a larger piece of them, and work harder, with more experience under your belt of what works, to ensure they do acquire value.

You seem to just be trying to make excuses for not getting into new launches and helping them too to grow.

You probably had plenty of reasons not to become an early adopter of bitcoin too, even if people had made sure you were one of the first to know about it.

Seems likely to be more a case of not going to the station until you are sure the train has left than the train leaving too soon.

-MarkM-

Not necessarily an insurmountable problem. What exactly is the formula to be used to determine the number of coins a specified block number should mint? This must of course be a figure that can be computed by a client that is downloading the blockchain for the first time, checking each block as it goes to make sure the cirrect number of coins were minted in that block.

How many servers can you deploy to listen on a port for people running a client for your new currency? Or what bounty will be py people to set these up for you? (Unthinkingbit offered one bitcoin each for five miners to do so, and has not yet five miners doing so I don't think, so you might like to offer a little more than that?)

Once we have at least a small network running your new coin, I can also add it to the repertoire of my trading bots, the more blockchain-based currencies they are able to deal in the better.

-MarkM-

Some of the alternate chains have been discussing a concept they call "reputable merchants" or "reputable suppliers".

They basically seem to be likening a seller of digital cryptographic coins to a dealer in antique coins or other collectables.

The basic idea is the dealer you buy your coins from would be happy to buy them back at the same price, minus ("of course") a small transaction fee.

So basically they figure if they consistenly remain willing to buy back the coins they sell, at very little "spread" from the price thye sold them at, then at least the people who buy *from them* need not be so concerned about "volatility".

They have even suggested this strategy could work in a limited way in blockchains where anyone anywhere could choose to mine and to "dump" the coins they mine at lower than the rate these "reputable dealers" buy back the coins they themselves sell.

Two approaches: one, keep track for each customer (under a Know Your Customer system) of how many coins you sold them, and only buy that many back from them (at lest at the "money back if not satisfied with your purchase" rate). Two, watch the blockchain, and only buy back the specific coins (at the "money back" rate) that you sold.

-MarkM-