The hope part relates to politics, law, and thus maybe under that, political philosophy.

It is a hope that the amount of murder and war involved in allowing the technical potential of the technology will not be too huge, or that the technical difficulty in suppressing it will be high enough to make slaughter war or even mere heavy populating of prisons seem to enough people to be wasteful that maybe it won't get that bad.

There might be technical solutions to the crazies holding nuclear weapons, but do any of them allow letting them die of old age rather than by some possibly more expedient means?

-MarkM-

The hoops you have to go through to use the exchanges are not very trivial.

It would maybe be better to leave Bitcoin to the grownups, and instead play with Kidcoins, dirt cheap easy kiddie coins no-one thinks will ever be worth much so no-one has any qualms about selling them or even giving them away, other possibly than being concerned that they might almost be kind of sleazing or cheating by actually accepting money for the things instead of treating them as a loss leader educational tool to splatter all over everywhere so everyone can at no cost play with all the concepts and systems as long as they like, maybe even long enough that their fiat will actually make it into one of the exchanges so they can play with Real Bitcoins.

-MarkM- (Of course bitNicKeLs are far far too valuable to be casually thrown around like that, sorry, they'll cost you in Real Bitcoin... )

(P.S. of course no-one ever heard of testnet, right?)

OMG already they have dropped out of mainstream consciousness, quick, sell, sell, sell, before the price plum gets eaten! OMG OMG OMG

-MarkM- (Try Freenode #bitcoin-bots /msg nickelbot help nkl)

Plum eating, you say? Absurd. Namecoin seeds not all germinating as swiftly surely and strongly as some might have hoped, maybe.

But plum eating? Sheesh, first you gotta grow the plum-sapling, then let it grow into a plum-tree, then some harvest time see if it is that harvest time or next cycle's that will see an actual plum appear.

If, in fact, the seeds are plum seeds at all in the first place.

-MarkM- (Beaglecoin prices plummeting! Beagle Brother Snoopy wants to know why! Oh my gosh!)

So all of this is to say that price ought to follow difficulty?

Because if the miners gave it away for nothing - or maybe even for a pizza they then ate or allowed to rot and recycle - people might not perceive it as quite as valuable as they might were all but the crumbs scraped up by miners were safely locked up in Scrooge McDuck's swimming-pool and widely advertised to and by the Beagle Brothers as exceedingly valuable?

-MarkM- (New! BeagleCoin! More generic than Snoopycoin so possibly less prone to intellectual property challenge! Only 0.00000001 BTC!)

Don't forget World of Warcraft "gold". MUDflation inflationary enuff for ya?

-MarkM- (I already posted elsewhere that I suspect BitNickels might not prove as deflationary as Actual Original ("Hacker") Bitcoin.)

I have been trying for decades to do something that the nightmare world of fiat currencies violently opposes at every turn, it seems, at least until it has aquired uncreative control, airbrushed and dolby'd all the vital  ingredients out of it, mashed it into pablum, removed taste odour and other sensibilities and turned it into just another way of preventing it from being done whilst pretending to be getting it done.

It seems likely still in fact, despite how brilliant Bitcoin is, that even bitcoin might not be sufficient to the task.

So here is the simplified baby-step dream:

Now that we don't have to worry about "money", "currency", and all that legalistic nightmare, maybe we can finally actually play games, maybe even games where it is only the forces of evil who are all tied up into ghastly knots of greed and mangerous dogs and oh such concern and worry about what is pretty much, actually, little if anything more than a bunch of protons, electrons, neutrons, photons and their various actual or imagined or hypothetical components.

Yada yada yada, the hash of my file converts into a better genetic program than yours, and your genetic program isn't even a carbon-based lifeform, ha ha so there, take that you silicon-based monstrosity, who cares, lets make a gold-based lifeform if you love gold so much, maybe a clan of dwarves known as Midans?

Whatever. Sheesh. My character can't have certain sequences of bits in his her or its wallet in *your* game? So what? Maybe it is not *your* game we are trying to play.

-MarkM- (No supper if I don't complete the level by bedtime? That is *gambling*, how dare you suggest such a thing!)

(tl;d or whatever they notation is: short form is we dont use money the closest we come to it is playing with crypted bits.)

So sell them on 34th street and call them 34th street giftcards and refer people to the movie for deeper insight.

-MarkM-

Bitcoin is a gateway, hopefully a route from the nightmarish world of fiat currencies to worlds upon worlds of virtual goods, services, commodities, currencies, experiences, activities and so on.

Once the initial leap to bitcoin has been accomplished, however many awful hoops people have to jump through to accomplish that, hopefully a lot of those hoops and nightmares can be left behind in the 'old world' as we move forward into worlds of warpcraft and weftcraft, free to enjoy our magic swords and starships and galactic empires, even incorporating this little planet Earth into our larger universes and GNUniverses.

(Who knows, maybe we virtual entities living in virtual worlds *do* have some "essential self" in some world somewhere; is that somewhere to be a "hell on earth" or an open universe of open minds and hearts and... mining opportunities?

-MarkM-

My currency exchanging bots use bash scripts as the back end, but they are not really intended for heavy traffic.

-MarkM-

It could be useful for pools to be able to pick and choose what to mine aka where to get work from, and to be able to abstract the work they are actually doing from the rewards they pay to client miners.

I am thinking of mining as a kind of spot market, or at least a market. Anyone might come up with a new blockchain they would like to have some hashing (mining) power applied to, but miners might have no interest in whatever application or commodity/currency the new blockchain implements or is used for.

So it could be nice if miners could basically just straight out sell their hashing power, and blockchain operators could buy that hashing power.

One of the effects would hopefully be more-efficient marketing of hashing power, another effect hopefully would be relieving individual miners of some of the complexities of arbitrage. At the least it should help make it easier for the hard parts of arbitrage to be quite mobile in the sense that responsibility for doing arbitrage could be shared or could be focussed at different points.

By focussed at different points I mean use cases such as a professional miner pooling a number of mining rigs via an in-house arbitraging pool system that finds them the best price per megahash based on the currency/commodity in which they wish to be paid for their megahashes or a pool that basically serves as a way of outsourcing that functionality.

I have seen various works in progress for use by miners to try to make sure all their rigs are getting work, falling back to different pools / sources-of-work and so on; I am thinking that pools themselves could also do something similar but what they would be picking and choosing among would be various blockchains offering various rewards for doing work.

Spot markets for hashing/mining could of course serve an attacker who wishes to buy up enough hashing power to perform some particular attack against some particular blockchain, but they should also be able to serve defenders who wish to quickly round up enough power to fend off an attack.

Maybe "responsible" providers, market-makers or market-operators would arrange with various blockchain operators some means of guessing whether a proposed purchase of power seems to threaten to be an attack or seems to possibly be a rallying of defense, but maybe that simply is not possible due to attack and defense being rather relative terms? (Is it an attacker defending their attack from a defender or a defener atttacking an attacker's dubious fork of a blockchain?)

-MarkM-

Bitcoins need not exist in a vacuum, there can be other things miners can mine.

So we can have not just monolithically "miners" but a potential distinction between combinations of "miners who already mined some bitcoin" and "miners who might mine some bitcoin".

Miners who already mined some bitcoin might consider selling some bitcoin. Miners who might mine some bitcoin potentially / hypothetically might mine something else instead or as well.

If interest does turn out to follow mining to any extent and interest does turn out to lead to some demand to some extent then whatever else miners choose to mine might experience an increase in demand, which could lead to an increase in price, which could lead to increased ability to be used to purchase bitcoins, which ability if exercised could lead to increasing price of bitcoins...

-MarkM- (Hmm, how low would bitcoin price have to go in order for parting with some botcoin in return for some bitcoin to seem attractive?)

It is not really one bit, it is one additional bit.

It was conceptually easy to transpose halving uncertainty into doubling certainty, but trying to then re-write the sensible-sounding story of how your certainty doubled as somehow being a case of your uncertainty having halved was beyond me. It'd seem to imply you were 100% uncertain until the card was flashed then became 50% uncertain, which doesn't sound right at all. So the whole idea that halving uncertainty implies doubling certainty seems dubious. Boolean logic might work better somehow maybe as it smells of one of those "from x implies y we cannot deduce that y implies x" type logic thingies.

Sounded good for a moment though, didn't it?

We were 50% uncertain that it was the one it turned out later not to be, until the card was flashed, then we were 100% uncertain it was the one it turned out not to be... Oops, uncertainty doubled, not halved.

-MarkM-
 

"Now i would like a currency that looses some value over time to make wealth holders spend it on things that get profit and not sit on them. I Think currency shouldn't be a wealth storing medium."

Leaving aside the problematic rationale about what effect such a currency would have on wealth holders, I suspect pocket-change blockchain-based currencies might serve. For example much as I would like bitNicKeLs to forever grow in value, it seems likely that if they do in fact seem to be doing so umpteen imitators would appear, competing for the same userbase, resulting in small-change blockchain-based currencies in general tending to stay relatively small in value and quite possibly generally tend to decline in value (at least those of them that ever actually managed to aquire any value to potentially be able to lose).

Thoughts such as that are part of what leads me to think that having quite a few blockchain-based currencies in play should tend to help the original bitcoins to grow in value instead of tending to cause all blockchain based currencies, or the original bitcoins in particular, to decline in value.

Basically I am thinking that maybe if small-change / pocket-change blockchain based currencies are seen not to hold value very well, the strong value-retaining performance of 'the real thing' (meaning bitcoins, not pepsicolgatepalmolivecoin or colacoin or whatever used to be a real thing in adspeak once upon a time) might cause the 'real thing' (actual bitcoins) to gain cachet as notably a 'blue chip' blockchain-based currency.

The 'legend' built around the Freeciv Galactic Milieu blockchain-based currencies aims at furthering such perceptions by maintaining that the Hacker nation, originator of Bitcoin, that uses Bitcoins as national currency, is far more advanced than the Martians, whose Martian BotCoin is upheld by far more powerful technology than that possessed by the Brits and Canucks, and so on, with bitNicKeLs being so puny they are typically only worth about 1/20 of a UKB or CDN...

-MarkM-

Okay, how about re-phrasing it by saying that the prior certainty is doubled?

Before the nurse flashed the card, you were 50% certain it was whichever it turned out later to be.

After the nurse flashed the card, you were 2 * 50 = 100 % certain it was whichever it turned out to be.

-MarkM-

It turns out that various people high up in the echelons of intergalactic banking took a close look at Bitcoin, and said, "You know, this would be a great mechanism for storing bank reserves, to handle inter-bank transfers and intergalactic settlements, to back sovereign currencies and make hyperinflation impossible, etc., etc.", thus giving rise to Martian BotCoins, United Kingdom Britcoins, Canadian Digital Notes, CZech Bitcoins, {galactic|} United Nations Shares and on and on and on.

So don't worry about a few puny earthling bankers on one puny planet in one minor galaxy, they are not nearly as important as some of them might like to think they are.

-MarkM-

Even just calling it a bank can be a problem.

It sounds to me though like a payment processor, basically the type of payment processor I have been asking for all along: one that gives the merchant the type of currency the merchant wants, in the quantity the merchant wants, for a good or service without complicating the merchant's life/business with details about what deal the payment processor made with the customer (other than not making such horrible deals with the merchant's customers that customers are driven away, so hopefully no "if you want to pay using body parts that will cost you an arm and a leg" or even "if you want to pay using your local fiat currency that will cost you a heck of a lot higher exchange fee than you would get almost anywhere else you might turn to to change your local fiat into whatever weird stuff the merchant is actually asking for").

-MarkM-

Wyldesites is still around eh, cool.

I bought my country house with adult site revenue, Adult Knotwork was just the tip of the iceberg, I created hundreds of thousands of adult sites, it is amazing how many sites a script can concoct out of a few thousand folders of image-sets.

By the turn of the millenium though Excite had been bought by the adult industry and turned into Overture, millions of dollars more a year budgetted for buying up any other search engines that were for sale, and pay per click was well on its way to being adopted even by mainstream giants like Google.

Jessy, the decade you mention was after the dot com crash, traffic was less and less free, I made my bundle when traffic was free and easy. Nowadays MSN and Yahoo no longer think the best content they have ever seen is their own results.

Is traffic king and content queen or traffic queen and content king? For me it was all about traffic, any crap could make money back in the day if you threw enough (unique) hits per hour at it.

I have been perusing this entire thread, so far the original poster said (in effect at least) that he will bring the traffic, then later oops he seems to be suggesting it is actually everyone else who will be doing that, but with his expert supervision of course.

The twitter forum happens to be coming soon currently, so I have not had that awesome site to look at to impress me.

Okay, read to the end now. Still confused as to who is going to bring the traffic, how much traffic they are going to bring, and where from.

I haven't followed twitter, does creating a few hundred thousand adult-oriented twitter accounts/friends work or is twitter a bit on the prude side?

-MarkM-

Game vs non-game-aka-real: Martian BotCoin is a euphemism for Martial BotCoin and part of the game's timeline includes the discovery of Earth in time for the Battle of Britain and, upcoming (some say in 2063), the Pointy Eared Aliens Nexus. Foiling the prognosticators who posit a huge catastrophe between now and the Pointy Eared Aliens Nexus is part of the game.

P2P: Martian BotCoins, United Kingdom Britcoins, Canadian Digital notes etc etc etc are all implemented using minimally modified bitcoin code, and a post just minutes ago about Multicoin (nee Freecoin) hints that maybe they will be more public more soon than the minimal mods made to plain old bitcoin code had led their proponents to expect.

-MarkM- (Of course the Martian nation, like the hacker nation whose national currency is Bitcoin, is listed in Freeciv as "fictional"...)

P.S. Just as beekeepers might like honey as their central measure of the value/price of all other things, Martians kinda like MBC for that, and, as you maybe show, Hackers seem to favour Bitcoin...

That licensed miners option will definitely get the attention of the Martians, Brits, Canucks and so on behind Martian BotCoins, United Kingdom Britcoins, Canadian Digital Notes and so on. Sounds very interesting, thanks for all the great work, keep at it! Could be some Botcoins, Britcoins, BitNickels etc in it for you somewhere along the line even...

-MarkM-