I hope you do manage to blaze a trail at this, I think quite a lot of people have tried to finance novels by means of the internet, even before Bitcoin came along... me too, see for example The Wyvern Street Irregulars and The Widdershins Piecrust which at the time the linked Wayback Machine snapshot was taken was just a short-short story but which has since developed into just the first snippet of a novel whose working title is Tales of D'ydii.

I have not given up but it definitely seems that part of the whole starving artist routine is in fact the part about starving. My latest approach to financing my novelwriting entirely by means of bitcoins is to use other means to obtain bitcoins then use them to live on while getting back to my writing.

Even fancying up the presentation into kind of graphic novel or playable-storyboard form by using Battle for Wesnoth to present timelines / storylines hasn't turned out to be particularly effective either, though possibly it might yet end up being more effective in the long run than plain old text. But that remains to be seen.

Product placement hasn't worked particularly well either, at least not yet. Giving Wesnoth, Freeciv, Bitcoin etc the spotlight in novels, stories, playable storyboards etc has thus far not incited much interest among fans of the prominently placed virtual products. Sigh.

I should get back to making sure Bitcoin gets lots of prominent mention in all these various means of telling and representing stories but oops I got sidetracked by techie things like setting up mining rigs.

So many people here do begging if only in their forum sigs that one cannot help wondering if maybe they do so because it works.

There seem to be a lot of capitalist variants here too though so maybe some kind of actual business-plan might be a good idea. I am a little dubious personally though of "come pay us 20 bitcoins to assign a tag to your project/company/shares" because, like, well, gee, if one actually had 20 bitcoins how much paper and ink, or keystrokes and disk space, might that buy, directly moving the project forward instead of passing the buck^H^H^H^HBitcoin on to some other project entirely?

I actually originally set out to fund the development of GPL'd software, much of the putting of fiction online stuff was more an attempt to use the fiction to bring in funds to finance software development than a direct attempt to finance the fiction itself, as what I initially transcribed into textfiles had already been written.

Ultimately it seems to come down more to financing one's own time/living than financing some specific thing one ends up spending one's time doing.

If you can come up with a gameplan that works, you might make more money publishing the gameplan itself in clickbank or some similar venue than from the fiction itself, there being so very many people out there hoping to find a way to scrounge up some funds by means of their writing...

So make it work! And keep notes of how that is done!

-MarkM-

This is where Clancoin enters the picture...

-MarkM- (How many Martian Botcoins would you charge to host a Martian Botcoin pool? )

So you'd like to pay 2% to 4% to participate in a pool?

Why would you pay it to one of these pools that you propose rather than to some already existing pool that already charges 2 to 4 percent?

-MarkM-

I have a bunch of Battle for Wesnoth (v1. campaigns that hopefully should be able to start doing this at some point during the move through v1.9 to v1.10, if the persistent worlds support via remote SQL databases feature does in fact get implemented. (It might already be implemented, the GNUniverse is large enough that I haven't revisited Wesnoth development for some time; it kind of got put on the back burner due to it's having hitherto focussed on narrating, and allowing the reliving of, historic events/timelines rather than actively changing history 'going forward'.

In the Galactic Milieu those campaigns are set in, Bitcoins are assumed to be the {inter|}galactic currency of the Hacker nation, thus the "Between the Worlds" campaign bundle is the one in which bitcoins per se will be most directly relevant to players, inasmuch as players in the Time Cadet branch of that bundle have the option of being, themselves, Hackers.

In other campaigns various variants of Bitcoin are more diretly relevant, for example in the Martian Invasion campaign, and thus in other campaigns in which the character Scotty is mentioned or involved, Martian Botcoins will probably be of more direct relevance than the original Bitcoins.

Meanwhile I have been working on http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/ to provide another set of virtual resources tradeable for bitcoins and bitcoin-variants. The showstopper there though is not being able to compile code there, probably not being able to run there stuff that I compile at home, and then even if I can put together something that will run there it is far from clear that I would actually be permitted to run it there.

The actual Freeciv worlds on which the Wesnoth campaigns are set is are similarly hobbled by the financial hurdles involved in being able to compile and execute code on boxes that are online and that I can have incoming ports open on for people to connect to.

I also do not like the idea of putting financial stuff on servers that I do not physically control, especially not on servers physically controlled by people who are familiar with Bitcoin and its potential value.

So ultimately much of what I am working toward is probably not really going to widely reachable until such time as I can get decent bandwidth into my own physical space with control of the router. (Currently I am living in someone else's house and they control the router, allowing me only one incoming port. Thus the spawning of various IRC-bot methods of providing access to various aspects of the GNUniverse such as the Galactic Milieu and the Crossfire RPG server that inhabits that one incoming port.)

So hey, it is being worked on. How interested are you, as measured in negotiable financial instruments such as bitcoin, dollars, yen, etc?

-MarkM-

Have you looked at Open Transactions?

Because Open Transactions didn't really have markets yet when I went looking, and because I only have one incoming port, already in use, I have so far been using IRC bots. I have had difficulties in the past in reliably getting hosting that can run stuff I compile myself and wasn't ready to splurge on a high end hosting solution, plus I don't like the idea of running financial applications on servers that someone else physically controls.

What I have done so far is simply open for each type of currency or share an account in each of the others, so that for example any bitcoins someone exchanges for General Mining Corp (GMC) shares go into General Mining Corp's bitcoin account, any Britcoins (UKB: United Kingdom Britcoins) someone exchanges for General Mining Corp (GMC) shares go into General Mining Corp's britcoin account and so on.

The bots thus act as kind of asset reserves, each asset type having its own reserves of each of the other asset types with which it can "back" itself (by using those reserves to "buy back", aka "redeem" it own shares/coins).

The main test/demo bot is NickelBot, which lurks in various #bitcoin-related channels on Freenode IRC.

I am also partway through coding a simple perl bot for Crossfire RPG that uses the same back-end shell-scripts as the IRC bots to make similar functionality available inside the RPG (Role Playing Game).

Open Transactions uses a package that can create RPC stuff for many languages, so I am also partway through putting an Open Transactions client into an eggdrop IRC bot using tcl rpc calls.

As more and more asset types based on bitcoin code come into existence all the time the need for systems to handle trading between any and all of them keeps growing. I originally stumbled upon bitcoin while searching for forex-and-commodity market system sourcecode. at that time I had been working on IRC bots and Crossfire RPG bots that would automatically trade, basically all sitting around chatting about various stuff they have in various warehouses on various planets, or in various stashes requiring various amounts of complicated/expensive shipping to move them from one repository to another, wheeler-dealing with each other each trying to increase its player/owner's holdings of whatever assets/items/currencies that particular player happened to want it to maximise for them.

Shifting focus to abstract units of value such as bitcoins is actually a bit of a simplification compared to my original aim which had been complicated by transport costs and amount of time needed to transport stuff and of course also even the potential for bad things to happen enroute (cutting off of supply lines, bandits lurking along the trade routes etc).

I am not a big fan of forcing everything to be priced/valued in terms of just one thing. In my Digitalis D'ydii Cluster on BBSes decades ago I always allowed players to pick any item from price lists to use as measure of the price of everything else, so that for example a player interested in obtaining tons of fuel to get the heck off the planet could view everything's value in terms of tons of fuel, or a player interested in shipping stuff could view all values in terms of tonlightmonths of transportation or whatever.

So I really do not find your insistence on making everything be valued in bitcoins appealing. Everything should be valued in terms of everything else, or at least in terms of anything else. (All pairs, maybe, really, to make a full spread of forex/shares markets?)

-MarkM-

I figure bitcoins are either worth far far far more than the silly little prices the markets have them at so far this year or aren't worth much/anything at all.

So the longer this lasts the better, lets shoot for winning a bitcoin worth thousands of dollars at least...

-MarkM-

If I ran an exchange I would want to do it at a physical space that I control, not some hosting place somewhere that people I do not know have physical access to.

If I started small this might limit my bandwidth significantly but if enough people used it to make bandwidth a problem presumably it would be feasible to increase the bandwidth.

I really do not like the idea of putting wallets on machines I do not physically control access to.

-MarkM-

The nature of the hypothetical attack was specified: it was / will be an "inexplicable" attack.

Hmm, an inexplicable attack on an explicable cryptocurrency destroys it, eh?

If we do go with another cryptocurrency despite that, ought we go with an explicable one or an inexplicable one?

-MarkM- (I might get so wrapped up in exploring inexplicability that I'd miss out on the ground floor opportunity of the new currency...)

Early on in the thread two things jumped out at me:

1) Something in background put on your computer by someone knowledgeable already "steals" your wallet regularly, purportedly "on your behalf" to "hide it from attackers" etc. How better to avoid butter melting in one's mouth than to be the trusted security expert who is obviously the one person who would not have done such a thing, it being so against their ethics etc that they have devoted their life to learning all about such things in order to prevent them. Naturally you'll say this was not the attacker. That is the whole point.

2) You ran virus scanner / anti-virus. How the heck did you ever manage to located the tiny tiny percent of such things that are not themselves the attackers?

I have read the whole thread now so I have gotten the impression that possibly your anti-virus might have good provenance and pedigree.

But how many security experts trusted by gosh maybe even entire governments who give them high clearances and so on, who routinely work with billions or at least millions of dollars and would never think of stealing them (ahem: from people who *would* list them among the suspects if any went missing...) would turn up their nose at a totally free half million bucks thrown at them by some simpleton suffering from overtrustingness syndrome?

It amazes me that this suspicious creator of automated hidden background saves of your wallet was not mentioned by other posters. The character has such amazing power of being unnoticed / unsuspected it even infects all the readers of this thread?!?!?!

Maybe it is that the tone of replies led people to prefer to be vague and general (list ALL your friends ANYONE having physical access) than to risk getting nasty response to pointing directly at the most capable suspect you have mentioned?

(A suspect who in fact should be one of the first to point to himself as a prime suspect if actually as you imply is any kind of reputable security type.)

-MarkM-

All this seems to be about using dev-kit boards, what is involved, now that the designs have been tested on devkit boards, in doing it on presumably cheaper maybe simpler (no extra I/O types just the one you actually want or whatever other optimisations) "production" boards?

Are the devkit ones the only ones you can simply plug into a usb port and play?

Although they might seem kind of expensive per MHash upfront cost, low power usage is for some people not merely a savings of money on power bill but maybe even a case of keeping power usage low enough that landlords or employers or whatever won't see drastic spike in power bill thus decide to no longer provide it "free"...

-MarkM-

There already are a whole bunch of alternates based on bitcoin code, it is not a problem so far.

If anything they just help bitcoin by showing that the concept is appealing enough that others have adopted the same system for their various alternative currencies.

I do not even see them as competing with bitcoin really, they are mostly co-operating, each of them is in effect yet another thing you can spend bitcoins on.

-MarkM-

Original Poster, your problem is trivially easy to solve.

Please just tell us first exactly how many fixed coins you wish to buy and at what price, since most people who mouth off like that fail to put their money where their mouth is.

If you are serious about buying coins that feature your "fix", they will be made available for you to buy. Its simple, just put your money where your mouth is.

Until you do, or someone does, why should someone even point you at the coins that have the feature you are mouthing off about, let alone build them from scratch just for you? Possibly a hidden cadre of people are already making fortunes with precisely such coins, but if you aren't serious about buying any there is no point wasting their time on you.

-MarkM-

Mixers need a float to work with, the big oldsters could send their coins through mixers constantly, or even run mixers of their own keeping newer coins and dumping old ones on other people.

Its stupid.

-MarkM-

Hoarding tends to be a loaded term implying possible wrongness or something a bit off.

A community might save up lots of stuff to build a big project, but a dragon does not save up oodles of gold and jewels to any purpose other than to have the largest hoard er I mean savings.

People might save boxtops or someting to some purpose but although I don't watch the television show "hoarders" I get the impression much of the so called hoarding is not to any particular purpose it is just sheer accumulation.

People might save eggs or a nice roast or something for sunday dinner but in wartime the longer they save rationed items for more sunday dinners they never actually have the more likely they are to be accused of hoarding.

-MarkM-

My landlord used to run around from bank to bank trading in all his CAD just to keep getting different bills he had not seen before, because some ranges of serial numbers, maybe with different pictures by different artists or whatever, sell for different above-face-value amounts on e-bay.

So Canadian notes are already not fungible I suppose, its just that only a few collectors and enthusiasts and maybe Archie comics' Jughead Jones bother to go to the trouble of cashing on in the deviation in value. (Jughead did it with small change.)

Don't bother with a new client, any good features can go in the normal client anyway and this using the old blockchain concept is silly pointless complexity to no good purpose.

Just start a new blockchain with massive hashing power thrown at it right from the start so no-one can complain that it started off ridiculously easy. Heck you could even make it so difficult that it takes on average much longer than ten minutes to make a block, aiming to move toward ten minutes only after quite some time has gone by to allow anyone to get aboard who wants to get aboard.

It would be nice to make several chains each addressing different complaints, since complainers seem mostly to be chronically unwilling to do so themselves.

-MarkM-

How much hashing power can you contribute to a new block chain?

Lets not worry about trying to "fix" this particular purported "problem" of the original blockchain, even if it were a ponzi scheme so what consenting adults should be allowed to play those anyway if no fraud is involved, just like the clearly labelled ponzi/pyramid someone is already running that accepts bitcoins.

People can accept or not accept bitcoins for some new blockchain's coins and can accept or not accept bitcoins for other things that could in principle then be traded for some new blockchain's coins. So what, some people playing some gold-game somewhere might buy some of the new coins, are you to "fix" that too by somehow changing the value based on where they got the coins?

Are you going to accept blood diamonds for new coins? Why worry about preventing old bitcoins coming into the new system if you cannot even prevent blood money entering?

Lets just make some new blockchains with the various features various complainers purport to support so we can tell future similar complainers "put your money where your mouth is, here is a blockchain with the features you claim to want, how much money you gonna put in?"

Chances are most are just hot air and won't put any money where their mouth is.

Lets use some of the fortune you don't think you deserve to make some alternatives?

-MarkM- (People will just sell their old coins elswhere instead of using your "conversion" algorithm probably...)

If coins are not fungible that is probably not a good thing, so this different values for different coins of the same blockchain doesn't sound like a good idea.

-MarkM-

Miners seem determined anyway to improve the chance of early adopters of any new blockchain being able to make coins with trivial ease. They accomplish this simply by not mining new blockchains and by verbiage aimed at discouraging other miners from mining new block chains.

Kind of strange really, shouldn't they be saying oh gosh yes go mine other chains, the less competition in the mining of this chain the more profitable it will be for me to take up the slack and even increase the difficulty of the current chain (as if it is me increasing the difficulty the increase is actually good for me though not so good for my competitors...)

One of the *problems* in starting new blockchains is precisely the problem of getting enough miners onto it that they don't seem like some tiny cabal of early adopters benefiting unfairly from an initially low difficulty.

-MarkM-

Come to http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/ sign up and start mining stuff in the game to sell for various digital currencies.

As more games are added there will be more ways to earn the same currencies and probably more new currencies too.

(If you do well in any game you might like to start a currency of your own instead of using other players' currencies all the time.)

-MarkM-

That new lower fee is what, 50,000 satoshis (the smallest unit / last decimal)?

It just makes sense that a heavyweight international reserve currency with massive security infrastructure, 24/7 watchdogs all over the world and so on is likely to work out more expensive than a throwaway to change jars tip jars buskers local liquor store alc-ies small-change currency suitable for penny-ante poker penny stock games and viewing internet porn one image at a time.

Do you really go to all the trouble of ATM to change-machine and back to busker instead of just dropping one of your smallest bills/notes? I thought usually one either has change or does not and if no oh well hit you next time I come by maybe if I have change then.

If Canadian Tire is actually on to something with its loyalty system, which it might not be since it doesn't seem to get copied a lot, you might end up with lots and lots of different change: three or four different types of air miles, a bunch of pepsicokepalmolivecolgate coupons, some nickels and dimes and pennies, various different colours of poker chips and game gold silver copper and platinum and so on ad nauseum.

A busker who will take those off your hands could be a weight off your mind and an excuse to tell the kids no more candy today see I just gave all my change to this nice busker.

The point of the $0.02 command in my IRC bots is so you might end up having BitNickel whether you want it or not, simply because someone who did adopt them chose to put some in your IRC nick's account using that command.

Coins for tips should be able to work fine that way for people who are themselves worth tipping and others might not feel much desire to tip anyone anyway.

-MarkM- (Assuming the busker doesn't simply make change for you themself, of course, which does sound simpler. )

P.S. New in town? Got any towncoin, Sir? Only five mikes each and the buskers are out today, You'll not want to stalk past them all without showing a little appreciation will you, Sir?

P.P.S. Oh not a problem, my travel agent told me about your town's towncoin and made sure I brought some. How many do buskers customarily get, anyway?