I am not claiming any of the bitcoin markets are operating the way I know some of my players would like their in-game exchanges and trading houses to work.

But the fact that such players would love to include dark pools as a cover for their methods does provide reason why some people would prefer not to have dark pools confusing the bid/ask data that they are trying to use to make their decisions.

Sometimes lacks of transparency that might be useful to inside traders are a legal concern, sometimes, it seems, not.

-MarkM-

All the more reason to not give them the client.

Tell them all about how bitcoin works, fine. Tell them to go use bitcoin itself if they want to get into the complicated techie stuff like the bitcoin daemon and client. Great, those ho do can even maybe earn barter-points by serving as local exchangers exchanging local barter points for global bitcoins and vice-versa.

But for the everyday normal citizen or merchant, have them use the town''s modified MyBitCoin site that interfaces onto the town's barter-point blockchain.

There *is* a usefulness in going with a blockchain even while a short-sighted observer might imagine a daabase based system would be as good, and that is so you are ready to open it up in 140 years or maybe even less as a fully P2P system.

(Also of course as an excuse to tell them all about how Bitcoin works so you can tell them go use real bitcoin if the way you are locally using the code currently lacks parts of the full bitcoin benefits that they feel are important enough to be worth going to real bitcoin for instead of using your local thing.)

-MarkM-

Does e.g. Facebook even allow facebook-apps that deal with money? Maybe they already figured out that they want a monopoly on money processing within their meta-app?

-MarkM-

It probably does not really require much of your time at all, just your money.

You need to put up enough money as a "float" for the service to operate with and to cover any losses due to either

(1) The statistical losses due to reversed incoming fiat transactions happening before the padded fees/exchange-rate has accumulated enough to cover them; or

(2) Your estimation of the amount of padding and/or fees falling short of what turns out to actually be necessary.

Bear in mind this is not like selling some hard to resell service or widget that the vast vast majority of people who steal paypal accounts and credit cards have absolutely no interest in using as a way to "cash out" their "ill-gotten gains".

On the contrary, this is pretty much the equivalent of putting up a shingle saying "launder your ill-gotten gains here".

On the one hand, cashing out people's ill-gotten gains can pay some very nicely high fees and exchange rates.

On the other hand the people whose paypal accounts and credit cards were stolen quite often do reverse the transactions.

That all said, please specify the fees and/or exchange rates you are prepared to put up the float money for such a service to operate with. Coding is pretty much irrelevant, no need to consume your precious coding time, all that is needed is your float money and the fee and exchange rates at which to utilise it, and likely someone can be found to do the day to day operations including running whatever already existing or easily modifiable code will work, maybe even for less than minimum wage just because like you they just want to make such a thing available for the good of the community.

-MarkM-

My initial discovery of bitcoin happened because I was looking for software I could use for trading games / trade in games.

I specifically wanted players who owned trading houses to be able to set their software up to buy low and sell high. That is, I assumed many players were not really interested in passing on low prices to the masses, they would prefer to buy low offers and sell to high buy-offers rather than to tell someone who offered a high price "oh gee guy, didn't you see that lower offer, here, I'll let you have the low offer instead of grabbing it myself and re-selling to you at the price you are offering".

I can understand that if other players think your exchange / trading-house does in fact play 34th-street Santa for them that could be a marketing point attracting people to yours instead of to a competitor, heck the 34th-street Santa movie was all about that. But guys, it was just a movie! Does Macey's *actually* tell Gimbels?

Dark pools are such a clever way of obfuscating this that I figure the very same players my original design was intended for will want to also implement dark pools so they can pretend they are not actually buying low and selling high but are in fact trying to play Santa but being thrown some roadblocks by dark pool users but gee our customers demand dark pools so what can we do...

-MarkM-

Transaction processing, yes, fine. The problems mostly arise when mining also mints coins. Leave out that minting of coins and all of a sudden you don't care whether the miners are in your town or anywhere else, who cares, anyone who wants to help secure the nework for you is welcome to do so, IF enough will do so to secure it against attackers.

Maybe the fixed address that minted coins go to would work best, if one of those addresses is the address of the Weak Blockchain Insurance Corp-or-Org.

That way the insurance body would always have plenty of coin ready to finance defence measures in the event of an attack, and attackers would have little incentive to mine other than if they thought they could achieve some attack other than simply mining more coins than the entire town's own citizens manage to mine.

-MarkM-

You are actually complaining about fiat currency, but you are mis-directing your complaint by trying to make it sound as if the problem is with the non-fiat currency.

If you had an actual money to begin with, people would accept it for bitcoin readily and easily.

For example you can buy bitcoin with pecunix or with liberty reserve, and if the feds had not shut down e-gold you'd be able to buy it with e-gold too.

It is not our fault that the fed shut down e-gold, thus limiting your options slightly.

If you find that buying bitcoin, liberty reserve, pecunix etc using fiat is made hard for you, go complain to your congresspeople or ombudspeople or what not telling them you don't want them reversing your transactions and so on. Or complain to your credit card provider about their giving you a hard time buying electronic currencies or something.

Once you have something reasonable in hand you are fine, a lot of blockchain based currencies become accessible easily once you have some bitcoin for example, since a lot of them don't care to bother at all with fiat, letting bitcoin serve as gateway to that stupid world so they do not have to.

-MarkM-

Why do you even need to allow just anyone in the town to mine?

All that does is create un-needed vulnerability.

The only reason to allow open season on mining is to quickly achieve a huge amount of hashing at a price that might well seem cheap to the originators of the system simply because they personally have no need plan or desire to ever hand over any goods or services of their own in return for the coins so they do not care who gets coins all they are really after is to convince someone somewhere - someone else, not themself - to hand over real goods or services in return for such coins.

You can in effect whitelist IP addresses that connect directly to you, but you cannot stop them from allowing more people you know nothing about from connecting to them.

Maybe you could run separate daemons, one per approved connection, each with its own copy of the blockchain, compare the difficulty on each of them to see if any of them are bringing more than one CPU worth of hashing to the task and if so disconnect them, then later connect all your daemons for a nightly clearing run kind of thing to resolve all those forks against each other to form one central blockchain containing all the transactions from all the chains that did not violate the one-CPU-power rule.

Here is another idea that might be better: run one GPU yourself for 36 days to generate as many coins as 36000 people using one CPU each would have generated, then give people the coins their CPU would have generated instead of giving them any ability to generate coins using their CPU.

In other words, avoid the whole can of worms about who generates the coins by generating them yourself and giving them out to anyone who you would have allowed to generate them had you taken the route of opening up the generating to the entire criminal underworld then tried to limit which of them were from your town.

-MarkM-

http://www.erights.org/elang/index.html

-MarkM-

Did Bill Gates just write his own version of BASIC or buy one?

Did IBM make their own BASIC or just buy it from Bill Gates?

Did IBM have processors made for them to their own design or just use existing INTEL designs?

Etc.

-MarkM-

Late to the party? You're crazy, it is very early days yet, with such easy to manipulate markets that it would be almost trivially easy for anyone who finds a mere $55,000,000 to be pathetically small to just do a few dirt cheap things like opening up a few dozen competitors of MtGox and make vast fortunes using the current existing bitcoin system.

-MarkM-

Maybe you should use BitNickels (NKL) for now. They have the option of going up in value to be 1/20 of a bitcoin but in order to try to avoid complaints about rapidly changing value and also in order to try to avoid complaints about early adopters getting too rich they have stayed at about the price of a real-nickel old-style U.S. nickel, that is, about US$0.07 per BitNickel.

You can anticipate that some day, hopefully when they are in wide circulation long after any early adopter period is long past, they will starting moving toward being 1/20 of a bitcoin instead of 1/20 of a CDN or a UKB or a CZB or any of the various other blockchain-based digital currencies.

-MarkM-

That is why I am aiming at using games instead of local LETS systems as a way of starting up new blockchains.

I feel no need to defend a town's local LETS blockchain so won't rush to answer on behalf of such a blockchain.

On behalf of game currency blockchains though I suggest to players that they compare the price you charge for such massive hashing power to the price the game(s) charge for game currency and consider whether they would be better off in game currency by directly buying the currency instead of buying hashing power from you.

If they would not, the game currency is maybe being overpriced and should lower its price before someone does perform the arbitrage of buying your hashing power to apply  to the game-currency.

-MarkM- (Hey, did I just say in effect "let the market decide"? )

P.S. Weak Blockchain Insurance Corp. though should probably look into your pricing...

How is there no incentive for a GPU farm?

Even with game currencies valued by no-one outside the game GPU farms are a very real threat.

Why would anyone in your town who does have a GPU refrain from using it instead of or as well as their CPU?

Are you maybe not mining coins with each block?

Or are you valuing your coins very very very low, so low that even with a CPU they do not really cover the cost of electricty so even CPU mining will only be done by people who think of their electricity as free or maybe feel they are not using as much electricity as their landlord computed into their power-included rent so running a miner is a way to help get their money's worth instead of overpaying for their bundled electricity or who simply like the idea of donating electricity to the effort?

Even with no "real money" to be made by running a GPU farm I already see people trying to come up with ways to win games, win wars against other game nations in game wars, and so on by running a bunch of GPUs. It is hard to believe a town's teenagers, or even adult citizens, are going to refrain from making use of what GPUs they have on hand if by doing so they can grab more of the town's new barter credits than the Joneses next door.

Skeptics or cynics might even go so far as to suggest the reason you want to deliberately not rule out GPU farms is because you plan to use one yourself!

-MarkM-

Dark pools are a great feature for any exchange that wants to reserve the right to step in front of the queue at any moment on their own behalf but would prefer not to advertise the fact that they reserve that right. They can simply step in at any moment and leave people to guess or assume "it must have been a dark pool order I guess" instead of thinking "gee those guys stopped me getting that deal I was properly queued up for and presumably would have gotten were it not for their inability to keep their greedy paws out of it".

-MarkM-

There is nothing to stop anyone producing yet another currency for use by their customers to buy their product, thus issuing precisely enough currency to purchase the new product(s) being produced.

For example OPEC could have issued OPEC$ and backed them with oil. MacDonalds could issue Mac$ and back them with big macs.

Just because there exists a nice deflationary bitcoin in the world does not at all mean no-one else can issue tickets or credits backed by their promise to provide something in return for them when someone want to redeem them.

So the whole FUD about limiting the number of original blockchain bitcoins being a bad thing is just FUD.

Notice that most such complainers not only do not create their own blockchain having the properties they claim are ideal but furthermore there does not seem to even be much real intention on their parts to even put any wealth into such an ideal even if someone else created it tailored to their specifications. How ideal *is* their ideal if even they are not willing to actually invest in it / buy into it?

So I guess a good question here would be okay great you are right now how much actual wealth are you ready to put into this better thing that you describe once we compile the relevant code to have it ready to use for you?

-MarkM-

Why don't you want to stop a miner from going crazy with a farm?

If you want CPU mining to work reasonably even just one miner using a GPU instead of a CPU is a kind of "going crazy" isn't it? I thought I'd read somehwere of GPU power being thousands of times faster at this than CPUs? So you would need over a thousand people using their CPU just to match one miner using one GPU?

Of course if you issue all the coins right in the genesis block instead of having them minted with each block the town council or the barter network organisers or whoever has a better ability to ensure the system doesn't get upset by new coins magically appearing from nowhere / anywhere and also there will be less incentive for someone to "go crazy with a farm". Instead of "going crazy" anyone with a bunch of GPUs can become a highly respected pillar of the community merely as a deterrent to attackers by having power in reserve ready to bring online at any moment if the difficulty is observed to be rising higher than one, or higher than whatever normal power-conserving level of diffficulty the town finds it needs to allow due to some of the participants not understanding exactly how to keep their node from processing too fast.

You might even be able to keep difficulty so low that when someone does a transaction they turn on processing on their node for a half hour or so so that their node can generate a block to contain that transaction, if not enough other people are currently already doing the same thing.

Any time the difficulty starts to climb, promptly start auditing everyone's connections to find out where the rogue processing is coming from, maybe also turning on the town's cyber-defense GPU-equipped unit that can all by itself match the power of all the CPUs of all the verified / authorised participants.

It would be lovely to work this out, because various blockchains already in existence face similar concerns. So far many of them have settled for all sharing just one machine using just one CPU to "mine" so that between the lot of them sharing that one CPU none of them have any worry about their difficulty climbing higher than one (1) and in fact it has turned out that by this means they also are not having to deal with 7200 new coins each day but far less than 7200 new coins each day. This means they also hopefully will not be facing the kind of complaints about early adopters getting too much of the pie that we keep seeing in these forums, because they are in fact keeping the issuing of new coins very low even compared to what just one CPU not sharing its power across many blockchains could achieve.

If you have access to people willing to dedicate only one CPU or less to "mining",  that could be great to co-operate with.

A lot of electricity could be conserved by having the majority of the available hashing power not actually in use during periods of not being under attack, so that any attacker would not be able to actually know just how much power they would be up against if they attacked until they actually do mount an attack.

-MarkM-

You don't even need to go to the trouble of creating your own new blockchain, there are plenty of startups already that you can buy into dirt cheap. In fact if you want to spread to a lot of people without costing them a lot and without the price growing so fast that within a very short time people are making this same complaint about early adopters having got it too cheap you should maybe even *try* to keep people from thinking it is going to be huge, going to make a fortune and so on.

In fact it might be best to try to come up with some method or approach that can somehow keep them from going up in price until all 21 million of them have been issued. Maybe tell people hey they are plenty more still coming, each day there are more so don't pay higher price for old ones, just wait a while for more new ones to be made or maybe even (depending on how exactly they are actually minted) participate in the minting process to make your own.

This can be done several times, so that if you think there might be more than 21 million people who might want one you can start making a new blockchain of another 21 million coins once the first 21 million are in circulation and there are still late adopters who would prefer a new coin costing only one of something instead of buying one of the already fully issued previous 21 million for more then one of something.

This might even be able to work like normal coins where you have different types trading at different values.

If you can clearly express all of the characteristics you are looking for in what the code should actually do in a blockchain you would like to buy into we can look over all the ones already out there to see if any of them match your criteria and if not then quite likely someone can easily start one that does match your criteria.

How much wealth exactly are you thinking of putting into whichever one does work the way you would like it to work?

-MarkM-

"Never do anything illegal" [snip] "blackmail them".

What jurisdiction *is* that?

-MarkM-

I am finding that bitcoin seems to be turning out to be not so great for micro-payments.

At first blush the idea of having eight decimals sounds great because it brings to mind conversion rates such as those of World of Warcraft gold (less than a dollar for several million WoW gold), and sounds as if it could be useful if players of http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/ thought a mere 100,000 or less units (intended to represent on the order of a ton or more per unit probably) of metal or crystal or deuterium should similarly sell for less than a dollar.

For individual character scale items that probably should cost less than a ton of crystals, being able to send someone just one of that very last decimal-place sounds useful.

World of Warcraft gold is awkward not only because of rules they might have against trading it but also because it is hard to hold as a speculator who has no interest in playing the game nor in paying a monthly player-fee to maintain a character in the game to hold the gold.

Thus I figured something like bitcoin would be great. Various games could be built with the "satoshi" unit of currency in mind - that last decimal place of the eight decimal places.

In Crossfire RPG there is already so much implicit inflation that they don't even bother with coppers they use silver as the lowest denomination coin, ten of those to a gold, five of those to a platinum, 100 platinum to a jade and 100 jade to an amberium. So an amberium is 500,000 silver. It seems quite likely that an amberium might well sell for less than a dollar, let alone less than a bitcoin.

The new default fee is what, 50,000 satoshis? How useful is one satoshi if you have to pay 50,000 satoshis to send it to someone?

So I think I need a design that will specifically favour using it as dirt cheap, even throwaway, money.

Deliberately encourage it to be considered worthless by anyone other than gamers and speculators-speculating-that-gamers-might-be-mad. (Mad as in holy moly who the heck would fork out real money for a virtual "magic sword" for gosh sakes?!?!)

Some speculators might also speculate that it could be a sleeper, sneaking up on the world by appearing to be maybe worth even less than world of warcraft gold until some day when all 21 million are in circulation and the fact that this distinguishes it from the normal run of the mill MUDflation-currencies (that are created out of nothing by falling from the pockets of goblins that, it turns out, are themselves created from nothing, possibly not even needing to be bred in vats using limited resources by wizards who might, being wizards, maybe themselves have been created from nothing in the beginning when the universe was created and might even, being wizards, be able to eventually even defeat death) really starts to "hit home".

These coins would not only provide an item that players, speculators, market-makers etc need not even be aware of the game (or of any specific game) in order to use, but that also is a glaring exception to the MUDflationary creation of goods resources items currency and so on in so many games. Thus from an in-game perspective it seems reasonable they should be so valuable that one might even be able to buy tons of mass of materials with them. But depending on how addicted one might or might not be to any specific game they might nonetheless seem worthless to anyone who happens not to know of some market where they could sell them for something they do consider quite valuable, maybe for example some coin or other that is of notable use in some game that they *are* addicted to. (Possibly even with the term game here including "the game known by some as 'real life'"...)

I have all along thought that it would probably turn out to be better to have a separate currency intended and possibly even designed for use in/with games rather than to try to impose upon bitcoins requirements that would make them more useful in games (such as being able to readily and standardly use that last decimal for small purchases without outrageous-by-proportion transaction fees even maybe?)

By starting out with a multiple-galaxies setting as one of the first settings considered, I do have the option of claiming that obviously propagating your transactions across many galaxies probably will cost at least a much as a beer and quite likely more than a beer. So even within indvidual games it might make sense to have multiple blockchains, one (or more: not only the original Hacker-nation "bitcoins" but also Martian Botcoin, United Kingdom Britcoin and maybe even CZech Bitcoin) propagating intergalactically but at least one "local to one solar system or a small group of relatively close to one-another solar systems or even just to one world" blockchain useable for buying beer and pretzels without incurring intergalactic transaction-propagation fees.

There is also a feedback loop to consider, because Earth is considered mythical by most places in those galaxies so instead of thinking Earth currencies are vastly more valuable than galactic currencies the tendency is to assume any talk of Earth is probably by roleplaying gamers playing games involving the mythical/fictional planet earth and that earth currencies are actually roleplaying game currencies.

Characters in the game are maybe about as likely to value earth currencies as earthlings are to value game currencies, thus opening vast possibilities for arbitrage. You might not even be willing to pay one dollar per million game-goldcoins for yourself yet be able to discover players willing to pay significantly more than a dollar for some item that some shop somewhere routinely sells for a lot less than a million game-goldcoins. You might be able to buy one game-currency dirt cheap from players met in some game that does not directly honour that particular game-currency or does not value it highly and sell it to players met in some other game where that specific game-currency is the main unit of value used in trading valuable metals or crystals or even fuel for fusion powerplants.

How can one prevent a currency almost identical to bitcoin zooming up in earthling-currency exchange-value or is it, as some seem to be claiming, sufficient merely to not be the original bitcoin? Maybe no changes whatsoever are needed in the rules in order to achieve this goal? Would a new blockchain using the same rules as the original one be well able to maintain an exchange rate as low as or even lower than testnet's even though unlike testnet it is intended as an actual store of units of account not as a doomed to be erased record of units intended to be erased?

I do not favour creating far far more than 21 million coins as the game economies might well in total be smaller than the entire planet earth economy that bitcoins are intended to serve so using 21 million should seem like more of an oversupply of coins, or less of an undersupply of coins, than bitcoins seem relative to their target service-volume.

So in summary I am not yet sure exactly what needs to be changed, maybe nothing if those theorists are correct who claim that a second blockchain based on the same rules as the original blockchain would automagically find itself enjoying a far lower valuation than the original.

Since the original question is about restarting, I guess what I would do differently would be to make an extra *persistent* (unlike testnet's non-persistence) blockchain from the start, maybe by having a -game switch as well as a -testnet switch. (Maybe with use of both switches meaning to use the game testnet not the main testnet?)

If the game and non-game blockchains were thusly both created from the outset though, neither would be "the original", so we are back to the question of what might need to be different in the rules in order to lean the non-game blockchain toward real world valuability and the game blockchain toward being dismissed as a mere roleplaying game currency by short-sighted speculators who fail to see the value in games and/or game currencies?

-MarkM-