Quote: "maybe banks would be the only ones that actually were running the software and we all just had interfaces to it and they still had some transaction fees, although much smaller."

This might be an interesting model for various alternate block chain variants/clones of Bitcoin to try.

I suspect that if existing government-licensed banks did this, they would do it with their own blockchain or blockchains.

Think peer to peer where peers are highly privileged folks not just any old tom dick or hairy.

The model might work well for example as an international currency if national hashing power happens to compare similarly to other types of national power. If the current top five or seven or ten or twenty or whatever finance-nations or groups (e.g Euro nations as a group) turn out to also be the top five or seven or ten or twenty of whatever in hashing power, maybe moving to a blockchain-based reserve currency could work well for them.

It might be a useful startup configuration for various alternative bitcoin-like currencies because limiting the "peers" doping the actual "mining" part of the system - in particular, the actual "minting" of the coins - allows various different models of how to initially distribute the coins to be implemented.

Instead of any tom dick or hairy grabbing a copy of the software and linking (possibly even anonymously) into the network, various groups can issue their own variants each featuring their own ideas of how to "back" the "value" of "their" coins and how to initially distribute coins.

As a start toward a kind of experiment or simulation of this kind of thing, a "resource mining" game has been set up at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/ to provide a kind of substitute for or simulation of "mining", allowing players to "mine" or "synthesise" three different "resources" (metal, crystal and deuterium) which are themselves then used to construct "mining" and "synthesising" facilities and various support infrastructure such as transportation, storage, defense and so on.

This provides a backdrop against which various factions groups or individuals can try to establish "value" in any currencies they care to implement, whether new blockchains invented by themselves or any of the ones supported by my IRC bots or any existing currencies or even simple balances of how much of which resource someone is claimed to have "on deposit" at some storage facility or facilities featuring various shipping costs to transport the deposited resources to and from such repositories.

Establishing quick and easy conversion between any number of currencies based on bitcoin type blockchains can thus maybe be started within games as a kind of t4estbed to play with it all and maybe to some extent even "simulate".

As a player, will you seek to establish one or more currencies yourself, or trade via currencies set up by others, or stick to bitcoins and paypal and pecunix and liberty reserve, or maybe even just do barter of one resource for another without bothering with "currencies" at all?

It could be interesting to see what choices people make and the outcomes of them...

-MarkM-

Join IRC channel #bitcoin-otc on Freenode.

There you should find a bot named NickelBot. It has info obtainable by the IRC command

/msg NickelBot help

Unfortunately I think it currently thinks a BitCoin is worth less than a CDN...

If you learn of others besides those NickelBot already knows about, do tell.

-MarkM-

Just look up CAD.

Resist attempts to drive the price higher. Sure there will be some kind of transaction fee, for example I plan to have my bots use NKL (BitNickels) for such fees, but basically if people try to buy CDN for much more than 1 CAD per CDN it will presumably be because people buying it aren't then spending it. As long as they go ahead and spend it hopefully it will be able to go back out into circulation, allowing the supply to keep up with the demand.

Sure some day, probably in a few years yet, when a large percent of the eventual 21 million or so coins are actually in circulation, it might become time to open the thing up for every tom dick and harry to try to drive down the price by minting them at home, but at that point they will also thereby be driving up the difficulty, making it more expensive to actually mint the things.

-MarkM-

There are already several distinct blockchains based on the Bitcoin software, I have test/demo IRCbots running that interface to several of them.

The CDN (Canadian Digital Notes) one is looking particularly interesting to me lately not just because I am in Canada but also because of the relative price-stability.

Mainline Bitcoin is looking a bit like a zero-reserve-banking system in some ways, to whatever extent it might be true that a run on the bank (everyone trying to sell all their bitcoins) might degrade the price.

I don't actually expect all the miners to just want to sell, with none of them being willing to actually "back" the coins they "mint" by offering to "buy them back" with goods services or other currencies, but the CDN plan of only "issuing" CDN coins the "issuers" (miners, minters) have CAD in the bank to "back" them with certainly has some appeal, as does the idea that their coins might thus keep a more stable price than mainline Bitcoins have. (The thinking behind that idea is that at least until uptake outstrips speed of minting, that is, until demand outstrips supply, there seems little reason for them to jump in value much higher than the CAD the people "minting" them are "backing" them with.)

I can set CDN prices based on CAD costs of doing business and expect that CDN will probably not fluctuate much in value compared to CAD thus that my prices should not require constant drastic revision.

The way Bitcoin has been fluctuating it seems to me it is probably much simpler to use a separate type of coin for commerce, buying mainline Bitcoins mostly for savings or investment or speculation rather than for use as spending-money.

Since basically the same software - thus the same interfaces/commands - are used for all the variants, it is easy to switch an application between the various versions/blockchains/currencies and to do exchanges between them. In fact my bots only work with currencies based on bitcoin code, not bothering at all with other protocols/interfaces such as paypal or liberty reserve etc etc.


-MarkM-

Quote: "I'm really torn on this. I'm more on the libertarian side but I just don't see the motivation to write a book / make a movie / program if I know that everyone is going to bittorent my file and I'll actually lose money writing it. Not saying that should stop me from making it or the end result would justify IP laws or not. I'm just saying I wouldn't want to go in to a project knowing I'll lose money due to copying."

It is maybe a pity actually that most likely this would *not* prevent profit-motivated works of literature and art, leaving the field to those who do the art for the art's sake.

Advertisers would probably still produce movies glorifying their products, military-fancying regimes still produce movies glorifying war and combat, and so on.

It is maybe bad enough that some things get glorified, that propaganda is so rife and pervasive, without making its production worse than cost free but actually directly profitable!

(One might have to weave the product or "philosophy" more tightly into the plot instead of simply placing one's products as non-essential props in non-essential scenes, which might inspire one to employ imaginative script or screenplay writers...)

-MarkM- (Just a quick try at a counterexample off the top of my head, maybe full of holes...)

Apparently it is not necessary for "miners" to have insider information about blockchains they "mine" for, "mining" is a commodity that can be separated from the details/internals of blockchains by "black box" pools.

Basically a pool can hire miners, paying them in whatever currency miners choose to accept.

So for "mining" companies, a proliferation of blockchains should be a good thing, helping free them from "dependence" upon any one specific blockchain-based currency or application.

With "mining" in place like that as a "commodity", available to anyone who wishes to process a blockchain for any purpose, people interested in different ways of distributing digital coins/tokens can maybe separate themselves initially from the perceived-by-some "problem" of allowing any tom dick or harry to mint the coins. The coins can be distributed first and then once all of them (o any chosen number of them) have been issued the possibility of opening up the network can be revisited.

Such an approach allows coins to be issued with goods they can buy already in place, because it allows issuing of coins to be correlated with provision of goods for those coins to buy. The providers of the goods no longer have to worry that more coins might be issued than there are goods waiting to be bought.

For example a "General Mining Corp" can issue its own GMC coinage to people who deposit resources and redeem those same coins for almost that amount of resources (that amount minus operating costs of operating the storage / transaction / trading / delivery system).

By making an online game accessible to pretty much anyone with a browser, anyone can build "resource" collection or mining or synthesis facilities to obtain "resources" to sell for such coins, and by means of "merely a bunch of games" distribution of coins can take place in an open market that values not only currency inputs (people who want to buy World of Bitcurrency coins or facilities or characters or whatever) but also human time (people who actually play the games, creating virtual world scenarios and events and economies and markets and so on by their activities).

In some number of years anyone who does in fact prefer to get their coins "free" simply by puttering around at their computer playing games burning up hours they maybe cannot do not or have no desire to "sell" in other markets can have coins, distributed in a way that is based on human input and time and playing skills instead of GPU cycles.

At any time that it seems worthwhile to weigh it down with the cost of "hiring" GPU farms to "secure" the network, block box pools can be used to hire however much GPU power seems worth the cost of paying for it.

Each and every player can issued their own coinage if they wish, competing on the markets with any other coinages on the markets.

It might well turn out that many coinages will not consider the cost of employing GPU farms worthwhile until/unless trade values of trade in their coinage exceeds, in various negotiable valuables, the cost of getting into GPU-power-wars or simply the cost quoted by their local GPU farm for jacking up the difficulty of their blockchain.

(Many might even ask why jack up the difficulty at all? Just how much overhead cost *is* there in opening up one's currency to the pseudonymous public to fight GPU-power-wars with?)

-MarkM- (Build your virtual resource mines free at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/ ! )

So did Gavin's video win this bounty so this one can be closed now?

-MarkM-

Wow, no response at all on this one eh? Hmmm. Is WIndows Phone 7 a particularly difficult target system?

-MarkM-

Wow this sounds really complicated.

Isn't there anything out there that can work transparently for applications?

Like maybe tell your firewall that when an application asks for port number # it should instead be connected to an anonymity tunnel of certain specifications like looking up IP address on a table? Or tell firewall that any  attempt to connect to a certain IP address + port combination means to use such and such anonymous tunnel?

Whatever, this bounty specified freenet so how is implementation coming along on this?

-MarkM-

How is this bountied project coming along?

I see there is now an export wallet function, but does it encrypt?

Or does adding the encrytian remain to be done still?

-MarkM-

You certainly seem to be proposing to create a Star Trek type economy using current technology.

If the jargon term "resource based economy" does not correspond to the type of economy popularised by Star Trek, that has a huge body of fans due to its popularisation by Star Trek, it would be nice to know how it differs.

How does/would "building a Star Trek type economy using current technology" differ from "building a 'resource based economy' using current technology"?

Everything I have discovered so far about "resource based economy" seems identical to "Star Trek type economy", as far as I can see the quibbling is merely about what level of technology might be achieved by a society operating on the basis of such an economy.

(Possibly also with some misapprehension by some as to what technology might be absolutely necessary to the implementation of such an economy, but Trekkers would hardly be Trekkers if they did not know that current physical engineering  technology should suffice, the challenge being one of social engineering technology if technological at all.)

You seem to propose the implementation of an economy type popularised in movies and television and having a large fan base due to that. If your proposed economy type differs from the one those fans are so eager for, clarifying the differences should be useful, maybe they might not necessarily be "dealbreakers"?

-MarkM-

The economy.

You propose a future in which such an economy is in effect.

The future is fiction until it happens.

It is well known to Trekkers that the technological feasibility of this that or the other plot-device is largely irrelevant, the question is not do we need to wait for replicators, transporters and faster than light travel before we can implement such an economy.

The more important question, getting more and more important as 2063 approaches, is whether it is in fact necessary that a period of world wide devastation / devastating world scale conflict occur in order to proceed to the proposed economic model?

Way back when, it presumably seemed to the authors that such an economy so soon in our future would not be at all possible barring such worldwide devastation or devastating conflict.

It is known that current technology should suffice as far as any physical engineering in concerned.

Portraying the proposed society as a far fetched fiction is a piece of social engineering.


Filling in the timespan between now and the actual world wide deployment of such an economy is going to take some figuring out of how utterly fictional the concept of actually accomplishing such a deployment is going to actually turn out to be.

Many people consider it very far-fetched, such that packaging it alongside ray guns and starships has historically served as a practical way "flying under the radar of such people" to get the ideas "out there" to a more receptive demographic.

As we come closer to whatever desired target date we wish to set as to when exactly we wish to complete the deployment it becomes more and more important / urgent to solve the social engineering problems to which the futuristic technology props serve as smokescreens.

The Venus Project seems to basically propose that we should by now or soon be able to cease pretending we are talking about an imaginary future economy but are in fact working toward actual deployment of such an economy.

The more the intent is perceived as real and realistic the more likely it might be that whatever kind of social upheaval / devastation that opponents of such ideas might find convenient to oppose such ideas with might also be deployed.


It would be nice to proceed without the kind of upheaval / devastation the original-series timeline suggested might turn out to be required.

Toward that end, this Venus thing does seem interesting and maybe, who knows, it could even turn out to be useful.

Admittedly a lot of fandom seems to just shrug at the proposed period of devastation, preferring to look forward to 2063 and beyond without seeming concern about preceding devastation. Likely that tends though to be the portions of fandom least likely to be regarded as actual Trekkers.

-MarkM- (Imagining fiction to be irrelevant to its topics seems weird/shortsighted, counterexamples are probably rife throughout literature.)

P.S. It seems ironic that you are dismissing so lightly the very dream/ideal you claim to espouse and one of possibly its largest and most dedicated groups of fans...

The resource based economy is desribed using stuff right out of Star Trek, like each individual being free to develop their potential. Star Trek seems to be a "resourcce based economy" and it is one that already has gone through a whole lot of the problems of trying to use movies to promote such a society, including such tactics as pretendig it is a far distant / purely imaginary future in order not to scare people who might object to a suggestion that it is just around the corner.

Supposedly the latest movie tried changing a lot in order to again find a way to get "normal people" instead of people who already bought into the idea of resource based societies to watch the shows/movies.

Also progressively attempts have been made to move the portrayals back in time closer to our current time, possibly because of a perception that one maybe need no longer pretend to be speaking about a time centuries away when speaking of a resource based economy.

This a a whole lot of investment and a huge body of trekkers some quite dedicated all aimed at the concept of a resource based economy.

Even putting it into a fiction surrounded by all kinds of "unbelievable" technology doesn't seem to go very far though in defusing people's ingrained / conditioned disbelief in such an economic model. It seems that to some people the proposed economy is maybe even harder to believe possible than faster than light transportation (which is afterall "merely a technical innovation or breakthrough").

The technical innovations / gadgets are mere metaphors and plot devices, one would hardly credit a person as actually being a Trekker if they were unaware that getting from "here" to "there" is not a matter of physical engineering but, rather, one of social engineering.

-MarkM-

Well lets try this scientific need determination of what to do, maybe?

How much bread and water (and some vitamins minerals etc in it presumably) do those people scientifically *need*?

If the latest Trek movie proves to have actually solved the problem it was apparently created to solve, to wit that of getting joe public to actually watch movies about resource based society, then is it scientifically necessary to have these folk produce one showing more precisely the now-to-2063 span during which the timetable as last I heard it apparently calls for a major world scale disaster or war or something to occur in order to set the stage, or would it be scientifically adequate to have Paramount produce it?

-MarkM- (more important, is the world scale destruction leading up to Zephram's flight scientifically necessary?)

Sure it does, just because the number of planets in the local area went down from 9 to 8 doesn't mean there isn't a planet handy that they could use. Even a tiny no longer a planet like Pluto is a whole heck of a lot of resources, plenty to base an economy on, surely? Or think of the "free" energy available if they pick Mercury for their economic utopia.

Its just a matter of getting out there and *doing* it. Nice thing about using some planet other than Earth is they might find they don't have nearly as many "conscientious objectors" hanging around hassling them too...

-MarkM-

How many Star Trek movies are there already?

Don't you lot watch them?

What for we need waste time energy and resources, let along donations, on poorer attempts to represent interesting societies?

Are you lot even Trekkers at all? Or just timewasters, maybe even underminers seeking to undermine the vision by taking the valuable pocket change people might be able to use to obtain some free time to watch a trek episode or even a whole movie?

Movies have BEEN DONE already. You are not the we you keep talking about, you seem more like a bunch of wannabe grand nagi or high mucketty mucks yakking on and on about how EVERYONE ELSE should do something because YOU DO NOTHING and so that YOU CAN DO NOTHING.

Go scrub the transporter platform with a toothbrush then report for education at the holodeck.

-MarkM-

This so called money or currency you describe sounds more like votes than like money or currency.

You only get so many votes per timespan, depending on how many elections take place you are eligible to vote in.

Naturally we congresspeople vote ourselves higher salaries oops no wait, its the riff-raff who vote themselves bread and circi...

-MarkM- (Yeah yeah I know (or at least suspect) circi isn't quite correct Latin...)

P.S. how much do votes cost in your area? Around here different political parties harvest different numbers of votes per dollar spent on {|trying to get} votes...

--
"Control the coinage and the courts—let the rabble have the rest." Thus the Padishah Emperor advises you. And he tells you: "If you want profits, you must rule." There is truth in these words, but I ask myself: "Who are the rabble and who are the ruled?"
-Muad'Dib's Secret Message to the Landsraad from "Arrakis Awakening" by the Princess Irulan

Re 777's "Why would the average person switch to the new coin when bitcoin is already established? The only reason I can come up with is force. Perhaps that's what you meant by "devote their military-industrial complexes to doing so", but if they are going to use force, why bother with the coin? Perhaps to give the illusion of freedom?"...

Oh sorry, did I say Politcoin? Silly me, I meant, of course, Federal Reserve Bits...

-MarkM- (New? Nonsense! Federal Reserve Bits have always been good, whether printed on paper or encoded in a blockchain! )

Person to person pseudo-anonymous virtual commodity trading between games, maybe?

Sick of game X but got lots of goodies there? Interested in trying game Y with goodies? How about a bot playing game X buys your game X goodies and because the currency used is so virtual it can be transmitted to game Y, where a bot playing game Y will sell you game Y goodies for it?

Sick of games where you pile up vast piles of stuff only to find you cannot actually use it? I am in one currently that is very pretty and has merchants priests and heroes as well as armies to march on other cities with but it turns out all the wood stone gold etc I accumulate cannot even be spent! I maxxed out my "guild', cannot spend more on that. About all I could do would be slaughter all my troops regularly as cannon fodder to get my heroes experience and my city fame by attacking lairs of monsters. Actually the game seems totally useless for my purposes as I cannot even ship goods to friend's cities to help friends get established. So no point making a bot for that game, it is fundamentally broken for economy purposes. But not all games are quite THAT bad. Many do allow you to ship stuff around, give it or sell it to friend or foe or even just drop it someplace where animals and corrosion won't destroy it before someone arrives to collect it.

Sick of all the hassles involved in trying to deal in World of Warcraft gold, Runescape gold, etc? Lets set up games where there are currencies designed to be much easier for person to person trades to take place player to player regardless of what games they want to go to.

When I was a kid staying at my grandparents house with no other kids around I used to play all six monopoly characters, having each follow it's own personality to try to raise 1500 to buy a ticket to Careers, where they'd try to earn enough to buy into Mine a Million and invest in Totopoly horses. Have you never found it frustrating that so many games are by design incapable of working like unix commands where you can plug them in to each other in various ways to build larger pictures in which all the various games are merely parts of larger wholes?

That is the kind of thing I like to do. Galaxies of Freeciv planets, Crossfire RPG maps of the cities so you can run around in the streets or go kill rats in the sewers, each stock market city having an actual stockmarket game with all those stockmarkets interacting, each nation trying to float it's own currency and convince other nations it is worth something, on and on and on. Worldbuilding on a J.R.R. Tolkien meets E.E. Doc Smith scale!

-MarkM- (Skyluke Du Q here we come, use the farce! No no not the dork side, duh! )

P.S. Ideally the MUD would act as the captions / narrated video interface for those who cannot see and/or cannot use the fullblown holodeck rendering or even 2D or 3D graphical renderings of what is going on in their chosen aspect of the overall collection of multiverses...

Any botters around, maybe with source code of bots for various popular venues?

I have not really looked yet at how to bot web-based things such as via greasemonkey browser-plugins or whatever.

First I built eggdrop-based IRC bots, now I am working on a bot for the Crossciv "Freeciv Galactic Milieu" Crossfire-RPG server. (It is online in game as the character known as "Trader".)

It occurs to me that it ought not be hard to use shell scripts similar to those my eggdrop-based IRC bots call from tools such as MUD-clients so as to be able to bring Bitcoin capabilities into pretty much any MUD / MOO etc type of environment / app / game, and that might interest me to do if player population actually picked up at kingdoms.se MUD which is the only one I ever really stuck with.

Can anyone recommend good scriptable-bot free source code available for scripting web based games?

-MarkM-

--
See sample web based game at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/