Maybe once you scale up / fast foward management might look less infeasible.

Imagine PolitCoin, an alternate blockchain different only in its initial starter block and the port number it uses and the IRC channel it uses, with all "major" nations and multinationals running full clients backed by mega custom-chip dedicated computing facilities.

Would they even need to operate as a friend to friend network in which only such powerful entities are "allowed" and few but their own intelligence services manage to "sneak into"? Maybe they would outcompute even the largest pools grass root bitcoin-type currencies including the original Bitcoin manage to put together? So much so that who cares if people play "mining" instead of playing national or state / region govt-run lotteries?

Maybe you could end up with about as many actually significant mining facilities as there are currently sovereign nations on Earth, and they could fight wars about how to manage it just like they have historically tended to do about almost any "significant" commodity / store of value / medium of exchange?

Just how hard *is* it for a coalition of superpowers to "manage" bitcoin{|-type currencies} if they choose to devote their military-industrial complexes to doing so?

Which would be harder, setting up inviolate private networks for their mining centers to use for Politcoin, or going with open networks allowing any tom dick or harry who might not even be a sovereign nation nor a multinational worth more than many sovereign nations?

(Part of the point here is that various features of the protocol might be just as handy between "individual nationstates / multinationals" as between actually-individual "individuals"...)

-MarkM-

P.S. I am actually tooling up to pseudo-simulate such ideas at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/ by equating a "nation or multinational (aka player)"'s block-processing capability to computer technology level multiplied by number of research labs...

Maybe you don't need to be a gamer yourself to do that.

There are quite a few games available for free that we could add Bitcoin support to, currently my bottleneck in actually checking out such games and getting players in the test them to make sure they actually work is the hosting, so in addition to doing promotional work such as directing traffic to game sites or getting game banners displayed all over the net etc there is also potential to actually invest in game projects that need funds to get hosting.

Currently for example I am using a free hosting account to test (and, it turns out, debug and fix up) Xnova Redesigned at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/

That free hosting account only allows one MySQL database so although it has enough disk space left that I could upload a Travian clone to test, it would not provide another database, which the Travian clone would need.

Mos games out there don't let you buy and sell their stuff, nor run bots. So I am checking out all the free open source games I can find and would like to set up instances of all of them that work, all modified to accept bitcoin. I have quite a bit already done but that means I have pretty much used up all the hosting I have available...

The more people actually put bitcoins into such games of course, the faster I will be able to expand my hosting to permit more games to be set up and checked out.

-MarkM-

Maybe even more useful than gathering shipping info would be to allow the merchant to specify the price in some currency other than Bitcoin.

In other words the customer pays the payment processing service in Bitcoin and the service gives the merchant the currency the merchant specified.

Paypal does that, doesn't it? I can tell it my price in CAD for example and I don't care what currency the customer chooses to use? Paypal tells them how much it will cost in their own currency to buy the thing I have priced in my currency?

That frees merchants from the entire headache of trying to play forex on the side as well as operate their business. Set your price, let your payment processing service take care of how to accept different currencies different credit cards etc etc, all you need from the processing service is the price you specified in the currency you specified. The more different currencies and cards and mobile/phone payment tokens and so on and so on the payment processor accepts the better but all that complication should be the payment processor's headache not the merchant's.

-MarkM-

Why not?

What is wrong with competition?

Do you really expect that all nations throughout umpteen galaxies would all use only the original Bitcoins developed by the Hacker nation?

That the Hacker nation would never pass on that technology to anyone else - such as the Martians for example?

Do you want all games that have anyhing to do with Bitcoins to be illegal in umpteen states of the USA due to being construed as gambling?

It might well be absolutely necessary to have most games use "chip" or "game credit" currencies internally, only accepting Bitcoins and never cashing out, in order to avoid being classified as gambling instead of merely as virtual objects / data that people can play with however they choose to play with them.

Heck it might even be bad enough merely to allow game currencies to be anonymously traded among players outside of the game, even if no trading of "real actual genuine original bitcoins" was involved whatsoever.

How can you have forex / stock market stuff going on in a game if the game only has one currency?

In the Galactic Milieu it is assumed that if real actual bitcoins as used here on Earth exist among the galaxies they are a currency used by the Hacker nation. No other nation is assumed to be so advanced as to actually somehow manage to get in contact with Earth, in fact most people among the galaxies believe "the planet known as Earth" to be fictional.

(Think about it from the perspective of a Freeciv nation, when through most of Freeciv's history 30 nations was the max a planet could have plus very very seldom did the game get won peacefully, usually one nation or maybe a small alliance wiped out all other nations. A planet with a few hundred nations on it is crazy, obviously a myth. They would destroy each other, maybe even destroy the planet...)

Sheesh what is with you people? Why the heck should characters in games all use the same blockchain that real people outside of games use? Does that even make any sense at all? Without hypothesizing some totally weirdly high tech (maybe indistinguishable from magick) enabler such as the (possibly also thought to be fictional just like Earth itself is thought to be) Hacker nation?

Have you ever tried selling in-game objects on e-bay etc?

It is a can of worms at the best of times. If you want to play poker roulette etc go to a casino. This is a roleplaying game. Roles include such roles as operators of block chain type currencies similar to Bitcoin. Get over it.


Or okay, how about this, DONATE REAL BITCOINS for the game to give to players whose computer labs are dedicated to processing blockchains / transactions but who have no actual real-Earth GPUs corresponding to their massive in-game computer facilities...


Commit to hand over real bitcoins for all the players who characters are running computer facilities to receive as their game-computer-tech earnings and maybe we can dispense with the use of alternate currencies in the game...


-MarkM-

Alpha/Beta (development) stage 2D isometric roleplaying universe now accepts bitcoins as well as various alternate block chain currencies based on bitcoin code.

Accessible using Crossfire RPG clients such as the java one whose daily build is at http://invidious.meflin.net/jxclient.jar

The clients use a metaserver to find out what servers are out there, ours is listed as Crossciv, Freeciv Galactic Milieu.

But, it has fantasy as well as science fiction milieus. Using the old classic character-creation method where creating your character is done on the server you choose milieu buy your choice of race/species and profession, basically anything other than a non-magical human is considere fantasy and lands on a fantasy world instead of in the science-fictional galactic milieu.

The newfangled character creation method where race and profession and stats are all done in the client kind of messes with that currently, as the programmers didn't realise anyone was actually using the ability to steer characters to different starting locations based on their race and profession. So until some mechanism is added for filtering access to areas based on race and profession anyone using the newfangled, client-side character-creation routine ends up in the fantasy world even if they are a plain old non-magical human thief swashbuckler ninja warrior barbarian etc.

(Like I said it is still in development... )

-MarkM-

There already are several alternate currencies built using Bitcoin's code, each using a separate blockchain. So alternate bitcoin-type currencies are not hypothetical, they already exist.

For example in the bitcoin IRC channels I have a sample IRC bot that supports a number of these alternate currencies.

The way the bot currently works is each currency has an account with each of the other currencies. For example the Brits have a Botcoin account and a Canadian Digital Notes account and a General Retirement Fund shares account and so on.

This has the effect of each currency having balances of various other currencies it can use to "buy itself back" aka to redeem its coins.

If for example someone (such as the Canucks for example) had bought some Britcoins using Canadian Digital Notes then Britcoins would have a balance of 100 Canadian Digital Notes available to be used as "backing" for Britcoins, that is, available to be used for the purpose of buying Britcoins by spending Canadian Digital Notes, much as the Canucks already did to cause the Brits to have that 100 CDN on hand.

The bot keeps these backing balances separate. That is, it will not spend any more than the Brits actually have of each other currency/commodity on buying back Britcoins.

This is looking to be an interesting market, because of course once someone has managed to buy those (for example) CDN from the Brits in return for Britcoins, then that is it, the Brits have no more CDN left with which to "back" aka "redeem" Britcoins.

In other words the bot does not lump all CDN together, it tracks separate balances per each other currency, so CDN it obtained by selling Britcoins will only be used to buy Britcoins, not to buy for example Martian BotCoins. Martian Botcoins would have their own distinct CDN balance, consisting of CDN that had been used to buy Martian BotCoins, and only those CDN would be used to buy Martian BotCoins.

That simple mechanism makes the bot in effect act on behalf of each currency as an administrator of a "backing facility" providing "backing" individually for each currency.

These currencies seem especially well suited to situations in which moving of hard goods is awkward, such as when remote operators operate robotic/waldo facilities in remote galaxies so far away that only consciousness/telepresence/data can reasonably be shipped.

Instead of trying to ship you a hundred thousand tonnes of deuterium from, say, a galaxy in the http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/ group of galaxies to, for example (though maybe forbidden by Zorg's terms?) a galaxy in the Zorg Empires group of galaxies, I could sell deuterium in one group of galaxies for digital coins then use those digital coins to buy deuterium in your local galaxy to ship to you, thereby saving shipping costs and thus maybe provide you with deuterium cheaper than if I shipped it from a galaxy far far away...

-MarkM-

I have been watching several alternate bitcoin-based currencies start up, and so far the people behind them have all felt that even if there were fifty transactions per block every block paying 50 coins per block is stsill a very high transaction fee.

They have also all had problems with the idea of handing over goods to people who aren't willing to actually back the currency but instead just want to generate it and spend it. Miners, in other words.

Thus so far all are taking the approach of using private "friend to friend" networks for the first few years to develop and establish their currencies, as they feel this gives them the best ability to actually back the currency.

Basically if they are the only issuers of their currency then they can see to it that they only issue it in situations where they are in fact willing to back it with goods.

They do not want to be in the position of saying "we will give you goods in return for coins some stranger generates with a GPU". Instead they are aiming to be in the position of saying "we will give you good in return for coins that we issue".

In fact the reason each interest-group is creating its own currency is because they do not want to have to redeem other people's such currencies over which they have no control as to the amount issued and the value being provided by those who are issuing it.

-MarkM-

It can easily be thought of as a kind of ponzi scheme.

The claim that the crash in price if the long time miners sold their hoards indicates it is not a ponzi does not make sense to me, because ponzis too tend to crash very similarly. (The originators cash out instead of continuing to give back incoming money to other people.)

We need not speculate about new startups, we can experiment to obtain empirical results.

A number of currencies have been commissioned, and I have implemented IRC bot interfaces to them.

So far none of them have seen value in exposing their blockchain building operations to the public. They see the distribution nature of the protocol as useful for communicating among trusted partners, and prefer to keep difficulty at 1 (one), which they can well afford as long as they don't start attacking each other.

It looks like they plan to address value primarily by not "issuing" coins that are not in some way or other "backed". For example they are all committed to buying huge number of each others' coins, so each will be backed by a basket of all the others. Even that though they do not consider sufficient, they are also trying to work out policies to try to "ensure" that there is more "behind" them than just other such virtual/digital coins.

The way the IRC bots do their accounting is dictated by that requirement, for example. Each type of coin has an account at each type of coin. If you have let's say some CDN, and you tell the bot to exchange it for GMC, it sends the CDN to the gmcbank's CDN account and sends GMC from the cdnbank GMC account to your GMC account.

It can only do that if cdnbank has enough in its GMC account. There can be any amount of GMC in the other coin-type's GMC accounts, those are not relevant, only the GMC that is in cdnbank's GMC account can be used to "back" (aka buy) CDN.

Thus basically what the bots are doing is holding the stuff used to back the various coins. Each coin has it's own distinct collection of stuff to back itself with aka to buy back the coins it issues.

So basically the plan seems to be not to "cash out" by buying fiat currencies but, rather, to "back" themselves by buying fiat currencies to hold as "reserves" with which to back their own value; standing ready to buy themselves back.

Thus the lack of desire to open up "mining opportunities": they have no desire to bleed out their reserves by cashing in coins created by random miners. In essence they can have digital tokens manufactured at less cost by keeping difficulty low until many, maybe even all, coins have been manufactured.

-MarkM-

I have been talking to "nations" that do see the bitcoin approach as well worth considering. They are nations in a game, so they do not have as much vested interest to worry about as "real" nations, they might even be more open-minded "players", and they are not "nations" that have huge populations of bankers and bureaucrats, so their views are not likely to reflect quite those of current day "real" nations.

Nonetheless they do have some concerns, mostly around the idea that thy would prefer to "own" most of "their" money themselves rather than have it appear in the hands of a population of "miners" that might not be very easy to designate.

Basically they are not keen to "back" some random miner's currency rather than "their own" currency, especially if the miner might not even be one of their citizens. Heck the miner might even be a person in a nation one is not eager to help in any way.

Some of the "nations" that have been looking into this though are determined to give it a try. They like the distributed network as a way that many nations can participate in each using each currency, and they plan to have only "nations" and "banks" do any mining until a few years down the line, maybe even after the full quota of coins have been mined.

Each nation is committing to trade at par some huge number of coins with each other nation that is part of the pact, but as a direct central bank to central bank exchange rate not a commitment to exchange at par with any tom dick or harry who happens to be a citizen of a participating "nation".

For reasons that actually derive from conditions on "the mythical planet known as Earth", the Hacker "nation", which supposedly used actual bitcoins as its currency, is not participating in the exchange at par agreement nor in the buy so much of each other's currency agreement. That mostly comes down to the fact that no-one who might be construed as a representative of the Hacker "nation" has indicated any desire or intent to put such large numbers of coins into this "experiment". So although initially the possibly many new block-chanin based currencies will start of at par, they might all as a group be far from at par with actual bitcoins.

Hopefully this will be an interesting experiment. I am setting up IRC bots right now to provide a simple interface with just very basic command such as balance, address, send and exchange.

-MarkM-

Quote: "BitCoins are a little less anonymous than cash because you can see their flow publically, but ultimately these flows are much like the serial numbers on paper money - if you could see the serial numbers move between anonymous individuals, you might be able to puzzle things out when they enter or exit some other monetary world."

Excellent! That is it: BitCoin is that subsystem of the orbital mind control satellite network that reads those tracer things in the paper currency to track the serial numbers that same way the aliens track the people they imbed such tracers into. (s/such tracers/the same tracers/ if intelligence regarding goings on in Area 51 are correct).

So just like the mind-control satellite network we can see exactly which serial numbers send how much of their denomination (value) to which other serial numbers and when.

There is no need to know who those serial numbers might relate to because the implants in people are used for the people-tracking part of the problem (hahahahah).

Bitcoin is cash not radio pet-tracking chips. But, it is cash no-one can "resist" scrawling their private graffiti on so like other graffiti artists find the cans of (tracked by alien labelling molecules) spraypaint they scrawled the graffiti with and you've got them. (Or at least you've got the cans of paint, and thereby maybe whoever stole them from them or had them planted on them to incriminate them etc, how convoluted a plotwriter are you looking for for your conspiracy stories...)

-MarkM- (of course they can "replicate" the cans of paint and plant them on anyone or everyone on their botnet...)

Quote: "As of now there is no known virus that steals wallet files."

Other than the "backup your wallet" one implemented and transmitted by Organic Peripheral Engineering, you mean?

-MarkM-

Hmm I think of the wallet as more like your collection of bank cards and passbooks and passwords and PIN numbers.

I regard my actual "bank accounts" as being distributed across the peer to peer network, so everyone and their bitcoind has a backup of my bank accounts complete with balances. But I need some info from my wallet to convince them all that the accounts actually are mine...

-MarkM-

Sure, but, out of all the possible paths you could focus in on where it (the oldest complete size 1.0 coin) would be now if if always moved at every opportunity and either (1) it always fitted itself into the smallest outgoing portion it could fit in, on the one hand or (2) it always went with the largest outgoing portion it could fit in.

That could find the oldest coin that didn't want to go big and the oldest coin that was a wannabe majoritarian (or maybe democrat?)

-MarkM- (Biggies maybe want to be as close to header of transaction as possible if it is necessary to break ties...)

Exactly like that, yes! There is no point chancing making the earthling miners jealous or envious by flaunting the high value of the 'special dirt' they are hired to dig up, especially if that might give them crazy ideas like mining the stuff for themselves instead of mining it dirt cheap for 'aliens'. Especially if it has martial applications in the planet-domination field.

It is kind of similar to if the fed pre-printed umpteen years worth of bills ahead of time, or a casino bought massive numbers of plastic disks up front far more than they are likely to actually need for years but at such dirt cheap prices heck why not, they might come in handy one of these years or decades if things go well.

Having players choose whether to buy a ten their fiat currency per month subscription to a site OR crank out five such memberships per ten minutes divided by the number of other players choosing that option might devalue the memberships. Better to first get to a point where subscriptions amount to 300 local fiats per hour before starting to open up the mining "opportunity" maybe. Just an idea, but it is being looked into. Uh, by aliens, of course. No-one here but we earthlings, those Martians are oxymorons.

-MarkM- (Martial applications? What Martial Applications? MI1594 (Martian Invasion 1594) is just a game to we earthlings, isn't it?)

Bigot!

-MarkM- (Note to Martian BotCoin mint: do you wanna hire bigotted miners? (Why not, you bigots?))

It is not the hired miners' concern what is being mined. They are offered 0.05 bitcoin per day per 2MH/s and that is all they need to know, in fact if they need too much info - more than a secure private blockchain-using network wishes mere miners to know - then either some kind of non-disclosure contract would probably have to be involved or maybe the mining jobs would only be offered to the royal family of the nation hiring the miners or maybe it would be decided mining is too sensitive a job it should take place only on the mint's own supercomputers...

-MarkM- (None of your biz what we mine, you want bitcoins or not? Okay so we mine poker chips and have players, so what? Want bitcoin?)

So if someone wanted to do some kind of blockchain-based app using modified bitcoin code they could probably attract more and more miners at BTC 0.05 per day of 2MH/s mining {as|if} the difficultly of mining bitcoins increases?

-MarkM-

Maybe we are approaching a time when a market value for hashing work can be figured out, so any applications considering using a blockchain approach to something will know how much miner work they can buy for how many bitcoins, dollars, lire, or whatever miners might accept in payment for mining.

A blockchain that simply replaces bitcoin's genesis block and leaves the rest of "how it works" unchanged should produce on average 50 whatevers per ten minutess = 300 per hour etc. By comparing that to the price of miner work they could figure out how much they need to bring in by whatever means in order to be able to afford how much mining work.

They might also question the economic utility of opening their network to random @home miners and seek to research whether the amount of information a hired miner would need in order to mine is too much information to allow out of their hands.

Once a miner does a getwork of work for you, do they know enough to force themselves onto your network mining more than you wish them to mine or faster or harder than you wish them to mine? Or could one set quotas, this mining company we will buy this much work from, this other company maybe more or less?

-MarkM-

Any user accounts on any of your machines that are used to run untrusted software such as random screensavers and such that you impulse download while surfing the net should probably not also be used for financial applications, at least if one feels the concern that you feel.

Log in to your user account that has the financial apps only when you have finances to transact. For recreational computing log in to your recreational account.

It is much the same as not using your system-administrator account for recreation. Regard your financial-administration account similarly.

Treat your recreational account like En Guard's "red light district" activity: each time you visit you might be mugged so only take as much money there as you are prepared to lose.

-MarkM-

There are some interesting historical re-enactment holodramas produced and directed by researchers at the Institute of Chronodynamics (see the "Time Cadet" timeline(s) in the Battle for Wesnoth add-on "Between the Worlds" for info regarding said Institute) that have just in the last few years started to become viewable using Earthling technology that shed considerable light upon this matter.

Apparently the Grand Nexus Uberplan software suite deployed on primitive worlds such as ours aims to enable the training of Holobarracks Programmers in advance of the release of actual Holobarrack Technology. To that end, a storyboarding tool known as Battle for Wesnoth has been made available which is able to parse one of the more simplistic timeline-scripting layers of standard Holonovels and Holodocudramas, allowing Earthlings to actually follow the plotlines of such novels and docudramas.

According to sources inside the I.C. who actually worked on the research and development of the Institute's historical holodocumentary re-enactments, Bitcoin software was already in use on the planet known as M4 when Marie Marny was elected as shown in Battle for Wesnoth add-on "Martian Invasion 1594". And yes, that does mean 1594 C.E.

The very same computer that you see in Canadian Prime Minister Kenzie's office on the planet known as M5 in the Battle for Wesnoth add-on "Mystery in 1596" did not have Bitcoin software on it when Scotty arrived in 1596, but by the time he left it had been installed.

In  "Mutiny in 1626", the computer that Captain Bligh captured from the Egyptians was not running Bitcoin software when he captured it, but obtaining and installing such software was an important step forward for the various nations on the planet known as E29 in their attempts at resisting the depredations of the Egyptian Fundamentalists led by "living god" Akhenaten.

There is apparently little agreement however as to whether the software as released here on Earth was placed under a BSD license instead of a Grand Nexual Uberplan (GNU) license as a tip of the hat to a British implementation known as Bits Shillings and Pence (B,s,d) or to the software itself, Brilliant Satoshi Digicurrency. If it was also intended as a means of slipping under the radar of anyone investigating the Grand {Nexus|Nexual} Uberplan oops, sorry, Agent Crissy and her fellow holoprogrammers at the Institute have kind of let that cat out of the bag it seems...

-MarkM-