Do you ever think about a possibly purely hypothetical "Satoshi Estate" and what it might have been "up to" and why?

We have already seen for well over a decade now that a very simple strategy of building buy-sides denser than sell-sides leads not only to take-home profits to live on and to building upward the spot market price of the sell-side asset but also to an ever-growing hoard of surplus sell-side asset.

Excellent examples are bitcoin's merged-mined siblings IXCoin and I0Coin, excellent because they have been "trashed" over and over again (fly by night / oops we got hacked exchanges running off with all the buy side and sell side on that exchange, for example) yet the strategy just keeps on keeping on, still working after all these years.

So we already know that the money is in the trading, the constant buying-back and re-selling of the shrinking number of the sell-side asset remaining out in the wild, not yet bought back for the last time and frozen buried in concrete under the estate's swimming-pool or however a given estate likes to freeze the "surplus" sell-side assets it takes off of the market.

We already know that even the great-grandheirs ought never need to dig those frozen assets back up to put back on the market because the allowances doled out to the beneficiaries of the estate can come out of the trading profits, the take-home buy-side offers that are retired from time to time to thin out the bottom of the buy-side when the buy-side has been built strongly enough that the bottom can be thinned a little due to the higher offers part of it suffices to keep "dumpers" from being able to "dump" the price down far enough to barely begin to threaten to touch the bottom part of the buy-side.

So when we hear that vast swathes of blocks thought to have been mined by Satoshi have never ever moved, we have a very simple obvious reason already known as to why if Satoshi lived Satoshi or the "Satoshi Estate" should probably never have needed to move those coins and indeed ought never to need to do so.

It is totally un-necessary to postulate that Satoshi or the Satoshi Estate does not move them because moving them might panic folks who imagine they might end up being "dumped" to "dump downward" the spot market prices.

It is also totally un-necessary to postulate that Satoshi is dead and died before managing to pass the private keys controlling those coins to the Satoshi Estate.

It suffices simply to imagine that if I was able to come up with my so very simple "build the buy side more densely than the buy side" strategy maybe Satoshi or the Satoshi Estate might also have come up with it...

Heck it even allows us to go ahead and look at bitcoin as an IOU like other money / coins /tokens, IOUs Satoshi's code authorises anyone to issue on Satoshi's behalf simply by mustering enough hashing-power to do so, and thus to further "justify" Satoshi or the Satoshi Estate taking more and more bitcoins off the market all the time as being the natural thing for someone to do with their IOUs, since any not yet bought back and taken off the market are debts still outstanding...

-MarkM-

In line with how most projects think about "real world assets" I found myself thinking about how I could for example digitise one of my houses by doing something like taking the official assessed value the land tax is based on as akin to what the Galactic Milieu calls a "treasury", which is to say a supposed value of the whole thing which would then be divided by the number of "shares" or "tokens" or "coins" minted to compute the value per "share" or "token" or "coin".

But it has occurred to me that it might be worth seriously considering doing it the actual Galactic Milieu way, which in the case for example of one of my houses would be to treat "the planet known as Earth" no differently from any other possibly or potentially fictional or in an other way unreliable planet and thus its so called "real estate" no differently than than that of any other planet in the game, thus simply not counting the "real estate" into the treasuries-based calculation of value whatsoever.

If for example the house in question has an assessed value of 88,000 CAD (albeit possibly "capped" for land tax considerations such that the land tax is possibly not based upon the entire assessed value), one would proceed by placing 88,000 CAD worth of assets into an "official treasury" from which the Milieu would thenceforward compute the value per minted share, token or coin of the asset.

Basically the real-estate, just like all the planets, civilisations, starships, deathstars, magic swords, magic armour and so on and so on and so on in the game, would be just another "slush fund" item, more petty-cash or operating-funds or tools or infrastruture or inventory the asset can use to try to generate wealth to add to its "treasury" in the event that it manages to keep its spot-market prices up near its value per unit calculated from its "treasury".

It seems to me on first glance that this is in a way a little like various kinds of "insurance" one might take out on such objects when digitising them, in the sense that even if the house burns down or the local government on that planet decides a distributed autonomous organisation cannot own land or any other weird random disaster happens to the object itself, the existence of the "treasury" continues to provide some sense that the asset as implemented continues to hold some value...


-MarkM-

Years ago now we set up an instance of the free open source web-based game "Galaxy Forces" at https://GalaxyForces.MyGamesOnline.org/

As seems to happen often, it turned out to be ridiculously lucrative, showing right off the bat that we had vastly underestimated how much game resources would be reasonable startup costs for the kind of venture the game launches new players upon.

It took what seemed like mere moments for the players to pay off their startup loans, and soon they were hauling in vast profits.

Naturally registration of new players was disabled to give us time to work out how this interesting game can be reasonably fitted in to the overall Milieu.

Its internal currency is called credits, and after some discussion we decided to directly correlate those so called credits with the platinum coin used in our Crossfire-RPG servers, which in turn correlates directly with the goldpieces used in our CoffeeMUD servers. (Ten silver to a gold, five gold to a platinum, a hundred platinum to a jade, a hundred jade to an amberium; on HORIZON gold pieces are tokenised, in integers, as MGOLD (for MUD Gold), on Stellar it is amberium that is tokenised, with decimals, as CCAMB (for CrossCiv AMBerium).)

It is a rather advanced-technology region of space, which seems even possibly to use "super-metals" (theoretical island of stability of atomic nuclei way out in transuranics range) as its so called metal, probably pretty much ignoring our mundane range of metals as just another cheap crap replicators can churn out or something like that.

Its main power (energy) system seems somewhat akin to the naquadah type stuff we see in the Stargate mythos, an unstable substance used in reactors. They call it Uran but it seems unlikely it is actually uranium.

Basically the players arrive with the right to start a colony and whatever gear and people it takes to do that.

They also have a small starship, seems akin to Star Wars mythos small personal starships, but maybe a little bigger than the one or two person Xwing fighters.

Either everyone who goes there was sterilised up front or it just totally ignores breeding; one gets population for one's colony at what amounts to a personnel shop, one cost for normal civililians then maybe five or six times that cost for "scientists".

Soldiers are trained from civililians, you build an academy for that or use someone else's academy (some planets offer that service).

The main "cash crops" out there are weird "crystals" left behind by some alien race; some attempts to implement aliens as players were started in code but none of the code developed sufficiently to make them playable.

Events like reactor meltdowns and such can happen, reducing population satisfaction or happiness or morale type score, but no mechanisms are in the code for countering such reductions; however it also appears the code might not cause that score to have any actual effect yet on population productivity.

The prices of the things you build for defense of your colony and for attacking other colonies have a very interesting feature of getting higher and higher the more you build of a given thing.

I call that interesting because it seems a nice way to imply a whole bundle of social issues like guilds, professions, unions, workplace safety regulations and on and on and on like that, whereby as industries become more established they are less and less about the initial cottage-industry starship-mechanics building stuff in their backyards and more and more about guilds and professional-societies and unions and so on making roles in the industry more and more defined with higher and higher wages and probably more and more bureaucracy amd regulations and bylaws and zoning and certifications of qualification and so on and so on and so on.

So it is maybe as if simply by that price formula twist a whole complex social phenomenon is simulated.

The "crystals" seem used in artificial intelligence, since many of one's workers are robots and building the robots requires crystals as components.

However since the fantasy worlds typical in Crossfire-RPG servers also have magic crystals, maybe the two instances of crystals can be correlated, providing Galaxy Forces with a potential export product to export to Crossfire-RPG fantasy worlds.

Obviously in any play to earn game it is important to identify its "cash crop" exports, the features it is going to use to bring in imports of the "cash crops" of other games, even if ultimately the only "cash crops" involved are actual currencies, each game producing a currency that can be traded for the currencies of other games.

Since we already correlated the currencies so that our Crossfire-RPG servers, our CoffeeMUD servers, and our Galaxy Forces server all use the same "in game fiat", by correlating this game's "credits" directly with one platinum aka five gold of the other games, we kind of need imports and exports other than currencies, if possible.

Since they are all free open-source games, we are of course very open to ideas from anyone, and even to anyone adding code to any of the standard distributions of the games toward helping the standard code as released play nicely with the Galactic Milieu as a whole.


-MarkM-

NOTE: I re-posted this on HIVE. Turns out they do identity/authorship checks, awesome! Yes HIVE, this is me...

Annapolis Royal Crypto proposed a very low key yet surprisingly high impact "game" some time ago...

The "small scale experiment" was simply to buy 1 to 3 Stellar Lumens worth of each of 1 to 3 of the Galactic Milieu assets each 1 to 3 days or so.

Back then of course was before Lumens made their recent climb in value, so if the scale seems large now (Lumens are worth about five times what they used to be) maybe consider scaling it down.

A LOBSTR wallet on a smartphone was used initially, set to show balances and such denominated in Lumens so one could see how one was actually doing without changes in the fiat values of anything confusing matters.

A later post showed how well the experiment was doing; suffice to day it was doing so well that less than two weeks later another post described it as like getting an instant 30% on everything put into it!

Of course that was not exactly what was happening, it was more like putting in another 25 Lumens, playing the experiment, and finding total value in Lumens of the account was still up 30% despite having presumably ostensibly "diluted" it by putting in more Lumens. If the total was still up 30% on average the new 25 too must have gained 30%, kind of idea. Which picks really did it though gets averaged out; it is even possible the particular picks the new 25 Lumens went on happened to do badly momentarily but others made up for it.

This "simple experiment" though reminded me of another rather fun sub-game of the metagame, which I call the bargain-hunting game.

Basically each time a new Latest Rates include-file comes out, convert it into Lumens, possibly using a script like this one:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
#
# myrates.sh
#

BC=/usr/bin/bc
#RATESFILE=/usr/local/lib/ot/conversionrates.inc
RATESFILE=conversionrates.inc

MYrate=$1

if [ "x$MYrate" == "x" ]; then
  echo "Syntax: myrate.sh rate"
  exit 1
fi

. $RATESFILE

echo sBCErate=`echo "scale=8; $sBCErate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo sBCIrate=`echo "scale=8; $sBCIrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo sBMCrate=`echo "scale=8; $sBMCrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo sBRFrate=`echo "scale=8; $sBRFrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo BTCrate=`echo "scale=8; $BTCrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo CDNrate=`echo "scale=8; $CDNrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo CLCrate=`echo "scale=8; $CLCrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo sCMCrate=`echo "scale=8; $sCMCrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo sCRFrate=`echo "scale=8; $sCRFrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo CZBrate=`echo "scale=8; $CZBrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo DVCrate=`echo "scale=8; $DVCrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo sDVCrate=`echo "scale=8; $sDVCrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo FBXrate=`echo "scale=8; $FBXrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo sGDCrate=`echo "scale=8; $sGDCrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo sGFCrate=`echo "scale=8; $sGFCrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo sGFFrate=`echo "scale=8; $sGFFrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo sGHCrate=`echo "scale=8; $sGHCrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo GMCrate=`echo "scale=8; $GMCrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo sGMCFrate=`echo "scale=8; $sGMCFrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo GPLrate=`echo "scale=8; $GPLrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo GPL2rate=`echo "scale=8; $GPL2rate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo sGRCrate=`echo "scale=8; $sGRCrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo GRFrate=`echo "scale=8; $GRFrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo sGRFFrate=`echo "scale=8; $sGRFFrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo sGROWrate=`echo "scale=8; $sGROWrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo GRPrate=`echo "scale=8; $GRPrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo sGRPrate=`echo "scale=8; $sGRPrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo I0Crate=`echo "scale=8; $I0Crate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo IXCrate=`echo "scale=8; $IXCrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo LTCrate=`echo "scale=8; $LTCrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo MBCrate=`echo "scale=8; $MBCrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo NKLrate=`echo "scale=8; $NKLrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo NMCrate=`echo "scale=8; $NMCrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo NRDrate=`echo "scale=8; $NRDrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo QBTrate=`echo "scale=8; $QBTrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo SPICErate=`echo "scale=8; $SPICErate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo TBXrate=`echo "scale=8; $TBXrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo UFCrate=`echo "scale=8; $UFCrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo UKBrate=`echo "scale=8; $UKBrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo sUNFrate=`echo "scale=8; $sUNFrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo UNSrate=`echo "scale=8; $UNSrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo USFrate=`echo "scale=8; $USFrate / $MYrate"|$BC`
echo XGGrate=`echo "scale=8; $XGGrate / $MYrate"|$BC`

The script lets you convert into any of the listed things by feeding the shown value in as first arg to the script, or of course you can feed it any arbitrary number, such as, in this instance, your own personal concept of how much a Stellar Lumen is worth. It then spits out the list with it all denominated in the arbitrary unit you put in.

So, having all the calculated values expressed in Lumens according to your own proprietary concept of how much a Lumen is worth or anyone else's concept they may have instructed you how to compute, you are then ready to go "bargain hunting", which basically means if you see anything being offered much cheaper than your shown values they are probably bargains.

Along the way of course you also encounter from time to time folk offering more, sometimes a whole lot more, Lumens for something than your own methods have computed, which can be a time to view Lumens themselves as being at that moment, if bought with that asset, a bargain!


-MarkM-

I installed Bison Relay but the page expected to show invitations for new users to get started connecting to folk is empty.

Rather than limit my scope to people specifically following Decred's own announcements thread I figured I'd ask here if anyone is interested in connecting over this end to end encrypted chat that apparently discarded user accounts and other potentially sensitive metadata carrying elements in favour of directly connecting users with minimum feasible escape of user metadata to servers and such.

Decred's thread has links to blog posts claiming some kind of insiders conspiracy has been conspiring to keep the world from being informed about Decred, yet nonetheless on looking in my AtomicWallet expecting to find a supposedly-suppressed blockchain wouldn't be there I found lo and behold it is there so it was simple to have the wallet swap something else for some Decred to get me started.

Very weird though is that later the same day while reading NaMeCoin's announce thread it occurred to me to check that of course an ancient established coin like NaMeCoin would of course be in AtomicWallet only to find NameCoin seems not to be there! Who, exactly, is it that some insider conspiracy is actually suppressing, again?

Part of what looks interesting about Decred / Bison Relay is apparently they do real atomic swaps between blockchains, though whether NaMeCoin is one such chain I do not yet know nor do I yet know whether actually all such similar chains are implicitly included due to configuring a swap being so configurable one merely plugs in relevant byte by byte details or somesuch of each blockchain and what encryption and signature methods it uses and presto ready to use your newfangled newly made up chain.

Here is where I read it has atomic swaps: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1290358.msg58824131#msg58824131

So anyway, anyone interested in chatting over Bison Relay? I cannot even tell yet how its topics work as that tab of client is unpopulated until I get one or more contacts; it seems maybe to imply topic channels though so once in there maybe we can find channels about almost any topic of interest at all including maybe any altcoins we happen to have common interest in?

Not sure how sensitive invites are, so if DM here seems too insecure maybe use Keybase end to end encrypted chat to invite me into Bison Relay? My Keybase handle is knotwork.


-MarkM-

Thinking about algorithmic pegs led me to wonder about applying such ideas to "the centralisation problem", particularly in proof of stake and delegated proof of stake scenarios.

The goes something along the lines of:

- Governance token giving vote proportional to number owned need not be the same asset as serves as main "currency" of the chain/platform, in fact maybe it is best that it is not.

- Proof of identity of owner can be optional so no involuntary "doxxing" is required.

Algorithm "pegs" price per unit to solution of the requirement "no doxxed entity doxxedly owns more than X percent and all doxxed entities in total doxxedly own majority between them", where quantitatively number taken as majority is whatever such number as suffices to pass the highest-requirement motion, so for example if constitution amendment requires 75% but common motions require only 55%, the 75% figure would be the one the pegging algorithm aims at.

The algorithm would simply keep spewing out more and more and more of the governance token until a sufficient number of doxxed accounts held them.

Holders would have an incentive to snap up any new units using doxxed accounts lest the increasing number in existence dilute the value per unit more than holders would prefer.

Initially firing-up could spawn a lot of units of course so maybe include some kind of rate-limiting consideration, who knows what kind would be best, does not more than doubling the number of units in a single block sound sufficient or too rapid?


-MarkM-

EDIT: Actual number of doxxed accounts holding would also probably need a minimum too, at least P number or percent of them in existence or something.

A few ideas have started to be tossed around by players of the Galactic Milieu along the lines of whether it is time to consider adding some kind of "auxilliary" treasury alongside the "official treasury" from which the game computes a "computed value" for each unit of an asset simply by dividing the total value of the treasury by the number of units minted.

The idea basically is that possibly just having the single treasury plus all the slush funds, so that only usually about half of an asset's total holdings counts as official treasury from which to calculate the value of each of the asset's units minted, is not really sufficing to convey the asset's value, as witnessed by over a decade now of trying to "float" such assets on spot markets.

It is already well known within the Milieu that spot markets are stunningly "inefficient" tools, especially at low trade volumes, for attempting to "discover" value by "discovering" prices.

But not only would it be as difficult for the Milieu to measure actual depth across all known spot markets to arrive at an "auxilliary treasury" value as to attempt to derive value per unit from spot markets, but for no clear reason none of the "aggregator sites" along the lines of CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko do that for us as far as I am aware. Nor come to think of it do they even acknowledge the existence of most of the spot markets on which we can conveniently "list" our assets.

Thus arises the idea that maybe when initially launching a treasury-based asset a civilisation or Corp divide their holdings into three, rather than only two, piles; one to put into an official treasury as already is normal, one to leave in one's slush funds as too is already normal, but a third to put into something to be termed an auxilliary treasury, AUXTR for short.

There had already been some ongoing discussion as to whether the initial holdings should be divided into three parts anyway, with the idea the third part would be the warchest of buy-offers deployed on spot markets to buy back one's asset; so the latest question has become whether or not there should actually be four parts, the buy-side's warchest and an auxilliary treasury being the third and fourth parts.

Which brings us up to date, where folks are throwing around ideas whereby those latter two parts would both be served by an AUXPOW by having the AUXPOW include a process for withdrawing from it and making that process accessible in the form of some kind of market or auction system so that entities desiring to redeem the asset for its calculated value according to its AUXPOW (as distinct from and separate from and not including its calculate value according to its "official treasury" that is already in place) could do so through some process that gives them some amount of choice as to which exact assets in the auxilliary treasury, and how many or what proportion of each, the redemption would be paid out in.

Since these seem like matters upon which some ideas and suggestions from outsiders might be helpful, I posted this post...


-MarkM-

Something a site-master asked me about just recently led me to wonder how much if any market there might be for a play to earn/win-things game for websites.

Off the top of my head I think of things like the free open-source "Villages Online" game, but many varieties of games could be made available via frames or widgets or outright run-able directly on the end-using site.

Villages Online is a simple free open-source implementation of basically pretty much the older versions of "Travian".

It is actually somewhat generic in that one can also choose a planets or stars type of "theme" in which villages are known as stars or planets or starsystems or whatever, city walls are force-fields, chariots are some kind of starship and so on and so on and so on.

The thing about it that I have long wanted to get around to fixing anyway is that it includes no "drain", no place or thing that the villages can ship stuff to that removes it from play, presumably keeping score of how much of what each player's villages have in total sent there.

So my site-master acquaintance's query led me to the idea that such an end-use place or thing that vanishes stuff and keeps score of what it vanishes could easily be used to dole out pretty much anything to players.

All that need change from end-using-site to end-using-site would be what is doled out and how much of which things villages can send it takes to "earn" each reward.

A service allowing it to be used in frames or via widgets or both would allow it to be used even by end-user-sites that don't want to run it directly themselves.

Such a play-to-earn-as-a-service site could set its awards to be tokens doled out from a end-using-site's balance, or even from an end-using-site's balance of some token or coin of their own even maybe though that would mean adding some kind of fee system whereby the service would be compensated for provision of the service.

Does any of that sound like it would even have a market at all?

As I am not totally informed as to what my site-master acquaintance is really looking for I am not sure I have even one potential customer for any such thing yet myself.

Obviously - as in obvious from where I am posting this - bitcoin would be a fine award for such games to be doling out to their players.

Also the much-referenced site-master might well have the wherewithal to simply take this idea and run with it, it is not a propietary idea, consider it free open source.


-MarkM-

I see a lot of folk complain about rug pulls but it is far from clear to me that those very same folk are actually furnishing rugs in the first place themselves personally.

The category of rugpull I am on about here is the one where the buy-side of the order-book, the actual column of buy-offers "supporting" the price, is "pulled" as in the offers are deleted.

How many of you don't even actually build a column of buy offers for each asset you work with in each pair you trade it in?

(It is tempting to aside "aha, thought so..." at this point.)

If you don't even provide a rug you don't really have any say in whether it gets pulled or not.

Provide ruggery yourself and there remains at least that much even if everyone else pulls theirs or never even considers providing one.


-MarkM-

I have noticed lately that a lot of folks hereabouts seem to think marketing / publicity is extremely important;

I have also noticed that many pie-charts of token-distribution allocate some slice to marketing / publicity.

Thus I am interested in how much percent the typical investor who thinks marketing deserves a budget typically allocates to marketing.

Presumably a person who thinks "marketing is everything" will be putting the vast majority of their investments into marketing-engines, advertising, publicity-systems and the like, figuring that the more powerful their publicity ability the more profit they can earn on maybe in many cases basically anything at all that they choose to promote.

Either by "affiliate advertising" or simply allocating some tiny portion of their budget toward purchasing things to advertise, ultimately the majority of their earnings will come not really so much from the things they promote as from having the ability to promote them.

In fact it seems to my naive thinking that at an extreme this kind of thinking might lead them to not even bother "investing" in any "inventory" such as coins or tokens or shares or whatever to advertise, leaning instead toward the affiliate approach or just directly being or investing into advertising agencies and such, either way basically promoting things they do not even own.

Probably because I hail from a free open source and community-based background, it has always seemed to me that each player or participant or investor or whatever one chooses to call them ought to be able to make their own decision as to how much of their capital to spend on "inventory" aka "investments" versus how much of it to spend on promoting such things; thus that individuals or Corps or groups or demographics or whatever who believe marketing is important would allocate more toward promoting the things they invest in than would folk who are of an opinion that if the thing is worthwhile it won't need such expenses: the "build a better mousetrap" idea versus the "if you aren't going to pay them to come they won't be coming" idea...


-MarkM-

"Griefing" is a very familiar problem in online multi-player gaming, heck likely even in tabletop multiplayer gaming "griefers" can be encountered from time to time but due to the small numbers of players at such tables it can often be dealt with simply by never again inviting them to a "game night".

In GameFi gaming, there is a species of griefer known as a "dumper", and those "dumpers" are pretty much exactly the same "dumpers" seen throughout crypto:

quintessential "takers, not makers" of spot markets.

They can make entire platforms of spot markets un-useable, especially in the case of platforms in which all the "spot markets" use the platform's native asset as one side of each trading-pair, if they get themselves into a position of being able to "dump" that asset.

It can become totally impractical to build good strong buy-sides for other assets on the platform by making the native asset so worthless that there simply are not enough of them in existence, or not enough of them in the game, to build everything else's buy-side with.

This problem makes it very clear that it is very useful for a game to have many currencies, because a simple way to deal with the problem is to basically strike off of your list of currencies you are willing to sell stuff for any currency that has become infested with such "griefers".

We have not been running the Galactic Milieu long enough yet to have much or any idea of how many decades such "griefers" tend to stick around "griefing" any particular game or currency, so it is not yet clear for how many years or decades one needs typically to avoid selling anything for that currency, but as long as you have plenty of currencies to choose from and avoid selling any of them for any that are already infected with such "griefers", in the long term hopefully some year or decade down the line they will exhaust their stockpiles and it will become feasible to return to building up the value of the offending currency so that some year or some decade or whatever after the "griefers" have run out of it it will again attain a value sufficient to let it start to gain at least a minor usefulness, at least in building buy-side for extremely cheap things...

The big reason to avoid selling anything for an "infected" currency is that the griefers' most likely reason for even buying any of what you are offering to sell is to trash that thing's value too by also "dumping" that; in other words, anything you sell to them is likely to itself become yet another "infected" currency or commodity (asset).



-MarkM-

[down]

The trouble with most so-called "stable coins" is that they are intended to be "stable" in fiat terms, which means they are actually intended to forever go down in value just like fiat does.

The Galactic Milieu on the other hand has for well over a decade now been working on prototyping "better than stable" coins.

If you look at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/deuterium.html you should be able to see, or maybe a better term would be to compute, that we seem to have succeeded rather well at creating in so-called "DEUterium" a commodity that tracks fiat quite well.

But as mentioned above tracking fiat simply means succeeding in going ever downward in value.

The more interesting aspect of that table is the assets along the top, which are actually only some of the early assets of like kind, newer ones have not been added to that particular table.

Notice that our stable-relative-to-fiat asset DEUterium actually goes downward in terms of the others (others except of course BTC, NMC and LTC which are sample assets to help calibrate the tables, not actual better-than-stable assets themselves except at least in bitcoin's case in average over time rather than continuing calculated value).

So far from this prototyping it does look like it is feasible to develop actual "better than stable" assets...


-MarkM-

Imagine that a long time ago, over a decade ago by now in fact, you were one of the few who managed to get in on an amazing opportunity.

You managed to get control of a "Galactic Repo" Corp, one of many being formed at that long-ago time.

In essence what had happened was players had been given the opportunity to set up intergalactic mining Corps at no cost to them, each such Corp starting out with debts to General Mining Corp (GMC) of 1000 GMC scrip and to General Retirement Funds (GRF) of 1000 GRF scrip, at 1% per planet-Earth day interest rate.

Back then not many actual characters on the Galactic Diplomacy planet took up the opportunity, rather as it turned out most of the Corps created were created by "random internet passers-by", likely including a few folk from BitCoinTalk forums who had not bothered to get into the Galactic Milieu with actual characters on the individual-character scale but took one quick look at this new intergalactic mining Corps scale maybe just to see what it looked like inside.

Thus most of the intergalactic mining Corps created involved someone logging in once, taking one quick look around, often not even having their initial mining colony start building powerplants and mines, and logged back out again never to be heard from again.

Naturally, the 1% per day interest on those Corps' startup loans built up quite a bit over time, as Einstein is claimed to have pointed out compound interest is powerful and these loans compound hourly in planet-Earth hours not game hours (typically game time runs 12 times faster than Earth time or thereabouts).

About a year later, an attempt was launched to get all those abandoned colonies up and running again, which of course involved finding characters qualified to run such Corps and willing to do so.

Thus were born the Galactic Repo Corps, starting with First Galactic Repo (FGR), Second Galactic Repo (SGR) and Third Galactic Repo (TGR) then continuing with Galactic Repo 4 (GR4) through Galactic Repo 33 (GR33).

Over time, more and more of those Repo Corps have succeeded in paying off their debts.

Accomplishing that involved a number of political and financial steps that included the spawning of more and more Financial Corps, starting with General Financial Corp, which turned out to be so fantastically profitable that it soon led others to get in on the idea.

In the course of those developments, interest rates fell as various Corps competed to get some of the debtor Corps to switch to them, which of course involved basically paying off the existing loans with lower interest rate loans from the new Financial Corps and sometimes the lowering of interest rates by Corps seeking to convince their debtors to stay with them.

Even with all that though, at time of writing this post a number of the intergalactic mining Corps are not only still deeply in debt but seem doomed to forever dig themselves deeper at current interest rates.

More and more competition is arising though among players and Corps and even Civilisations that recognise the value of these intergalactic mining Corps and in some cases deeply regret not having gotten into them from the outset well over a decade ago when the opportunity was presented.

My question here though is not what those looking to acquire such a Corp could or should do, as more and more ideas about that are already being proposed, but rather, how best ought the folk currently running the Corps whose debt situation seems almost beyond hope to proceed?

Several Repo Corps have already been acquired, seemingly by paying its erstwhile management a thousand or a few thousand GMC or GRF or UKB or CDN or whatever, since after all this time of running a Repo Corp at a loss, all its income going toward paying its loans hoping to end up with a fully paid-off Corp thereafter, some players were very willing to take a golden handshake payoff and let someone or something else pay off all the loans and take control of the Corp.

But is that the best thing for remaining chief operating officers or whatever they call themselves to do?


-MarkM-

Recently the New Roman Denarius found its spot market prices had far exceeded their treasury-based calculated value.

While their most-immediate response was to drive down their spot market price to bring it closer to their calculated value, this has also opened up an opportunity to take a serious look at adding more assets into their treasury to increase their calculated value.

As readers hopefully are aware by now, the Galactic Milieu's treasury-based assets system is a kind of continuation of, or further layer of, the Milieu's policy of only tokenising half of the coins it actually has, so that half can be used if need be to buy back all its tokens while the other half can sit in cold storage to be the actual coins the tokens represent; that way even after buying back all its tokens the tokens can continue to represent actual coins rather than needing like many other systems do to in essence de-tokenise coins to buy back its tokens.

This policy means for actual coins on their own blockchains not only that trade in them can happen even if their blockchains get clogged up such as by driving their difficulty so huge it takes months or more for them to start moving again (as happened to FairBriX not so long ago for example) but also that for every token available to trade them with there are typically two actual coins rather than one stashed away; this helps keep coins off the market, increasing the relative rarity of "in the wild" coins that could potentially be "dumped" onto spot markets to manipulate prices or outright trash prices.

The treasuries system layers upon that by tying up tokens into "treasuries" from which the game calculates "calculated values" of the tokens.

It does that not only because the spot markets are usually massively insanely "inefficient" but also as another help toward increasing the relative rarity of "in the wild" tokens that could potentially be "dumped".

There is still some "dumping" that happens with various of the coins and tokens of course, but over time this approach should help mitigate that.

Nonetheless we still evidently have enough "dumpers" in the wild that for many coins and tokens the spot market prices have tended to be lower, sometimes quite a lot lower, than the calculated value used in the game.

Thus a time like this, when a Milieu currency has found that its spot market prices have been very much higher than its calculated value, is the proper time to consider adding more assets into its treasury, thus increasing its calculated value.

Accordingly, the proto-Romans (Romans by inclination but not yet having officially created an actual "civilisation" in the Milieu) are in negotiations with various other groups, in particular, apparently, the Ixians, about adding some of their currency into the treasury of the New Roman Denarius.

It should be noted though that most of the groups with whom they are in negotiations are not themselves in the fortunate position of having built up their own currency's buy-side on the spot markets to a value higher than its own calculated-from-treasury value, thus in most cases if a deal does go through the NRD they get from the proto-Romans for some of their own currency will not be eligible for adding to their own treasury; they would be receiving it into one of their "slush fund" accounts instead, hopefully to help them build up the spot market buy-sides of their own currency toward some future day when they too will succeed in building a strong enough buy-side to fully match, or even exceed, their calculated value.

This "slush funds" approach, wherein slush fund assets are not counted toward the calculated value of their currency, and in which ideally the total value of their slush funds should ideally match or exceed the total value of their actual treasury from which their calculated value is computed, acts as yet another factor in favour of viewing the calculated values as by-design under-estimations of value, increasing further the multi-layered depth of value upon value upon value by which the Milieu aims to enhance the value of its assets.


-MarkM-

Since we are apparently finally actually approaching the launch of DMDv4, maybe now is a good time to use DMDv3 as an example to walk through the process of turning an asset into a Galactic Milieu "treasury-based asset".

Essentially what is called for is the creation of a "treasury" whose total value should ideally at least approach the supposed "market cap" of the asset according to such spot markets or spot market aggregator sites as might already list it.

Since there are only ever to be something like 4.2 or 4.3 million DMDv3 coins ever minted, and their supposed value lately has tended to be below USD$5 per coin, it is a small enough market-cap coin to probably not be too terribly hard to set up with a commensurate "treasury".

Furthermore there remains a chance, maybe a pretty high chance, that once people have claimed their DMDv4 coins corresponding to their holdings of DMDv3, leaving DMDv3 free to become "Diamond Classic", the spot markets might show a plunge, possibly a quite drastic plunge, in DMDv3 prices if, indeed, the exchanges that currently carry DMDv3 and claim they will go on to carry DMDv4 giving all their users of DMDv3 their corresponding DMDv4 even bother to continue to list DMDv3 at all.

Indeed it is not even clear whether the exchanges offering that automatic claiming of your DMDv4 for you even plan to actually give you back your DMDv3 after that claiming!

So it is quite possible that it will not even be necessary for a "treasury" for DMDv3, to make it a "treasury based asset" in the Galactic Milieu, to even come close to the current "market cap" of DMDv3; if prices decline drastically once DMDv4 is in place a much smaller "treasury" might suffice for DMDv3, thus presumably leaving it much of whatever assets the supporters of making it a "treasury based asset" can scrape together to become "slush funds", especially of course "slush funds" to be used to build its buy-side order-books on whatever platforms and exchanges it does end up supported by.

It should of course be pointed out that there is little point initially in putting more value into its "official treasury" than can be put into its buy-sides on whatever venues end up supporting it, in fact historically we have seen that in many cases an asset's "dumpers" apparently have total disregard for the treasury-based valuations of assets and just set about trashing the prices of everything they can; there seems to be a species of "griefer" in crypto gaming that loves that particular form of "griefing".


-MarkM-

As my take on "play to earn" evidently differs from what seem to be the "norms", I'll try in this post to give at least some glimpses into my own thinking on the genre.

For starters, a big part of my original thinking on the matter had to do with discouraging "griefing" in games by trying to ensure players have "skin in the game", something to lose, something hopefully sufficiently valuable or important to them that the risk of losing it could potentially serve as an effective discouragement of "griefing".

Thus my first thoughts were along the lines of requiring at least an initial fee to play even if not an ongoing fee such as a subscription, with the bulk of those fees going into some kind of earning or interest-bearing mechanism so that the longer the player kept playing the larger the eventual payment they could be refunded if or when they "honourably-discharged" themselves, a refund they would not be eligible for were they "dishonourably discharged" and that thanks to the earning or interest-bearing mechanism could well be larger than the original fee, ideally of course significantly larger.

The big "catch" I ran into with that of course lay in finding a suitable and reliable "earning or interest-bearing mechanism" to plug into that model.

It did not take a whole lot of empirical testing to determine that so-called "HYIPs" (High Yield Interest Programs) were not dependable for such a purpose.

Thus the challenge ever since has been to find or construct suitable plug-in "earning or interest-bearing" mechanisms.

Eventually of course, bitcoin was invented, wherein "mining" is an absolutely literal "money making" mechanism.

Aha, thought I, maybe at last this play-to-earn idea might be do-able!

Suffice to say that with the advent and proliferation of crypto, "earning mechanisms" aplenty are nowadays readily available.

This of course led to a new challenge: why bother to play games to earn rather than directly accessing the underlying earning mechanism(s)?

Anyone who might upon occasion have wondered why the Galactic Milieu has thus far not followed the crypto "fashion" of publishing a "whitepaper" might possibly give some thought to that challenge themselves, maybe they can provide some useful thoughts upon the matter.

The overall model is basically to have games intervene between earning-mechanisms and end-users (players), so ultimately play to earn games constructed according to such a model fundamentally amount to yet another form of "middleware" coming between the spigots and the wannabe-guzzlers.

Presumably the general tendency here in the bitcointalk forum would be to disintermediate the middleware and go directly to the faucets/spigots.

Thus arises the possibility that providing "whitepapers" detailing the spigots/faucets might be counterproductive...


-MarkM-

A whole lot of players, or potential players, clearly still exist to whom "the grind" evidently has great appeal.

So I thought now could be a good time to bring to folks' attention again a now somewhat ancient Devtome-Wiki article:

https://www.devtome.com/cpu_mining

Basically what it is about is "the grind" as a form of "CPU mining" hopefully somewhat resistant to "botnets", as a means of distributing currencies / coins / tokens (thus also as a potential form of "airdrop" even).


-MarkM-

I probably should post this Q-and-A on Quora as well as here, being as how Quora is specifically a Q-and-A kind of site, but here goes anyway...

The question has arisen, "does the Galactic Milieu project have a deck".

The answer of course is that we have at least three decks, and if we are to take the "law of fives" seriously we undoubtedly must in actuality have at least five.

There is of course the classic... the Rider-Waite deck.

Then of course for serious inquirers the Crowley deck.

Then if the cutting or possibly even bleeding edge deck is sought, kindly seek out the Ellen Cannon Reed deck.

Quite likely all three, plus almost certainly a considerable amount of commentary etcetera on them, can readily be found on line, which is herein left as an exercise for the student (aka player?)

-MarkM-

I get the impression the Ivory Tower around here is a relatively successful mechanism for keeping the masses from intruding into the affairs presumably of "Ivory Tower Intellectuals", however is it also making said masses less likely to be aware of what said intellectuals have been ruminating about?

I noticed https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5174190.0 just now in the Ivory Tower section of these forums and wondered if what it is on about is basically a no-brainer "duh of course" to Altcoin Intellectuals and Altcoin Discussionists in general or possibly to some something more akin to an "aha!"...

-MarkM-

I am attempting to understand a whitepaper, and have encountered within it a phrase I find grammatically indecipherable so to speak.

Googling the entire sentence in which it appears finds no comments, posts, arguments, queries etc about it, and it is actually cited at various other sites without any of them appearing on casual perusal of the google results to noticeably seem to be a site that is questioning the phrase nor the sentence containing the phrase. Indeed I suspect not even the whitepaper itself as a whole come to think of it.

The subject of this post (and thus also thread) is a sufficiently large snippet of the phrase that I find problematical (in being to me either unintelligible due to being ungrammatical or ungrammatical due to my apparent inability to " intelligibilise" - intelligiblise? in U.S. presumably "intelligibilize" or "intelligblise"? - it; which is maybe just a neologism for understand it.

The snippet provided seems to suffice at least for googling of your own if you need more of it than just the provided snippet to decide whether it is grammatical or uninteligible or I am merely failing to decipher it let alone to grok it.

-MarkM-

EDIT: Aha, got it! Leaving this in place though to encourage others to do so.