With all the problems the merged mined SHA256 coins have had with "exchanges", I wonder if the "moneychanger bots" approaches I was using years ago (when there were hardly any altcoins around) might be worth updating and re-deploying?
Originally I wrote them as IRC-bots, but of course IRC is kind of insecure, so to use them with "real money" on IRC would require re-implementing them based on the "gribble" bot, where any action that needs to be secure requires the user to pgp-sign a security-response issued by the bot.
Their back-ends though were shell-scripts, so that the back end functionality can be used by anything that can issue a system-call to the shell to secute system-commands on the server.
Thus it was relatively simple to modify in-game bots such as bartenders in guildhouses in Crossfire RPG and MUD-characters run by tinyfugue MUD-clients.
Unlike IRC, with Crossfire RPG and with MUDs one can use ssh-type connections; I am not sure offhand whether Crossfire RPG servers and clients have built-in ability to allow ssh-type connections, but CoffeeMUD does and so does the TinyFugue MUD-client, and of course even if the Crossfire-RPG clients and servers do not natively support secure connections one could always set up proxies or pipes using ssh itself, albeit that might not be real popular with grandmothers and the like.
Basically what these bots do is provide a logged-on (in IRC or whatever online game the bot is running in/on) access to accounts on a coin daemon, using the coin daemon's own built-in (and primitive) "accounts" system, and also maintain per-currency accounts for a number of currencies so as to enable moneychanging.
This is different from trading on an exchange because you do not get to place offers.
The bots thus do not need to maintain a database of how much who is offering of what for what.
Instead what they do is use the coin daemon accounts system to keep accounts of how much of each type of coin they bought with which other type of coin so as to in effect "back" each coin with the coins they have bought with it.
For example suppose the bot buys some IXCoin using BiTCoin. The IXC that it bought USING BTC goes into a fund it can then use to buy BTC with IXC.
If it also happens to buy some IXC with NaMeCoin, that IXC goes into a separate account, so that it can then use it to buy NMC.
The IXC it bought with BTC will only be used to buy BTC, the IXC it bought with NMC will only be used to buy NMC and so on for all the coin-pairs.
That way it kind of tries to act like a nation's bank or reserves, backing a coin by using other coins to buy it with; but it does that for all the currencies, so the one bot could be used by all the nations to back their own currencies with reserves of all the other currencies.
The main reason for all this was that among the very first "altcoins" were the national coins of the Brits (United Kingdom Britcoins, UKB), Canucks (Canadian Digital Notes, CDN), Martians (Martian BotCoins, MBC), and United Nations (United Nations Scrip, UNS) and the corporate coins/funds of General Mining Corp (General Mining Corp scrip, GMC) and General Retirement Funds (General Retirement Funds scrip, GRF), and the ubiquitous bitNicKeL, NKL, all of which were at that time early-model blockchain-based currencies that were implemented before GRouPcoin and DeVCoin, using ancient bitcoin code, by modifying the code to have the -testnet flag of the client activate an alternative blockchain instead of the bitcoin testnet. (So that users could use just one client to access bitcoin and their game-nation or game-corporation's national or corporate coin simply by using the -testnet setting.)
Thus the majority of the coins the bots originally supported were national/corporate coins, so that the basic core concept of "backing" a currency with "reserves" was a core concept.
(The game-nations and game-corporations behind UKB, CDN, MBC, UNS, GMC, GRF and NKL were strong proponents of the idea that minting and issuing a coin without standing behind it by being ready willing and able to "buy it back" was essential/important.)
So anyway, the basic idea here is that maybe "exchanges" are not really that good for us, because they keep unlisting us if they do not see "volume" to get fees from, whereas these "moneychangers" do not care about volume as they do not need to track thousands of offers other people are making but instead just need to stand ready to buy back any coins they have sold, using the coins they sold them for, in order to provide "backing" for the coins they support.
Historic and current exchange-rates are shown at
http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html(Assume some markup or markdown will be applied of course, selling at higher than listed rate and buying at lower than listed rate.
)
-MarkM-
