[DVC]DevCoin - Official Thread - Moderated

[alyssa85]

Hi, Question(s) about writing, copyright, collated work (on devtome, of course):
A. - If I write something with my own pictures (more then a dozen) and I'd like to include some other pictures (a couple, let's say from some University), with proper credits, is it considered original or collated?
(for exemplification, You might read http://toyservice.ro/stories/2011/led-dynamo-flashlight-tuning-and-repairs-july-2011/, rectifier pictures)
B. - Current copyright laws(*) might prosecute You for something like Pe?si(R) or Co?aCo?a(R) in the background of Your pictures. How do devtome interprets those new restrictions: should I gimp away any brand name/logo (blur/pixelize/...)? I work mostly with well known brands, and they appear in my pictures...

I mention I have read [almost] all I could find at search here and on devtome.

Thanks in advance for Your effort,

-------
(*) I have a few years under belt navigating through copyright laws in my country

If they are your own pictures, place them in articles that you list in your profile as original.

Note that everything you put onto devtome comes is placed there under a creative commons licence - which means a third party can then legally take the material/pictures and place them on their own site.

Don't put other people's brand images on devtome unless you have permission. So with coca-cola - give them a miss (devtome can't afford lawsuits).

[psybits]

Please support the official Devtome twitter account guys

PM me if you have a Devtome service / website which should go out on the twitter account.

https://twitter.com/Devtome

[wiser]

Is it really true that DeVCoin is the second-oldest cryptocoin, right after BiTCoin?

It really came before NaMeCoin, before, oops, GRouPcoin?

Hahaha we (Unthinkingbit and I) made GRouPcoin initially as just a chain to try out ways of implementing DeVCoin, then once we figured out how we could do DeVCoin GRouPcoin shed all those test/prototype features and the gamers who had been getting into it for use in games continued using it. So okay lets not count GRouPcoin, since we can lump it in as basically "part of DeVCoin", and it didn't really "go public", much at least, really, until after DeVCoin was launched. It just kind of continued along on its merry way as a coin used in certain games - such as the Galactic Milieu - for quite a while before much of anyone other than the gamers using it really noticed the darn thing had not died.

(Some gamers, coming from games like Dungeons and Dragons, Chivalry and Sorcery, Land of the Rising Sun and so on and so on, still to this day think that ultimately GRouPcoin ought, by market forces, end up as in effect a 1000-devcoin coin, because it generates one thousandth as many coins per block as DeVCoin and, being as how both are merged mined, ought hopefully to end up having the same difficulty as DeVCoin too. Thus, one thousand times as many hashes per coin to mint, thus, one thousand times as expensive. They aren't at all adapted to having different coins have different exchange rates, they are used to the number of silverpieces per gold piece, the number of copper piece, etc hard-coded into the game as constants! )

So I don't mind GRouPcoin being considered to come after DeVCoin, afterall it was only in order to implement DeVCoin, and as part of implementing DeVCoin, that it came into existence at all. DeVCoin already existed as our goal in our heads when we came up with the idea of making GRouPcoin as a testbed to try out some implementation ideas.

But I have a vague recollection that people who made chronological lists from time to time of which coin got created when used to list something else after BiTCoin before DeVCoin, didn't they? Or did they? If they did, were they wrong?

-MarkM-

Thanks for the background.  I'd never heard of Groupcoin before.  My impression that DVC is the second longest running crypto comes from this thread I think.  I've heard it before several times and it was repeated when the 2nd anniversary came around.  It is possible that this is a "legend" in the making that's not factually accurate.  I do have the impression that there may have been cryptos developed before DVC but that they are not considered viable today.  In any case, if you can show me that this is factually inaccurate I will go ahead and make a correction to my article.  I will also do some research and see what I can find out in the mean time.

If there are other facts in my article that are incorrect (I am a newbie still and don't have all the details straight yet), please also educate me and I'll make the appropriate corrections

MarkM, since you are one of the developers of Devcoin, wouldn't you have the ability to make the changes to how the Devtome works and so forth that you have been bringing up on the thread in the past two days?  I notice that often changes are suggested by various people here, and for the most part they get ignored, but every so often the system gets tweaked some based on a suggestion (or a bunch of similar suggestions) made here.  I personally appreciate the fact that changes are never made in a hurry, but to be honest I'm not even sure how changes are made at all.  If the share allocation for the Devtome were to change to the way you suggested, for example, what would the process be?

It was only at 200 satoshis for April and May - and that was entirely due to a pump and dump by Fontas - see the following thread where he admits he manipulated it to rise by 600%:

https://forum.litecoin.net/index.php?topic=4698.0

Pump and dump prices do not reflect the real market (that's why the Nasdaq, Dow Jones and FTSE ban them). They're a con. They manipulate prices to con ordinary people into thinking that the price is rising and they'd better buy in, and the conman then unloads to the unsuspecting noobs. Then they remove their pretendy buy walls, and it all collapses back to the "normal" price, except now you've got some people who have bought at the top and they are hurting.

Let's not have community members attack each other for something that was caused by an outsider just looking to make some quick cash...

Why isn't Devcoin subject to more pump and dumps any more? Primarily because other coins have been launched that are easier for the speculators to manipulate, plus the action has moved away from vircurex to cryptsy and Btc-e - and cryptsy doesn't let you trade dvc for btc, and btc-e ignores devcoin entirely.

OK, there you have it, folks.  So it really, truly, is not the Devtome writers' fault for depressing the price just because we sell off some DVC in order to actually do something with our earnings (while hopefully also working towards DVCs themselves being more suited to that purpose).  Now that all the insults directed at writers have served their purpose of inspiring my title, I think they can and should be discontinued

So is Vircurex now the only platform that allows trading directly from DVC to BTC?  

this is really good wiser Im proud of you! Mandatory reading for new writers.. this should be read
by the people who hate on devcoin. It has had
a black eye amongst some of the older crypto members speaking with ppl on forums but reading this should open their eyes. Ppl can link this page to anyone who wants motivation to get into devcoin aswell as how devcoin works kind of and how to earn and put it all in the
big picture. I will use it as a tool. Thanks!

Thanks so much for the kind words

[mrca]

Hi, Question(s) about writing, copyright, collated work (on devtome, of course):
A. - If I write something with my own pictures (more then a dozen) and I'd like to include some other pictures (a couple, let's say from some University), with proper credits, is it considered original or collated?
(for exemplification, You might read http://toyservice.ro/stories/2011/led-dynamo-flashlight-tuning-and-repairs-july-2011/, rectifier pictures)
B. - Current copyright laws(*) might prosecute You for something like Pe?si(R) or Co?aCo?a(R) in the background of Your pictures. How do devtome interprets those new restrictions: should I gimp away any brand name/logo (blur/pixelize/...)? I work mostly with well known brands, and they appear in my pictures...

I mention I have read [almost] all I could find at search here and on devtome.

Thanks in advance for Your effort,

-------
(*) I have a few years under belt navigating through copyright laws in my country

If they are your own pictures, place them in articles that you list in your profile as original.

Note that everything you put onto devtome comes is placed there under a creative commons licence - which means a third party can then legally take the material/pictures and place them on their own site.

Don't put other people's brand images on devtome unless you have permission. So with coca-cola - give them a miss (devtome can't afford lawsuits).

Lot of Thanks for Your quick answer, question B it's clear (I/We are going to gimp out all brands).

There is still question A: Do referred work taint the original work (when present in small percent, i.e. 5-15%)?
(some master and phd papers I've wrote were criticized when there were not enough references because of the novelty of domain and lack of existing literature... Here might be the reverse: the presence of some other work - small percent - could taint the original work and "degrade" it to collation?)

Thanks again for patience

[alyssa85]

Wiser I think devcoin is either the third oldest altcoin or the fourth. Namecoin was launched in April 2011, and Devcoin was launched in August 2011.

I think there may have been some other coins in-between that didn't make it.


I found this thread on groupcoin

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67991.0

In that thread markm wrote the following:

GRouPcoin is what we built on the way to creating DeVCoin. We tried some approaches toward how we thought we might be able to do DeVCoin, then once we settled on how to proceed we went ahead and made the actual DeVCoin.

Since the things we had been trying were things that turned out not to work, they were removed or turned back off, leaving GRouPcoin as just a simple inflation-forever coin, that is, a coin that keeps making 50 coins per block forever.

It also has the difficulty adapting fixes various coins adopted after seeing namecoin get left at high difficulty for months by being abandoned by miners, and the timetravel fix that prevents the timetravel exploit.

So it is just a nice simple example of a coin that keeps making new coins forever, which some people once upon a time thought might be better than designed-in deflation. I guess the people who used to argue against deflation, in favour of some kind of forever-minting coin like this one, maybe weren't really all that serious in their proposals since they do not seem to have made much or even any effort to actually pursue the experiment to see whether in fact not building in deflation is better than having deflation designed-in.

Nonetheless the experiment continues, and the coin is also being considered by the various Repossession corps in various games for adoption as their own currency, which they would then tend to refer to as Galactic RePo coin (also known as General RePo coin)  instead of GRouPcoin, retaining the GRP symbol but re-purposing it.

but am not sure when it became stand-alone and stopped being a test for devcoin.

[alyssa85]

Hi, Question(s) about writing, copyright, collated work (on devtome, of course):
A. - If I write something with my own pictures (more then a dozen) and I'd like to include some other pictures (a couple, let's say from some University), with proper credits, is it considered original or collated?
(for exemplification, You might read http://toyservice.ro/stories/2011/led-dynamo-flashlight-tuning-and-repairs-july-2011/, rectifier pictures)
B. - Current copyright laws(*) might prosecute You for something like Pe?si(R) or Co?aCo?a(R) in the background of Your pictures. How do devtome interprets those new restrictions: should I gimp away any brand name/logo (blur/pixelize/...)? I work mostly with well known brands, and they appear in my pictures...

I mention I have read [almost] all I could find at search here and on devtome.

Thanks in advance for Your effort,

-------
(*) I have a few years under belt navigating through copyright laws in my country

If they are your own pictures, place them in articles that you list in your profile as original.

Note that everything you put onto devtome comes is placed there under a creative commons licence - which means a third party can then legally take the material/pictures and place them on their own site.

Don't put other people's brand images on devtome unless you have permission. So with coca-cola - give them a miss (devtome can't afford lawsuits).

There is still question A: Do referred work taint the original work (when present in small percent, i.e. 5-15%)?
(some master and phd papers I've wrote were criticized when there were not enough references because of the novelty of domain and lack of existing literature... Here might be the reverse: the presence of some other work - small percent - could taint the original work and "degrade" it to collation?)

If the original was produced by you (i.e. you own the copyright), you can post it in it's entirety onto devtome and list it as an "original" work in your profile.

Collated work is more collations based on "fair use" quotations - l would say no more than 5% from the original source, otherwise you get into the realms of plagiarisation, and always put the quoted bits in quotes, and add a reference link to source.

[wiser]

Wiser I think devcoin is either the third oldest altcoin or the fourth. Namecoin was launched in April 2011, and Devcoin was launched in August 2011.

I think there may have been some other coins in-between that didn't make it.

Thanks Alyssa85.  I will go ahead and make a correction to reflect what you wrote.  And feel free to send any additional info you might come across, and like I said I will try to find this out for myself in the next few days too.

[markm]

There is still question A: Do referred work taint the original work (when present in small percent, i.e. 5-15%)?
(some master and phd papers I've wrote were criticized when there were not enough references because of the novelty of domain and lack of existing literature... Here might be the reverse: the presence of some other work - small percent - could taint the original work and "degrade" it to collation?)

I suspect any "other work" hosted on the Devtome server or included directly into a page served from the Devtome server probably needs to be free open source content used in accordance with its existing free open source license.

Are you familiar with wikipedia's stance on this issue?

It seems to me references are typically put at the bottom of the page and consist basically of links to third party sites that hosted the material that is referenced.

So for example if you want to make reference to a particular proprietary photo out there on the net somewhere, or even a photo you yourself took for some corporation (they own the copyright and have released it as free open source) that they now host on their site - probably regardless of whether it shows any logos - you should use a little superscript reference-number link like wikipedia does or some such mechanism the reader can click to jump to that reference's little blurb/link at the bottom of the page, from which they can click away to the third party site if they wish to see/read/hear/watch the actual thing/material you are making reference to...

-MarkM-

[markm]

but am not sure when it became stand-alone and stopped being a test for devcoin.

It seems reasonable to list it after DeVCoin, because DeVCoin already existed in our heads when we created GRouPcoin as a testbed to try approaches toward implementing DeVCoin, and I am pretty sure it wasn't until DeVCoin was working that we ripped out the failed attempts at creating a DeVCoin from the GRouPcoin code making it the actual GRouPcoin we are familiar with today rather than just a testbed - with gamers actually trying to use it so there'd be in effect actual testers testing it - on which to try ideas aimed at creating what we were actually trying to create (DeVCoin).

We can probably reasonably regard GRouPcoin as having remained a test coin until DeVCoin was launched; once DeVCoin was up and running its -testnet flag presumably would have been the way to go for any further testing of it. GRouPcoin never did have what DeVCoin has, it mostly tested little crucial details of what exactly one can do to coinbase transactions and how. Once we knew enough about what we could do there, we knew how we could implement DeVCoin so went ahead and did so. The gamers continued to test the use of cryptocurrency in games with the GRouPcoins they had accumulated, and naturally did not want their coins to vanish... If they were willign to game with vanishing coins they would have used bitcoin testnet coins in their games. A key feature for coins for gaming was, to them, the fact no dungeonmaster or game script etc etc could take their coins away aka cause them to vanish. Permanence was, to them, an essential feature. So GRouPcoin, without any of the failed attempts at changing genesis blocks or first few blocks or every block's coinbase or anthing like that, chugged along much like while other gaming coins such as United Kingdom Britcoins, Canadian Digital Notes, United Nations Scrip, General Mining Corp scrip, General Retirement Funds scrip etc etc etc. (All of which eventually moved away from using blockchains "temporarily" until such future time as sufficient transaction volumes exist to make the transaction fees add up to enough to attract miners.)

I think I read somewhere that the scrypt coins - Tenebrix then Fairbrix then Litecoin (though that list might be leaving out SHA256 coins launched in the meantime, I do not know) came after DeVCoin and thus presumably also after GRouPcoin. I do not know if that is true though.

-MarkM-

[alyssa85]

MarkM - seeing as you were the developer for Devcoin, can I ask you a question? What was the reasoning behind issuing 50,000 coins per round instead of 50.

Someone on reddit described Devcoin as a "zimbabwe currency" - i.e. they looked at the number of coins rather than market cap, and decided in a split second that it was "zimbabwe" and therefore they didn't want to participate. I'm convinced this is the thing holding the coin back - it's not fitting in with pre-conceived ideas about how a currency should be.

[markm]

In those days a whole lot of posts and threads had been or were going on about how with bitcoin going up in value so much ordinary things people buy like a cup of coffee or whatever was going to end up needing lots of decimal-places, and normal people would be weirded out by that, so bitcoin should move its decimal place, and on and on like that.

So part of the design that Unthinkingbit hired me to help him learn how to implement and help him implement included that the intended coin was to have already moved the decimal place from the get-go, so as to get the whole big argument about whether to move the decimal place and if so how far to move it and so on out of the way right from the initial design.

So basically it was handed down to me "from above" by the client as part of the initial specs of what he wanted.

When bitcoin is $1000 per coin and a cheap cup of coffee costs 0.001 BTC, maybe if we are really lucky, and awesome marketers, and create oodles of businesses that use devcoin, and convince masses of people and shops and so on to adopt it as yet another of the many currencies their payment processor processes for them, that same cup of coffee might cost the much less confusing price of 1 DVC.

(Good luck with that. We'd presumably need our difficulty to catch up with bitcoin's too while we're at it to achieve that, so I guess we need to convince all the bitcoin pools to take up merged mining too...)

(Oh and we keep mining forever, so we'd get an inflation hit that bitcoin doesn't...)

Unthinkingbit did most of the work, he is the developer, he hired me to help him learn/discover how to implement what he wanted and I helped a little in actually coding it in the process of us both discovering how it could be done. He mostly just needed someone more familiar with the bitcoin codebase to help him learn faster how it worked, and we both needed to do some actual experiments to learn what kind of hacks at it we could get away with.

(I think I had already been working on all the game-nation and game-corporation blockchains at the time so was quite familiar with making basic hacks at the code to make clonecoins, though I had been hacking the testnet code to make those so that gamers could use the -testnet switch (or a renamed such switch) to make their client do their chosen gamecoin or use the same client without a switch to have it do normal bitcoin as usual.)

-MarkM-

[shakezula]

markm - is there a way to mirror this:

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/

Without getting a login prompt? I've added a receiver files repository to my site, and would like to cron job a script to pull them from your site--is that doable?

[FinShaggy]

Is Devtome down?

[markm]

markm - is there a way to mirror this:

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/

Without getting a login prompt? I've added a receiver files repository to my site, and would like to cron job a script to pull them from your site--is that doable?

The receiver files are not linked from anything at all, you'd have to ask for them by name, knowing in advance what names you want to ask for, one by one. Same for the account_##.csv files.

Of course in any given round there ought only be one new reciever file you need and, if you want the account file to match, one new account file. The older ones you would presumably already have by then.

They are not behind any login prompt, that login thing is just the php scripts of a php+mysql intergalactic mining game.

-MarkM-

[sidhujag]

anyone know what the low was on vircurex? I see 28 on the last trades but dont knownif that was the low?

Btw you can trade on mcxnow.com... its an up and comer and pretty sweet built ontop of c++ very fast and secure also pays out interest on balance of dvc.

[markm]

But is run by RealSolid, of more fame or infamy than just Solidcoin fame or infamy, for whatever that is worth or not worth or anti-worth, right?

-MarkM-

[shakezula]

markm - is there a way to mirror this:

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/

Without getting a login prompt? I've added a receiver files repository to my site, and would like to cron job a script to pull them from your site--is that doable?

The receiver files are not linked from anything at all, you'd have to ask for them by name, knowing in advance what names you want to ask for, one by one. Same for the account_##.csv files.

Of course in any given round there ought only be one new reciever file you need and, if you want the account file to match, one new account file. The older ones you would presumably already have by then.

They are not behind any login prompt, that login thing is just the php scripts of a php+mysql intergalactic mining game.

-MarkM-

Thank you, I will just script something to wget them by name and augment the name upwards by month.

[jasinlee]

devtome.com is getting pounded by bots for registration. Since the new writers are manually added anyway I am going to disable the page for now to avoid the registration bots. If theres an issue with this let me know.

[smeagol]

markm - is there a way to mirror this:

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/

Without getting a login prompt? I've added a receiver files repository to my site, and would like to cron job a script to pull them from your site--is that doable?

I am a file admin as well, what do I have to do?

[markm]

markm - is there a way to mirror this:

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/

Without getting a login prompt? I've added a receiver files repository to my site, and would like to cron job a script to pull them from your site--is that doable?

I am a file admin as well, what do I have to do?

I am not convinved that all the receiver-file sites "blindly" duplicating whatever garbage some hacker manages to put on one such site is a great idea; indeed it seems to weaken the theoretical robustness that having multiple admins maintaining multiple receiver-file sites ought to be buying us.

One time I noticed Unthinkingbit had left something out, as when I ran the file-generating scripts I happened to notice the resulting receiver-files were not paying me at all; I knew I ought to be getting at least a little something for maintaining a receiver-file site so I questioned what was up.

Despite that I didnt really look hard at all the rounds since, maybe checked the first time I was in the receivers file but then just figured whatever problem had happened before was now fixed.

So I think it is probably a good idea that admins actually run their "get latest receiver file from site X" script manually and take some kind of cursory look at what it gets before defeating the purpose of having multiple admins "maintain" copies by blindly copying whatever hack some hacker manages to get into one site and thus give the hacker automatically a hack of a majority of the sites, as the whole point had been one would have to hack a majority of the sites to accomplish a hack that would effect/affect end-users.

Also even if cron is used at all, it surely ought not to be, like, "every day in case the files changed that day", but, at most, "when a new round is due, to get the correct new files for that round."

Furthermore, typically Unthinkingbit PMs me that it is time to generate the files and upload them to my site, I do that, then he checks them (presumably) before then contacting other admins informing them the next round's files are ready. Or, at least in theory, he notices a problem, such as that he had forgot soemthing on his end before telling me to generate the files, and tells me to generate them again as he has made a fix.

So having "cron" propagate that initial erroneous file everywhere in the meantime while we are still not in consensus even just the two of us that we created them correctly would not be a great idea.

For example sometimes he will PM me to generate them and upload them, I do, then days later he PMs me again to tell me so and so had not put his tip address correctly on his Devtome author page or whatever so now that is fixed I should generate and upload again.

Only once he feels that what I have generated from the component datafiles he has put in his charity-git directory I git pull from is good, and the remaining days of grace authors get for getting their tip address right and all that does he then proceed to tell other admins that a new receiver file (or when we add another host to all receiver files going back in time to make even past history more robust, a new set of receiver files) is available for them to grab from my site.

It isn't a great idea to have "cron" pull the intermediate draughts that are part of Unthinkingbit and I working toward a consensus on what the new files should contain and whether the copy on my site is ready for others to grab yet.

Admittedly changing our working methods so as not to upload to my actual site others grab from until after consensus could avoid that but would then also add another potential place for a glitch in that we could end up in consensus that what we created is good, without it actually being on my site others pull from yet.

The way we do it currently, by the time we think it is good it is already on the correct site others will then be told to grab it from. So he is checking in effect not only that they built correctly but also in the correct place where they will thus actually get grabbed, both by other admins (who hopefully doublecheck them before putting them on their own sites) and by end-user clients.

TL;DR: I think thus admins should not use cron, and should have two scripts/commands: one very seldom used, that grabs all the files, for those rare occassions when we update the entire set of files to make all the files list all the current file-sites; and one for the usual every round case, that just grabs only the latest files. That one they might end up having to use more than once if somehow Unthinkingbit tells them my copy is ready to grab from before the grace days are over and some new author urgently convinces him to squeeze them in at the last moment due to some gltich with their tip address or something.

(For all I know, it might be that Unthinkingbit tells just one other admin the files are ready, and waits for them to confirm we don't seem to have screwed them up, before telling another admin or more admins or the rest of the admins... We should maybe figure out what we'd do if Unthinkingbit got run over by a bus without our knowledge thus we didn't hear from him at all, too, maybe... s/maybe/probably/ ... s/probably/certainly/ ...)

-MarkM-