[DVC]DevCoin - Official Thread - Moderated

[markm]

We can implement an "interest" type incentive simply by assigning "shares" to any share-recieving addresses that still contain coins that have not moved for a certain span of time.

By limiting this to share-receiver addresses, such as the addresses folks have on file in Devtome as the address to pay their shares to, we hopefully will at least to some extent avoid paying interest to ancient long-lost dead addresses no-one remembers their private keys to.

A better way of implementing it though might be to assign a certain number of shares, or a certain percentage of the total shares, to a "General Interest Corp" (GIC) which will pay dividends to its own shareholders and whose mandate includes holding more of the coins itself after each dividend-payment cycle than it held prior to the previous dividend-payment cycle thus ties up more and more coins itself.

So far I have avoided creating any dividend-paying assets for a few reasons:

One reason I have avoided creating dividend-paying assets is that the dividend-payment cycle tends to create sawtooth waves in the value of the asset, since the value grows as it accumulates stuff then falls when it pays some of that stuff out as dividends.

Another reason I have avoided creating dividend-paying assets is my background as Gamemaster of "Role Playing Games" (RPGs); it has been my experience in games that players typically are not doing market-investor type analysis of their dividend-paying assets but, rather, have tended to in a way possibly over-value them; they have tended to hang on to such assets stubbornly, because the mere fact that such assets keep creating new value for the player makes them hands-off earners.

Take for example an "Odin's Ring" object that creates a gold ring each day; or a "Purse of Plenty" that creates a gold coin each day, or other such objects; I have yet to encounter a player who has computed a reasonable sale price to sell such an object based on its annual earnings or suchlike; instead players have historically tended to just hang on to such objects as something that will ensure their character keeps getting richer even if the player vanishes for a decade or few decades failing to play at all. Maybe it is simply too much trouble to try to bend their minds around how to compute a price, or maybe it is partly there are not a lot of active markets in such trinkets so they do not have other "interest-bearing" trinkets against which to compare relative price vs earnings ratios.

Take for example "General Holding Corp", known outside the game as "General Hosting Corp". It charges the civilisations on the FreeCiv planets "hosting fees" intended to cover the projected cost of maintaining "OpenSimulator" three-dimensional representations ("regions") to represent the land held by those civilisations on those planets.

The actual cost of running a FreeCiv planet is far, far less than the projected cost of representing that entire planet in  "OpenSimulator"; General Holding Corp (GHC) accumulates the difference between what it charges the civilisations and what it currently actually costs the Corp to maintain the planets at the current level and scale of representation.

Since we thus far have not deployed OpenSimulator on planetary scales, this accumulates a lot, so obviously it is in the interests of the civilisations to hold enough shares of GHC to offset their civilisation-hosting fees.

This in turn would lead to a barrier-to-entry for prospective new civilisations considering joining the game, if all the shares of GHC were already owned by competing civilisations. If we insist that in order to create a civilisation within the game you must own at least one such share that makes even less incentive for anyone to part with a share, at least to anyone who does not already control a civilisation within the game.

By not paying dividends, General Holding Corp (GHC) forces players to have to sell shares if they want to "realise" any of the accrued "earnings" of the Corp. That hopefully will create enough sell-pressure over time to ensure that at least from time to time it becomes possible for aspiring civilisations to find a share to try to buy.

Another example is General Financial Corp. As can be seen from the table at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/sharesindvc.html it has accumulated value over time. If it paid dividends what would be anyone's incentive to sell any of the shares? By not paying dividends it forces holders to have to part with shares if the holders want to "realise" any of the gains.

Considering how much hassle has historically been involved in dealing with "exchanges", whereby any given asset or coin might at any time turn out not to happen to be actually "listed" at any such service, it has seemed particularly important to try to give holders some reason to actually sell something occassionally. So the giving of dividends has historically always seemed like a counter-productive idea compared to making it necessary for someone to actually somehow "make a sale" in order to "realise" any "earnings" or "profits"...

BY THE WAY, regarding "DiaMonD": that is indeed a nice coin, at some point I should probably add it into the "current conversion rates" calculations as it has been becoming more and more important to the "big picture" ever since using it as a major way of withdrawing earnings from Cryptsy. Well over 100,000 DMD so far is in our current "big picture" and it is expected to have more and more importance as part of the "reserves" that in effect are the ultimate "backing" of the coins used in the Galactic Milieu and thus effectively in "backing" DeVCoin. It will probably also eventually become associated with the in-game objects known as diamonds in the various games that serve as interfaces into the Milieu.

ALSO BY THE WAY, regarding General Holding Corp shares, you might have noticed GHC is not listed in the public pages showing share values. That is deliberate, as the Corp is not really intended to be publicly traded as ownership of its shares is intended to be by civilisations and prospective civilisations rather than by the general public.

-MarkM-

[1714310761]

1714310761

[1714310761]

1714310761

[1714310761]

1714310761

[develCuy]

Wonderful!! This is the kind of feedback we need for this discussion!!

I look forward to your feedback people!

I thought I'd chime in with a few points. Back when I got started writing for the Devtome, Devcoin was one of just a handful of cryptocoins on the scene, meaning it didn't have much competition. Now there are over 500 cryptocoins in existence, some of which are so fundamentally solid and profitable that they are attracting the interest of venture capitalists and hedge fund managers. This means we can learn even more from the successful coins and honestly stack up Devcoin against them to see what would need to be changed in order to be competitive.

The following are a few observations I have about what it takes to make a successful cryptocurrency in today's industry:

1. More and more, it is important for a new coin project to be more than just a coin. It must be a complete ecosystem. This often means multiple tokens and interlocking systems. Some good examples are the emerging VIVA project (vivaco.in), Steemit (with its Steem, Steem Power and Steem Dollars tokens), Ethereum and NEM with their block chains capable of supporting other tokens.

2. There has to be genuine value supporting the coin. This means infrastructure that makes the coin easier to use or adds value to it in some way. Bitcoin has a lot of that (example, various trading platforms, Coinbase, payment processors, websites which sell quality products and accept Bitcoin payments) which has been added on by third parties. However a new altcoin needs to have some of that value added right from the beginning by the development team itself. Some other good examples of coins with value added infrastructure include DNotes and Steemit.

3. There has to be a development team. It can't be a one man show. The bigger and better organized the team, the better chance the coin has. A development team that runs the enterprise like a genuine business is even better. This means it can't all be about coding, though that is important. There have to be others on the team who handle the outreach and marketing and who tell the coders the features needed to make the coin user friendly for non coders (which is most of the people you hope will adopt your coin).

4. A coin needs a built in incentive to tie up the supply and keep it off the market. This means that it is in people's self interest to hold onto the coin for the long haul. Idealism or faith in the coin is not enough. If I am going to hold your coin there has to be something in it for me both now and in the future. The simplest way to do this is to offer some kind of interest equivalent whereby my holding onto the coin earns me a rate of return in the form of new coins or some other token. DNotes has the DNotes vault which pays monthly "interest" to all who hold coins in it for set amounts of time (the penalty for early withdrawal being that you lose the earned interest). Diamond Coin has a cloud mining operation where people earn Diamonds based on how much Bitcoin they have donated to the operation. Any Proof of Stake coin already incentivizes people to hold the coin and run the wallet.

I have always believed that Devcoin's biggest weakness as it works right now is that it incentivizes earning and dumping, not holding. Then to add insult to injury when it became known or suspected that people earning Devcoins were dumping them, they were often harshly repudiated here (not called out by name or anything but it was clear that those who dumped were considered to be bad for the coin,). In order to hold onto Devcoins you had to be altruistic towards it and basically take the hit from others dumping, and that is just not going to be sustainable because most of us plain aren't altruistic like that. This is probably the most important change Devcoin needs to make. The coin needs to be coded in to incentivize holding rather than dumping.

Related to this, it must be assumed that people will game the system if it is beneficial to them to do so. You need to engineer your system in such a way that there is no benefit to attempting to gain the system and that using the system in the way you intend is what gives the greatest benefit to the end user. That can be very challenging to accomplish but I believe it is possible and the successful (and not so successful) coins now out there have a lot to teach us about what kind of things need to be written into the code. The code should also be flexible enough that when you find a loophole you don't want, you can fix it with an update or fork.

5. The development team needs to have a good reason to create buy support for the coin on the open market. Again, altruism is not enough. In the case of Diamond coin, the developers need to buy Diamond in order to pay the weekly payouts from the cloud mining operation. If the developers aren't buying the coin, then others need to do so for reasons of self interest. With the exception of the speculators who are there to profit from trading itself, the reason that anyone else would buy the coin has to be because they need the coin. You need the coin in order to gain the benefit from accumulating and holding it, or you need it to pay someone with it, or you need it to buy something with it. An altruistic desire to prop up the coin's value is not enough and won't be sustainable long term.

6. The coin needs to be attractive to speculators. Speculators are important because they provide liquidity for everyone else, meaning others can easily buy or sell the coin at a consistent value (not too much difference between top buy and sell requests). So whatever it is that makes speculators go "wow, I want to speculate on this coin!" is what your coin needs to have so that everyone else can have the needed liquidity to get into and out of the coin at will.

7. The coin needs to have a solid community of people who are there because being part of this community will better their financial lives in some way. They should believe in the coin but that belief should stem from solid fundamentals and the perception that this coin will do good things for their bottom line. In order to nurture this community it is very important to have basic courtesy and professionalism wherever that community gathers. That community needs to be growing.

There are probably a couple more points that I have missed, but what I have shared is a good starting point. How does Devcoin do on each of these fundamentals? How could it be changed or forked to excel in those fundamentals which are weak now? The honest discussion around these points could become the basis for a solid plan for how to update Devcoin to now be competitive in today's industry.

[R-J-F]

I thought I'd chime in with a few points. Back when I got started writing for the Devtome, Devcoin was one of just a handful of cryptocoins on the scene, meaning it didn't have much competition. Now there are over 500 cryptocoins in existence, some of which are so fundamentally solid and profitable that they are attracting the interest of venture capitalists and hedge fund managers. This means we can learn even more from the successful coins and honestly stack up Devcoin against them to see what would need to be changed in order to be competitive.

The following are a few observations I have about what it takes to make a successful cryptocurrency in today's industry:

1. More and more, it is important for a new coin project to be more than just a coin. It must be a complete ecosystem. This often means multiple tokens and interlocking systems. Some good examples are the emerging VIVA project (vivaco.in), Steemit (with its Steem, Steem Power and Steem Dollars tokens), Ethereum and NEM with their block chains capable of supporting other tokens.

2. There has to be genuine value supporting the coin. This means infrastructure that makes the coin easier to use or adds value to it in some way. Bitcoin has a lot of that (example, various trading platforms, Coinbase, payment processors, websites which sell quality products and accept Bitcoin payments) which has been added on by third parties. However a new altcoin needs to have some of that value added right from the beginning by the development team itself. Some other good examples of coins with value added infrastructure include DNotes and Steemit.

3. There has to be a development team. It can't be a one man show. The bigger and better organized the team, the better chance the coin has. A development team that runs the enterprise like a genuine business is even better. This means it can't all be about coding, though that is important. There have to be others on the team who handle the outreach and marketing and who tell the coders the features needed to make the coin user friendly for non coders (which is most of the people you hope will adopt your coin).

4. A coin needs a built in incentive to tie up the supply and keep it off the market. This means that it is in people's self interest to hold onto the coin for the long haul. Idealism or faith in the coin is not enough. If I am going to hold your coin there has to be something in it for me both now and in the future. The simplest way to do this is to offer some kind of interest equivalent whereby my holding onto the coin earns me a rate of return in the form of new coins or some other token. DNotes has the DNotes vault which pays monthly "interest" to all who hold coins in it for set amounts of time (the penalty for early withdrawal being that you lose the earned interest). Diamond Coin has a cloud mining operation where people earn Diamonds based on how much Bitcoin they have donated to the operation. Any Proof of Stake coin already incentivizes people to hold the coin and run the wallet.

I have always believed that Devcoin's biggest weakness as it works right now is that it incentivizes earning and dumping, not holding. Then to add insult to injury when it became known or suspected that people earning Devcoins were dumping them, they were often harshly repudiated here (not called out by name or anything but it was clear that those who dumped were considered to be bad for the coin,). In order to hold onto Devcoins you had to be altruistic towards it and basically take the hit from others dumping, and that is just not going to be sustainable because most of us plain aren't altruistic like that. This is probably the most important change Devcoin needs to make. The coin needs to be coded in to incentivize holding rather than dumping.

Related to this, it must be assumed that people will game the system if it is beneficial to them to do so. You need to engineer your system in such a way that there is no benefit to attempting to gain the system and that using the system in the way you intend is what gives the greatest benefit to the end user. That can be very challenging to accomplish but I believe it is possible and the successful (and not so successful) coins now out there have a lot to teach us about what kind of things need to be written into the code. The code should also be flexible enough that when you find a loophole you don't want, you can fix it with an update or fork.

5. The development team needs to have a good reason to create buy support for the coin on the open market. Again, altruism is not enough. In the case of Diamond coin, the developers need to buy Diamond in order to pay the weekly payouts from the cloud mining operation. If the developers aren't buying the coin, then others need to do so for reasons of self interest. With the exception of the speculators who are there to profit from trading itself, the reason that anyone else would buy the coin has to be because they need the coin. You need the coin in order to gain the benefit from accumulating and holding it, or you need it to pay someone with it, or you need it to buy something with it. An altruistic desire to prop up the coin's value is not enough and won't be sustainable long term.

6. The coin needs to be attractive to speculators. Speculators are important because they provide liquidity for everyone else, meaning others can easily buy or sell the coin at a consistent value (not too much difference between top buy and sell requests). So whatever it is that makes speculators go "wow, I want to speculate on this coin!" is what your coin needs to have so that everyone else can have the needed liquidity to get into and out of the coin at will.

7. The coin needs to have a solid community of people who are there because being part of this community will better their financial lives in some way. They should believe in the coin but that belief should stem from solid fundamentals and the perception that this coin will do good things for their bottom line. In order to nurture this community it is very important to have basic courtesy and professionalism wherever that community gathers. That community needs to be growing.

There are probably a couple more points that I have missed, but what I have shared is a good starting point. How does Devcoin do on each of these fundamentals? How could it be changed or forked to excel in those fundamentals which are weak now? The honest discussion around these points could become the basis for a solid plan for how to update Devcoin to now be competitive in today's industry.

This is excellent. Wiser has captured the essence of success in crypto and reduced it to a few paragraphs of intelligent, well thought out observations and advice. What is printed above should become a roadmap for a successful crypto project.

[wiser]

On another note I had to start my Devcoin wallet all over again (download the block chain again). It is now stuck on 111 weeks behind for the past 24 to 36 hours. Do I just wait it out or do I need to try something different? Thanks.

EDIT: Well, waiting it out worked! Wallet is synced.

[R-J-F]

On another note I had to start my Devcoin wallet all over again (download the block chain again). It is now stuck on 111 weeks behind for the past 24 to 36 hours. Do I just wait it out or do I need to try something different? Thanks.

EDIT: Well, waiting it out worked! Wallet is synced.

Synced without issue. Good to visit my balance again! 

[rplescia]

I think wiser hit the nail on the head with his point #4 above. From reading through this thread and trying to get an understanding of where some of the issues lie it's clear to me that for this coin to survive one of the main things that need to happen is to switch this coin to Proof of Stake with a fair interest rate, eliminating the need for anyone to buy back Devcoin. Create a new wallet and give people a grace period to transition over to the new wallet, after that burn the old coins. Get the community involved in resurrecting this coin in the same way Dimecoin and Embercoin has, encouraging people to trade the coin and create liquidity

[ranlo]

I am 100% on board with the interest idea, and think it would go a long way towards promoting holding the coins. Could even implement one of those "must hold x days" rules to make it more effective.

[olcott]

Guys I have a spare resources on my hosting server. I would like to offer some of those resources to the DevCoin project if needed.

[R-J-F]

I think wiser hit the nail on the head with his point #4 above. From reading through this thread and trying to get an understanding of where some of the issues lie it's clear to me that for this coin to survive one of the main things that need to happen is to switch this coin to Proof of Stake with a fair interest rate, eliminating the need for anyone to buy back Devcoin. Create a new wallet and give people a grace period to transition over to the new wallet, after that burn the old coins. Get the community involved in resurrecting this coin in the same way Dimecoin and Embercoin has, encouraging people to trade the coin and create liquidity

Agree. This makes sense and covers most if not all the issues at hand.

[nutildah]

Hi guys, I read a few recent pages of this thread but can't seem to find out which exchange devcoin is listed on. There must be at least one because CoinGecko has a price for it. Thanks for your help.

[MicroGuy]

Hi guys, I read a few recent pages of this thread but can't seem to find out which exchange devcoin is listed on. There must be at least one because CoinGecko has a price for it. Thanks for your help.

Here you go! https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/devcoin/#markets

[develCuy]

The Discussion is taking too long

TIME FOR A BACKUP PLAN

While I still believe that Devcoin still has enough community support for "resurrecting", it looks to me that people is waiting for real action rather than more endless discussion. Back to the basics:

"Talk is cheap... Code is gold!"

Let's code some stuff guys!

So, I'm planning to push some stuff to the official repo so you guys can play with it and to provide feedback hands-on.

If you guys want to push some code upstream, go ahead!

This is our playground from now on: http://github.com/coinzen/devcoin/

Let's move convert this discussion into Pull Requests!

[Wekkel]

Please make a Windows wallet so I can play with it. I cannot code that well (and GitHub is still a mystery to me) so I cannot be much of service in terms of coding.

[K1773R]

The Discussion is taking too long

TIME FOR A BACKUP PLAN

While I still believe that Devcoin still has enough community support for "resurrecting", it looks to me that people is waiting for real action rather than more endless discussion. Back to the basics:

"Talk is cheap... Code is gold!"

Let's code some stuff guys!

So, I'm planning to push some stuff to the official repo so you guys can play with it and to provide feedback hands-on.

If you guys want to push some code upstream, go ahead!

This is our playground from now on: http://github.com/coinzen/devcoin/

Let's move convert this discussion into Pull Requests!

just dont play on the master branch.

[wiser]

The Discussion is taking too long

TIME FOR A BACKUP PLAN

While I still believe that Devcoin still has enough community support for "resurrecting", it looks to me that people is waiting for real action rather than more endless discussion. Back to the basics:

"Talk is cheap... Code is gold!"

Let's code some stuff guys!

So, I'm planning to push some stuff to the official repo so you guys can play with it and to provide feedback hands-on.

If you guys want to push some code upstream, go ahead!

This is our playground from now on: http://github.com/coinzen/devcoin/

Let's move convert this discussion into Pull Requests!

That sounds like a good move. Can you periodically post updates here on how the coding is going, for those of us who don't code?

[markm]

Are you lot aware of the panoply of domains this project has had sitting around for years waiting to be deployed?

I really think that instead of throwing around all kinds of F.U.D. about how the coin is broken and so on, you would do better to actually make proper use of the damn coin the way it actually is.

All this moaning and screwing around has served to keep delaying and delaying and delaying the deployment of all the cool stuff we have sitting in the wings.

For example all the problems with the Wiki make the idea of deplying the various special-focus Wikis we have long had domains ready for seem like hmm hmm maybe just not yet, let them get the general-purpose no-specific-focus Wiki working smoothly first before expanding into the whole panoply of specialised-topic Wikis.

We have a perfectly good coin that works just fine, we the original developers are still right here, still waiting for the folks who insisted they needed to take control of various of its domains, run its wiki and so on to actually demonstrate that they are in fact able to perform those tasks adequately.

By the way regarding the current Wiki, is there some reason why we cannot deploy Google Adsense ads on it? Preferably big graphic banners that pey per exposure rather than per click?

I am thinking of setting up all our domains with webservers, if only with placeholder pages explaining what kinds of things we had had in mind for each domain, and since one of our biggest problems is too many shares being allocated to folks who dump the coins instead of to folks who are tying the coins up into various projects designed to absorb and retain coins, maybe it would be a great idea to assign a share per such domain toward hosting and admin, or even a share toward hosting and an additional share toward administrative expenses?

Also maybe it would be a good idea to enumerate and describe some of the projects that aim to tie up coins, create "Corps" out of them, and assign each such "Corp" a share toward administrative costs?

I am also re-visiting the idea of insisting upon actual DeVCoins in payment for various things, especially recurring annual things, that are denominated in DeVCoins, instead of flexibly offering to accept "equivalent value" ( at current exchange rates such as those shown at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc ) in various other coins and assets, to force players to have to resort to some form of exchange to pay those recurring fees and thus be more likely to impact the actual exchange-rates.

I think there are something like two billion devcoins minted each year, with one thousand players an annual fee of two million DeVCoins per player would consume all of that. with only one hundred players it would take an annual fee of twenty million to do so.

You have to have an, or the, entire economy in mind; you need "money sinks" equal to the amount of money being minted if you are to keep MUDflation from running away with itself.


Maybe it is time to make the authorship shares of the Wiki be shares of the DeVCoins that the advertising on the Wiki manages to bring in? Have it buy DeVCoins with the advertising revenue as was originally intended but also give the authors shares only of that revenue?

Bring back to mind yet again that originally one share was intended to be what one person who as a matter of lifestyle puts in typically ten hours per week of coding work was to receive.

How many thousands of words should an author be able to post in a forty-hour month of writing on the Wiki?

Is it not a bit ridiculous to expect forty hours of writing to result in only one thousand words?

How many words SHOULD we really require of authors per forty hours (one share) of writing?

Meanwhile, I am continuing to build up the buy-side of the DVC/LTC orderbook...

-MarkM-

[markm]

I have started to strengthen the DVC/LTC order-book, but of course to strengthen the buy-side (buying DVC, using LTC) involves taking "real wealth" and converting it in LTC with which to place "buy DVC" orders.

Since there are many other things I can do "real wealth", it naturally occurs to me to wonder what exactly I am buying by buying DVC.

Once upon a time buying DVC used to mean supporting the development of Free, Open-Source software.

Specifically, the Free Open Source Software I was interested in was certain cryptocoins and certain games and certain tools useful or potentially useful for integrating cryptocoins and crypto-assets with games.

Back in those days everything seemed fine, we had a number of deployable multi-player-game systems, an endless budget (shares of DVC) with which to commission any code changes the games might need in order to better integrate with one-another and with the backdrop of cryptocoins and crypto-assets linking them all together into one overarching multiverse economy, wow what could possibly go wrong?

One of the thiongs that went wrong, it seems is suddenly the development budget, that is to say, the shares of minted DVC, suddenly got diverted awat from software development into the development of prose (writing, written material); and furthermore not specifically prose designed to enhance the economy of the multiverse underdevelopment but seemingly mostly prose that did not even make any mention of the multiverse, so that all this massive collection of prose did not even seem to effectively promote the economy of the multiverse at all, instead it chopped the whole thing off from its root, which had been free open source software.

We were not even designing whole new systems from scratch, but sensibly and economically taking already-existing software systems requiring minimal modification to link them all together into one larger multiverse and in fact mostly being able to work together to build that multiverse without even absolutely having to change the code at all, provided human labour could be used to perform the linkage tasks that ideally would eventually be handled in code.

So as I look into adding more and more LTC to the buy-side of the DVC/LTC market, I find myself asking just how much of the minted DVC nowadays actually goes to software developers and to bounties for making the needed changes to existing software to better support the multiversial economy we are building, as compared to how much is being frittered away on unrelated writings, writings that are not part and parcel of documenting and marketing the multiverse that we are building?

Maybe it would be useful to allocate some bounties for the kinds of articles that we probably need for easing the introduction of people into our multiverse?

Maybe articles by new players describing by what route they chose to enter the multiverse, what choices they perceived to be available to them, which they actually chose and why, how theyt went about whatever they did go about and so on?

It was kind of assumed that since the game provided an endless wealth of things to write about, players would be the primary contributors to Devtome, basically creating an ever growing wealth of documentation about the game and how it has been played any how it could be played any whether this that or the other approach to play seemed better or worse than verious other approaches and so on and so forth, doubtless with somewhat propagandistic slants making one's own guild or nation or whatever sound like a better one to team up with than its competitors and so on to add spice to the narratives.

In addition to working on obtaining LTC with which to build up the DVC/LTC buy side order-book I have been working on migrating the parts of the multiverse's economy that has been residing in the Digitalis Open Transactions Server all these years to the HORIZON platform ( see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2197968.0 ).

This is all part of my lifestyle of "devotes typically 10 hours or more per week to the development of free open source software" that earns me one share of the minted DeVCoins. It seems kind of insane that anyone other than maybe Stephen King or the like should be earning an entire share of the minted DeVCoin just for pasting 1000 words to the Wiki, why the heck would anyone ever waste time creating software when they can instead write thousands of words about how much more coins they earn simply writing about why they cannot afford time to spend creating software compared to simply writing about doing so or, really, writing about any darn thing that crosses their mind?

-MarkM-

[ranlo]

I have started to strengthen the DVC/LTC order-book, but of course to strengthen the buy-side (buying DVC, using LTC) involves taking "real wealth" and converting it in LTC with which to place "buy DVC" orders.

Since there are many other things I can do "real wealth", it naturally occurs to me to wonder what exactly I am buying by buying DVC.

Once upon a time buying DVC used to mean supporting the development of Free, Open-Source software.

Specifically, the Free Open Source Software I was interested in was certain cryptocoins and certain games and certain tools useful or potentially useful for integrating cryptocoins and crypto-assets with games.

Back in those days everything seemed fine, we had a number of deployable multi-player-game systems, an endless budget (shares of DVC) with which to commission any code changes the games might need in order to better integrate with one-another and with the backdrop of cryptocoins and crypto-assets linking them all together into one overarching multiverse economy, wow what could possibly go wrong?

One of the thiongs that went wrong, it seems is suddenly the development budget, that is to say, the shares of minted DVC, suddenly got diverted awat from software development into the development of prose (writing, written material); and furthermore not specifically prose designed to enhance the economy of the multiverse underdevelopment but seemingly mostly prose that did not even make any mention of the multiverse, so that all this massive collection of prose did not even seem to effectively promote the economy of the multiverse at all, instead it chopped the whole thing off from its root, which had been free open source software.

We were not even designing whole new systems from scratch, but sensibly and economically taking already-existing software systems requiring minimal modification to link them altogether into one larger multiverse and in fact mostly being able to work together to build that multiverse without even absoluitely having to change the code at all, provided human labour could be used to perform the linkage tasks that ideally would eventually be handled in code.

So as I look into adding more and more LTC to the buy-side of the DVC/LTC market, I find myself asking just how much of the minted DVC nowadays actually goes to software developers and to bounties for making the needed changes to existing software to better support the multiversial economy we are building, as compared to how much is being frittered away on unrelated writings, writings that are not part and parcel of documenting and marketing the multiverse that we are building?

Maybe it would be useful to allocate some bounties for the kinds of articles that we probably need for easing the introduction of people into our multiverse?

Maybe articles by new players describing by what route they chose to enter the multiverse, what choices they perceived to be available to them, which they actually chose and why, how theyt went about whatever they did go about and so on?

It was kind of assumed that since the game provided an endless wealth of things to write about, players would be the primary contributors to Devtome, basically creating an ever growing wealth of documentation about the game and how it has been played any how it could be played any whether this that or the other approach to play seemed better or worse than verious other approaches and so on and so forth, doubtless with somewhat propagandistic slants making one's own guild or nation or whatever sound like a better one to team up with than its competitors and so on to add spice to the narratives.

-MarkM-

Gotta be honest. I have tried to get into the game a few times. It's just not user-friendly enough. It's confusing and somewhat convoluted. I think that's why it's not really catching on -- learning how to even get in the game and do anything is a job in and of itself. That said, I love the idea of a game backing DVC. But it has to be easy enough that passive players can dig in.

[markm]

Gotta be honest. I have tried to get into the game a few times. It's just not user-friendly enough. It's confusing and somewhat convoluted. I think that's why it's not really catching on -- learning how to even get in the game and do anything is a job in and of itself. That said, I love the idea of a game backing DVC. But it has to be easy enough that passive players can dig in.

Maybe that is where writing could help. Someone could write about their explorations so far, the steps they took and where they led etc.

It does not help that the financial base under it all has kept being pulled out from under it, or even when not the finances the actual servers as when the three third-party servers that were serving as dvcstable01, dvcstable02 and dvcstable06 dot dvcnode.org all went offline due to the hosting company turning out, after all that time, to be massive scammers.

The Battle for Wesnoth modules that educate players about the game (being as how BfW is basically a computer-aided-instruction program with battle scenes interleaved to get the players personally involved in the histories they are reading by attempting to re-enact them) have always been online of course, but with the passage of time I would not be surprised if we have again reached a point where the mainline release of BfW is a newer version so that until we yet again update the modules to match the latest version folks would have to use an old, legacy version of BFW to play the modules.

Possibly the simplest way to initially get one's feet wet is the two-dimensional tile-based interface, "Crossfire RPG", which is maybe retro enough that pretty much anyone can probably manage to work with it although it does require graphics and probably would not work well on a cellphone or tiny tablet.

That is still the only free-as-in-beer way in, and so is vulnerable to account-spamming and character-spamming and, by account and character spamming, the creating out of nothing of in-game resources such as food, clothing, tools and even money and/or valuables. So it necessarily tries to keep the "wealth" on a small scale. Its currency therefore does not appear in the HORIZON system until the coin known as "Amberium", which has a lot of buying-power in the Crossfire RPG system but whose value out in the multiverse at large has still to be determined, presumably by market forces.

The main potential code-modification wanted for the Crossfire RPG code is to fix the support for permadeath.

When playing e.g. Dungeons and Dragons or the like live on the tabletop with players miniatures pencil and paper and so on in one's livingroom one typically is in permadeath mode, which gives a real RPG flavour that is lacking in typical videogames where instead of actually dying, possibly being able to be resurrected if such technology or magick is available, players simply re-appear at their last save point or in Crossfire RPG's case, at their designated "savebed". The code does have permadeath, and we use it, but there is a glitch that is very important economically in that guild memberships bank accounts and even one's corpse that is sitting where one died waiting potentially for resurrection are all tied to the character-name but the character-creation routines do not prevent the creation of a character whose name is the same as some other dead character, so if when you die an opponent managed to create themselves a character of that same name before you do they inherit your memberships, your bank accounts, and even your corpse with all its skills and experience and such. That is a potentially very serious problem that really needs to be fixed!

Arguably it simply adds zest to character-killing as if you kill someone's character there is a chance you will be faster at re-using the character-name than they are, but this is not an intended effect just a side-effect of the permadeath code not having been fully followed-through.

The mainline developers of Crossfire RPG do not actually favour permadeath so are actually maybe more likely to remove it than to tidy up its loose ends, so this is something where a bounty would maybe be very useful. If we can make DVC bounties actually worth something that is.

P.S. In a way it is not just one game supporting DeVCoin, it is every actually working free open source multi-player online game codebase we can find and even a lot of work over the years on trying to fix some that were not really working when we first came across them!

-MarkM-

[K1773R]

This is all part of my lifestyle of "devotes typically 10 hours or more per week to the development of free open source software" that earns me one share of the minted DeVCoins. It seems kind of insane that anyone other than maybe Stephen King or the like should be earning an entire share of the minted DeVCoin just for pasting 1000 words to the Wiki, why the heck would anyone ever waste time creating software when they can instead write thousands of words about how much more coins they earn simply writing about why they cannot afford time to spend creating software compared to simply writing about doing so or, really, writing about any darn thing that crosses their mind?

-MarkM-

i never understood what "writers" have to do with DEVcoin, ie development. once that took off, i lost interest in devcoin just like other devs. a revert is needed.