I too am interested in where and how DeVCoin is being mined. If the blockchain is moving, despite its massively high difficulty, obviously there is a LOT of hashing power pointed at it, so much that it is hard to believe it is not being done by means of merged mining.
Remember that DeVCoin is just one of a whole family of merged-mined coins. It can be merged alongside IXCoin, I0Coin, GRouPcoin, CoiLedCoin and even GeistGeld, all of whose blockchains are also still moving and some of whom are still on exchanges of the "normal" type that people expect. IXCoin and I0Coin for example are both on FreiExchange and IXCoin is also still on Yobit.
There are also a bunch of "Galactic Currencies" that once upon a time used to be blockchains of their own, but which migrated to the Open Transactions platform long long ago leaving GRouPcoin to continue as its own blockchain using merged mining in order to demonstrate to them whether or not it would in fact be practical to secure a blockchain using merged mining. The thinking was that if GRouPcoin showed merged mining to be practical and effective those other currencies could think about migrate back to blockchains of their own, merged mined, if GRouPcoin's life as a merged mined coin seemed so successful that they had reason to think they too could survive that way despite the fact that, unlike GRouPcoin, they did not have a continuing minting of new coins to pay out to miners.
Currently it is still not looking good for GRouPcoin, nor indeed for CoiLedCoin; they are struggling along with difficulties far too high for the amount of hash-power they are receiving; so currently it continues to look like the other "Galactic Currencies" were wise to move away from trying to run on blockchains of their own.
However Open Transactions also did not pan out as hoped, in particular its developers kept refusing to finalise their data format and also would not commit to providing automation for migrating to any new formats they decided to switch to, so now those currencies have migrated to the HORIZON platform and also can be traded using tokens on the STELLAR platform.
Because of the general lack of liquidity so many coins suffer, and the horrible treatment they have received at the hands of various "normal" familiar types of "exchanges", we also came up with the "Treasuries" system to allow us to calculate "relative values" of the coins and Corps (shares). Admittedly those calculated values have been difficult to translate into price-on-exchanges on the "normal" familiar exchanges, but still they can be useful. They at least allow various games to conveniently translate between the various currencies, which is necessary because a fair bit of economic activity does continue to take place within the "
Galactic Milieu.
Currently we seem to be left with just three routes out to fiat from the entire panoply of coins and assets: IXCoin, which can be sold at FreiExchange and at Yobit; I0Coin, which can be sold at FreiExchange, and Stellar Lumens, which can be sold at many many places.
A whole lot of the coins should have prices against Stellar Lumens on the Stellar platform, but I expect you will find that most or even all of themsell for far less than our calculated values. So maybe it would be helpful to try to put together some kind of averaged ratio giving us an idea at what fraction of their computed values our coins tend to be going for there are on Yobit and FreiExchange, and maybe even some attempt could be made to figure out from time to time which route out is offering the best prices from time to time.
There are too many coins involved for me alone to keep up with, my Stellar clients do not even give me any easy way to tell whether someone has bought some of some coin or other thus yielding Stellar Lumens which I can use to build up that coin's Lumen buy-side.
I have been monitoring IXCoin and I0Coin on FreiExchange and Yobit, but so far am a long way from building up their prices there anywhere close to the computed values. In the past however I have found it possible over time to build them up to a dollar or so each. If anyone else had been helping me do that back when my email account got hacked they would maybe still have that kind of value, but no, not a soul was helping so when the hacker dumped all my coins they didn't get dumped on a friend doing the same strategy I was doing, instead they went for almost nothing to who-ever had a few random buy offers down at insanely low prices. We would have been spared that if even just one other person had been bolstering the buy-sides as I was. Having only one person, vulnerable to just one email account hack, doing it was a terrible mistake we should not repeat. We NEED more people keeping up the buy-sides the way I was, so that next time one such person gets hacked it does not destroy the value of all the coins.
As to DeVCoin in particular, in my mind one of the big problems we had with it is not enough DeVCoins were spent into the Galactic Milieu to allow the players to effectively use DeVCoins themselves to pay their DeVCoin-denominated debts. This was actually a large part of why the whole "Treasuries" system was created, since it became necessary for the players to pay those debts using other currencies instead of by buying DeVCoins with their other currencies so as to pay the debts using actual DeVCoins.
Nowadays for example shipments of DEUterium being delivered to General Mining Corp and General Retirement Fund depots have been tending to amount to 25 million to a few hundred million DeVCoins worth of DEUterium at a time. Lately I have noticed that General Mining Corp has been using Canadian Digital Notes (CDN) to pay for such shipments. In the case of deliveries from Corps whose debts is with General Financial Corp and thus denominated in DeVCoins, this has resulted in an accumulation of Canadian Digital Notes in General Financial Corp's "slush fund". This is not ideal for DeVCoin.
Ideally, there would at all times be hundreds of millions of DeVCoins for sale for CDN, and also for GMC and GRF and other commonly used (in the Milieu) currencies, so that General Financial Corp could reasonably as that the debts be paid in actual DeVCoins instead of in "equivalent value" (according to the computed relative values based on the "Treasuries") of CDN, GMC, GRF, UNS, UKB or whatever else the buyer of the DEUterium happens to have conveniently on hand.
Further, this would need to be sustainable. That is, those DeVCoins would need to cycle back around into buying up those other currencies. General Financial Corp can handle that IF it actually starts to accumulate actual DeVCoins into its "slush fund". The problem thus amounts to the fact that far too little of the DeVCoins ever minted ever got allocated into the Galactic Milieu. The total number in circulation within the Milieu is far too small to have been of practical use.
The theory had been that since so many Corps within the Milieu would be needing DeVCoins so as to pay their DeVCoin-denominated debt that there would constantly be a lot of liquidity, with DeVCoins being bought with a whole bunch of other currencies though probably mostly GMC and GRF since it was General Mining Corp and General Retirement Fund that were buying the DEUterium thus presumably would have been expected to often be using their own currencies (GMC and GRF respectively) to do much of the buying.
As it is though, there is so little DeVCoin available to be bought using pretty much any currency, especially those most commonly used within the Milieu, that it simply is not practical to really use DeVCoins at all other than as a "unit of account" for debts that are in practice being paid using other currencies entirely.
A possible side-effect of this seems to have been the lack of issuance of DeVCoin bounties for software modifications useful to the Milieu, the cause-and-effect presumably being that since by withholding DeVCoins from the Milieu the Milieu never really managed to become the great economic engine for DeVCoin it was intended to be, thus never became important enough to the DeVCoin project to seem worth developing using bounties.
I have to agree with a point made by someone earlier, that simply piling up DeVCoins in a "DeVCoin Foundation" kind of entity does not really inspire a lot of confidence that those coins will not hit the markets and drive down the price.
Part of the idea behind the Milieu was precisely to tie up coins so they would not hit the markets, expecially DeVCoin since it was one of the highest-inflation coins; but they were to be tied up into ever more and more and more entities, maybe even buried many layers deep under each-other so it would become ever more unlikely that the coins all the various entities had in their treasuries would ever hit the markets.
For example one idea that has been in the cards for many years is the building of value of virtual real-estate by tying up coins into the real-estate. This would work really nicely if we also had some kind of taxes or suchlike on the real-estate because with some kind of tax we could go beyond simply taking all the money paid for the real-estate and distributing it to non-player-characters standing by to buy back that real-estate; we could constantly increase, using the taxes, the amount of money those non-player-characters have sitting there waiting to buy back the real-estate, thus increasing the value of the real-estate.
Back when we started there were no "smart contract" platforms. Nowadays they are proliferating. Thus nowadays it would also be possible to do things like sink coins into entire planets, bound up with smart-contracts, so that the only way to bring them back into circulation would be to destroy the planet, possibly using a ratio like the 20% we see in CoffeeMUD where when you scrap a thing made from a material you only get back 20% of the material that went into it.
So we could have a doomsday option whereby a death-star or somesuch (probably itself not cheap) could scrap a planet yielding 20% of its backing coins as immiediate salvage and the remaining 80% diffusing into harder and harder to reclaim portions, ultimately maybe to include cosmic dust and gamma rays and other photos and particles and so on that eventually could coalesce into new stars that could form new planets. We could tie up coins for literally centuries or millennia and overall it would be much more interesting that "burning" them.
The large scale view really of thev approach I have been taking is not to accumulate coins in order to dump them, but to accumulate them in order that they can be buried for the foreseeable future, driving up the value of those that remain in circulation.
The whole way I issued tokens onto the Open Transactions platform was part of that: the idea was that once I issued X number of tokens representing, say, DeVCoins, the DeVCoins represented by those tokens could be buried "forever", or at least until my heirs and assigns, or great-great-great-grandchildren or whatever, eventually devided there is no longer any point in trading DeVCoins unsing tokens so the whole operation should be shut down, so they would dig up the coins and use them to honour the tokens.
But as I said, ideally the coins would never need to be dug up. I issued tokens for only half my coins precisely so that I would be able to buy back all the tokens without having to dig up the "buried" coins they represent.
The idea is to make money on the day to day buying and selling, not on the hoard.
-MarkM-
