[DVC]DevCoin - Official Thread - Moderated

[mv1986]

I'd start from what you want Devcoin to be that it isn't now, and mechanics of how, and work backwards. Not vice versa.
The answer to renew vs not (and relative interests of current vs future holders) will become apparent in the process.

Wise words from a wise guy!

[1713883612]

1713883612

[R-J-F]

I'd start from what you want Devcoin to be that it isn't now, and mechanics of how, and work backwards. Not vice versa.
The answer to renew vs not (and relative interests of current vs future holders) will become apparent in the process.

This is the crux of the issue. And, don't forget, this forum has a voting system you can take advantage of before making any 1 to 1 million decisions.

[markm]

Don't screw around with the existing coin. It is still in early days, relative inflation is less each year, if you think it is too high wait a few years.

What would probably be helpful would be to get working open sourceexchange code working so we do not have to keep depending on third party exchanges that are not specifically invested in the merged mined coins, of which DeVCoin is one.

There are plenty of coins people can trade in their DeVCoins for, but without working free open source code we have to do it all manually.

Look at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html if you are unsatisfied with your DeVCoins trade thm for something else. But do not screw with DeVCoin as it is a major part of that whole interwoven ecosystem of currencies and assets.

Also I finally bit the bullet and started trading on the DVC/LTC market, so come dump your DeVCoins for Litecoins if you don't want your DeVCoins.

-MarkM-

[HHWlife]

New Devcoin (nDVC) and the Devcoin Renewal Service (DRS)

Thanks everyone for your feedback! We clearly have two options here:

1. Starting anew (airdrop or ICO)
2. Allow to convert old DVC into new DVC (consider old DVC as pre-mined)

Each option has pros and cons, but somebody has to make a decision when there is not general agreement, otherwise we'll never move forward.

My decision is to go for option #2. I know it will take more effort and that some people is holding big amounts of old DVC for doing almost "nothing", but there is an "easy" fix for that: Pump nDVC quite high against old DVC!

Devcoin Renewal Service (DRS) and its Exchange Rate

What is a fair exchange rate for DVC/nDVC? I need help with that! My proposal is 1:1000000 (1 nDVC for every 1,000,000.00 old DVC). Please propose your own exchange rate stating why you consider it fair!

Of course, there should be some boundaries for this, because old DVC will still be generated by old miners. The day nDVC is released, we should also announce the date when DRS will be available and the date when it will shut down, so that no more conversion will be possible.

We have two very important questions here:

1. What is a fair exchange rate for converting DVC to nDVC?
2. For how long should the Devcoin Renewal Service be available? weeks? months? years?

Please give some light to this discussion

how did you come up with 1mil:1? whats the total supply now? i think 1000:1 seem more realistic. we dont want to reduce the coin too much. i think new total supply should be around 100mil to 1bln. anything more than 10bil. looks like a pump&dump coin(unless we have superstar team working on it) and appears to mainly cater to whales.
i ill say drs should be no longer than one month. this coin has been around over 4yrs. we cant wait forever. lets move fast and ignore naysayers. decentralization means we go democratic and dont heed one or two persons biased argument. just like after many years of debate we finally did the segwit wtnss adoption, lets stop being lazy and start moving.

[HHWlife]

Don't screw around with the existing coin. It is still in early days, relative inflation is less each year, if you think it is too high wait a few years.

What would probably be helpful would be to get working open sourceexchange code working so we do not have to keep depending on third party exchanges that are not specifically invested in the merged mined coins, of which DeVCoin is one.

There are plenty of coins people can trade in their DeVCoins for, but without working free open source code we have to do it all manually.

Look at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html if you are unsatisfied with your DeVCoins trade thm for something else. But do not screw with DeVCoin as it is a major part of that whole interwoven ecosystem of currencies and assets.

Also I finally bit the bullet and started trading on the DVC/LTC market, so come dump your DeVCoins for Litecoins if you don't want your DeVCoins.

-MarkM-

are you a dev for this coin? it appears that this coin is almost dead and you dont want ppl to improve on it? the historical chart shows dvc was nothing more than a pump and dump coin. since the last dump its been inactive for over 4 yrs and you dont want ppll to do anything to it? cmon buddy wake up!

[markm]

Yeah I helped Unthinkingbit create this coin, and I still run the receivers script for him each cycle creating the receiver and account files that he then sends out to the other custodians.

If you want a new different coin create one whether you clone this or something else entirely.
lThere is huge amount of work in on this one, a lot of infrastructure has been put onto the HORIZON network in last year for example though HORIZON now itself is not on exchanges so BURST is back in the running and we are looking into the STELLAR networktoo now that so many folks have been given LUMENs lately.

DeVCoin is just one of the original merged mined coins, I mined them all using p2pool until the Swedish Neptune miners I got turned out to be too powerful for that pool, then with mmpool until they ran afoul of some technical glitch caused by some new update of bitcoin.

DeVCoin, IXCoin and I0Coin are still on exchanges and DeVCoin has still not gone down to one Lite-satishi nor one DOGE-satoshi so it is far from dead.

-MarkM-

[HHWlife]

Yeah I helped Unthinkingbit create this coin, and I still run the receivers script for him each cycle creating the receiver and account files that he then sends out to the other custodians....ch caused by some new update of bitcoin....

DeVCoin, IXCoin and I0Coin are still on exchanges and DeVCoin has still not gone down to one Lite-satishi nor one DOGE-satoshi so it is far from dead.

-MarkM-

so you are waiting for this coin to be really really dead since  its not down to one Lite-satoshi?

even though ppl appreciate all the work you put into dvc and you deserve to be compensated for it, usually any coin over 2billion, unless it has a superstar devs or strong dedicated team, will be looked upon as a pumpanddump coin (exception: dogecoin but even that coin is not taken seriously. unlike dvc ripple and stellar got dedicated team) where the starter devs' only interest is to make quick bucks and get out. this coin has shown that(look at our historical chart). all the evidence shows dvc has not been for the community.

however, we can change that. if you are serious about reviving this coin and get compensated for your past and future work, i recomend that you either 1) create new coin(for ex. creating a new erc20 coin on ethereum blockchain or wave platform) with the same name and let the holders swap where the total new coin is 100mil to 1billion; or 2) if you want no new coin at least burn the total coin supply and reduce to no more than 1billion total supply, or find other ways to reduce the supply.

i dont necessarily disagree with anything you said other than the total coin supply reduction bc we dont seem to have full time active dev at the moment.  ppl would feel more confident to invest if whales dont have so much percentage of total coins to manipulate the price.  nobody wants to be victims of pump and dump which is pretty common in the crypto world.  

[HHWlife]

100% support them. not maybe or maybe not support them. thats what i meant. support them 100%

But on your statement - why should you or I be 100% supported for doing basically nothing for X years beyond waiting and hoping?

the fact that ppl bought the coin is something not nothing. most ppl will not get involved actively. they took the initiative to buy/mine the coin. they spent money. its like ppl who bought bitcoin very early and got lucky. they didnt do diddle either but at least they got in early and got rich.

ppl who bought or mined  dvc early should be compensated 100% for believing in this coin if we swap.

[mmpool]

even though ppl appreciate all the work you put into dvc and you deserve to be compensated for it, usually any coin over 2billion, unless it has a superstar devs or strong dedicated team, will be looked upon as a pumpanddump coin (exception: dogecoin but even that coin is not taken seriously. unlike dvc ripple and stellar got dedicated team) where the starter devs' only interest is to make quick bucks and get out. this coin has shown that(look at our historical chart). all the evidence shows dvc has not been for the community.

You're thinking of this coin as if it is like other coins, but my understanding is its history is different. It was created to reward people working on open source software or writing articles on devtome. It wasn't created to "make quick bucks" or to pump and dump. The way it works is open source developers get their devcoins and they sell it as a way to make an income off their software efforts People who want to support the open source devs buy devcoins. By buying devcoins they are creating price support for the devs selling it. Buying devcoins is like donating to open source software. That few people are propping up the price is probably more a reflection of not understanding the reasoning behind the coin.

New developers should define what they want the new coin to be. Is it the above, or something different? If it's different, they should create a new coin. Markm being an original designer of the coin doesn't need to start a new coin to continue it - they already have it. What's the point of calling a new coin 'devcoin' if it's completely different from current devcoin and is just like every other coin?

An understanding of why devcoin hasn't gotten more popular would be a good discussion. I see lack of keeping the client updated, the distribution of coins to developers isn't very transparent, devtome authors got large amounts compared to others, devtome didn't pull in the advertising income that was expected and the lack of understanding that buying devcoins off developers is a way of donating to them.

[.cryptic.]

I still have some leftover coins from the yester years.Any working exchange to trade them?

[markm]

Don't forget Cryptsy. I lost over 134 bitcoins that were the buy-side support for DeVCoin, IXCoin, and I0Coin on Cryptsy.

Recovering from that loss of capital is taking time, but recovery is happening, take a look at IXCoin and I0Coin now; DeVCoin I have only in the last few days started on because I had not wanted to own any Litecoins nor any DOGE, and until some recent time, I am not sure when, there was no market of DVC vs BTC. Now I see there is DVC/BTC again but price has gone so low it is not practical yet to work on that market so I am working in Litecoins for now until we get prices back up some.

I suggest that things like what happened with Cryptsy are bigger problems than most are aware, and that the coin is being blamed for what really is mostly just the effect of the theft of the project's working-capital by Cryptsy.

If we still had the 134+ BTC and 800k+ IXCoin and I cannot recall offhand how many hundreds of millions of DeVCoins that Cryptsy stole we would be in far better shape than we currently are. Give us time to recover.

I still have some leftover coins from the yester years.Any working exchange to trade them?

Some place called CoinGather, no idea if it is just another bunch of thieves though.

-MarkM-
 

[weisoq]

the fact that ppl bought the coin is something not nothing. most ppl will not get involved actively. they took the initiative to buy/mine the coin. they spent money. its like ppl who bought bitcoin very early and got lucky. they didnt do diddle either but at least they got in early and got rich.

ppl who bought or mined  dvc early should be compensated 100% for believing in this coin if we swap.

Then the obvious retort is to ask why we deserve a bailout for a losing choice?

Otherwise, many perhaps most dvc holders 'earned' rather than bought them. As mmpool outlines, Devcoin's rationale is different to most. The mechanics were wrong but a bailout would take failed methodology (for reasons where we may disagree) and again underwrite it in a new endeavour. That's asking for more of the same.

How to differentiate between varying interest? I have no idea, but that's one reason I doubt a new coin forcing deletion of the old is a good idea. Another is swap-or-not is secondary to successful mechanics and incentives.

[develCuy]

how did you come up with 1mil:1? whats the total supply now? i think 1000:1 seem more realistic. we dont want to reduce the coin too much. i think new total supply should be around 100mil to 1bln. anything more than 10bil. looks like a pump&dump coin(unless we have superstar team working on it) and appears to mainly cater to whales.

Because at current market price:
BTC/USD: $3,356.00
LTC/BTC: 0.01302011
DVC/LTC: 0.00000045

Doing some math:

IF 1,000,000.00 DVC = 1 nDVC THEN

1,000,000.00 DVC * 0.00000045 * 0.01302011 * 3,356.00 = 19.66 USD = 1nDVC

Let's say that TODAY we do the hardfork and we launch the Devcoin Renewal Service, then 19.66 USD is worth 1.00000000 New Devcoin (nDVC), so that:

100,000 DVC = 0.10000000 nDVC = 1.97 USD
10,000 DVC = 0.01000000 nDVC = 0.20 USD
1,000 DVC = 0.00100000 nDVC = 0.02 USD
500 DVC = 0.00050000 nDVC = 0.01 USD

People holding less than 500 DVC have nothing to worry about, and they could still get some nDVC back.

Now look at the extreme scenario. If we do the exchange rate 1:10000000000 (1 nDVC per every 10,000,000,000 DVC):

500 DVC = 0.00000005 nDVC = 0.01 USD
1,000 DVC = 0.00000010 nDVC = 0.02 USD
10,000 DVC = 0.00000100 nDVC = 0.20 USD
100,000 DVC = 0.00001000 nDVC = 1.97 USD
1,000,000 DVC = 0.00010000 nDVC = 19.66 USD
10,000,000 DVC = 0.00100000 nDVC = 196.62 USD
100,000,000 DVC = 0.01000000 nDVC = 1,966.29 USD - Throw your Bitcoin away!
1,000,000,000 DVC = 0.10000000 nDVC = 19,662.97 USD - Total Bitcoin destruction
10,000,000,000 DVC = 1.00000000 nDVC = 196,629.70 USD - What is Bitcoin buddy?

Seriously speaking, I guess that few people is willing to create a coin that is worth more than Bitcoin, but it is still an exchange rate that will not left people behind. That is the only reason

There you have the numbers people, do your own math and please propose your preferred DVC/nDVC exchange rate and state WHY!

i ill say drs should be no longer than one month. this coin has been around over 4yrs. we cant wait forever. lets move fast and ignore naysayers. decentralization means we go democratic and dont heed one or two persons biased argument. just like after many years of debate we finally did the segwit wtnss adoption, lets stop being lazy and start moving.

One month is really a short term IMHO, how about 3 months or maybe 3 old Devcoin cycles?

[develCuy]

OK, one week with no feedback or complains, then just stay with this exchange rate:

1,000,000.00 DVC = 1 nDVC

(One million old Devcoin per 1 new Devcoin)

From Step 0 to Step 1

This was the original plan:

1. Define a new Rewards Distribution System (RDS) for new generated Devcoins (a new policy for the receiver_xx.csv files)
2. Define a new Inflation Rate Strategy (IRS O_o!), no more wild generation of Devcoins!
3. Implement RDS & IRS in tesnet
4. Hardfork Devcoin

Then @Sidhujag and @weisoq noted that we should resolve what to do with currently generated Devcoin. That is why we had this long discussion regarding old and new Devcoin.

There might be more to say in the future, but for now KEEP MOVING ON!

Rewards Distribution System (RDS) and Inflation Rate Strategy (IRS)

I'm wondering about a fair RDS. New Devcoin (nDVC) should be sustainable if we want it to prosper. The mission of this project should always be in the core. Devcoin was created to support developers of Free/Libre Open Source Software and artists (poets, writers, painters, etc.). Let's call them: creators. This makes Devcoin an organization with an strong mission, one that can make a difference on peoples lives.

If we want to help others, we should help ourselves first! For example, if you see a person suffering hunger and you have no bread to share, and you are suffering hunger as well, how could you help the other person? Go get some bread, eat and share with the other person! What if you see a hundred people suffering hunger? Do you have budget for 100 breads? Should you split your little piece of bread into a hundred little tiny pieces? Should you instead pick one person from the hundred?...

Devcoin project is supposed to help people but we didn't have clear who to help and how to help. Sometimes we make things worst when we try to help people. That is why RDS and IRS are the actual implementation of Devcoin's mission.

Let's meditate about past happenings with Devcoin, does it really helped people or the reverse? Devtome for example, there was a big campaign calling for creators, they believed they could get some money back from their time investment. Some might got something back, but the truth is that Devcoin not helped much. This kind of situations only produces frustration and drives people angry.

Conclusion? Devcoin is in debt with lots of people that trusted the project. We should not left them behind!

With things above in mind, I want to ask you:

1. IRS approach: How could we bring some stability to Devcoin as a currency?
2. RDS approach: How many people and how much should Devcoin project help?

I look forward to your feedback!

[weisoq]

Feedback is impossible until you make firm proposals/justification. What changes you want, why and how.
Reiterating a purpose and focusing on secondary issue of a swap is not a plan.

[markm]

So far there is no clear explanation of who the new coin intends to distribute how many coins to and under what circumstances.

A huge part of the problem with DeVCoin is NOT that the developers abandoned it, both of us are still here; what is wrong is that vast amounts of the infrastructure and decisions were hijacked.

Many or even most of the websites died after various people using various uh, lets say "political arguments" or "politics" hijacked them, claiming it was wrong of the developers, who have been here all along and are still doing the few tasks that have not been hijacked from us, to get to do everything. We were "conned" into letting others take control of various things only to find out over the years that that turns out to have been a bad idea. Lots of folks simply abandoned stuff upon learning that it was not profitable for them. We the original developers maybe should have just kept control, yeah a lot of functions are not profitable, tough for us, boo hoo.

From the start I have had a huge web of projects all designed to intertwine to create a universe of value, involving a lot of free open source game projects that with minimal added code to each of them could all intertwine and work together so as to all provide different types and scales of interface into one combined massively multiplayer multiverse, and to this day who-ever took over the allocating of shares as bounties for the programming of specific free open source software functionalities has yet to publish any bounties I am aware of incentivising the development of thse minimal bits of functionality that will make all these free open sourve games systems intertwine, so all the interactions between them are still being handled manually, which in turn has slowed down the timelines considerably.

Part of the design is that more and more coins of more and more types will get bound up more and more into entities that are less and less likely to ever put the coins back onto the exchanges. For example the abstracted "small business, medium business, and large business sector" system absorbs coins  as collateral representing abstractly such economic sectors and almost never releases the underlying coins back into circulation since the usual "liquidation" process consists basically of some other entity buying the "liquidated" units of the represented sector of the economy at liquidation prices; a lot of the detailed-level-game "stuff" represented by the abstrct units of a sector of an economy continue to exist, new businesses take over the retail space it may have involved, re-use the retail shelving and furniture and so on, the land involved co0ntinues to exist in the game and still has however many coins are tied up in representing the value or potential value of that land and so on.

Consider that one share was calibrated to represent the monthly stipend of a person doing an average of ten hours or so per week of programming.

Is it reasonable, as the Devtome seems to effectively be claiming, that an author who is not even writing actual working code should be managing to only write one thousand words per fourty-hour month of developing some other form of writing than actual code?

By giving one share per thousand words the Devtome is giving forty hours of pay per thousand words!

Either that or maybe we should rather imagine that a person should be able to put out at least a thousand words in an hour, and increase the "lifestyle developer doing an average of ten hours a week" stipend to forty shares?

We need to discuss pay-rates regardless of whether a new coin is to be created, because old coin or new the rates of pay need to not be so insanely out-of-whack.

It would also be useful to allocate shares to the markets of a whole bunch of in-game commodities, basically abstracting a whole bunch of non-player-character economics so that we do not need to actually co9de in working detail all the many non-player characters who buy such things as oak, pine, mahogany, willow, granite, marble, alabaster, iron, steel, tin, copper, bronze, etcetera etcetera etcetera at least until we get better at actually getting programmers to code such things. So basically for example maybe assign one share to each commodity for now, so we can put off worrying until later about all the nit-picky details of exactly how many non player characters buy how much of each commodity and why and what they do with it and at what price how many of them will choose a different material or commodity to use instead or maybe even change thewir lifestyle to eliminate a need or want for that particular commodity and so on.

I have to run right now unfortunately so will have to close this post for now.

-MarkM-

[develCuy]

Feedback is impossible until you make firm proposals/justification. What changes you want, why and how.
Reiterating a purpose and focusing on secondary issue of a swap is not a plan.

OK, maybe I assumed most people that cares about Devcoin realize why we should fix things rather than letting them stay as they are.

The only reason for me is that Devcoin is currently not sustainable by design, that is why I'm proposing a new IRS and RDS, and to hardfork with a DRS. So I'm taking time to discuss every aspect of my proposal openly in this forum, the change needs all help possible!

Let me elaborate a few things on why Devcoin is not sustainable:

1. Most rewards (bounties, staff, devtome, minning, etc) are paid for doing absolutely nothing.
2. Devtome is abandoned and nobody wants to take care of it
3. There is only have ONE exchange accepting Devcoin, and there will hardly be other accepting it
4. Development is stuck, source code is outdated, there is no development team, nor any maintenance (hello security!)
5. Currently Devcoin is not creating any value at all, it is just a merged mined coin that slowly dumps on every cycle

In short, Devcoin is vanishing as we discuss, somebody must do something! How about US doing something for Devcoin?

You know something? I'm already working hard to create assets for Devcoin, it will be backed by real assets from day zero, YET first things first. Devcoin needs purpose back into the minds of core team, are you in or what?

[markm]

It is not abandoned, DeVCoin was created by Unthinkingbit and I and we are still here and still doing our parts.

The argument that it would take 2.2 bitcoins per month to buy all the minted coins per month at one BTC-satoshi each merely shows how many years of such buying power were stolen from us by Cryptsy, if we get our bitcoins back from Cryptsy we can keep buying for years.

Historically I was buying at 3 satoshis and selling for 4 satoshis consistently, plus growing the buy-side order-books stronger and stronger, I was in fact approaching the point where people could dump ALL the existing coins and there was buy-side already sitting on the exchanges waiting to buy them all.

It simply takes time to make up a loss of 134+ bitcoins of buy-side order-book.

I have bought some litecoins and started to build up the LTC/DVC order-books on CopinGather, it will take time but over time we will eventually re-build the liquidity that Cryptsy stole from us.

There are lots of assets etc that folk can trade their DeVCoins in for, see http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

I was just about to set up DeVCoins on the HORIZON network when HORIZON ran out of exchanges and people started saying it was dead. I am now looking at using the STELLAR network, which is based on Ripple so hopefully will allow us to have trading-pairs that do not insinuate the platform's native coin (LUMENS) into every pair, so I think maybe on STELLAR we can det up direct trading pairs between DeVCoin and IXCoin, I0Coin, United Kingdom Britcoins, Martian BotCoins, General Mining Corp scrip, General Retirement Corp scrip and so on and so on without anyof them being forced to have to pair with the platform's own coin as a mediator. If that is so STELLAR network should be even more useful than the HORIZON network. It remains to be seen though whether we can get their code for "gateways" working to automate conversion between on-blockchain coins and STELLAR-network tokens representing such coins.

If people are being paid for doing nothing that needs to be addressed.

We also should either lower the shares per word for Devtome writing or increase the shares for software development, and create bounties for the few little functionalities the free open source games need to mesh them together better, such as in FreeCiv a starship flag for units along with routines for exporting starships, with destination info, from a running instance of FreeCiv and import into another running instance of FreeCiv corresponding to the designated destination, hopefully incorporating a check of the distance to the destination planet before export so people don't send their starships on voyages they do not have sufficient movement-points to complete. That will become more and more useful ans the number of starships travelling between planets increases, right now we have to do it by saving both games, hacking the savegame file to remove starship(s) from one game and add them to another, then re-start the games. That is kind of awkward.

-MarkM-

[weisoq]

OK, maybe I assumed most people that cares about Devcoin realize why we should fix things rather than letting them stay as they are.

The only reason for me is that Devcoin is currently not sustainable by design, that is why I'm proposing a new IRS and RDS, and to hardfork with a DRS. So I'm taking time to discuss every aspect of my proposal openly in this forum, the change needs all help possible!

Let me elaborate a few things on why Devcoin is not sustainable:

1. Most rewards (bounties, staff, devtome, minning, etc) are paid for doing absolutely nothing.
2. Devtome is abandoned and nobody wants to take care of it
3. There is only have ONE exchange accepting Devcoin, and there will hardly be other accepting it
4. Development is stuck, source code is outdated, there is no development team, nor any maintenance (hello security!)
5. Currently Devcoin is not creating any value at all, it is just a merged mined coin that slowly dumps on every cycle

In short, Devcoin is vanishing as we discuss, somebody must do something! How about US doing something for Devcoin?

You know something? I'm already working hard to create assets for Devcoin, it will be backed by real assets from day zero, YET first things first. Devcoin needs purpose back into the minds of core team, are you in or what?

In what though?

I'm not saying things are perfect; argued similarly on the model for years.

Again, my opinion is you need to put conversion to the side and lay detail on the table. There may be (dis)agreement. Perhaps changes must be encompassed in a new coin (per markm above). But successful decentralised change demands explanation and consensus.

e.g. Generation: unlimited, limited, constant, dynamic, merged, standalone, levels, rate of change, why, why not, how? ...

I'm only being blunt to try keeping this pragmatic and avoid going round in circles again. No point inferring any other motive as we've been here before, but will leave you to it.

[wiser]

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.