[DVC]DevCoin - Official Thread - Moderated

[ranlo]

Since part of the sentiment in this whole auctions thing seems to be some idea that since we are a community and someone in our community really really wants an auction site we the community should somehow make it possible for him to have one, how about this idea:

A DeVCoin Credit Union.

Lets incorporate a credit union whose native currency is DeVCoin.

Those people who choose to join the union - which costs money, which money becomes capital the union can use to do loans - get to decide amongst themselves, using a set of bylaws and probably Roberts Rules of Order or some similar standard operating procedure, who among them deserves a loan of how much.

This would also mean there is a legal entity that can own shares of legal businesses, so it could do financing that includes retaining equity in businesses that it helps to start up.

In order to attract capital for loaning, it could offer deposit accounts that pay interest, that interest being less than the interest it charges on loans.

Then any Devcoin holders who believe that the members of the union are makign wise choices about what/who to loan to aka what/who to invest in can deposit DeVCoins into such interest-paying accounts.

It will be interesting to measure the confidence DeVCoin holders have in the decision making skills of the members of the union by seeing how much they choose to deposit in such accounts.

-MarkM-

I like the idea. The issue is there's a lot of risk involved for depositors still. If that could be ironed out I think the idea is doable.

[sidhujag]

Well bitcoin would definitely be accepted, but so would Devcoin... we would buy devcoin with any other coins to bid up the market anyway, and the devcoins we have would be used to fund shares or other projects that need funding... ie: pay for bounties for future projects instead of using shares, or pay devtome via profits instead of shares, opening up more shares for something else, like funding these type of businesses?

In the end whatever we accept, we would convert back to devcoins anyway to do what you are saying, and another reason for doing this is for another way to spend devcoins not only other coins, so those that get dvc aren't dumping at market all the time.

This is a good example.

So you have a business that accepts bitcoin/devcoin. But you really don't care about bitcoin, so it's superfluous to the definition because really you say in the next sentence that any other coins are just going to be used to buy devcoin. So what you really have is an invention that sells a product/service and turns those profits in to cryptocurrency buys/bids/funding projects/bounties/pay devtome writers.

That's not a business. You're trying to create an economic system. In fact, I've read these threads and I think I am unlearning what ya'll want to accomplish.

Devcoins are traded via bitcoin and it would help with adding buy side liquidity and bidding up the market and more speculators will start buying aswell. Isn't the idea of funding projects core to devcoin? Do you not see how this would indirectly or directly help fund projects and raise market cap?

[georgem]

I was thinking about the possibilities of devcoin and what direction it should take in the future, and there was one thing I wondered:

If we want to pay creators/developers for open source stuff they create... shouldn't we first have some kind of open bulletin board where people can request useful stuff of all kinds?

If we want to create an open market where ideas and developers meet, we should not forget the need for a platform where people can express their wishes.

I understand that at this point most bounties and wishes are revolving arount the basic management, administration and financialization of the devcoin/devtome platforms, but shouldn't we early enough implement a simple yet partitioned platform for idea exchanges?

Good idea. How about a section of the new forum?

ThinkI

Yes, a forum would be a first simple playground for that.
But in the end I can imagine some form of "exchange", where jobsoffers and jobrequests meet, and are somehow coordinated and pushed upwards depending on how many people find this a good idea.
The amount of shares that are given should be derived by the developer who is willing to take the least amount of devcoins for the particular task.
That way we could introduce some kind of competition that lowers the shares, but rises the value of devcoins.

Aslong as people get large amount of devcoins for simply writing a text about anything they want nomatter the value for society we are not going anywhere.

[markm]

The risk involved in even depositing one's coins with a third party at all aside, the risks such an entity would itself face can be worked with in various ways.

For example the auctions proposal involves buying a license to a proprietary software package.

The Credit Union entity, being a fully legally incorporated entity, could retain ownership of that license until the loan(s) are paid in full.

For loans in general, they could be secured using collateral.

Long long ago it was realised that often it would be nicer to be able to borrow something other than BiTCoins to use as spending money or for investing in things expected to be on the long term less lucrative than simply holding BiTCoin, and DeVCoin was one of the top candidates for what to borrow. Thus already the practice of using BiTCoins as collateral to borrow DeVCoins is almost traditional in some circles.

Regardless of what borrowers use as collateral, I think that the whole concept of how fractional reserve or frozen-for-some-time deposit accounts work in connection with the making of loans, as a business plan, is quite well researched by this point in history. I do not know what percentage of Credit Union startups succeeded over the centuries or decades or whatever though.

-MarkM-

[dalamar96]

Yes, a forum would be a first simple playground for that.
But in the end I can imagine some form of "exchange", where jobsoffers and jobrequests meet, and are somehow coordinated and pushed upwards depending on how many people find this a good idea.
The amount of shares that are given should be derived by the developer who is willing to take the least amount of devcoins for the particular task.
That way we could introduce some kind of competition that lowers the shares, but rises the value of devcoins.

Aslong as people get large amount of devcoins for simply writing a text about anything they want nomatter the value for society we are not going anywhere.

This was the idea behind the bounty site... if someone beats  me to it good on them , I haven't worked on my version in over a week, too much other stuff going on at the moment

[markm]

As to the risk posed by depositing with a third party at all, maybe a really good pile of bounties to consider would be bounties aimed at making tangible real and functional the Lex Cryptographia concepts: http://bitcoinism.blogspot.ca/2013/12/lex-cryptographia.html

(Which happens to be another thing that Open Transactions is expected to be an important tool for/toward.)

-MarkM-

[sidhujag]

As to the risk posed by depositing with a third party at all, maybe a really good pile of bounties to consider would be bounties aimed at making tangible real and functional the Lex Cryptographia concepts: http://bitcoinism.blogspot.ca/2013/12/lex-cryptographia.html

(Which happens to be another thing that Open Transactions is expected to be an important tool for/toward.)

-MarkM-

Isn't this at the core of what Open Transactions would provide? Escrow, bonds, surety of contracts between 2 parties?

[sidhujag]

A bounty exchange would be cool but when I brought it up before UTB said we simply don't have enough admins to support growing bounty list that is dynamic based on some demand... but I think if it starts small it will go a long way to 1) get new ideas of projects that may help devcoin and 2) a platform to communicate, update status and provide feedback to those working on bounties.. would help organize things, like maybe a testing phase of the bounty where people are assigned to tasks to ensure the bounty is complete to spec.

[markm]

Open Transactions provides a lot of stuff and aims to provide more too that is not actually in the code yet but the Lex Cryptographia also wants more such as reputation systems for example of one thing I can think of off the top of my head that Open Transactions does not even have it in mind to provide itself I think.

-MarkM-

[novacadian]

The amount of shares that are given should be derived by the developer who is willing to take the least amount of devcoins for the particular task.
That way we could introduce some kind of competition that lowers the shares, but rises the value of devcoins.

Aslong as people get large amount of devcoins for simply writing a text about anything they want nomatter the value for society we are not going anywhere.

It seemed just a matter of time for this shoe to drop. The religious zeal of market competition will have western freelance developers competing with Asian developers for $3/hour bids, which one now sees on many coding monkey projects' sites. Meanwhile writers get $50/hour for writing to DevTomes. A few shares spread around for a committee to get the mandate of this project down for referral may be a good idea.

- Nova

[sidhujag]

btw with cryptsy and vircurex volume's so high we are getting well above the 7.2 million dvc volume per day... the longer it stays at these prices the better

[Hunterbunter]

So you have a business that accepts bitcoin/devcoin. But you really don't care about bitcoin, so it's superfluous to the definition because really you say in the next sentence that any other coins are just going to be used to buy devcoin. So what you really have is an invention that sells a product/service and turns those profits in to cryptocurrency buys/bids/funding projects/bounties/pay devtome writers.

That's not a business. You're trying to create an economic system. In fact, I've read these threads and I think I am unlearning what ya'll want to accomplish.

Yeah, any time someone says "Increase the value of devcoins for everyone", they're implying a more robust economic system. The ultimate accomplishment is to proliferate open source.

If accepting DeVCoin would make any sense to such sites as a business proposition then creating yet another such site seems redundant, since it would make sense for such sites to support DeVCoin so if they are not themselves idiots - which presumably they are not if the are already succeeding even without DeVCoins having any involvement - they will do the sensible thing and accept DeVCoins.

Meanwhile I foresee us basically ending up having put someone into a business of their own (since there is no legal entity constituting the DeVCoin project that could own shares of the business) who will simply find, like all the other such auction sites, that it makes no sense to bother with DeVCoins.

On the other hand if we create free open source software for doing such sites, maybe hundreds or thousands of people will try to make a go of such sites and maybe - not likely but maybe - among them will turn out to be someone who will somehow make a go of it, and at that point we could approach them hoping they are more sympathetic to the idea of accepting DeVCoins (since DeVCoins made available to them the free open source software that made their business possible) than quibids or other sites using similar models but possibly not using free open source software to do it, let alone free open souce software that is only free and open source thanks to the DeVCoin project.

The other problem is that a site that accepts devcoins as a secondary coin will have their own base currency to work in, strengthening that, as money flows in. Devcoin economic value will be lower, compared to an equivalent site that uses dvc as the base currency to measure profit. What we want, is not for businesses to be sympathetic to our cause, but to follow our lead - where they choose to accept devcoins because it suits them. We can do that by creating a strong economic system. The fact that devcoins are less attractive to speculators actually makes it better suited to this task than the other crypto currencies.

One of the ultimate problems with bitcoins et al, is that they want to replace fiat as the go-to trade currency, but they're just not as good as fiat at doing that because of the deflation driven speculation - most fiat businesses that 'accept bitcoins' have probably never even see one. Devcoins are in the unique position where the production of coins is infinite (is it the only one?). It's the closest coin to fiat in terms of inflation, which makes it far better as a potential trading currency than all of the other coins - the cost of production is very low with merged mining etc. If it's going to succeed in its mission (proliferate open source), then in my opinion it should be taking advantage of this strength.

I believe for it to fully realize it's unique market position, it should focus on becoming the currency that people naturally want to convert all other crypto-currencies into, to get work done, like purchase inputs with and pay salaries from (so a form of cashflow currency - I don't know how realistic this is at the moment). We have a chance of achieving that because: it is an administrated coin (so emphasis on products can be made), we're interesting to creators of work not just speculators, the price is actually relatively stable, and we have all the other benefits of cryptocurrencies. Combine this with your last paragraph, and I think it's a recipe for success. Open source is very much about empowering people, and it leaves us with a very important question to ask:

Does the devcoin project want to create individual businesses and hope to compete against all the other already successful businesses, or create a framework for business (with open source tools, plus maybe an example business) for others to push their own success? Gabe Newell / Valve was doing very well from steam and traditional game production, but is doing phenomenally better with f2p and user empowerment. He's completely sold on the idea of empowering people, and has essentially created an economy of his own (TF2 hats and DOTA 2 items). I think in the vein of the original devcoin goal, the second version makes more sense.

The credit union is a good idea for this, and ultimately we as administrators should be looking at ways to empower people into creating them with open source software - whether by just finding and packaging it into an example, working credit union, which others can freely copy, or creating one from scratch, which others can freely copy. Of course in most cases we'll use the cheapest option, with the caveat that the solution must be completely open source and freely usable. I think we should stick to innovating and let the market decide its value.

[dalamar96]

btw with cryptsy and vircurex volume's so high we are getting well above the 7.2 million dvc volume per day... the longer it stays at these prices the better

Question, where did you get the 7.2M DVC / day?  Last I saw on Vircurex DVC - BTC was over 67M and BTC - DVC was like 56 BTC which is over 56M DVC. That would put it just on Vir over 100M DVC today.  Just an observation

[markm]

I think about half of the merged mined coins keep generating coins forever. DVC, GRP, CLC and GeistGeld all do, I think.

The latter two are still ridiculously easy to mine too so we could rake in lots of them before all the public merged mining pools get around to adding them if only someone had done the free open source merged mining pool code bounty.

Unfortunately anyone even considering doing that bounty probably figured they would be better off making umpteen times as much money for a fraction as much work by just writing stuff in Devtome.

I still think now and then though about doing some kind of mining company with shares and having it do merged mining, so as to expose more people to the less-well-known merged mined coins.

But with the free open source mining pool software we could have made pools that pay out only the first four or six or so of the merged mined coins the first few months or years or whatever, only starting to give out the CLC and XGG later on once people actually want them enough because they are on enough exchanges and so on that they consider them important enough to be worth coming to a pool that does include them over a pool that does not.

For doing a credit union the Cyclos system might be useful but I heard they were going to stop being free open source on newer versions.

Open Transactions should be very useful as soon as the installer system is set up for it so that people can install it instead of having to compile it themselves.

-MarkM-

[Athanasios Motok]

I propose a 48 share bounty for whoever creates a devcoin wallet similar to that of the TREZOR Bitcoin wallet (http://www.bitcointrezor.com/).
Does anybody object to this?

Thanks,
-AM

Yeah probably. What is it? What's the rationale? What steps would be required? etc

Steps required are someone would need knowledge of how the software is able to store the bitcoins securely and be able to change it up, as well as creating a new device for the actual storage. The rationale behind this is to help promote devcoin since you really can not take them places aside from through your laptop or accessing from vircurex or other web based storage... It is basically a portable wallet for bitcoin that could possible work for devcoin. As for the other replies to the proposal if now is not the time because of the whole android wallet coming out then that is fine as well.

[sidhujag]

btw with cryptsy and vircurex volume's so high we are getting well above the 7.2 million dvc volume per day... the longer it stays at these prices the better

Question, where did you get the 7.2M DVC / day?  Last I saw on Vircurex DVC - BTC was over 67M and BTC - DVC was like 56 BTC which is over 56M DVC. That would put it just on Vir over 100M DVC today.  Just an observation

Price will rise if volume is more than 7.2M DVC a day since that is the amount that is minted. Supply/Demand. Since we just started to have this volume, it will take some time to saturate old coins with the volume but I like to use an average volume since we work on monthly cycles, to use a monthly average... a rolling 6 month average is probably ideal but by then saturation has probably already occured... its useful to find outliers coins who have a higher than usual volume per day basis for say a few weeks, and then figure that it is probably undervalued in the medium term if the price doesn't reflect the newfound demand.

[sidhujag]

I propose a 48 share bounty for whoever creates a devcoin wallet similar to that of the TREZOR Bitcoin wallet (http://www.bitcointrezor.com/).
Does anybody object to this?

Thanks,
-AM

Yeah probably. What is it? What's the rationale? What steps would be required? etc

Steps required are someone would need knowledge of how the software is able to store the bitcoins securely and be able to change it up, as well as creating a new device for the actual storage. The rationale behind this is to help promote devcoin since you really can not take them places aside from through your laptop or accessing from vircurex or other web based storage... It is basically a portable wallet for bitcoin that could possible work for devcoin. As for the other replies to the proposal if now is not the time because of the whole android wallet coming out then that is fine as well.

Yea with android wallet you get the offline spending and stuff, so you can pretty much write your private key on paper and store it somewhere safe, dont even bother with usb and devices that may not last a tested amount of time. Better yet the android wallet will let you export your devcoin private key via QR code and then you can print it out on paper or whatever you want.

[cexylikepie]

I see that there is a current user on Devtome that is doing League of Legends guides.
I am not like this person, his guides are copied and pasted over and over with very little actual information or depth.

I do not like it at all that he is taking advantage of devtome and i assure you my guides will be quality, lengthy, and very in depth.

I want to help people become better players, not take advantage of devtome. I really suggest removing that toxic user and his so-called "guides".

Anybody can use copy and paste.

[dalamar96]

btw with cryptsy and vircurex volume's so high we are getting well above the 7.2 million dvc volume per day... the longer it stays at these prices the better

Question, where did you get the 7.2M DVC / day?  Last I saw on Vircurex DVC - BTC was over 67M and BTC - DVC was like 56 BTC which is over 56M DVC. That would put it just on Vir over 100M DVC today.  Just an observation

Price will rise if volume is more than 7.2M DVC a day since that is the amount that is minted. Supply/Demand. Since we just started to have this volume, it will take some time to saturate old coins with the volume but I like to use an average volume since we work on monthly cycles, to use a monthly average... a rolling 6 month average is probably ideal but by then saturation has probably already occured... its useful to find outliers coins who have a higher than usual volume per day basis for say a few weeks, and then figure that it is probably undervalued in the medium term if the price doesn't reflect the newfound demand.

Awesome, thanx for the explanation! I had no clue what you meant by the 7.2 and no idea about it's significance. Makes sense tho! Thanx Oh and Dodg's are up around 6000BTC  volume on Cryptsy... that is a LOT of coins.... near 6 Billion?

Edit: ok since they are up around 180satoshi's I guess it is more like 3.8 Billion Volume

[dalamar96]

I see that there is a current user on Devtome that is doing League of Legends guides.
I am not like this person, his guides are copied and pasted over and over with very little actual information or depth.

I do not like it at all that he is taking advantage of devtome and i assure you my guides will be quality, lengthy, and very in depth.

I want to help people become better players, not take advantage of devtome. I really suggest removing that toxic user and his so-called "guides".

Anybody can use copy and paste.

He isn't the only one doing stuff like that