[DVC]DevCoin - Official Thread - Moderated

[Traxo]

I still think what we need to do is keep building the buy sides as strong as possible, the approach I have described before has worked over and over and over again not only tending the value up and up and up but also yielding more and more of the coin back again to bury in the backyard or wherever; that is, it takes more and more of the coin out of circulation while growing the value per coin of those still piled up on the exchages as huge buy side and sell side columns of offers.

On Interstellar exchange, by pressing [∞] you can see list of "all" assets: https://interstellar.exchange/app/#/markets/guest  
If somebody wants to try it, you will need to narrow down the spread, and increase the volume in order for it to actually show up in that tab (and be filterable by "market search" feature). I'm not sure what the target volume and spread numbers are for it to show up there, but I was told by their team that the algo includes these variables. Also not sure when the computation occurs, so maybe we'll need to give it some time after few trades.

Here is presumably most relevant trade pair for this thread:  
https://interstellar.exchange/app/#/trade/guest/DVC/GBHAQ252S4Z4AQOM4BWIRC3UHAOJIKCZQBUJGD336YH2O7W2NKRXMHA5/XLM/native

It would be practical for similar pairs to actually be searchable within this somewhat easy-to-use client, because it seems like a relatively complicated process (for your average joe) to actually find the asset issuer, and then find the pair manually by using the relevant info.


Btw, company shares are only on Horizon platform I think. You could use this client to access it: https://github.com/NeXTHorizon/hz-source

[develCuy]

You can already right now start helping build the XLM buy-side against DeVCoin and a bunch of our other assets on the STELLAR platform, see http://makemoney.knotwork.com/stellar/

I think that we can do both approaches. We could support two tokens as a project: DeVCoin and DeVDollar for two different purposes:

- DeVCoin token: speculative, free & wild market!
- DeVDollar token: stable coin for paying beneficiaries

In regards to "stable coin", we could use the trusted USDT token on Stellar: https://stellar.expert/explorer/public/asset/USDT-GCQTGZQQ5G4PTM2GL7CDIFKUBIPEC52BROAQIAPW53XBRJVN6ZJVTG6V

This is what could happen on every Devcoin round:

- Buy X amount of USDT with external reserves(STEEM, HIVE, SBD, HBD, etc)
- Use half of available USDT to buy DevCoin (build up the buy side)
- Put the other half into the treasury and release an equivalent amount of DeVDollars (1:1 ratio)

Eventually, if we need to issue more DeVCoin tokens, the Devcoin Foundation should burn as much as required Devcoins (the actual coins) from its own reserve (OpenSourceFund + friends).

- develCuy

[ranlo]

You can already right now start helping build the XLM buy-side against DeVCoin and a bunch of our other assets on the STELLAR platform, see http://makemoney.knotwork.com/stellar/

I think that we can do both approaches. We could support two tokens as a project: DeVCoin and DeVDollar for two different purposes:

- DeVCoin token: speculative, free & wild market!
- DeVDollar token: stable coin for paying beneficiaries

In regards to "stable coin", we could use the trusted USDT token on Stellar: https://stellar.expert/explorer/public/asset/USDT-GCQTGZQQ5G4PTM2GL7CDIFKUBIPEC52BROAQIAPW53XBRJVN6ZJVTG6V

This is what could happen on every Devcoin round:

- Buy X amount of USDT with external reserves(STEEM, HIVE, SBD, HBD, etc)
- Use half of available USDT to buy DevCoin (build up the buy side)
- Put the other half into the treasury and release an equivalent amount of DeVDollars (1:1 ratio)

Eventually, if we need to issue more DeVCoin tokens, the Devcoin Foundation should burn as much as required Devcoins (the actual coins) from its own reserve (OpenSourceFund + friends).

- develCuy

I'm all for the plan you've come up with. It may need some more fleshing out and refinement but I think that it's a solid plan and would help achieve everything we need in terms of helping DVC become more desirable, thus building up a reason for people to create new use cases (such as gaming sites, shops, etc.), creating a cyclic effect.

[markm]

The idea of burning coins to back a token based on them seems a bit weird compared to actually having the coins on hand to redeem the tokens for real coins.

Kind of hard to figure how the token is supposed to be worth anything when the coins it supposedly represents have been burned.

At least with the existing tokens I can redeem them for actual on the blockchain coins.

Also, we definitely DO need more DeVCoin tokens, as I have written before.

There simply are not enough of them on the platform(s) to make it reasonable to require people paying DeVCoin-denominated debts to pay them IN DEVCOIN.

Just looking at the last two payments made to GFC against loans I see 123+ million and 138+ million devcoins of debt paid respectively, but no way was there that many actual DeVCoins available for the debtor to have been able to buy actual DeVCoins to make those payments with; they were made with General Retirement Funds (GRF) scrip if I recall correctly. Ideally the debtor should have been able to buy that many DeVCoins using the GRF scrip or whatever other currencies they have been using then pay actual DVC to GFC. Those two payments were not even unusually large.

If it were practical for GFC to insist on being paid IN DEVCOINS, it would soak up huge numbers of DeVCoins quite rapidly I expect, to the point where it would maybe have to become the primary seller of them just to enable the debtors to be able to obtain enough of them to make their payments with. So possibly just GFC alone could solve the whole "DVC has no value" conundrum provided there were in fact plenty of DeVCoins in play. Basically DeVCoin has pretty much killed all its own value by throwing all its coins to pretty much any useless thing other than the game which was created and developed over all these years specifically for the purpose of giving DeVCoins value.

-MarkM-

[Qtera]

I'm all for the plan you've come up with. It may need some more fleshing out and refinement but I think that it's a solid plan and would help achieve everything we need in terms of helping DVC become more desirable, thus building up a reason for people to create new use cases (such as gaming sites, shops, etc.), creating a cyclic effect.

I think it is a good plan, too! I like the idea of tokens and to give DVC a growing momentum. I think also that burning coins could be a good solution.

[develCuy]

First of all to make things clear, Mark you have your DVC tokens that represent something in your game and your own assets like GFC, etc. But sometimes in your language you seem to say that all Devcoin holders are playing in your game or even that the Devcoin Foundation has some debt to pay to you or your game, so you come time after time stating that there is a zillionary debt. Who are the debtors? You alone, the players? everybody holding Devcoin coins? Can you clarify that for everybody in this thread?

Now, regarding the following:

Kind of hard to figure how the token is supposed to be worth anything when the coins it supposedly represents have been burned.

I propose to burn the coins because Devcoin has infinite supply programmed in the core and we can't change that. Rather the tokens have limited supply or at least more supply needs to be created on purpose by the issuer.

Regarding how to exchange DeVCoin Tokens back for Devcoin coins, we have all the Devcoin holders that sum up a huge reserve of coins altogether, so we have enough stock available in the wild! Any individual can release their own "community-DeVCoin" tokens and say: Hey, do you want real Devcoins? buy any amount of my tokens and I'll transfer the equivalent of real Devcoin coins to your wallet. Presto! The difference is that "official" DeVCoin tokens issued by the Devcoin Foundation have intrinsic value by themselves, while community-DeVCoins represent an asset if that is the issuer intention, just like you are already doing Mark.

- develCuy

[Traxo]

It can't hurt to open a support ticket with Coinomi. That seems simple enough.

With Ledger it sounds like we'd have to build some of that integration ourselves, so it's a matter of someone knowing how to do it.

I'd say go for it.

I opened a ticket with Coinomi and will let you know what happens.

What was the update with regards to Coinomi listing? I can't remember.

[Apocalipsa]

It can't hurt to open a support ticket with Coinomi. That seems simple enough.

With Ledger it sounds like we'd have to build some of that integration ourselves, so it's a matter of someone knowing how to do it.

I'd say go for it.

I opened a ticket with Coinomi and will let you know what happens.

What was the update with regards to Coinomi listing? I can't remember.

Would be really nice to finally have a mobile wallet.  And cold storage.   

[markm]

First of all to make things clear, Mark you have your DVC tokens that represent something in your game and your own assets like GFC, etc. But sometimes in your language you seem to say that all Devcoin holders are playing in your game or even that the Devcoin Foundation has some debt to pay to you or your game, so you come time after time stating that there is a zillionary debt. Who are the debtors? You alone, the players? everybody holding Devcoin coins? Can you clarify that for everybody in this thread?

The game is all-encompassing, Earth is just a mythical planet that has usually been thought to even be impossible and definitely improbable, because tales about the planet known as Earth often seem to say or imply that there are more different civilisations on that one planet than any actual known planet has ever been known to have.

FreeCiv only supports a maximum number of civilisations in play at once, and until quite-recent versions the limit was much lower than the present number of 127 or so; thus for most of FreeCiv's history it has not been possible to represent in FreeCiv the actual state of affairs on Earth. Since the peoples of the FreeCiv-based planets have only ever actually encountered planets with far far less civilisations than that on them, the whole idea of an "origin of humanity" planet that has had many many different civilisations all living on it at once without even yet supposedly having been taken over by one of them seems rather unlikely, thus probably apocryphal, mythical, fictional.

Nonetheless some ideas that some have associated with that mythical planet are widespread through the galaxy or galaxies as it is an enduring and large body of mythology; there are even entire ouvres of literature attributed to authors who purportedly were or are Earthlings.

One thing you might have noticed in stories about money as it is used on Earth is that it is heavily debt-based. In fact it is often described as basically coming into existence in the form of debt in the first place. Banks loan out funds they do not necessarily even have, and thus new money comes into existence.

Debt also is an economic driver, in that it creates demand for the currency.

Then too, most free open source multiplayer online games basically give stuff out for nothing to starting players, so that it is possible to flood the game with free stuff out of no-where just by creating new player-accounts so as to get all the stuff each new player gets given at their start of play, which can be a nasty hole in the entire economy, especially if what players start with is something that ought to be quite expensive such as an entire colony ship just arriving at a planet for it to colonise.

Thus it is necessary when adding a game into the larger multiverse to somehow account for where the starting gear for the new game came from in terms of the already running games.

In the case of the intergalactic colony ships creating mining colonies in galaxies far far away the question naturally arises who built them, who paid for them, how did they even get to those far away galaxies, who authorised the new player to take control of the new colony and why and how and where did they come up with whatever resources were involved in getting to that point?

So, each new player-account in the Galaxies Online game came with a back-story that it had borrowed from General Mining Corp (GMC) and General Retirement Funds (GRF) Corps in order to finance the sending of the colony ship that was just now as they started play landing on a planet in a far-away galaxy to start building a mining-colony.

This also gave them a built-in market for the DEUterium they came there to mine, since both GMC and GRF were building depot colonies out there to which the DEUterium could be delivered in return for currency.

Thus it should have all been really rather simple; people would start play, build colonies, mine DEUterium, ship it to depots and thereby pay off those debts.

Where it got more complicated was when it emerged that most players simply registered, got given a colony, and never came back.

That led eventually to some very large debts, so the ability to register as a new player was closed and "repossession Corps" were set up to "repossess" the abandoned colonies since the entire project of setting up these colonies is considered essential to the security of the civilised galaxies, that is, to the civilisations based on FreeCiv.

So now there are about forty-something intergalactic mining Corps still but most of them are "repo Corps", Corps that took over colonies that had been abandoned for more than an entire planet-Earth year, which should be about twelve game-years if FreeCiv one-year game-turns are given a whole month each to play out.

Of those only a few are "free and clear" having long ago paid off their startup loans; most of them still owe huge amounts, some so much that it might make more sense to think of them as owned by the Corps they owe their debts to.

If you follow up the entire many-years-now back-story of the whole thing you will see that there was a period around the whole repossession period in which various governments decided that they were not all that eager to let GMC and GRF be the only lenders raking in the nice amounts of interest the mining Corps were paying on their loans. Thus a bunch of alternative financing schemes were created and for a while their representatives on the Galactic Diplomacy Planet were running around actively competing with one-another to re-finance the miners with loans denominated in their own currencies.

If you search bitcointalk you should still be able to find threads where you can see General Financial Corp being created as a Corp with one million shares, various entities giving it startup funds, the calculation of its initial value per share fo9und by dividing the total initial funds by the one million shares to find it started at 20 DVC per share.

Only a few months later you can see its shares had gone up massively thanks to their officers' cleverness in arranging to borrow MBC from the Martians at a lower interest rate than other governments were asking, so low that GFC was able to offer the miners interest rates competetive with what the various governments were asking.

Thus GFC ended up with probably more of the miners on its books than any of the other lenders ended up with.

Way back then miners liked their debts to be denominated in DVC rather than GMC, GRF, MBC, UKB, CAD or UNS because those other currencies were trending up in value so fast their was a real worry that debts denominated in those currencies might end up being impossible to ever pay. DVC was not climbing anywhere near as fast, which made it an attractive option at the time.

Later there came a period, while we were still calculating the value of DeVCoin by looking at the prices prevailing on the usual web-based "exchanges" folk here on bitcointalk are used to, when DeVCoin's value plummeted so low that a few Corps who noticed in time managed to completely pay off their DeVCoin-denominated loans and some others at least managed to make a big dent in their debt.

Already at that time though there were so few DeVCoins on the platform that it was not practical to expect them to actually get hold of DeVCoins with which to pay; they would have paid using other currencies, using the "Latest Rates include-file" conversion-rates. Because even that many years ago the DeVCoin project was not allocating many if any DeVCoins toward any projects that formed any part of this whole huge multiverse of intertwinded economies created for the purpose of both providing value to the coins and making use of free open source software that presumably was most of the whole point of DeVCoin's mandate.

For whatever reason none of the coins, even those merged-mined right alongside DeVCoin, were not getting any DVC shares for running their nodes, nor bounties to upgrade their software to keep it current; none of the FreeCiv nations were getting any shares for forming entire civilisations of backdrop for DeVCoins to operate in, nothing. Basically pretty much the only DeVCoins going onto the platform were the half of my own coins that I was free to tokenise given I only tokenise half of what I have of a coin in order that I still have the other half to redeem the tokens with without having to go dig up the coins I actually tokenised.

Plus of course I have lost well over a billion DVC on those "normal web-based exchanges" over the years as they flow-by-night. Again with no shares for running those market-making operations over those years.

All of this should have been learned by hanging out on the Galactic Diplomacy Planet all these years, or by Devtome-wiki posts about it all by players who did thusly hang out with the other diplomats and reps and such keeping track of it all and probably also becoming influential political figures helping to steer the whole thing; instead people were being paid for Devtome postings that did not seem to relate whatsoever to any part of any project that was actually working on building up entire universe of backdrop and economy behind DeVCoins and its sibling coins that are mined right alongside it using merged mining.

Right now coins like GRouPcoin, CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld, three of the merged-mined coins, hardly even have any nodes left online, and other coins that are not merged-mined, such as the two original scrypt-based coins that pre-dated litecoin (Tenebrix and Fairbrix) are in similar straits. Some coins are so low in difficulty by now that you can mine them with just one CPU core. That is the time to be mining them, to build up a bit of a stash before someone with a GPU or some ASICs comes along and drives their difficulty back up. Thanks to my policy of not minting-and-destroying tokens on-demand, a low difficulty on-chain does not really affect the security of coins traded on the platforms because the actual on-blockchain coins backing the tokens do not keep changing as people cash in and out; once a coin has been tokenised, mostly years ago, I use the other half of my coins to cash out to the blockchain anyone who wants to thusly cash out, so the coins actually backing the tokens stay year after year unmoving on the blockchain racking up year after year of confirmations.

-MarkM-

[develCuy]

Let me answer bit by bit:

First of all to make things clear, Mark you have your DVC tokens that represent something in your game and your own assets like GFC, etc. But sometimes in your language you seem to say that all Devcoin holders are playing in your game or even that the Devcoin Foundation has some debt to pay to you or your game, so you come time after time stating that there is a zillionary debt. Who are the debtors? You alone, the players? everybody holding Devcoin coins? Can you clarify that for everybody in this thread?

The game is all-encompassing, Earth is just a mythical planet that has usually been thought to even be impossible and definitely improbable, because tales about the planet known as Earth often seem to say or imply that there are more different civilisations on that one planet than any actual known planet has ever been known to have.

(...)

For whatever reason none of the coins, even those merged-mined right alongside DeVCoin, were not getting any DVC shares for running their nodes, nor bounties to upgrade their software to keep it current; none of the FreeCiv nations were getting any shares for forming entire civilisations of backdrop for DeVCoins to operate in, nothing. Basically pretty much the only DeVCoins going onto the platform were the half of my own coins that I was free to tokenise given I only tokenise half of what I have of a coin in order that I still have the other half to redeem the tokens with without having to go dig up the coins I actually tokenised.

(...)

Plus of course I have lost well over a billion DVC on those "normal web-based exchanges" over the years as they flow-by-night. Again with no shares for running those market-making operations over those years.

Ok, it is clear now that you are talking about your very own game. Thanks for the clarification. Also, big thanks for building up the market!

All of this should have been learned by hanging out on the Galactic Diplomacy Planet all these years, or by Devtome-wiki posts about it all by players who did thusly hang out qwith the other diplomats and reps and such keeping track of it all and probably also becoming influential political figures helping to steer the whole thing; instead people were being paid for Devtome postings that did not seem to relate whatsoever to any part of any project that was actually working on building up entire universe of backdrop and economy behind DeVCoins and its sibling coins that are mined right alongside it using merged mining.

Hopefully we managed to close that hole in the bucket. Now is time to convert Devtome into a real asset.

Right now coins like GRouPcoin, CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld, three of the merged-mined coins, hardly even have any nodes left online, and other coins that are not merged-mined, such as the two original scrypt-based coins that pre-dated litecoin (Tenebrix and Fairbrix) are in similar straits. Some coins are so low in difficulty by now that you can mine them with just one CPU core. That is the time to be mining them, to build up a bit of a stash before someone with a GPU or some ASICs comes along and drives their difficulty back up. Thanks to my policy of not minting-and-destroying tokens on-demand, a low difficulty on-chain does not really affect the security of coins traded on the platforms because the actual on-blockchain coins backing the tokens do not keep changing as people sash in and out; once a coin has been tokenised, mostly years ago, I use the other half of my coins to cash out to the blockchain anyone who wants to thusly cash out, so the coins actually backing the tokens stay year after year unmoving on the blockchain racking up year after year of confirmations.

I think that there is no silver-bullet for current Devcoin situation. Also, I need to educate myself more on the Stellar platform inner working.

Lats but not least, @Traxo raised a very important point in regards to ease of use. We might solve that with documentation, or perhaps we can build something within the Devcoin wallet in the long term. Baby steps.

- develCuy

[Traxo]

Lats but not least, @Traxo raised a very important point in regards to ease of use. We might solve that with documentation, or perhaps we can build something within the Devcoin wallet in the long term. Baby steps.

With regards to Stellar (Interstellar), we have these two guides: 
https://steemit.com/devcoin/@satoshi0x/how-to-buy-sell-dvc-using-stellar 
https://steemit.com/devtome/@satoshi0x/part-two-exchanging-your-dvc-tokens-on-stellar-for-blockchain-dvc-coins 

Coinomi wallet apparently has integrated Changelly and Instaswap, so maybe "CEO or lead dev" (only) could contact them and see what is required to get them list the coin:
Instaswap:  https://instaswap.io/coinListing 
Changelly:  https://changelly.com/for-tokens 

Maybe in the future somebody could also come up with a simple-to-use Stellar client fork which supports exclusively Galactic-Milieu-related tokens.

[markm]

I think that there is no silver-bullet for current Devcoin situation.

The "treasuries" system could be that silver bullet IF continued minting of new DeVCoins doesn't get used as simply a way to basically just try to "drain the treasury" by cashing out new DeVCoins constantly for stuff from the "treasury".

The "treasury" account being used to compute a value per coin for DeVCoins is NHZ-YC2W-ZDCP-NS4G-4CEGK on the HORIZON platform.

The "Latest Rates" include file ( http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc ) is denominated in DeVCoins.

From that we can work backward to figure out what that might mean we could get for some DeVCoins by using the conversion rates of things we know we can sell on "exchanges":

For example in the file we see:

I0Crate=468.38334724
IXCrate=461.30183912

That tells us 468.38334724 DeVCoins should be worth whatever one I0Coin is worth and 461.30183912 DeVCoins should be worth whatever one IXCoin is worth.

We can look on FreiExchange to find one possible current value for I0Coins in terms of BitCoins, and for IXCoins we can look not only on FreiExchange but also on Yobit and maybe elsewhere too, those are the two exchanges I am currently working on building up buy-sides.

So you can divide 468.38334724 by whatever you think I0Coins are supposedly worth, or divide 461.30183912 by whatever you think IXCoins are supposedly worth to figure out how much DeVCoins supposedly ought to be worth according to this system.

Whether that much value can be sustained seems to depend largely upon how wisely minted DeVCoins are allocated, as in are they allocated to folks who just run out and dump them or on folks who actively work toward building up their buy-sides (since the buy-side is basically what reporting sites and aggregation sites and so on look at to decide value).

It would probably be very helpful to avoid thinking of the coins as some kind of money or thing-with-intrinsic-value and instead think of them as IOU tokens. When you hold them you are simply holding a stockpile of tokens you can issue as IOUs to other people; when you get them back they are just blank tokens again, useful to you only as tokens you can use again if you choose to represent another IOU.

I get the impression you keep trying to think of them as something of actual value, and of course just like blank disks of metal or paper or wood or whatever if they are useful to you as tokens, like poker chips or whatever, then ok there is maybe some intrinsic value in that, a box of poker chips is not free at the dollar-store or wherever, but they are just a tool for accounting. Think of every DeVCoin you do not have safely buried in concrete under the swimming-pool or whatever as a debt we need to buy back, and make sure if you do dig any up and hand them out that you do so in return for something that you can somehow make use of to redeem those debts or to put into the "treasury" or use on a buy-side to bolster the perceived value of the coin or somesuch.

Presumably the theory behind issuing them to developers of free open source software was presumably at least in part the idea that such software could, and hopefully even would, be used to "create value" in some way. So maybe it might still make sense to issue shares for running nodes of coins that have "too few" nodes, and bounties for updating the code of coins whose code is considered "too dated".

Apparently there is also a "Slush Fund" associated with that "treasury" too, we maintain "Slush Funds" alongside the treasuries as a place to keep any on hand of the coin the "treasury" is for so as not to have in a "treasury" any of the coin the "treasury" is for; but there are currently no DVC tokens in the "Slush Fund" just a thousand shares of DeVCorp.

DeVCorp is shown in the Latest Rates include-file currently as:

sDVCrate=938408.81116320

That shows how many DeVCoins one share of DeVCorp is currently computed to be worth.

So presumably the idea for that "Slush Fund" is to try to sell those DeVCorp shares to raise HZ with which to eventually probably buy-back DVC tokens.

You might notice that HZ is not listed in the "Latest Rates" file. That is because HZ is not on any "exchanges" yet nor has it been set up with a "treasury" yet from which to compute a value for it.

Lately it has been being used in the buying and selling of assets on the HORIZON platform as if it were worth one cent Canadian but realistically it probably needs to be worth a lot more than that OR all the assets need to be worth a whole lot less than they are being computed to be worth if there are realistically to be enough HZ to buy any large fraction of all the assets.

It looks like the "Slush Fund" needs to cancel some of its sell offers though, I see it is currently offering to sell DeVCorp shares at well below the computed value.

(Presumably when the offers were posted though they would have been above the value computed back then.)

-MarkM-

[develCuy]

One of the thing i like Deviant is the team continue to work hard for this project, I remembered early days that this coin was newly launch I got the coin from their bounty and the price was too cheap, I never know that time how to setup the masternode, so i have no choice but to sell this coin very cheap. And i was shocked when i look on the CMC, hey DEV team you hitted 96USD all time high!! Congrats, I think I need to sell some of my holdings to buy again Deviant coin!

I'm afraid to say that Deviant coin is different project than Devcoin.

- develCuy

[develCuy]

After the last discussion about new Devcoin tokens:

I think that so far we arrived to the agreement that "tokenizing" Devcoin is not a bad idea and that we have some alternatives at hand with optimistic projections. So far so good, yet we should talk about more aspects of the project.

Community building. I'm participating in Free Software communities for about 19 years and 11 of them I've been an active Open Source developer. I know very well the key relevance of building a community around any successful Open Source project. If we are supposed to succeed in this new venture, we need to start building the community again. Now let me help with the definition of community member, which might seem obvious to many, but we need to document stuff. So, in my experience, a community member is a human node of the project. Just like devcoind, we need people connecting with new people, we need word of mouth, we need to foster human trust lines, we need a network of people to market our project. For that very reason leadership is always challenged to create more and more ways to involve more people on project plan execution. Long history short, right now we are planning stuff but we need to make things happen at scale someday, without a community we'll never ever succeed! The big question is: Who is willing to become a human node of Devcoin? People joins a project for particular reasons, we should not assume that people is here just to make profits, because money can pay many things, but we can't buy life purpose. If I learned something from my involvement in Free Software communities, it is that money is the last thing to worry about when a community rocks! Let's make Devcoin community rock! Ideas?

Asset scarcity. Devcoin has already released a huge amount of coins that we can hardly control scarcity at this point. For that reason it is good to create a new asset like the coins, that we can manage better with all the hard learned lessons that came failure after failure. In short, I stay with the idea of releasing new Devcoin tokens bit by bit, rather than releasing millions of them at once or letting things in auto-mode. This is directly connected with my community building point, because, if we design the right structure, decision making will foster growth of our new assets along the community, with strategies like community driven asset management. BTW, don't think that I'm proposing political structures like democracy. Rather I'm proposing to build a community that contributes actively to the growth of their assets in common. For example, if we buy an apple tree for our farming business, we should expect to get some apples to sell someday. But we all have to take care of the tree so that we can get a lot of delicious apples for the community and for sale. We'll need to manage the business wisely in many regards, including not producing too few nor too much.

Building value. It doesn't necessarily mean to build market value 100% of the time, or only focusing on market value. Our new assets should be valuable beyond financial value. This time I can talk about my own interest on Devcoin. I believe on the dream of building an organization that effectively brings financial support to Open Source creators worldwide. For that reason we need Devcoin to have not only financial value, but to really represent its purpose. Only then we can go and knock the door of other organizations and companies that share our core values. What do we want them to see when they come and see our community? What kind of organization do you think they are willing to collaborate with? and finally: Would you be proud to be part of The Devcoin Foundation?

I look forward to your feedback.

Go go Devcoin!

- develCuy

[Qtera]

That works for linux as generally u can do everything u need through the terminal. Have you ever built a cryptowallet on windows?? it really is not a simple process and similar on mac.  http://web.archive.org/web/20130821030414/https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=149479.0

Really do need to offer all the platform binaries otherwise it is restricting the entry level to just get a wallet and people will not bother or be turned away from dvc, or worse yet someone who has dvc can no longer access if old versions of dvc are not going to work / sync

I used to make builds for windows and mac as part of the linux build as you can cross compile but it has been many years since I did this but details are here https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/build-windows.md

I would STRONGLY recommend that these binaries are released as well otherwise it will have a negative impact on the dvc network.

Fuzzybear

I tried to build binaries for the devcoin wallet using the instructions provided by Fuzzybear, but I failed miserably.  I followed the same instructions to compile the bitcoin wallet using the current master branch (v0.20.99.0-a79bca2f1) and it was pretty straight forward.

The problem I faced trying to compile the devcoin wallet was that it seems there's no "instructions" to tell the compiler how to build the windows binary. I mean, the instructions guides you step by step until you hit a wall and I suspect it's due to differences in versions. I don't know if it's possible to update the code to the most recent version or if there's already a branch in the repository addressing that, but unfortunately I got to the point I can't advance more in that regard because that exceeds my knowledge in that matter. I suspect that something similar is happening with the mac versions but it's only a hunch. However, if that could be solved in some way, I think it is possible that I could build a windows binary, although, I need to learn how to wrap it all in a single installer first, of course.

Anyway, that was a fast briefing of my findings trying to build a devcoin wallet on windows.

Cheers!

[develCuy]

Here you have it:

https://token.d.tube/

Dtube is an online uncensored video platform, they innitialy launched on the STEEM platform, now after 20 months they are launching their own utility token. Their launch website is very clear, it explains their purpose (the problem they fix), how to earn & spend the tokens, why and how their approach is better than the traditional model, etc.

Straight to the point: we need more than just the token! We need a purpose, a community supporting our purpose and to effectively achieve our purpose.

Go go Devcoin!

- develCuy

[markm]

One thing I find awkward about "burning" coins is it makes it even harder to figure out how many of a coin actually exist.

It is bad enough having to deal with the ever-changing rates of minting of some coins without also trying to somehow figure out which coins already minted are still "in existence" and how many are in "lost or impossible addresses".

Please understand that the calculated values based on the "treasuries" use the number of coins minted to come up with the value per coin.

That means all the DeVCoins you have already minted, and probably even also all or most of those that will be minted in the next month or so, are all accounted for in that computed value; it is the value at which the "treasury" could buy every single DeVCoin minted so far and some that are still to be minted in the next little while.

Furthermore there is also at least one Slush Fund over and above the actual "treasury", so actually more DeVCoins than actually exist could be bought up at the calculated value.

So there is NO PROBLEM "backing" all the DeVCoins being minted. Go ahead and mint at the normal rate and sell them or donate them to the DVC Slush Fund in return for anything they happen to have on hand, or try to work out some kind of multi-step deal whereby they and you adjust what you hold in some way that arrives at you each having something to trade with one-another.

In effect you are not the only devcoin foundation, there can be many of them, but just the one single "treasury" all by itself accounts for the computed value of a DeVCoin in the "Latest Rates" include-file, a value that applies to each and every individual DeVCoin from the first one minted through the last one minted.

And by the way, "Traxo" has built a lovely tool for manipulating the "Latest Rates", take a look: https://latestrates.traxo.me/?from=IXC&to=I0C

That example URL he gave me happens to be one that shows the relative values of IXC and I0C according to the "Latest Rates".

You can use the page to relate any two of the assets. You can use it to find each "pair" on InterStellar's site, and you can use it to re-write the Latest Rates in terms of any arbitrary value you type in, so that for example if you decide that some asset XXX happens to be worth YYY you can get all the Rates priced in XXX by entering YYY as the arbitrary conversion number.

-MarkM-

[develCuy]

Mark, now I can say aloud that from the many ideas we've got a source of wisdom!

So there is NO PROBLEM "backing" all the DeVCoins being minted. Go ahead and mint at the normal rate and sell them or donate them to the DVC Slush Fund in return for anything they happen to have on hand, or try to work out some kind of multi-step deal whereby they and you adjust what you hold in some way that arrives at you each having something to trade with one-another.

In effect you are not the only devcoin foundation, there can be many of them, but just the one single "treasury" all by itself accounts for the computed value of a DeVCoin in the "Latest Rates" include-file, a value that applies to each and every individual DeVCoin from the first one minted through the last one minted.

I get your point of using the coins for other than making a fire. My idea was to give some use to all the coins stuck in the Devcoin Foundation (DF) wallets.

And by the way, "Traxo" has built a lovely tool for manipulating the "Latest Rates", take a look: https://latestrates.traxo.me/?from=IXC&to=I0C

(...)

You can use the page to relate any two of the assets. You can use it to find each "pair" on InterStellar's site, and you can use it to re-write the Latest Rates in terms of any arbitrary value you type in, so that for example if you decide that some asset XXX happens to be worth YYY you can get all the Rates priced in XXX by entering YYY as the arbitrary conversion number.

I'm evaluating your offering to buy Galactic Milieu assets. Yet, my stopper is that assets we acquire for the DF should serve its purpose. We are fostering Open Source every time we provide financial support to creators. We are supposed to provide financial support to them. It means that they are in need of actual money that they can use to buy food, to buy goods and to pay bills. so that they can spend more time on their projects.

The big question is: What asset can we buy from the Galactic Milieu that our beneficiaries can exchange for food and goods or to pay bills in the real world?

- develCuy

[markm]

Ah well that of course brings us back to the idea they should be creating value for the coins/assets.

I think way back in the beginning it was hoped that by giving them the coins they would be motivated to include the coins somehow into their projects, maybe enhancing the value of the coins and, by having that currency in common, the ability of their project to interact with others enhancing the value of them all and so on.

We were also trying to support all the other coins that could be merged-mined alongside DeVCoin, and trying also to motivate the creation of "exchanges" where all those coins could be traded.

It likely still makes sense that the first free open source projects we should be "supporting" should be those coins, since from the start those who have been with us from the beginning have presumably been accumulating all of them in the course of their merged-mining, and those mining pools that offered merged-mining might also still have such coins and so on.

Also the platforms where we can trade them, such as HORIZON and Stellar.

HORIZON used to be on Poloniex, I managed to buy up quite a few of them back then, it fluctuated usually between about 33 satoshis to 133 satoshis back then. It would be useful to get it (its native coin, HZ) onto exchanges again since on the HORIZON platform all pairs involve HZ, it insinuates itself into all trades. Maybe FreiExchange can be convinced to list it? Part of what could be in it for them could be that maybe that way we can finally get DeVCoin's "spot price" on the exchange back up over one satoshi to get some volume moving there in DeVCoin; it might also lead to more I0Coin activity too. IXCoin is already nicely active and is already up over 800 satoshis so hey, maybe folks looking to "cash out" to fiat could buy IXCoins? Or of course they could buy Stellar Lumens with something? I tried to set up pairs on the Stellar platform of everything against Lumens as well as everything against DeVCoins, so maybe if there are not a lot of Lumens offered directly against DeVCoin you could consume a whole bunch of offers of other things against DeVCoin then those other things against Lumens?

I think someone posted something somewhere about InterStellar maybe even having a tool or something for multi-stage converting of things?

Basically what we should probably be supporting first-off are things that provide value to our multiverse of intertwined projects, those so far being a whole bunch of classic and antique and science-fiction-milieu coins, the HORIZON and Stellar platforms (both originally chosen due to their distribution methods both of which handed out lots of free coins of their native coin allowing us to get set up on those platforms), and the various free open source multiplayer online games we have so far found to actually work and found a way to weave into the Milieu.

Speaking of which, there is one called Galaxy of Drones that looks like it could be useable given enough scale (as in number of players) and backstory and such, IF we can do well enough at this to be able to incorporate seven new products into the mix. Its basic concept seems to be that it is possible to set up a galaxy in such a way that power can be shared across the galaxy, serving as currency, and seven different types of planets can be mined each primarily for one particular type of "fuel" used to generate the power. The "technology levels" are basically a progression from the least-efficient fuel (and therefor type of planet) toward the most-efficient as well as through a fairly short list of types of ships used to attack and defend the planets.

It has a "mothership" mechanism whereby each player has a "mothership" they originally start play with and to which they ship the seven types of fuel-substance for "sale"; so it looks like it could be fitted into a larger scheme from which those motherships were presumably sent and to which the "motherships" send those seven products as they are "sold" for the "power" that acts as both the local currency of that galaxy and the means of production of all the building types and ship types within that galaxy.

So basically all we would need to do would be to monitor the "sales" of those products at the motherships, and have the products vanished by each mothership in the course of those "sales" arrive in some larger scheme of things in the warehousing depots of who-ever each particular "mothership" is backed by in that larger scheme of things.

So basically we would have seven new kinds of assets, complete with a scheme whereby they are "mined" and ability of the "miners" to build fleets to attack each other and to defend their own mining operations (planets) and so on.

As a free open source online massively multiplayer game that seems to actually work it certainly qualifies to be incorporated into the Milieu, but it is maybe a bit TOO massive for our current level of development inasmuch as test-playing it I easily racked up hundreds of planets but it became quite time-consuming to maintain a huge empire in it given I have so many other things to do. It could use more automation tools to make it easier to run huge empires or a very large population of players to exploit an entire galaxy without eating up the entire lives of the exploiters.

So basically turn your question around: which free open source projects can we find ways to create value with, and how can we expand our repertoire of projects and types of projects we can do that with?

We should look at projects with an eye to how we can fit them into our growing economy of projects.

We use a couple of "O-game clones" for intergalactic mining, FreeCiv for planetary scale running of civilisations in the civilised galaxy or galaxies, Crossfire RPG for "rogue-like" two-dimensional individual-character scale operations on those civilised planets, CoffeeMUD for text-based and thus easily scrip-table  individual character scale operations, and Battle for Wesnoth for, so far, creating docudramas documenting history, though for years now Wesnoth is supposed to have been heading toward being able to actually create history by being able to manipulate persistent worlds (databases) instead of merely creating docudramas or carrying our small scale "duel" type operations involving small units of troops and such.

What other projects do you have in mind to support first, and what does each have to offer as an enhancement to what we have so far?

We were supporting Open Transactions because it had looked like it would give us a good platform, and also if it did so maybe even be able to be used as a zoom in on FreeCiv worlds to provide actual operating markets, banks and stock-exchanges so when a city builds such a bulding it could pop up an entire Open Transactions server per market, bank or stock-exhange making them actually functional beyond the mere abstractions they exist as in FreeCiv itself.

Since in FreeCiv we can save each game-turn, thus could in principle branch off different timelines from any saved game, Battle for Wesnoth offers the potential to create time-cadet operations whereby a player could change the outcomes of some turn on some planet and branch off a new timeline, if time travel ends up somehow sometime being discovered / developed.

And so on.

Let us hear about more potentially useful free open source projects we can put to good use...

... Like STEEM maybe? STEEM seems like it could be useful...

With STEEM maybe we can reward people for creating masses of documention of what we already have going?

Folks could write about how they got into whatever facet of it all, what they found to be effective tactics for scaling up to some of the other facts and stuff like that? How and whay to create a Clan or Guild or Party or Society or Association, why one would choose to start such a thing using the Crossfire RPG interface rather than the COffeeMUD interface or vice-versa, gosh there is just so much folks could usefully write about...

-MarkM-

[Traxo]

I tried to set up pairs on the Stellar platform of everything against Lumens as well as everything against DeVCoins, so maybe if there are not a lot of Lumens offered directly against DeVCoin you could consume a whole bunch of offers of other things against DeVCoin then those other things against Lumens?

I think someone posted something somewhere about InterStellar maybe even having a tool or something for multi-stage converting of things?

You mean pathfinding?

Cross-asset payments

Suppose you are holding sheep and want to buy something from a store that only accepts wheat. You can create a payment in Stellar that will automatically convert your sheep into wheat. It goes through the sheep/wheat orderbook and converts your sheep at the best available rate.

You can also make more complicated paths of asset conversion. Imagine that the sheep/wheat orderbook has a very large spread or is nonexistent. In this case, you might get a better rate if you first trade your sheep for brick and then sell that brick for wheat. So a potential path would be 2 hops: sheep->brick->wheat. This path would take you through the sheep/brick orderbook and then the brick/wheat orderbook.

These paths of asset conversion can contain up to 6 hops, but the whole payment is atomic–it will either succeed or fail. The payment sender will never be left holding an unwanted asset.

This process of finding the best path of a payment is called pathfinding. Pathfinding involves looking at the current orderbooks and finding which series of conversions gives you the best rate. It is handled outside of Stellar Core by something like Horizon.

With Interstellar v3.5, we took our most unique feature, the crypto asset swap, and transformed it from something good to something insanely great. It now allows anyone to swap between any two crypto assets on the SDEX (Stellar Decentralized Exchange), even without a direct market between those two crypto assets. We achieve this feat by FINDING the best PATH between any two assets and use only the best path to swap one crypto asset for another. Hence the internal codename: PathFinder.
 
Our primary motivation for this PathFinder update was to address some shortcomings that our previous crypto asset swap feature had. One of the flaws our previous model had was that it only handled crypto asset swaps for the absolute best current offers on the SDEX without considering liquidity and depth of the orderbook. It was also limited to direct markets between any two crypto assets, i.e. you couldn’t swap from Interstellar’s BTC to Tempo’s EUR on the SDEX because there wasn’t any direct market between both crypto assets. Users who also used our advanced multisig feature experienced difficulties making swaps work for them because by the time all the signers signed the crypto asset swap transaction, the orderbook would most likely have already changed, transforming their market order into a limit order. This wasn’t a good user experience. Our new crypto asset swap feature solves all the above-mentioned issues beautifully, by finding the best path between any two crypto assets in real time.

So basically turn your question around: which free open source projects can we find ways to create value with, and how can we expand our repertoire of projects and types of projects we can do that with?

We should look at projects with an eye to how we can fit them into our growing economy of projects.
[...]
Folks could write about how they got into whatever facet of it all, what they found to be effective tactics for scaling up to some of the other facts and stuff like that? How and whay to create a Clan or Guild or Party or Society or Association, why one would choose to start such a thing using the Crossfire RPG interface rather than the COffeeMUD interface or vice-versa, gosh there is just so much folks could usefully write about...

CrossFire RPG seems like rather complex game. Perhaps other games are as well, so I think a lot of people might find it not worth their time to delve into it. I remember OGame and similar games involving risks of somebody attacking you, thus taking part of your resources, and thus making some players actually quit the game, or start playing on another server.  
Maybe there could be simpler games? Just so that folks can start with something tangible, and easy to understand, to get the general idea what it's about?  
Since you are already scaling the... perspective(?) down (galaxy->civilization->individual), how about creating some simple "mini-games" which individual ("character") would be playing? For example some simple puzzle games (competitive?), or some gambling-type games?