[GRP] GRouPcoin

[markm]

I have applied the BIP-30 patch to groupcoin, latest source code is at

https://sourceforge.net/projects/galacticmilieu/files/GRouPcoin/

It seems we never did get around to applying the merged mining (as aux chain) patches to groupcoin-qt so currently wxWidgets is the only GUI available, it is right in there with the groupcoind in the groupcoin-09-Mar-2012.tgz archive.

-MarkM-

[worldinacoin]

Actually what is groupcoin?  I tried installing the client in Windows 7 but can't get it to run

[gorgo1]

What is GroupCoin all about exactly? How's this different from the other alt chains like SC,i0 coin,GG etc?

[bitcoinsarefun]

What is GroupCoin all about exactly? How's this different from the other alt chains like SC,i0 coin,GG etc?

Actually what is groupcoin?  I tried installing the client in Windows 7 but can't get it to run

According to the readme file


Groupcoin is the precursor to devcoin, in which we tested
some ideas to fall back on in case we could not do what
we wanted devcoin to do.

Devcoin was described at

https://github.com/Unthinkingbit/charity/wiki/Devcoin-Description

but the description has apparently since been moved to

http://www.devtome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Devcoin

[markm]

Yes, exactly, GRouPcoin is what we built on the way to creating DeVCoin. We tried some approaches toward how we thought we might be able to do DeVCoin, then once we settled on how to proceed we went ahead and made the actual DeVCoin.

Since the things we had been trying were things that turned out not to work, they were removed or turned back off, leaving GRouPcoin as just a simple inflation-forever coin, that is, a coin that keeps making 50 coins per block forever.

It also has the difficulty adapting fixes various coins adopted after seeing namecoin get left at high difficulty for months by being abandoned by miners, and the timetravel fix that prevents the timetravel exploit.

So it is just a nice simple example of a coin that keeps making new coins forever, which some people once upon a time thought might be better than designed-in deflation. I guess the people who used to argue against deflation, in favour of some kind of forever-minting coin like this one, maybe weren't really all that serious in their proposals since they do not seem to have made much or even any effort to actually pursue the experiment to see whether in fact not building in deflation is better than having deflation designed-in.

Nonetheless the experiment continues, and the coin is also being considered by the various Repossession corps in various games for adoption as their own currency, which they would then tend to refer to as Galactic RePo coin (also known as General RePo coin)  instead of GRouPcoin, retaining the GRP symbol but re-purposing it.

-MarkM-

EDIT: For the Repo corps to use an inflationary coin is kind of ironic given that the existence of such corps in the first place is itself a move against the inflationary nature of new-player-startup-stuff in games, whereby games can be spammed-full of free stuff simply by having lots of new players joining the game and being automatically provided with various startup items and/or resources and/or places/villages/planets/etc.

[kjlimo]

So is Groupcoin still running?  Is there an exchange, pool, gui, or other things available for people to easily get involved in mining/owning/using Groupcoins?

[markm]

It is still running, but the exchange is an Open Transactions server and Open Transactions is still having some growing pains, another round of deep improvements to the code that might make all of the existing stuff we set up in the exchange have to be re-done from scratch. We are still trying to work out whether our data will need re-doing or not, as the latest round of changes are still in progress.

Once it is working, Open Transactions will be a great platform for trading all the cryptocurrencies and also a whole bunch of shares in various corps. It is a general purpose platform that can do currencies and shares and eventually also other assets such as real-estate. So although it has taken many months already working with it, the work should be well worth it once we finally get through al lthe changes we found had to be done to make it a realistic platform.

If you want a GUI, you can compile with wxWidgets, same way bitcoin used to since it is based on bitcoin code. Most people using it are just really using tokens of it, through various kinds of bank-like systems such as their clan accounting or even, for clans that don't have their own cryptocoin daemons set up, a clan account with some clan or nation or planet or whatever that does have a daemon or that got an account on the Open Transactions server during periods when it was up and running, or that use person to person accounting in any of the various MUD or Crossfire or whatever servers.

-MarkM-

[Mousepotato]

Wait, was Groupcoin that one which was supposed to have a fixed exchange rate of $100 USD per Groupcoin?

[markm]

Wait, was Groupcoin that one which was supposed to have a fixed exchange rate of $100 USD per Groupcoin?

No, it is not pegged to fiat at all.

In some games though some of the players seem to generally assume it ought to be worth 1,000 DeVCoins since that is how many more DeVCoins get generated than GRouPcoins. The fact that mining them is actually much easier many players kind of shrug off as well y'know, the people who mine the gold for goldpieces or the silver for silverpieces or the copper for copperpieces probably make a markup too, its what parts of gaming interest you, you wanna run around killing critters and taking whatever kinds of coins or jewels or whatever they happen to have, or become some kind of computer geek to rig up your home machine to mine for you? Heck many players don't even run 24/7 scripts to train up characters or forage for resources etc. Many don't even run triggers to have them automatically eat when hungry, apply healing aids when wounded, etc. Its all in what aspect of gaming you happen to be into.

You lot probably don't even want to have a material body in the game subject to having some assassin sneak up behind it cosh it and steal your coins while you read the stock ticker. Others would prefer to pretend to read the stock ticker while waiting to pickpocket actual traders who come read it looking to trade. Different games for different folks...

Right now GRouPcoin and DeVCoin are looking better to most players than most cryptocurrencies simply because there aren't yet a lot of players offering decent stuff for sale for other currencies. With GRouPcoins or DeVCoins you can buy good gear, so they are "worth more"... Other currencies' advocates just don't seem to be into gaming maybe.

-MarkM-

[markm]

The long delayed debut of GRouPcorp, the GRouPcoin-promoting Corp along the lines of DeVCoin's DeVCorp, is finally coming back on track.

The initial offering was 1,000,000 shares at one GRouPcoin each, however only 22,000 were bought before we ran into a snag: it turned out that the issuer account for digiGRouPcoins (dGRP) on Digitalis Open Transactions server had gotten "out of sync" way back when during one of the major upgrades of the Open Transactions software, preventing us from issuing any more dGRP tokens.

This not only led to people not being able to receive these tokens, with which to buy shares, but also it interrupted me in the very process of recording the assets of the GRouPcorp Corp; all the asset valuation stats at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html have been showing a ridiculously small value for sGRP (GRouPcorp shares) because I had not gotten around to recording the fact that the Corp still owned 978000 of its own shares.

I have now corrected that omission, so the next run of the valuation routines should show the correct valuation for those shares.

However the issuing account for dGRP is still out of sync as with the further upgrades of the Open Transactions software the old sync script we used in the past to correct out of sync accounts is now out of date so we are waiting for an updated version of resync before we can resync the account and issue people the dGRP tokens they have been waiting so long for.

-MarkM-

[markm]

I have uploaded groupcoin-22-Aug-2012.tgz to the GRouPcoin subdirectory of my Sourceforge download site

https://sourceforge.net/projects/galacticmilieu/files/

It is the same as the groupcoin-09-Mar-2012.tgz that it replaces, except for the addition of a new checkpoint and

application of the important bugfix disclosed in the recent [Full Disclosure] CVE-2012-2459 (block merkle calculation exploit) thread.

-MarkM-

[killerstorm]

The long delayed debut of GRouPcorp, the GRouPcoin-promoting Corp along the lines of DeVCoin's DeVCorp, is finally coming back on track.

Can you please explain, is this just a game or do these corporations actually do anything? I've been reading your messages for some time, but still I cannot understand.

I understand that play assets are not fundamentally different from 'real' assets, but the difference is in fundamentals: is there any activity other than posting about it on forum? So, well, is this an economy in itself, or is it integrated with outer world?

[markm]

GRouPcorp hasn't really done anything yet.

DeVCorp though was instrumental in getting a whole bunch of stuff done, mostly through the General Financial Corp which DeVCorp was the main driving force behind.

As you said there really isn't much of a line you can draw between "real" and "non-real" currencies, contracts, trades, deals, and so on. In many ways the whole edifice of "unit of account" games known as "finance" is kind of unreal.

People who get right into some particular activity might find endless fascination in it, but one thing abstract finance seems potentially to offer is a way for all kinds of people to interact with all kinds of stuff in totally abstract ways where all they care about is some particular market, whether it be dollars for magic swords or pineapples for spaceships or whatever pair of assets catches their interest, possibly only because of the ups and downs of its chart without any interest whatsoever in what the actual things are whose relativity in that market has caught someone's attention.

Thanks to DeVCorp, a whole bunch of compound interest denominated in DeVCoins is coming the way of various entities; the main reason GRouPcorp has not done much the same for GRouPcoin yet is I have not been able to issue people their groupcoin tokens yet...

-MarkM-

[markm]

It turned out there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the GRouPcoin issuing account, I simply had not realised the resync utility operated on a per nym basis thus it had never actually been run for the GRouPcoin-issuing nym since way way back when some major updates and changes led to some old accounts getting out of sync.

So I have now been able to issue more dGRP (digiGRouPcoins) onto the server and once they are divvied up to their destined recipients GRouPcorp will be able to start selling its shares at last and thus have some capital with which to start doing whatever it is going to be doing.

-MarkM-

[markm]

Just thought it might be worthwhile to remind folks that this coin is still chugging along, and can still be merged-mined alongside bitcoins, namecoins, devcoins, ixcoins, i0coins and coiledcoins. It seems a few more merged-miners have picked up on that fact recently but so far its difficulty is still well within the reach of small at-home GPU-miners...

Also with the advent of the new Ripple, Open Transactions is no longer the only "exchange" available for it...

-MarkM-

[markm]

Something seems to have been going on with this coin recently, the plot

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/plotgrp.html

shows it has climbed rapidly.

Also its value per coin climbed back up above that of DeVCoin not long ago (though it is not the only coin that happened to).

Main menu of such and related plots and tables is at

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

-MarkM-

Edit: wrong paste buffer had pasted totally wrong URL for the plot, fixed now.

[markm]

Has GRouPcoin been added to a merged mining pool recently or is it just that merged mining privately is becoming more popular?

GRouPcoin's difficulty is up to 292949.03423883 now which is way higher than it was like hmm yesterday, maybe? Last few days sometime anyway.

-MarkM-

[tadakaluri]

How to mine GrouPcoin?

[markm]

How to mine GrouPcoin?

Using the daemon is probably easiest, as trying to compile the wXwidgets GUI was hard way back when and probably much harder now that maybe wXwidgets that one gets with one's distro is a much newer version than the old original bitcoin was built with. heck bitcoin was already using an older version than was current when i first came across bitcoin.

So unless you want to wrestle with ancient wXwidgets, the daemon would be the way to go.

I did upload though a copy of the specific wXwidgets I used.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/galacticmilieu/files/

-MarkM-

[markm]

Now up to 419400.16171871 difficulty!

-MarkM-