Topic: A fair and strong Bitcoin fork design exploration, "Faircoin" - page 2. (Read 5011 times)

The issue I see with this is how the rate of generation of the currency would be controlled. With Bitcoin it's in the protocol. How would you prevent gaming the system or the game's owner from generating large amounts of currency whenever they wanted in your scenario?

You make an interesting proposal, but it would require for the currency be an inherent part of the simulation.
A separate block chain if you will, a bit like bitcoins testnet but requiring simulated infrastructure to run.

All those things are what we try to simulate.

Maybe the word "simulation" might make the concept more understandable to you than the word "game".

You kind of sound a bit like a Private who refuses to take part in "field exercise" / "field training" on the grounds that there is no point "playing wargames".

Real world forces actually do "play games" as much as they can afford to, so that they can know whether their tools, equipment and people are ready for "the real thing".

Millions of dollars have already been lost due to people insisting on "going live" before their systems and people have been proven in "simulation".

It is not easy to get lots of people to spend hours and hours each doing testing; making a "game" out of it lets them at least get some kind of satisfaction/reward out of it.

-MarkM-

I'd say online games are a good use for cryptocurrencies yes. But so are drugs, socks and webhosting. (I'd leave out socks because they are closest to the thing I'd like to deal with)

Where my interest lies is have a system which is very well suited for these things:
land, food and shelter
production-, communication- and transportation-infrastructure
weapons, energy and computers

I don't care about the rest.

YOu seriously don't see any connection between vrtual currencies and virtual worlds?

World of Warcraft god, EVE Online currency, Lindens, Litecoins, Bitcoins, BotCoins, etc etc are all virtual currencies and many of them situate much of their economies within virtual worlds.

All that is without even getting into the legal aspects, wherein games seem to be a lot safe places in which to situate stock exchanges than plonking then right inside the jurisdiction of the Earth authorities like GLBSE did.

Stock exchange and currency exchanges working with virtual world currencies are primage targets for any kind of integration with bitcoins and any other cryptocoins.

Another economic aspect is that spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on money-transmitter licenses stock broker licenses and so on might not make sense for any coin of which you are not doing millions of dollars of volume, so cranking up the volume in virtual worlds makes a lot of sense for getting security issues solved and software fully tested before even considering using the software for real world exchanges and stock exchanges and such.

Plus if it is useless even for games it is totally useless. Whereas if is is useful as a game currency it might, like other game currencies before it, become valuable in the real world too.

There is also the matter of backing. Game currencies have an entire world, or many worlds, of products ready to buy with them right off the bat, whereas currencies no games will accept likely also few or no sellers of anything else will accept either so they just end up as pump and dump schemes, trying to scam people into selling fiat for them.

-MarkM-

I made a proposal on the topic of the thread, not a complete concept which if I had wouldn't even bother with this forum.

We all have our motivation, I respect yours, but if you link to some of your stuff please provide context to relate it to the discussion.
Srsly, I'm lost how are your online games related the economic aspect of cryptocurrencies?

I do not recall even seeing any links to any proposals, I would have gone and taken a look I expect had I noticed one but I don't even notice any links in any of your posts to this thread so have no idea where your proposal's documentation might be found.

Engines to drive civilisations are of course always of interest to the Freeciv ("'Cause civilisation should be free!") scale aspects of the Galactic Milieu and thus also ultimately to all the smaller scales too once assimilated into the Milieu.

-MarkM-

I took a quick look. I'll take a better look before commenting on it though.

Have you looked at my proposal at all? It's a little different than OP's in a way that it still rewards early adoption due to difficulty, but not as in the form of a block reward until 50% of the currency has been minted.
I am not that interested in being even in the same district as bitcoin, which strikes me more as a velociraptor than a gorilla. It might evolve into a bird some day but when the comet comes in its current form has to go.


I am not even interested in creating another cryptocurrency per se, but an engine to drive a self-sustaining civilization.

It's not perfect, as I said. Perfection may not even be close to being required. Heck, we get by with pieces of paper with a dead guy's face on the front well enough. I just think you need to look closely at what you're hoping to do before you go massively adjusting the protocol. No rewards for early mining will likely mean it's DOA. Allowing long-term inflation would be much more damaging than people realize (I suspect). Trying to make things "fair" will typically remove many of the incentives for generating and using such a currency in the first place.

Heck, I'm almost at the point that I've almost mined my first complete bitcoin. I'm no big player and it's mostly just a curiosity for me. I think the focus on mining is misplaced. In a short enough time, it will "Go away". Will some people who got in early make out like bandits? Of course. That is the nature of being in the right place at the right time.

Is there room for other crypto currencies? Possibly but they will have their own niche and their own problems to solve. In the arena that bitcoin fills, it is likely to be the 800lb gorilla in the room. Even technically better solutions (and I don't believe the OP's is) would have a hard time competing against it. There may be some interesting options in alternative currencies. Heck, one which did gradually redistribute itself might be interesting to some.

The major strength of CPUs is forked decision-trees. If it is not known even which planet one might end up on, or even, without some analysis of price lists from various planets, which planets offer the best rates of return for a given set of skills and state of peace, war, alliance or whatever between planets and the nations on those planets, it is hard to hard-code a fixed set of actions that will work constantly.

I suppose though I am really meaning PC mining as in Personal Computer mining, since the ability to keep historic prices on disk to compute trends and so on is also something GPUs and ASICs are not optimum at.

Daytrading automatically would be an example of the kind of mining I am thinking of.

Basically it is a matter of teaching your computer to make money automatically 24/7.

Once upon a time posting messages worked well, gradually the rules posting had to follow got harder and harder, like instead of only post to no more than 5 newsgroups the same post, it started getting into whether the post involved products or services for sale.

Once upon a time generating web-pages worked. You could generate gigabytes of pages of Yahoo search results on a topic and Yahoo would rate it number one because apparently it thought its own results were the most relevant possible content about the topic.

Once upon a time simply having autosurf programs running 24/7 in browsers worked. Heck that one still works somewhat for some people it just takes a heck of a lot of pageviews to earn, so that the electricity and network-bandwidth cost becomes more than the thing makes unless the pages it is showing to other "surfers" suck the rare actually live human viewers of the occassional page (e.g. people setting up still thus actually seeing some pages other people are showing) into extremely efficient marketing-funnels.

And so on. Mining World of Warcraft gold is really just yet another "how to rake in money automatically" plug-in.

See Total Automation Project, which was known as Money for Dummies until the "xxxxx for dummies" corp complained about it:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040803020712/http://isp.knotwork.com/dummies/

See also Makemoney Knotwork: Toward a GNU "make money":

http://web.archive.org/web/20070429184251/http://www.makemoney.knotwork.com/

-MarkM-

Would that be more like PC mining (player character). The strength of the CPU would not really be an issue.

Minecraft might be more of a fit though. I think a mod has even been suggested that would allow mining for actual BTC in the game.

Richy_T: People often try to hide their fear behind sarcasm. Since you think Bitcoin is perfect there is no point with you being here, is it? We are discussing an alternative to perfection, that's a waste of time.


Yes it is clear Satoshi choose the number of coins to be a certain value with a specific purpose, the problem is that the current paradigm present in this forum (Bitcoinism) tends to promote driving the value up to the point where common day goods would be traded in fractional values. (The whole perpetual early adoption thing)
The problem with Bitcoin is that the ever reducing block reward encourages this ideology and that's the reason why I think it should be changed.

thanks!

OK, we're good then.

I'm not feeling threatened. My original post was more satirical. A lot of the original poster's concerns seemed to be based on some perceived need for fairness and the solutions he was suggesting either seemed to further unbalance things, damage the chances of adoption of the currency or both. The motivation seemed to be to want to get a share of the loot once all the work had been done. One might look to the story of the little red hen.

Everything about Bitcoin appears to have been done for a reason and those reasons seem to have been calculated by someone who was both a genius and had some serious experience in the field. It's not perfect for sure but it seems to me that every part of the spec is at least "in the ball park". So there really needs to be a very good reason to change any of those decisions. One does alter an aircraft and take away the front window and yoke because it's not "fair" to the passengers.

With that said, I'm up for getting into the nitty-gritty of things so let's jump on in.

That's true, and maybe Satoshi thought about that. Hence, we don't have BTC millionaires (yet) and I find it interesting that the price tends to hover around either 2.5, 5 or ten dollars. The other price ranges feel more volatile. Perhaps it's just psychology. :-)

At the same time though, we do have 8 decimal places of precision so all the technical things have been accounted for as well.

BTW: I like your tag line. Scam or Legit? You don't quite know before hand. :-)

Think of DIablo3, WoW, EVE Online etc botfarms as CPU mining.

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

Afterall with even litecoin moving to GPUs, miners still need things to keep their CPUs busy, right?

The page linked is a start at exploring such CPU mining. (You need unpredictable-path "random" stuff like scripted non player characters in multiplayer online games have to deal with in order to stay in realms where CPUs outperform GPUs...)

-MarkM-

It's actually on the bitcoin wiki:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Units

Nah, you'd be safe.
My point: If you feel threatened by us discussing innovating the cryptocurrency concept you shouldn't make it so obvious.

I would tell you what I would encourage you to do but I don't want a ban.

There's quite a good thread on it somewhere. (Can't find it right now). I think it used "Millie" for the thousandths rather than Milli