It is still possible that oodles of IXCoin lost to fly-by-night or hacked exchanges are "out there" still yet to be dumped, yes.
But a lot of dumping has happened overall already, so maybe quite a bit of the stolen IXCoin has already long been dumped.
Then too, bear in mind that IXCoin is one of the "treasury based" currencies of the
Galactic Milieu.
Because the game cannot rely upon always having enough actively-arbitraging players constantly active on all the markets, each currency paired against each other currency, the "treasuries" system is used so the game can compute the relative values of all the currencies.
It does this by adding up the values of everything in the currency's "treasury" and dividing that total by the number of that coin that has been minted.
Notice that is the number MINTED, not the number still actively in play / in circulation.
That means for purposes of the Milieu's calculation of a currency's relative value keeping a bunch of that currency out of circulation does NOT affect the calculation, despite the fact doing so might well put upward pressure on "spot market" prices by limiting the available "supply" able to get onto such "spot markets" to be sold and thus the "supply" available on spot markets to be bought.
This calculation of values based on "treasury" holdings is run over and over and over again, comparing its resulting "
Latest Rates include-file" against the previous one until "diff latestrates.inc latestrates.old" finds the previous one and the current one are identical.
That means if any of the "reserve currencies" used in the "treasuries" change value, their changed value is applied to all the other "treasuries" and the calculation is run again; if any of those changed, their change is reflected in the next run around the loop, effecting all currencies having the changed one(s) in their own "treasuries"; and so on, round and round and round until they all come out unchanged from one run to the next.
That looping simulates an "efficient market", that is, a market in which everyone has full information and in which arbitrageurs efficiently balance out discrepancies.
The resulting "Latest Rates include file" thus shows values that work in all directions between all pairings of the currencies; for Open Transactions we had shell-scripts that included that file and automatically posted buy and sell offers of each currency against each other currency on three scales of how many coins in a bundle, so that like with porkbellies or cans of soup you could have different price-per-unit depending on whether you were buying individual items, packages of ten, packages of 100, packages of 1000 and so on. That way players could buy, say, 100000 at a time on the large scale market and resell at a profit in batches of 10000 at a time on the next-smaller market, or 1000 at a time on the next-next-smaller market and so on. The scripts used three scales for each pair and marked up their asking price or marked down their offering price from the values in the include-file by a smaller percentage the larger the market, like maybe 1% if you buy 100,000 at a time, 2% if you buy only 10,000, 3% if you buy 1000 at a time kind of thing.
Having these conversion-rates means all the major entities in the game can freely convert between currencies without having to somehow keep enough players active on each and every currency-pair's markets for organic "price-discovery" to take place. It means sellers of things and services in the game can accept any of the currencies they choose to, and, perhaps unfortunately, debtors can pay off their loans using any of the currencies without having to go through "spot markets" to try to convert their payment into the currency their loan is denominated in.
I said "perhaps unfortunately" there because for years now we in the DeVCoin project (DVC, another coin merged-mined right alongside BTC, IXC, I0C, CLC, GRP XGG etc) have speculated that if the vast amount of DeVCoin-denominated debt insisted on being paid IN ACTUAL DeVCoins, the amount of debt-paying constantly going on would likely cause massive pressure on any "spot markets" where folks can buy DeVCoins using other coins or currencies.
On the other hand, even if all the DeVCoins being constantly minted were all made available in the game for debtors whose loans are denominated in DeVCoins to buy up and use to make loan payments, there might not be enough!
So basically the Latest Rates include-file came about partly because waiting for players to actively trade each and every currency against, for example. DeVCoin so that debtors owing DeVCoins could use whatever coins they were earning to buy DeVCoins to make loan payments was simply not practical.
Now another thing to consider is that the calculation of value based on "treasury" does not count a currency's own coins if any of its own coins did happen to be in its treasury. Nowadays probably all the treasuries don't actually contain any of their own coin, but even if they did the calculation treats the value of their own coin as zero when adding up the value of their own treasury.
That means each currency has at least one "Slush Fund" account: a place where it can store any of its own coin that it owns.
Then, once they had at least one "Slush Fund" account anyway, many started to use their "Slush Fund" as a kind of catch-all petty (or not-so-petty) cash account.
So many of the currencies have pretty darn large amounts of stuff in their "Slush Funds", kind of like the way that when I tokenise coins I only tokenise half of them so I can keep the other half available to buy the tokens back without without needing to actually use the coins that "back" the tokens to "redeem" the tokens. I suppose ideally we should start trying to get everyone to keep at least as much value in their "Slush Fund" as they have in their "treasury", so that we/they do not need to dip into their actual "treasury" in order to "redeem" their coins at the values calculated from their "treasury".
(Afterall we do not wish to have to constantly change the contents of the treasuries just to do day to day things like buying back our coins from who-ever has somehow managed to get hold of some of them; it is nice to only put into our treasury things we hopefully never need to take back out of the treasury, or at least never to take anything out of the treasury without replacing it with something of greater or equal value. So if there is any chance that a currency might need to buy back every one of its coins at the value computed from its treasury it would be able to do that using its "Slush Fund", no need to actually "liquidate" anything that is actually in the treasury. Currently however that ideal is not yet enforced, so it is currently possible that some of the currencies might have to liquidate stuff from their treasury if enough of a "bank run" on their coin were to somehow happen.)
The germ of the idea behind this "treasuries" system began back when I was using eggdrop IRC-bots to allow access to the coin-daemons of the "big seven" Galactic currencies, many years ago.
Basically each daemon (coin) had a named account in its built-in simplistic accounts system (that maybe bitcoin still might have? Not sure. Older coins certainly still have it) named for each other coin.
So for example in IXCoin's daemon there were accounts for I0Coin and for DeVCoin and each other coin, so that each other coin could own some IXCoin.
Then the IRC bot could use the Latest Rates Include-file, adding a small fee to cover any blockchain fees and maybe a small stipend for itself, let folks buy back any of the coins using any of the other coins subject only to how many of each other coin each coin had.
That is, IF anyone had bought any IXC using, say, DVC, resulting in IXC's DVC-account having some DVC in it, THEN IXC was able to sell that DVC. Basically each coin thus could own some of each other coin, and users could only buy from each coin as many of each other coin as that particular coin actually had on hand.
Thus IF anyone bought any IXC using BTC, THEN that amount of BTC (minus any blockchain-fees) would be available to be bought FOR IXC.
In other words each coin would be redeemable in each other coin only up to however much of that other coin had been used to buy the coin in the first place.
In other other words, you could not expect to be able to buy BTC with IXC unless someone, even if only you yourself, had at some previous time already bought IXC with BTC.
Does that make sense to you?
Unfortunately over the years some BTC did get sent to third-party "exchanges" which ended up "flying by night", claiming to be hacked, and so on and so on.
Thus over the years such activities have periodically crippled our ability to buy back every single one of each coin USING the exact same coin as was originally used to buy it from us.
That is sad, but what can we do about it? We are still waiting for various coins from various "bankruptcy proceedings" of exchanges and suchlike things.
But meanwhile, each and every IXCoin, including ones in long-lost wallets that are totally and forever lost, can be redeemed at the rates shown in the Latest Rates include-file, albeit how many of which of the currencies shown it would take to do it necessarily varies according to how many of which currency who-ever you go to to redeem them happens to have on hand.
For a currency such as IXC, which only has 21 million coins yet each is currently shown as being worth so little, likely there are some other currencies that would be able to buy the entire lot of them from you, maybe without even needing to dip into their own actual "treasury" to do so...
-MarkM-