Topic: Devcoin - page 169. (Read 412955 times)

Devcoin is a token currency to fund open source developers who create software, hardware, articles, music, and other stuff:
https://github.com/Unthinkingbit/charity/wiki/Devcoin-Description

Another way of looking at devcoin is to compare it to Ithaca Hours:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Hours

I posted a link to the wikipedia article rather than the Ithaca Hours website because the Ithaca website is badly designed or broken.


Ithaca Hours are paper money, which costs roughly 0.1 USD to make:
http://consumerist.com/2011/03/rising-cotton-costs-make-paper-money-more-expensive-to-print.html

which is roughly 1% of their 10 USD value.

Devcoins are electronic coins for which the miners get 10% of the value.


Ithaca Hours are granted to Ithaca non-profit organizations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Hours#Economic_development

Devcoins are granted to developers on the bitcoin donation list:
https://github.com/Unthinkingbit/charity/blob/e5621e493d6a44472d3aa4679420f1bacce16039/bitcoindonationinformation.html

the devcoin share list:
https://github.com/Unthinkingbit/charity/blob/e5621e493d6a44472d3aa4679420f1bacce16039/devcoinshare.html

and devcoin bounties and in future other open source bounties:
https://github.com/Unthinkingbit/charity/wiki/Devcoin-Bounty


There is confusion about devcoin, but devcoin is just a token currency like Ithaca Hours, or the Christiania coin:
http://www.utopiskehorisonter.dk/engelsk/comcur.htm

Worgl Schillings:
http://www.globalideasbank.org/site/bank/idea.php?ideaId=904

United States Notes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Note
http://www.john-f-kennedy.net/thefederalreserve.htm

Colonial Script:
http://www.kamron.com/Liberty/colonial_script.htm
http://1zipmont.wordpress.com/the-status-quo/the-founding-fathers-colonial-script-the-federal-reserve-and-the-national-debt/

Devcoin is simply the first electronic, peer to peer, token currency.

At the time of this writing the bitcoin difficulty is 1,203,461:
http://allchains.info/

The devcoin difficulty varies because it uses a continuous average difficulty, but it's typically around 35:
http://107.20.193.62:2750/chain/Devcoin?count=500

Because only one tenth of devcoin generation goes to the miner, the effective difficulty value is 35 / 0.1 = 350.

Devcoin blocks are one thousand times bigger than the bitcoin blocks, to avoid potential problems people have dealing with large currency units:
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9299.0

So the value from difficulty of devcoin relative to bitcoin is the devcoin difficulty / bitcoin difficulty / 0.1 / 1000, which simplifies to:
devcoin difficulty / bitcoin difficulty / 100

Currently, the devcoin difficulty exchange rate is:
35 difficulty / 1,203,461 difficulty / 100 * 1 BTC/DVC = 0.000000291 BTC/DVC

The inverted exchange rate is:
1.0 / 0.000000291 BTC/DVC = 3,438,460 DVC/BTC

The last devcoin trade on vircurex:
https://vircurex.com/

was at 50,000 devcoins per bitcoin at the time of this writing.

So people are buying devcoins at way too high a price compared to generation.  While I want people to get devcoins, I don't want people do so at way too high a price.  I want people to know what they are getting into and know that the block size is fifty thousand devcoins.

Note:
I still don't want people to trade a lot until there is devcoin merged mining; but it would be good to see a realistic devcoin price in the meantime, even though the market is tiny.

I believe the idea and concept in general is an excellent one, everyone nowerdays talks about supporting opensource, but how many people actually support those releasing opensource software? Here we have a means of supporting a broader range of people and projects without having to transfer funds "somehow" to each and everyone individually. You could argue that this can also be done via BTC or any other of the existing alt-chains, but the main difference here is, one can now support a larger group of projects with one purchase of DVC rather than having to transfer coins to several projects. Similar to the Red Cross, I guess, you entrust them with donations and expect them to manage it properly by funding individual cases. You want to support opensource, go buy a couple of DVC of the exchanges, keep them or throw them away, doesn't matter, with the purchase of DVC, you have most likely bought them of someone who received them as being part of the opensource community group that is supported by the DVC.

Is the 90% too high or too low? Time will tell, we need a starting point somewhere. My take is that the majority of the coins need to go to the Opensource commonity because they get supported by selling their coins to those who want to support the projects, and not the miners selling them. Yes of course most miners mine to make money or at least cover their operational costs, so obviously a fair share needs to go to them too. 

Most likely there will only be a few miners unless we get merged mining up and running and convince some pools to use it. That sounds easier than done, strangely some of the big pools are not even merge mining BTC/NMC yet.

The ultimate goal is to support the Opensource community, right? Most people dont want to go and mine to support, they'll probably just want to go buy some DVC to support the overall community and then possibly donate them to a specific project.

This is an update of the wiki bounty.

For the bounty, the developer can choose from either the offered generation shares (minimum five million devcoins), or five million devcoins per share upfront or ten bitcoins per share, whichever you prefer will get generation shares.

Edit: There are now three wikis, and another is not needed; so the options of the devcoins upfront, or bitcoins, have been cancelled. The developer would only get generation shares.


The bounty is for an open source wiki where the contributors get a share of the advertising revenue, converted to devcoins, plus devcoin generation shares.  The developer who makes the wiki gets four generation shares (20 MVDC or 40 BTC).  If the wiki also has some kind of advertising, the developer will get an additional four shares (20 MVDC or 40 BTC).

There are three potential ways of getting advertising revenue:

1) A bitcoin advertising network like Operation Fabulous:
http://www.operationfabulous.com/

2) Handling bitcoin advertising directly.

3) Set up a cooperative in a tax free jurisdiction and connect to regular ad networks.

It doesn't matter what method is used.  All that matters is that only text or picture ads will be accepted, there will be only one ad group on each page, and no malware, porn or scammy stuff.

Whoever sets up the wiki will get a share of the generation to administer it.  However, they do not have total control over the website, they are just administering it for what will eventually be a democratic cooperative.  Of course, they will be part of that cooperative.  There are no notability requirements for the wiki, only the usual no malware, porn or scammy stuff.

If more than one person makes the wiki, the second will get three quarters of the bounty, the third two quarters of the bounty and the fourth one quarter of the bounty.  The next developers would have to maintain a backup of the first wiki, if the first wiki failed for some reason they would bring their wiki to the fore.

Thanks for the response.  It seems to me that devcoin has a fatal flaw-- 90% of the benefits go directly to a select group of people (approved by whom?), thus ensuring it would never get adopted as a currency/means of barter by the greater population. Also, what is the motivation to mine it for the greater population?  Or perhaps I'm not understanding it correctly?

The round 5 receiver files are now up:
http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/receiver_5.csv
https://raw.github.com/Unthinkingbit/charity/master/receiver_5.csv
http://devcoinblockexplorer.info/receiver/receiver_5.csv

They are based on the account 5 file at:
https://raw.github.com/Unthinkingbit/charity/master/account_5.csv

New awards will go into round 6.

Note: there are 38 receiver lines in round 5, so each receiver line gets a minimum of int(4,000 / 38) * 45,000 DVC = 4,725,000 DVC.  The maximum shortfall of Kumula's exchange bounty is 12 * (5,000,000 - 4,725,000) DVC = 3,300,000 DVC.  So I sent 3,300,000 DVC to cover it, in block 17299:
http://107.20.193.62:2750/tx/9dc97fc1cd8d38f31dc810f7899ef3ba68fd672c11cb1f04f1d32f299fd724cb

The way I see it it's a token currency to allow open source projects to trade resources and to pay people for contributions. When you start an open source project you have ideas that there will
be lots of people helping you just because you made it open source yet the reality is that many projects have just one or two developers doing most of the work. Devcoin allows people to help kickstart new or further develop existing projects and get some outside help.

Out of curiosity, what is everybody's take on the purpose and goals of devcoin? (Especially Unthinkingbit's opinion)

I've started writing the draft announcement for the project in-utero bounty.

http://www.in-utero.org/index.php/topic,6.msg6.html

I will revise it and add more details tomorrow. I have probably added far to much information (for background) in some parts and not enough in others.

I will also need to describe the requirements better for the story and the illustrations.

The next bounty will be for an animation of the rejuvenation processes that will be uploaded to youtube.

Hi Kumala,


You're welcome.

Thanks for choosing to take the bounty straight from generation, it means less accounting work for me 

Hi Caston,


A mixed bounty would be ok.

You can do whatever you want with your devcoins.

They arrived, many thanks.

Hi Kumala,


Thanks for sending the code snippets and backup script extract.  You demonstrated that your exchange meets all requirements for the secure exchange bounty.  Your award is 12 generation shares, which will be around 60 million DVC.  If there end up being more than 36 contributor groups in round 5 and therefore your share turns out to be less than 60 million DVC, I will cover the difference.


You'll get 12 generation shares, starting in round 5.

By the way I sent 1,000,000 DVC for address confirmation because I assumed that you wanted devcoins upfront rather than generation shares, I didn't notice that you wrote generation shares until now.  Consider them a bonus 

I'm interested in offering a bounty for an illustrated short story for project in-utero (http://www.in-utero.org) which is a spin-off of Rejuvepedia. (http://www.rejuvepedia.org)

I was thinking of making it something like 5 million DVC + 2000 TBX + 2000 LTC. The bounty may be split amongst the writer and the illustrator if they are different people.

This is not the official announcement of course but would a mixed bounty be ok?

best regards,

Chris

Hi Unthinkingbit,

1. If you enter the wrong passwort more than 3 times, a Captch shows up (for the next 5 minutes) that you require to enter in order to proceed with the login.
2. On the OS level I use fail2ban to capture attempts to crack the SSH username and password
3. Backup policy: the wallets get backuped up daily, the appplication database gets backed up every 10 minutes (currently full database backup due to its "small' size).
Further backup enhancements are planned: every order execution, withdrawal or deposit will be emailed to an admin account, this will then also allow a recovery with 0 data loss.

I'll send you the code snipplets and an extract from the backup script via PM,

7 generation shares, my DVC address: 1FCJgGYirQ4w2uA3rcE2zwVnD8LVwm8fbB

Thanks
Kumala

Hi Kumala,


Awesome!

Your exchange qualifies for the four share exchange bounty:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.552141

Furthermore, of the extra eight share security bounties:

1) Strong passwords are required.
2) If there are repeated attempts to login, login should be slowed or a captcha should be used if it's not already.
3) Passwords should be hashed at least 10,000 times.
4) There should be an off site backup, at least 100 kilometers away from the site.
5) Deposits need at least six confirmations before they can be exchanged.

After using I can see that it qualifies for:

1) Strong passwords
5) At least six confirmations

Unfortunately I did not put values on the parts of the security bounties, so I'll do that now:

1) Strong passwords, 2 shares
2) Login should be slowed or a captcha, 2 shares
3) Passwords should be hashed repeatedly, 2 shares
4) Off site backup, 1 share
5) Six plus confirmations, 1 share

So the total bounty that I can see it qualifies for is 4 + 2 for strong passwords + 1 for confirmations = 7 shares.  By the options of five million devcoins (MDVC) per share or ten bitcoins per share, whichever you prefer, from the Bounties Summary at:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.591984

You have the option of 7 generation shares, or 35 million devcoins, or 70 bitcoins.  Please post your preference and corresponding coin address.

To get the remaining security bounties, if the exchange qualifies for some or all additional security bounties, please send me some evidence for each by personal message:

2) An explanation of a defense against repeated login attempts.
3) A code snippet for repeated password hashing.
4) A way of proving that you have an off site backup.


Note to all traders:

I placed some token devcoin buy orders to test the exchange, however I will not place substantial buy orders until there is devcoin merged mining, because until there is merged mining devcoin is not a safe coin.  I recommend that no one else place substantial devcoin buy orders until there is merged mining.

If someone really wants to buy a substantial amount of devcoins before then, they can post a request in the thread to buy devcoins in return for someone's generation shares.  If devcoin has to be restarted because of an attack or code failure, the shares could be resent, although there is no guarantee.

The exchange is up and running, I have added Devcoin to www.vircurex.com

Hi Btc_novice


As soon as you get one, post it in the devcoin thread and you'll be added to that receiver round.



Hi Kumala,


That's fine.  I suggest adding a prefix to the hash so that'll it will be a bit easier to upgrade when a better function is used or the loop number is increased.  So in pseudo code, something like:

hash = ''
for i in xrange(10000):
  hash = sha2(hash + UserPassword + UserID + 12 digit random number + the_exchanges_secret_word + str(i))
hash = 'sha2-10000_' + hash

I'll probably pursue the loop I was mentioning above. Though I found a library that offers bcrypt for the framework I use, but I am trying to keep the source of my Exchange as lean as possible with as few dependency as possible. Every additional library and external code is ultimately a risk in the sense of potential additional vulnerabilities, version dependency (who knows if it will be maintained in the future, etc.).

Lets see, need to wrap up some other features I am currently implementing and testing. Another Chain, will probably also mean an upgrade of memory of the servers.

Glad to help.

As for a devcoin address, I don't have one yet.  I'm just getting started with bitcoin and litecoin, and haven't had time to investigate other alternative crypto currencies yet.