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A lot of games give players various stuff when they start the game.
This can lead to flooding the game with "starting gear" simply by creating thousands of player accounts purely for the purpose of accumulating all the free stuff new players get.
Thus we load players with debt, that is, we assume their starting gear was obtained by taking out loans.
Over time this has led to vast amounts of debt, and because most other currencies in the game appreciated in value much faster than DeVCoins, DeVCoins became the preferred currency to re-finance debt into for any players who could find refinancing denominated in DeVCoins.
General Financial Corp specialised in providing such financing, it managed to talk the Martians into loaning it a huge amount of wealth and into denominating that debt in DeVCoins instead of in, for example, Martian BotCoins.
Then GFC refinanced a whole bunch of intergalactic mining corps, in DeVCoins but at double the interest rate GFC was paying to the Martians for their bulk loan.
As can be seen from the tables and plots at
http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html this has worked out very lucrative for GFC, and thus for the value of GFC shares (the asset known as sGFC).
These loans are of course all secured loans; in fact, almost all the corps did in fact get repossessed already, and are now controlled by repo corps. The intergalactic mining operations are not only lucrative, they are also essential to the security of the home galaxies, because looking at all the similar intergalactic games out there we can see that typically species or races or guilds or groups or corps or entities or whatnot that you meet out among far flung galaxies are very hostile. So the home galaxies need this inner set of mining operations in far galaxies in order to build jump gates to reach even farther galaxies where they will set up their outer defense galaxies.
So ultimately the civilised worlds cannot really allow the mining operations to fail, else some day hordes of alien deathstars will inevitably descend upon the homeworlds like swarms of locusts.
-MarkM-
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Mark, are you familiar with stocks? I've been actively involved in stocks for 20 years, started very young, right out of high school. In fact, I couldn't stand school even though I was a straight A student but the only reason I went to college was because I kept failing at buying stocks and when Economics didn't give me sufficient tools I got a Finance degree as well (well, I'm like 4 classes short).
But all of this near daily focus on stocks, the stock market and 6 years of school dealing with stock related critical thinking (and an X factor) developed some soft of instinct in me which in the last 4 years has been frightingly accurate. I don't play video games so I didn't know anything about bitcoin and I've never heard of anything you just said. Everyhing you just said was like me going to a mechanics and for him to say: Yeah, your Toyota is cranking out flavonoids and it needs a new transgmorgifier and I'm pretty sure the mortabox is busted too. I'd probably just pay him and hope more weird things don't keep breaking down on me.
Let me tell you, with zero knowledge about digital currencies when I read an article about 40 days ago that bitcoin blew up to $256 per share I immediately first googled it to see what it was and then I immediately knew there would be another bitcoin because I recognized right away this wasn't a fluke but a new and permanent market and way of making real money. problem was everything was in programmer talk and it took me weeks to figure out I needed to mine so I bought a special $1700 rig which did nothing for me then I took it back and lost $300 then I bought an old server still of no use and then I finally found bitcointalk.org and this specific thread.
but My immediate reaction after bitcoiin blew up, because I felt another one would pop immediately was to look at all the names of these alternative currencies and pick one purely based on name and instinct. My first choice was Namecoin which when I googled it I found a screenshot from just a month earlier where the ask was $.001 (1/10th of 1 penny), and my next pick out of every other name out there was devcoin but for some reason I felt namecoin was it. as I did more research in how to buy these things which was next to impossible and finally found a tiny easily hackable company in Poland (vircurex) namecoin shot up and at one point traded at $1. that's a 1,000 fold increase. that means $1,000 investment would have given me a return of $1,000,000 in less than 30 or 40 days. In the history of the stock market this has never existed.
So first there was bitcoin and then namecoin and I'm supposed to believe this is a fluke? So then, crying in my soup, I went to my next, 2nd choice since I missed my 1,000 fold opportunity, devcoin.
At first devcoin looked like my instinct was right again - a flooded and diluted coin but with a solid reputation and more importantly and very unique in this nascent unknown market, devcoin had and still has the largest user base - the largest ownership base. this is incredibly important in a stock as it gives it credibility, stability and when the time comes it lowers the float which in turn makes it more difficult to find shares (coins) so the price spikes much higher than it would under normal circumstances.
But I couldn't mine this thing just like I broke myself trying to mine litecoin so I bought a couple million coins as a speculative play and then wired more money to buy more but was very disappointed at the fact there was no way of reducing my risk by doing something like mining. then a miracle happened and I ran across this thread which said you could earn devcoins by writing, marketing, designing, etc. what? this was a miracle - so I bought more coins anyway and started writing literally 16 hours per day sometimes as I see this as a 30-60 day opportunity - don't ask me why, it's that same instinct down to the bones saying something is gonna happen but I don't know if that means devcoin will disappear forever and I'll lose everything or if a hedge fund will offer the owners $5 million for a straight buyout which would actually be a good idea cause it takes 2, maybe 3 years to develop a good coin with widespread distribution and a good reputation. For a rich hedge fund $ 5 million would be a steal to buy devcoin, but I'm not sure these guys understand alternative currencies are just getting started. this truly is a new market.
Then I looked at vircurex to see if my money cleared so I could buy some more coin and my heart dropped when I saw devcoin drop by a factor of 10, a full decimal place, and then some from when I last bought it just 2 weeks earlier. I paid .0004 and now it's at .000027 ASK. That's just crazy, so in 2 weeks I lost around 70%. I was shocked and surprised cause it didn't make sense.
WEll, I'm still not sure why devoin is tanking so badly, maybe round 22 earners need to pay rent, whatever, I'm holding on to every coin I get, I'd rather go mow lawns than give them up for nothing but I can't think of a better explanation.
So this entire long ass post to get to this: The intergalactic story you just wrote, regarding the debt structure and protocol of the gaming industry, something I had no idea existed until now just blew my switch, my fuse, my mental fusebox and my mind and not to mention (once I replaced my mental fuse) all the lights went on.
do you have any idea what you just explained in your post above? A perfect setup for the mother of all short squeezes. A short squeeze is when a bunch of idiots borrow shares (they don't really own) against the existing shares thinking the stock price will go lower and they will then buy them lower and book the price difference, but instead of the stock going lower something happens and an event causes all the shorts to NEED to buy back the shares they borrowed in order to repay them and this rush for the doors all at the same time ccauses a massive short squeeze like what has happened to Tesla's stock over the last week where it went from around $30 to now over $90 when the actual value is maybe $40, but because of a short squeeze the stock price way over shoots until everyone who borrowed repays their shares and then the stock drops to find its equilibrium.
Given alternative currencies will only gain popularity from here on out - there's simply no going back, then there's no way for devcoin to not get paid back eventually. And since devcoin is the cheapest currency on the market, no matter is you repay it with a different coin or outright buy it, the effect will be that of a short squeeze as some event will occur where the majority of players (not necessarily game players, but "game" players) will for whatever reason jump on at the same time and once the price of devcoin starts to rise the rumor mill and media and blogs take over and at that point devoin buying will beget more buying and the more people buy the more the frenzy peaks and even more will buy and given the fact that most of the coins are sitting on a large number of separate individual drives this means that even though devoin is very liquid and diluted, there will be a massive shortage of coins for a while as most people don't even have accounts at places like vircurex so there's gonna be a 3 or 4 day mania where there won't be enough coins and the spike in price for devcoin can literally reach a level which is beyond absurd.
Now this is what I feel and lately (4 years) what I've felt has come true with a high margin of accuracy but this is not a gurantee. for example I don't know what would cuase that spark because I don't understand this business or how the lending works or if the owners of devcoin can call in "their markers" and force a rush and a huge spike, and I don't know why the price of a devcoin has dropped about 12 fold in less than 2 weeks, that's very disheartening although I will still buy some, albeit I'm now a bit worried, but not nearly as much once I read your story regarding the debt.
so basically devcoin is a ticking time-bomb and it's literally only a matter of time and my instinctive feeling is that the final round will be either round 24 or 25 which means 30-60 days but I'd be glad to be wrong as I do want to keep buying and earning devcoins for when that short squeeze day comes.
Thanks a lot for your input - it definitely changed my whole perspective again as the drop in price had me really worried today. Good luck and hold on to your coins, if what Im' saying happens most people will dump at 5 cents or 10 cents as that is a massive run % wise, but if what I'm saying holds true then the price will overshoot well beyond that price, by a large margin and could very well get to $1 or maybe a little higher. Now I realize how crazy that sounds but it's not any crazier than a never heard of alt currency hitting $266 and remaining over $100 all of this time or an even less known currency, namecoin to go up 1,000 fold in less than 30 days. This is a new market and there are reasons why prices can and will hit ridiculous levels for explainable reasons like physics, such as a lack of liquidity or a market maker to keep a stable supply of coins on the market at all times to prevent spikes and collapses, and of course to trade in black pools manipulating the stock price while quietly accumulating millions of shares for your master, Goldman Sachs, without moving the stock price up a single penny, but that's for stocks and so far the banks haven't started regulating, trading and manipulating these currencies but they will in the next 2 years but until then it's easy pickings cause right now there's maybe 6 good currencies and in 2 years there will probably be 100-300 and they will then be traded and manipulated by the banks and just like stocks, unless you have insider info (like them) your chances of making obsene profits are almost nil.
So everyone, maybe I'm totally wrong, but try to hold on to all your coins for another month or two, and besides the price is so low right now why give your coins away for free.
good luck to everyone, i've been writing (for devtome) all night long and it's time for me to go to bed.
regards,
Vlad
Definitely borrows a little heavily from the PPC website though!