Topic: Devcoin(DVC) Source Code Updated to Bitcoin 0.8.x - page 2. (Read 5377 times)

I'm not talking about competing with bitcoin. I'm referring to the fact that devcoin has an equivalent fiat price and compensation price that if there was the facilitation to trade away from bitcoin could still be the price, maybe. Devcoin is merged-mined with bitcoin so at very best it's symbiotic (some might say parastic to be fair to them, although I think the ends justify the means and I hear very little negative said on devcoin's intents). We agree on a lot of stuff, I just don't think what you're saying address the root problem at all.

You're assuming a market and prices will always adjust to technicalities of supply only. That may sometimes be the case but cryptos offer a pretty good example of when that's not really true. Let's say the changes are made. What happens if the price reverts to where it was, or just doesn't move? Is that because the adjustment wasn't big enough, or simply because holders are willing to sell at that price?
  
You're also then assuming that the infrastructure in place can smoothly adjust to those new technicals. The whole point of devcoin is potential inclusivity for the big wide world where mining is something involving the ground - ie. everyone - changing their terms of participation changes the basic rules.

On the mBTC issue, all I was saying was that decimals are avoided, which some think is becoming a perception issue for btc. I wasn't inferring anything about relative prices.

Basically I think relative supply has pretty much sod all to do with crypto prices. Yes there are obvious trends but try building difficulty and other input adjusted models and trading on that (as I and I bet many others have) - it's almost irrelevant as a simple price move determinant. Cryptos are as much about perception as reality. Take devcoin, it has constant supply but I think it's current rate of generation is exactly the same as bitcoin when adjusted for the /1000 dec move and will be until it reaches the equivalent point in time where btc halved. But that's not what people look at. If there's anything wrong with devcoin it's just the choice of such large numbers - perception - although in practice it's large numbers that could facilitate very widespread project distribution.

Stability comes with an equilibrium of participation, buying and selling. Not by playing about with the parameters, where if bitcoin is the benchmark that's the shadow we'd always be chasing. Regardless I do think it's good to be discussing all this. Devcoin and others make too many assumptions about incentive and interest that should be challenged when improvements can be made.

You maybe missed all the long laborious discussings of pegged currencies that happened months ago or maybe even more than a year ago.

People are still trying to invent a method of pegging, see for example the Mastercoin project and the Bitshares / Protoshares / etc project.

Maybe if any such projects prove that pegging is possible it might we worth considering the idea, but so far pegging remains an unsolved problem.

Maybe go discuss with them in their threads how they imagine pegging could be accomplished.

Remember too that difficulty is not the same among even the merged mined coins.

GRouPcoins "should" be worth 1000 DeVCoins each, if they had the same difficulty as DeVCoins, because GRP mints 50 coins every 10 minutes and DVC mints 50,000 coins every ten minutes. But their difficulty is different so they are a long way from that ratio of relative price so far...

Once GRP is stable at 1000 DVC each maybe your idea might seem to have some merit, but right now we have an experiment in progress (GRP vs DVC) testing your hypothesis that the number of coins being mined should or will lead to a ratio of value equal to the ratio of minting rate and so far it has not given much evidence that your theory is valid...

So go ahead and peg GRP as 1000 DVC to demonstrate that you are correct...

-MarkM-

Dvc is not pegged to fiat like btc is.. Ofcourse its a can of worms especially at a point when ppl will switch.. Isnt that why we created the bitcoin shares list? So they can import their btc wallets back into devcoin?

Even if you disregard the peg since trading is done via btc mainly the volume is getting to be a bigger problem as btc rises. We are a big fraction off of any kind of stability. Say in 10 yrs if bitcoin implodes and people switch you think they will switch to dvc? Miners will have to switch too?

Otherwise we keep btc as a big brother and roll fwd pegged zgainst it 1000:1 we are tied to its fate anyway until we grow enough to be self sustaining from miners to investors.

At this rate we will neither be self sustaining using bitcoin for mining etc or have harder and harder time coming up with any kind of volume to support real growth for a stable price. Thats what I see. Enough of that Unthinkngbit has last say and I doubt he will change it or even let a vote to be held.

The Canucks tried to peg Canadian Digital Notes (CDN) to CAD, and the Brits tried to peg United Kingdom Britcoins (UKB) to GBP.

The Martians ended up massively in profit from that because of course every time the CDN started to be worth more than one CAD the Canucks had to sell off CDN to bring the price down and the Martians bought it and every time the UKB started to be worth more than one GBP the Brits had to sell off UKB to bring the price down and the Martians bought that too.

End result was the Martian BotCoin climbed in value more/faster than CDN and GBP and the Canucks and Brits gave up trying to peg their coins to anything.

So don't try to 'peg' to anything, even trying to 'peg' to the current value whatever the current value is, in order to try to keep value 'stable', is a whole can of worms.

Compared to that, merely trying to always have on hand enough "reserves" of goods services and currencies to be able to provide value in exchange for the coin, thereby supporting the idea that the coin has value, and supporting the magnitude of the value (aka the exchange rate), is much less difficult it seems.

-MarkM-

I think all coins are tokens to bitcoin until main stream adoptions kicks in at which point ppl will decide to switch or leave some coins as niche..

If all coins are read in terms of btc then it makes sense to use that as a metric to set goals for price stability especially if fiat is phased out. Even if bitcoin sticks around as the main top dog after fiat is gone devcoin will always be priced in btc like any other coin.

If we are pricing in usd I dont see the proof.. All prices quoted in the thread by ppl are always btc denominations?

Exchanges removed dvc usd and new exchanges add only dvc btc with no plans for usd. All alt coins are unfortunately pegged to btc until otherwise proven.

Pegged currencies are a whole can of worms.

We never intended to peg our value to any other coin or currency.

We "solved" the "a dollar is a thousand or more coins" problem by moving our decimal point from the get-go so we would not eventually hit the same arguments bitcoin was having at the time about how the decimal point should be moved because people who use dollars don't like using three decimal places to express what a dollar is worth.

Now you are beyond trying to mollify people who don't like what a tiny fraction of a coin a dollar is and on to worrying about people who don't like how small a fraction of a thousand dollars (aka a bitcoin) a devcoin is worth...

What about the Martian BotCoin (MBC)? have you checked out what a tiny fraction of a Martian BotCoin a bitcoin, dollar, or devcoin is lately?

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

-MarkM-

This is not relevant since again im only talking about scale.. Devcoin needs to mint forever but im talking about reducing inflation to allow 0.001btc at a relative achievable amount of volume. Being able to mint is essential to the dev and reciever process but again im going down the likely road by saying we wont have 70k btc volume a day to achieve the goal.. By reducing that number it becomes likely again and increases the long term prospects of the coin especiially st that point of the boom when people decide which coin is the most stable to adopt to the average joe.

If it were true that Democracy actually works, in the sense of actually representing the will and/or desires of the people, then it would seem likely that the majority of franchised adults in so called "democracies" prefer inflationary currencies, as witnessed by the apparent determination of such nations to ensure their currencies remain inflationary.

Just because some minority of gold-bugs, libertarian nutbars and gosh knows what else (Austrian economists, who seem a minority maybe too among economists?) might not like our coin as much knowing it is inflationary does not seem a good reason to abort the grand experiment of minint coins at a fixed rate forever.

It seems possible that the reason we see less shouting lately from people who claim that bitcoin is totally doomed and totally broken-by-design on account of deflation being a bad thing is at least aprtly because, partly to shut them up, we did make some coins that are inflationary.

I wonder how best to get those noisy anti-deflation people into this thread to explain at length and in detail how and why inflation is better than deflation.

-MarkM-

What is the goal here? My goal is devcoin stable at 0.001 or 1 mbtc that is a goal... Who has 70k btc laying sround on a daily basis to soak up all that supply?

Bitcoin is a success its got mainstream adoption lined up devcoin is in no position to comoete it will always be a token back to bitcoin unless we change that early on... The first 10 yrs of any emerging tech is the boom... Devcoin will have 20 billion coins with a 10% inflation pa. Look at what happened to usd while inflation is lower than that over long term... At 10 yrs if mainstream adoption doesnt happen I dont think devcoin would survivr either... That is the point in which ppl will decide which one really to adopt... Im saying we prepare for then.

We havent addressed the mbtc issue at all because as btc blocks halve dvc will drop in half effectively never giving a chance to reach mbtc... Always at a bigger fraction thsn before. Adoption wont happen without price stability.

Say we aim for that time to have lower inflation and aiming for 0.001... The only reason it wouldnt happen is if volume was down.. If we follow the 1000:1 ratio price will tend to 1 mbtc instead of 0.5mbtc being the ceiling etc etc its also a phsycological factor for investors.

Now what happens when btc block drops to 12? Devcoin will be at 12k and inflation will drop to under 1% when supply is soaked up over a few years. As btc reward drops to under 1 dvc will stay above at some value which will allow,inflation to let price hover in and around 1mbtc... Remember the 1000:1 ratio would set inflation to target 1mbtc but speculation and old supply wouldnt let it happen until a few years in with lower inflation because it will take time for buyers to soak up old devcoins.

If enough volume is around then mathematically price tends to the goal if volume exists...

You cant say we solved the mbtc isssue if price cant reach 1mbtc without something crazy like 70k btc average a day. if we follow my spproach we probably need a quarter that and then fractions of that every time block halves.. And at 1000 dvc per block we would need like 1k btc volume a day to reach 0.001 (multiplying volume by 10x of how many btc to keep price at 0.001 to be safe). Also as btc value goes up volume will go down so 70k btc a day becomes more unlikely as btc price rises.

Devcoin has always been ragged on even by oldest members as a dumb coin... Now we are only a handful and their loss is our happiness when those are the only ones kicking themselves.. Anyone can buy in at any time if we set a future block to be the go point.

Anyway just throwing it out there.. If you do the math it only makes sense to me.. Remember also we are very early in thr project so if we aim for 10 yr goal I doubt that any criticism by the old devcoin haters will likely persist when main stream adoption chooses between btc and dvc (breaking the token ideology at that point)

"The Royal 'We'."

(Or if you prefer, "we the people behind the currencies that moved to Open Transactions insead of continuing to use blockchains because 'we' foresaw that attempting to 'back' coins random miners all over the world mint would be a huge problem compared to only 'backing' coins that 'we' ourselves mint.")

The Canucks, Brits, Martians etc told me from the start that if you let other nations other corporations other people - other 'miners', in short - mint 'your' coins 'you' will have a harder time trying to keep up their exchange-rate than if 'you' mint all the coins so that no one else gets any without providing 'you' with something of value so that 'you' remain in a position to 'redeem' aka 'back' the coins by using those things of value you parted with them in return for to 'buy them back' or to stock shops where those things of value could be re-sold for coins which of course is another way to 'back' them. (Back them with goods, basically. Which most miners seem reluctant to do.)

-MarkM-

What's the point of that? Creating a perpetual 'we' buying all 'our' coins seems to completely defeat the purpose. If people want to sell dvc, or ltc, or btc let them sell. The issue is how they get them in the first place. I don't generally like giving away money or labour for free, so the dvc I have through fiat or work has a certain value to me. If others are willing to offer their crypto at a price < than some sort of consensual value for a period of mining, or work, or its result I have to assume they either don't value their labour or work and/or they were paid too much relative to them and/or this is a second dip at payment.

That means anyone driving the price to x is willing to value whatever it took to get them at x. To address that we need to better align payment to implied value, not chase the lowest common denominator of value perception out there by just buying them out.

Theres no easy way and qr codes already in bitcoin

The number of coins being minted is only 200 million per "round".

The tendency toward zero value has been because of people dumping the coins instead of exchanging them wisely with care in ways that conserve or even enhance their value.

Now that we know the vast majority of people want to drive the value to zero, or maybe more correctly, want to dump them without caring or having to care about how their act effects the future perception of how valuable the coins are thus tend to act much as if they were trying to drive the value to zero, we can adapt to that.

Basically we can start by being set up ready willing and able to buy 200 million coins per "round", then we can continue to increase the number of coins we are prepared to buy, heck we can even keep increasing the "depth" of the buy-side of the order-book(s) to a point where we stand ready to buy not only each and every newly minted devcoin but also each and every devcoin that has already been minted.

It takes time to build up such depth but had we known from the first moment that we got onto the first exchange that the users of the currency would mostly be people who act as if their goal is to drive its value to zero we could have started preparing more robustly and sooner for such an eventuality.

I am not yet sure approximately how long it will take to build up the necessary depth but it can be done, although of course if exchanges tend to run away with the coins every time we build up a vast enough pile of "coins to buy devcoins with so that devcoins will be perceived to have value relative to the coins with which we are prepared to buy them" that will slow us down. Whereas if we keep our "reserves" with which we "back" devcoins off of the exchanges then clearly we face other problems.

Clearly some people are not holding as "reserves" enough of whatever they sell devcoins for to be able to buy back those same devcoins or even any significant fraction of them. Or maybe they do have plenty of "reserves" but are choosing not to use them as aggressively as some might prefer to keep the exchange rate up by buying devcoins when devcoins are cheap.

Now we know that, we should in principle be able adjust for it. So far I still think that we can.

-MarkM-

I understand the point but even if terms were changed, who's to say it settles at x ratio to btc. It will trade where people want to trade it like all coins.

But surely that can't be changed now. What if the bitcoin panel at a future bitcoin conference decide to change something else. Do we alter things again. Devcoin unlike most coins acknowledges the infrastructure that created it, paying out regularly to creators of various tools that progressed things. But to go forward it needs to get away from a bitcoin peg, not stick to it more.

I'd say this about all alts - people should be looking at their value in terms of what they can be used for or the local exchange medium, or the forward potential for that - not necessarily just /btc. Already btc is coming up against the mbtc debate - dvc already addresses that. And the constancy is fundamental to being able to pay ongoing development from generation. Still very early days but if the concept proves to not work in the future that will be because not enough people supported its aims, or because it wasn't done well enough - not because of the inflation rate which falls every period. Changing the terms now might mean those holding dvc (including me) do better out of it, but it would send a shitty msg.

just curious, have you got easy way of update code when bitcoin update from version to version? because we add every functions that orignial bitcoin doesn't have, that's a little harder to udpate codes.


having read all the discussion about inflation, I think i support sidhujag's suggested way. markm, you can think about it, sidhujag does know our goal and know why we do not use a inflated way, but this method is not bad too, and, maybe, we could get success earlier.

This is why I like the ratio of 1000:1 so we can talk about mBTC instead of satoshi's and it would appeal to a larger audience and not just the devcoin community who deals with 6 or 7 trailing zero pricing. I like the idea that you can get more, and the idea that mBTC would be the target price, however letting it tend to zero means you can't really use anything other than a satoshi, and that in itself is a problem with widespread adaption, continue to think it is worthless in the face of even great developments. Maybe in a hundred years when the ratio of new minted coins is negligible on the entire supply will it make sense for investors to put serious money into helping open source development, however as an investor today that really is like throwing money away and so the catch 22 rolls on. (Which investor wants to wait 100 years today for an investment to mature enough to consider it a success?)

If you do the math it would take 100 years before you reach < 1% inflation p.a.

Since we are early adopters changing it now wouldn't be considered a scam because in the long run it works to achieve a certain goal. I outlined the goal already but if the goals are different then I would like to know simply how what I said isn't better in the long run. That is I already agree to an infinite minting we are really talking about scale here only. The project description doesn't change.

Hey guys 1.0.3 is built and ready. I enabled QR payments in this one, so we need a mobile wallet to allow QR payments to take place... which really is a cool idea if we want traction in the vendor space.

Well if other things tend toward cheaper and cheaper too, which they ought to in relation to bitcoin if bitcoin deflates as it is hoped/expected to, devcoin will be a lot more useful than bitcoin for buying cheap things since it gives much more granularity then just "one satoshi each, two satoshis each etc".

Albeit scale helps with that kind of thing too in Open Transactions. Cheap things can be offered on large scale markets, so for example instead of having people offer a number of bitcoins for one of something, cheap somethings could choose to use a million at a time scale market or a hundred thousand at a time scale market in which people bid bitcoins for whole millions or whole hundred thousands of the cheap thing.

(Bear in mind that all assets, not just shares and deeds but also currencies, on my server are integers, so when you bid in bitcoins for something you bid in whole bitcoins for whole somethings... Probably resulting in bitcoiners preferring to offer their bitcoins for sale for cheaper things to bid for them rather than to bid bitcoins on a market where the something else is the thing for sale and the bitcoins are the thing in which bids are being taken.)

-MarkM-

Every time the block reward halves the ratio widens and pushes price down further. This means the price is tending towards 0 btc but not necessarily usd. So the case where dvc may stabalize in price is if/when bitcoiners switch to devcoin (not likely) and that is the case where devcoin has long term prospects unless the model is followed to allow a constant ratio until supply is saturated which I eluded to earlier, not sure if you got that. Supply will be saturated and we will still have an infinite generation rate.. just alot less, and at that point I would argue that people would switch to devcoin just because it offers more than a simple deflationary spiral.