Topic: [DVC]DevCoin - Official Thread - Moderated - page 279. (Read 1058949 times)

SInce the "business plans" bounty is actually just about ideas how people could make money, rather than an actual per se business plan as I had thought of business plans, how about my http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=cpu_mining page?

It is well over 500 words, and proposes that people create "workers" aka characters and have those workers aka characters running around mining stone or metal or chopping trees for wood or foraging for food or farming food or manufacturing useful objects or whatever they wish, using scripts such as those any player can easily create using clients such as tinyfugue. Even children can do this, it is not hard, novacadian's daughter was able to do that kind of stuff before her hands were even good at writing because typing is easier than writing as you just have to press keys instead of having to make a pen or pencil draw the character that is shown on the key...

I had thought about making a new separate page with a concrete proposal such as buy such and such a number of accounts, create so many of this type of character, have them do this then this then this, and so on all the way through to then sell this for that much here and that for that much here and so on, which seemed more what I would expect a business plan to involve. But since really what is wanted is just the general concept of a way to make money it occurred to me the CPU Mining page already has plenty of information on how it is done...

-MarkM-

Mark wrote:


Novacadian wrote:


The forum is to be open source. The domain name is secured, the org, com, and net. The forum is to run on Simple Machines Forum 2.

Excellent, I will just throttle down a bit and be more patient.

I don't think he added those yet. I'm not in the list for my bounty either (but he acknowledged that I am awarded one) so I wouldn't worry at this point.

I was looking at the Index of Charity website today and the bounty wasn't included yet. I just want to make sure that I was forgotten

Originally it was a share per project, leaving it up to the project lead to divvy the coins up among the team.

So by that method, if Blender was deemed a suitable project, the project would get one share.

Nonetheless that are probably well over 4000 projects out there, and only 4000 shares in a round.

We do have the ability to do fifths of a share though so could support up to 20,000 projects.

However the closer we get to using up all the share slots the more chunky/grainy the outcomes will be, because the clients rotate through the lines of the receivers file and if the number of lines does not divide evenly into 4000 some lines will get used more than others.

If most of the lines get used 100 times but a few get used 101 times that is only 1% difference in how much different shares are worth; but if all lines get used once and some get used twice, some are getting twice as much coin per share as others!

That is why I keep urging that the total number of shares be kept small compared to 4000; so that we go through the list lots of times per round, so that the ones that get used an extra time are not getting massively more coins, relatively, to others.

Of course another way to make them all even would be to always pad the list so it always divides evenly into 4000. That might be a good way to implement a bounties fund, for example; simply pad out the list to the next number of lines that divides evenly into 4000 by adding lines that pay out to an address used to accumulate coins to use for bounties.

Because a couple of projects - bitcoin and open transactions - are so incredibly important to our mission, an exception was made for those, allowing more than one person on each of those teams to get on the receivers list with a whole share to themself instead of the whole project getting one share to split up amongst its team as it sees fit.

Obviously the pay Devtome writers have been getting looks even more insanely huge when compared to these payscales, so it is no surprise that there has been so much backlash against the Devtome payscale.

Comparing Devtome to other projects it should count itself lucky if, like Bitcoin and Open Transactions, it gets to have more than one of its team each have one share!

-MarkM-

As there were less being passed out, provided they were excepted for some goods and services, they would simply be worth more proportionally. That seems to be a given provided the available goods and services could be maintained. That is just my layman's thoughts. Not that of an economist.


My last brownie may have gone down the wrong way as well. 

- Nova

Those are good questions, and I suppose the answer depends on whether you think bitcoins benefited from having more miners. I think it did - the more people who got into it, the more secure the network was (knowledge base, in the case of devcoins), more people started receiving bitcoins and talking about them (the most important thing), which interested more people. If there's a profit motive, and there was a small one with btc when it began, just as there is with dvc now, people will find the time to do what's required. I think it would be an amazing thing for devcoin's true value if all the blender peeps got on board, talked about it to everyone they knew, etc, including their customers and supporters. They'd then be making great software and getting slightly paid for it, which should theoretically produce a better blender faster, not to mention introduce them to other dvc related things.

You've touched on something that is part of why I think bitcoins exceeded so many expectations. The fear of these huge developers/miners coming is part of what makes people do more work now. It's incentive to get off one's bum and do it now instead of wait for someone else to come along and claim the prize, so it actively promotes time-to-market because it appeals to people's competitiveness. This competitiveness doesn't have to be a bad thing, as even in a competitive market we have the pools/collaboration/companies and all that, and it generally produces better quality stuff because teams want to out-do each other.

We really don't have to win anyone over - they will come as soon as they realize they can get paid for stuff they're already doing. Bounties are designed around creating new FOSS stuff, and those are still set by admin/developers/whoever.

I will bet everything I have that if every legitimate FOSS developer in the world got on board dvc tomorrow, the price of dvc would soon go through the roof through pure speculation. With bitcoins, there was always a debate over whether mining difficulty followed price or price followed mining difficulty, and it turned out that there is a mutual dependence, and both of them followed interest in bitcoins and reliability of the code/network. If difficulty was high, it was much cheaper to just buy the coins, and people who would otherwise mine ended up injecting money into the market...if difficulty was low but price high, work went up to match the price extremely quickly. Ultimately it's nicer if there is smooth growth, to avoid turning people off when things don't meet their hyped expectations, but even if there isn't, if it's a genuinely good idea people will come back later. Judging by this, interest is the strongest driving force of price, followed by the value offered by the network.


That's the beauty of devcoins, in my opinion. It is floating FOSS onto the free market, so the whole world decides how much it's worth. The more people that value what devcoins do, the more each share will be worth.

oh sorry, I think we misunderstood each other.
You are talking about the value of devcoins of course.

I was talking about how big a share a developer gets based on "his" value.

I should get to sleep now, it's too late...

Have you not been to an Exchange? Better than the Casino in Katmandu. A proven to be trustworthy exchange is Vircurex, yet there are a number of them. Day trading can while away an afternoon. 

- Nova

and who /how decides how much one is worth?

Is there something like a thunderdome were two people go in, only one comes out?

Sign them up! It's not how many but how much one is worth. That's my understanding anyway.

- Nova

But is it for example possible that the guys from blender.org (the 3d program) apply for devcoins?

Do they fulfil all criteria?

They have a large developer base... if they were to barge into devcoin, wouldn't that "increase the difficulty" (to continue your analogy with developing=mining) ?  

That would mean fewer shares for everyone, ...

so what is the goal here? To encourage NEW open source software... or to try and win over all the open source developer programs that already exist?

If all those guys worldwide learn about devcoins... wouldn't all the shares be gone in a minute?

That is a good thing, right? 

Great explanation.

Thanks .

I can get it to just compare lowercase-lowercase, that'll solve that problem, but it entirely depends on whether different people will be using the same names with different capitalizations in the future. If it's safe to assume not, this is easily fixable.


Hey zachofiddle, assuming you used correct case, the most likely reason is that the devtome script hasn't been run since you submitted your work. I know my own devtome contributions haven't been added yet, but my bounties have. I don't know whether the admins intend on running it again for this round or not, but if they do, it'll be added, and if not, it'll be added next round. I'm reading the account file to get that data, but its devtome.py that needs to run to update the devtome_31.csv file which is read (I believe) into the account file whenever the account file is updated


Thanks for both your encouragement and your data hosting

I've been getting the csv files off your site every time there's been a request so far, but that was just so I could prototype more quickly, which is also why the site's a bit slow. I will add a local-cache that only checks a few times a day for changes to speed the site up (and stop the server spam!).

That's because DVC is unlike every other crypto-coin, and I think most don't realize how it works, or it's potential yet, just like when bitcoins first started (there are thousand of people who rightfully belong on the bitcoin or devcoin share lists, but they just don't know about it yet). It's doing to open source what mining did to digital currency. The analogy is that of the 200M coins created per round, they're distributed based on the number of people doing work to earn them, instead of machines - with btc everyone competes for the transaction pot with hardware. With dvc, it's essentially the same thing but instead of calculating hashes, people are creating things. As time goes on, the btc hashes get more difficult as the number of miners increase, and similarly dvc payouts become harder to earn because the initial work has already been done, and more difficult work lies in improving it (as well as more people doing work). Collaboration on work is similar to how mining pools operate, and there is an opportunity for people to develop ways to make collaboration between strangers easier.

The only downside is that most of the value from cryptocoins come from speculative demise - that the coins are always going to become rarer, whereas devcoins are created indefinitely (and rightly so, since creative work is not used in the "transaction" system like with bitcoins et al). The upside is that speculation can still exist with dvc, with the added bonus that we get great open source stuff to share and improve. I honestly believe this is stuff that will make headlines once journalists get their heads around its nuances. It probably won't ever be as mainstream as bitcoins, because those are very easy to mine in comparison to this - this requires actual human effort from everyone trying to earn generation shares.

As for the price, for it to hit $0.10 people need a reason to buy them, and there is always going to be selective pressure towards more deflationary currencies over this one, because they are, after all, more deflationary - devcoins take this hit in exchange for allowing the philanthropists/advertisers a way in. Assuming maybe 50-80% of the payout is being cashed out each round, people have to be buying 100M-160M coins from the market with cash or another cryptocurrency every month. This means it needs an in-flow of cash around $10-$20M per month to support everyone selling the coins they earned @ $0.10. That doesn't sound impossible to me, especially if the seriously rich philanthropists who strongly believe in FOSS decide to back it. For it to get there, we need to give people amazing stuff that they just can't get enough of. That means great writing, great media, great software, great websites, etc, and if http://www.devtome.com and it's ilk become as popular as something like wikipedia I don't see why it won't disconnect from the value of other cryptocurrencies and take its own life - the price could very well be $1/coin in 3-10 years time.

Yeah, hopefully it's just something simple, site maintenance, etc.

I bought a B&N card from the site last week (goods on their way) so may just be a christmas holiday thing.

I just PMed Max2838 about it (they wrote the initial message announcing it). We'll see what they say about it.

The same thing is happening to me, too.  I don't know whats up with it, though.


More press releases!