Topic: [DVC]DevCoin - Official Thread - Moderated - page 29. (Read 1058927 times)

The answer to the question about the consequences of not paying the in-game loans is similar to any "secured" loan: the borrower had collateral, and loses that collateral if they fail to pay the loan.

That is in fact what already happened in by far the majority of cases: the original borrowers tended to be random passers-by on the internet who created an account in an intergalactic-mining game, a so-called "O-game clone", and basically never came back. A lot of them did not even bother starting their newly-automatically-created mining colony building anything.

This is also why there are not a lot of "free as in beer" methods of starting into the games: we learned from experience that if players are not putting up any collateral in entering the game, the folks already in the game end up having to do all the work of "playing" the new roles that were being brought into play for the supposed new players.

Evidently it really helps to have the players have "skin in the game" as some call it, that is, to have collateral, to have something against which they can borrow.

A planet-known-as-Earth year or more down the line, we had to start forming "Galactic Reposession Corps" to "repossess" intergalactic mining operations that had not been logged-into for a whole year or more.

"Reposessing" them rather than, for instance, "writing them off" as "bankrupt" was necessary because of the whole intergalactic politics behind it all, the fact that all the civilised worlds needed these mining operations to be "out there" as a first step toward creating a defensive shell around the civilised galaxies against the reasonably-to-be-anticipated eventual advent of nasty fleets of aggressors from other "O-game clones" far far way.

That is, we know from observing O-game clones all over the net the kind of behavior to be expected from denizens of distant galaxies, so we need to prepare our civilised galaxies against such potential opponents.

So rather than "write off" the colonies, the intergalactic United Nations created Galactic Repo Corps, one per abandoned mining operation, to assume the operation's debt and put the mines to work.

The collateral was the colonies each operation controlled.

Having seen that random passers-by who got to join the game for free almost all never actually built up or managed the mining operation they had signed up to manage, we no longer bother letting people start play that way. Nowadays if they wanted some kind of loans they would have to find them privately from some other players or something; or start in the one remaining free rabbit-hole where they get to start one individual person on an individual-character scale of play such as on the galactic diplomacy planet via the "CrossCiv" server.


As to the "bridge", I think in a lot of people's minds cryptocoins, and maybe even the whole concept of money itself, keeps being thought of as some kind of commodity; which to a small extend maybe cryptocoins are or can be but that aspect of them is more like the actual value of the metal a penny or nickel or dome or quarter or loonie is made of than like the face value such as being worth a cent or being worth five cents or being worth twenty-five cents or being worth on dollar.

Yes if you want a token people can conveniently and durably pass around from person to person and which you want to use as a token representing value such as "this token can buy flour salt and yeast and bread at my bakery business" or whatever, the tokens can have some small value to you because of their usefulness to you as something to use to represent the buying-power you want to issue to your suppliers and customers, so that when a farmer drops off sacks of flour to your warehouse you have something durable to issue him or her so they can later come back and use those tokens to buy back some of the flour they in effect stored in your warehouse, or buy some bread you baked from it or whatever.

But the point is that money is really basically a kind of I.O.U, to its issuer, or at any rate it SHOULD be.

Yes you might like to buy up every last one of some cheap cryptocoin or other so that when you issue them back out to folks you know how many are out there thus how much of the flour, yeast, salt and bread in your shop is "accounted for" by the coins that are in other people's hands, but, their value as counters you bought to put to some such use is probably trivial compared to their value IN USE AS YOUR I.O.U.s.

We have a few times now had the value of an IXC coin and the value of an I0C coin up to a dollar or so and that was not because that is how much they are "intrinsically" worth it is because we had managed to hoard or destroy enough of them that we could afford to use them as "dollar tokens" because seemingly at the time there were not enough out in the wild that folks were dumping too many of them to our "I will buy 100 of them at a dollar each, another 100 at 99 cents each, another 100 at 98 cents each, another 100 at 97 cents each" and so on offers.

Ideally we would have first bought or minted every last one of them, so that the only way anyone else had any was because we had given them some in token that we owed them something, even if that something was just "99% of what you gave me for them" or "90% of what you gave me for them" or suchlike. Then we would have been more secure against suddely finding someone out there had a million of them that we had not stockpiled enough gooods or services or dollars or whatever to be able to "redeem" at what we had been seeing as the current value each one was managing to represent.

You might notice if you look at the historical tables of values that the coins that minted 21 million, or in the case of bitNicKeLs 420 million, coins up front and did noy have random third parties minting more of them that those coins did very well compared to BiTCoin the first few years BECAUSE all kinds of folks all over the world, a lot of whom had no intention of buying back from customers the bitcoins they sold them, were minting bitcoins. Basically bitcoins were being minted by min ters who were not really putting their full faith and credit behind them, they were selling them off as if they were simple blank rounds of metal other people might choose to use as coinage rather than issuing them as their own coinage they stood ready to buy back for some substantial fraction of what they sold them for.

So you really have to keep in mind that money is I.O.U.s.

Robert A. Heinlein illustrated this in at least one of his "Lazarus Long" stories, Lazarus sets up a general store on a colony planet, issues "money" to his suppliers in return for the inventory he stocks the store with, and the colonists can then use that "money" to buy stuff in his store. Some colonist child or something sees him burning that money when it came back into his possession and thinks it weird that he is burning "money", but as he points out, those are his I.O.U.s and once he has redeemed them they are worthless to him except maybe, if they were durable and still in good shape, maybe as tokens he could re-use for the same purpose of representing him owing something to the bearer.

So as issuers of DeVCoins we need to bear in mind that we have chosen a relatively cheap, as these things currently go, token to use to represent our I.O.U.s but that they are our I.O.U.s and ultimately their value lies in the fact that we stand ready to "back" the, aka to "redeem" them, hopefully with "the full faith and credit of the DeV nation" or somesuch thing.

We need to have a whole bunch of OTHER coins, assets, currencies and so on partly because we need something to back our coins WITH, something people can redeem them FOR, and partly because even if we are very careful who we give out 9/10ths of the coins to we still are faced with the fact that random "miners" all over the world are able to "mint" OUR coin, and a lot of them do NOT think of them as their own I.O.U.s they are issuing and that they are expected to redeem; to the contrary, to many of them every block's 5000 coins that they get it 5000 more of OUR I.O.U.'s that we are giving them for their service of securing our blockchain or at least of keeping the blocks moving, and ultimately we have to "back" aka "redeem" those coins too.

Coins like IXCoin and I0Coin are "minting" far far fewer new coins, so they can be in some ways more useful than DeVCoins for use as yet more I.O.U.s we can "back" and "honour" because in using them we are not looking at a huge minting of more of them every day so they are potentially easier for us to keep on backing and ultimately hope to have almost all of them buried someplace to that those still out there waiting for us to redeem them become less and less in number and thus are practical maybe to use as I.O.U.s representing more and more value per coin of them.

-MarkM-

What is going on with DevCoin? is it still alive or is anybody doing something for this project? I remember the first days, as i come to cryptocurrencies and Devcoin was one of the first 20 Coins ever created, if i remember right. I had a bunch full of coins in my pocket years ago. I really hope this coin is coming back to live, because such a old coin deserves something better than a slowly dead. Maybe someone has some ideas for this project.

No.Mine clearly states Apocalipsa  You may edit that one above though 

Grrrrr, why would I ever use a sock, dude?   

Yeah Mark, break it down barney style for Apocalipsa

A) price discovery isn’t artificial manipulation.  Also, ixc and I0C prices aren’t “stable” cause of a stable liquid market but rather cause zero interest - you can’t even give the coins away for FREE!!!  It’s like saying let’s price DVC to dirt outside cause I haven’t seen much volatility in dirt prices.  Haha. 

B) arbitrage means real world use not a handful of guys playing video games using what could be a real world currency [one day].  Even second life had a more realistic currency market and nobody ever thought of those digital currencies as money. 

C) If you owe digital currency in a video game, like say IXC, what happens if you don’t pay?  What recourse do the lenders have? 

Where’s the BRIDGE??  The bridge between literally a game using these coins as “in-game currencies” and this REAL world where I can go buy a cow or a goat or maybe some feta and fries?  You need to bridge the two worlds [which seems absurd] but it’s doable.

Mesh the digital world with the physical world  - the new digical world. 

Can you write a simple answer to stuff like this that doesn’t require a week’s reading for us slow kids? 

Thanks, mark.   

I think the relative values of all the treasuries-based coins and assets do make sense, the problems arise in trying to integrate with the values of things that use just the next price or the last price that someone is about to get (top of buy side offers) or did just get (last actual trade) on some exchange or other as their supposed value.

So for example maybe for anything on the Latest Rates table that does have a pair on an exchange somewhere, compare how much it is/was on exchanges to what it is/was according to the Latest Rates list to figure out about how far out the exchanges are from the computed values on the rates table.

Maybe hopefully doing that for a number of things we'll find some consistency that they are all about half the price on exchanges than we computed, or one fifth, or whatever.

If the ratios are wildly inconsistent though I dunno, maybe try to average them?

Things that changed a lot on exchanges since last time Latest Rates was computed will tend to cause that I guess if the others do not also change right along with them. Like if Bitcoin doubles but litecoin goes down, XRP doesn't move much and Stellar moves a little more.

So maybe try using things that are not very volatile on exchanges. I0C and IXC havent moved much for a while on exchanges, so maybe look how much exchanges claim they are worth and ratio that to what the Rates table says they are worth to come up hopefully with a ratio you can blanket apply across all the Rates, like "recent Latest Rates seem to value everything at X times what exchanges have been saying" or something like that?

A goal then would be to work on building the I0C and IXC buy-sides on the exchanges to bring them up to the levels the Latest Rates file says they ought to be. It maybe ought to be a matter of "apparently arbitragers are not efficiently carrying the values across from platform to platform" or something like that?

-MarkM-

N E R D S ?

Orrrrr, a global financial coup. 

I’d look into it more but I’m focusing on imminent apocalyptical events.  Soooo much more exciting.   

It seems like more DVC liquidity as discussed privately would help accrue HZ tokens to buy up plenty of DVC for General Financial Corp to hold DVC in its account by selling its past slush fund of various other currencies that debtors pay with and earn to pay with... And going forward all the DVC bought by debtors with their own currencies via HZ or STELLAR platform directly would also go into the value of GFC shares because they hold more of a visibly traded DVC with a price in HZ that keeps growing?

Either way sounds like a great way to get DVC moving through another platform while tied to other various online exchanges through platforms and game currencies from other servers and their known prices we already have to weave a price that accurately reflects DVC in BTC value or BTC in DVC value, as well as other non-backed currencies or even to get a correct value of DVC Holdings so that the end computed price of DVC is also a beginning value that makes sense in terms of hash rate (so as to account for big seven currencies represented on dots with digi-currencies with dDVC values in DVC that do not have blockchain implementations here on "Earth")...

Pure speculation on my part, but if the game is hard to play with limited amount of seats for successful players isn't it worth exploring why it still exists?

Well, Mark, nobody really understands what you’re talking about and playing this “game” has proved to be complicated with with VERY limited seats. 

Probably just pure coincidences. 

There is a whole ecosystem that was built to make DeVCoin a centrepiece, to weave DeVCoin into an ever-growing economy of coins and assets and games, to weave it together with its sibling merged-mined coins, to build strong buy-sides for many "orphaned" and under-the-radar coins so they can all work together to strengthen each other and to have more and more liquidity routes so as some of them vanish from some exchanges hopefully others are still on other exchanges and as some get pumped or dumped others hopefully can stay more stable and so on.

There are a bunch of "staking" coins that mint new coins just by being online, too.

Heck some of them, such as Klingon Empire Darsek, (KED), Gold Pressed Latinum Two (GPL2), United Sci-Fi Coin (USF, or on some platforms SCIFI) are even on at least one exchange that purports to pay you some of the stake even while your coins are on the exchange, so you can pile up a good strong sell-side while still collecting much of your staking earnings.

There is General Financial Corp (GFC), which earns interest on an insanely huge amount of DeVCoin-denominated debt, an asset so successful we have to disallow the "DVC Holdings" account from holding it else it would be such a huge gain-loop, being denominated in DeVCoins itself, that it would send the computed value of a DeVCoin, computed by dividing the value of the "DVC Holdings" by the number of DeVCoins minted, into an endless gain-loop.

There is lots going on, but for some reason despite it all having been intended all along as an engine for DeVCoin, actual DeVCoins never seem to get allocated into it.

I have pointed out over and over again that if there were lots of DeVCoins available in the Galactic Milieu players would be able reasonably to use their General Mining Corp (GMC) and General Retirement Funds (GRF) and other Milieu coins (United Kingdom Britcoins, Martian BotCoins, United Nations Scrip and so on and so on, as well as their GeistGeld, FairBriX, TeneBriX, GRouPcoins, CoiLedCoins, AXIOM, AXON, GPL, GPL2, KED, USF, UFC and so on and so on and so on, to buy DeVCoins so that they could pay off their DeVCoin-denominated debts using actual DeVCoins instead of having to use those other things directly via a conversion-rate table.

But how much of the DeVCoin generated each round actually ends up being sold for any at all of all these other currencies? Seems like virtually none.

It almost seems like some other currency should buy up GFC and re-cast all its loans into some other currency or something like that, as all these years of operating as a DeVCoin-denominated financial institution seems to have been kind of pointless.

Nonetheless, despite the evident lack of interest on the part of DeVCoin-thread denizens year after year after year, the Galactic Milieu has kept soldiering on, albeit with DeVCoin, intended to be one of the most important currencies in the Milieu, being more and more left out in the cold.

-MarkM-

Hey Nova,

It is so sad for me to see you go, but I also understand other reasons of your resignation. I'm really concerned for the lack of community support for DevSTEEM, currently the only working idea to resurrect the Devcoin Foundation. Yet you still carried it all on your shoulders! I'm so proud of all the progress you did and to have you in the Devcoin project. Now, please let me tell you that you don't have to resign to the whole project, we still have room for contributions in other areas. Do not let failure to keep you down. So please take some time to reconsider your decision.

Last but not least, what I'm saying to Nova applies for everybody, we still have many ways to contribute with the Devcoin Project. The main requirement is to not see it as a source of passive income, we are supposed to operate as a foundation, so the idea is to raise funds that will finance Open Source Developers, and to pay overhead & operational costs. It  means that we need people to volunteer their time, we might have some small staff (paid work) like file custodians, but that is an exception not the rule. If we don't have volunteers, we can't build value up. Note that I'm not asking you guys to buy Devcoins, that might help but we need something else, we need to build assets that generate income for the foundation and make them grow, so that the foundation grows and we can finally help more people.

The ball is on your yard guys.

Go go Devcoin!

- develCuy

You're a champion of ethics friend. You've given me good insight on real world issues I hope you continue to write there.

Hey Nova,

Sorry to hear you are wanting t resign from devcoin project. Sounds like issues with steem and hive. You have brought a lot to devcoin over the years and I for one greatly appreciate all you have done for the community and coin, thank you

Fuzzybear

I'm so sorry to see you go Nova    Thank you for bring me on board to this project and all these years of hard work for devcoin. I'm gonna miss you.

Quitter virus going around lately.  :/

This is to announce my resignation from the DevCoin Project. The primary reason for this decision is because of my strong and vocal disagreement in the handling of the recent STEEM fork and my account's power down on both the STEEM and HIVE blockchains. My main focus with the DevCoin Project, of late, has been with #DevSTEEM so my position on the fork would not reflect well on DevCoin.

It has been my pleasure to have worked with you all over the years on such an altruistic project as DevCoin. Do not doubt for a moment that much good has come from it.

Yours truly,

- Nova

My reference was to my attempt at sarcasm. 

How was I being sarcastic? Can you elaborate please? I only wanted to know what, if any positive impact this Justin Tron saga would have for Devcoin.

 Regards

~kickback