Topic: [DVC]DevCoin - Official Thread - Moderated - page 382. (Read 1058927 times)

As long as people can make massively, insanely more coins writing for Devtome than writing code for bounties I suppose it is not surprising that bounties are not motivating people to get things done.


Not more shares, we want as few shares in total as possible, nicest would be no more than forty receiver-lines in total UNLESS we always make the number of receiver-lines an exact divisor of four thousand.

Right now we have had to put in an over-ride for admins because of the insanely high payments to authors, just to make sure admins do actually make some fraction of what authors do instead of beign crowded out entirely by authors.

Better would be to cap devtome at eighty shares total for the whole of devtome and let it share out the resulting coins among its authors.

(Though that would eat up eighty receiver-lines right away, twice the forty that would be a nice max number for fairness sake.)

Those shares would be worth a lot more coins per share than when a bunch of authors each get 80 shares all to themselves, each individually.

Lets remember again that a person who puts in ten hours a month OR MORE regularly and naturally on a lifestyle basis on directly important-to-devcoin projects of their own free will merely because they are going to do that anyway just because it is what they do gets one share. So basically any author who has a demonstrated history of putting in ten hours a month OR MORE writing articles for devtome freely without incentive/pay/bribe/bounty should be eligible to be nominated to become a recipient of devcoins.

Do we even have any such authors yet, or are all the ones we have found so far basically mercenaries who only write free open source articles for devtome (or even at all) when they are offered a direct bounty per thousand words for doing so? (If so maybe we have done enough bounties/paying now for getting articles written and should start offering bounties/pay for other things instead, watching authors to see if there do turn out to be any among them who do end up still writing for devtome ten hours a month or more as a lifestyle free open source writing person who would do that anyway even if there was no bounty / payment for it, and consider nominating some of them as deserving of getting put on the list of people who get a share of devcoins?)

Its not like we have any shortage of articles now. So maybe now we should start awarding bounties (payments) for promotion of the existing articles instead of for making yet more articles?


Actually bounties have historically been far from great for getting actual long term services, because opportunists tend to nip in, whip up something to get the bounty, then scrap the thing as soon as they have pocketed the bounty.

For example if you offer a bounty for settign up a pool, you are quite likely to have someone set up the pool, picket the bounty, then rip down the pool to free up their server for yet another different pool some other coin is offering a bounty for, then pocket that bounty, rip that pool down and put up yet another to pocket another bounty and so on.

That is why we are instead offering a bounty for free open source software for merged mining pools; once that exists people capable of operating such pools long term will be able to go ahead and do so, likely making decent money doing so due to pools are usually operated on a for-profit basis.

Similarly with block-explorers, offer a bounty for a block-explorer and someone whips one up, pockets the bounty, then rips it down again.

So again probably a bounty for free open source code would be the way to go; a bounty for getting your coin added to the standard distributions/repos of the standard free open source block-explorers.

-MarkM-

I keep trying to make a (merged) mining p2pool that will pay out in devcoins (in addition to 100% of the bitcoins mined being paid out in bitcoins) but it is a very expensive thing to do, partly because I0Coin and GeistGeld both needed massive amounts of RAM. I had to get a third dedicated server to host GeistGeld because having I0Coin and GeistGeld on one server and all the other merged mined coins plus p2pool itself on another server was not working, p2pool kept getting "over 5 seconds to get work from geistgeld" errors.

Now that our soon to be newly tenured developer has developed code allowing merged mined coins not to need such massive amounts of RAM I maybe could move GeistGeld back onto the same dedicated server as I0Coin, but, I already paid up front for the third server for a year so might as well use it for something. So for now GeistGeld is still on the third server. (He only fixed up I0Coin so far, so I0Coin uses way the heck less RAM now but GeistGeld has not yet been updated to match so it still uses crazy amounts of RAM.)

Just keeping up with updates/fixes of all the coin daemons and maintaining those servers and mining rigs to mine on them eats up quite a bit of time, though maybe the part that eats up the most is having to keep up with these forums to discover what is going on with all the coins, especially when just trying "git pull" on each coin does not actually result in getting the latest code. (Some github repository maintainers do this annoying thing where they create a new branch for new code then fail to make that the master/main/default branch so git pull stops getting the latest code.)

All of this massive expense for servers though is all still failing to actually result in a publicly useable merged mining pool because the bounties offered for code/scripts that will figure out how much each miner contributed to the mining since the last time such code/script was run have not yet sufficiently incentive-ised any coders to actually come up with free open source scripts for doing such things. I have not yet had time to delve into the inner workings of p2pool far enough to even know yet whether it has a historic record of all payments it has ever made to miners. If it does have such records then one should be able, in principle, to add up for each miner all the bitcoins they got paid since last time the desired script/code was run and from that compute what fraction of the total work-that-worked they evidently contributed, in order to produce a list of what fraction of any extra awards each one deserves so that one could do things like divvy up all the devcoins among them or sell all the other coins for devcoins and divvy up those devcoins among them or whatever extra awards one might want to divvy up among them based on how much each contributed since last you decided to divvy up something extra among them.

EDIT: As long as people can make massively, insanely more coins writing for Devtome than writing code for bounties I suppose it is not surprising that bounties are not motivating people to get things done.

-MarkM-

All the business ideas that Fin and others have mentioned... to start them, people will probably have to sell some DVC to raise the funds if they are not using their own resources.  That's going to be true until those needed services such as web development/design, e-commerce setup (for those who aren't inclined to DIY) can be paid for using Devcoins.  Hopefully people will start offering such services for DVC, but for them to get started, they probably would have to sell a few to buy services they need that are not yet offered for DVC.  And they would probably have to sell some to pay themselves because no one's time is truly free.

I don't think there's any way around the need to sell some of the Devtome earnings at this time.  I also think it's disingenuous for people to accuse those who sell as merely dumping for selfish gain (and anyway, it's not like that's forbidden).  Sales on the exchange are anonymous.  You don't know why someone sold or what they're going to do with the proceeds unless they share about it here.

As for us writers being the fat cats...  That's awesome!  I've never ever been accused of being a fat cat at the top of the heap before, so I'm going to enjoy this moment  

But at this time pretty much anyone can be a writer, so it's not like it's some elite group or anything.  If you want to be a fat cat at the top of the heap, then just sign up as a writer and start writing.  And most importantly, keep writing.  The system favors writing?  Well, then write.

MarkM raises a good point about the absolute limit of 4000 per round and he suggests some ways around it which I'm sure the decision makers can consider.  Another possibility is that partial shares could be awarded.  So at some point when the number of writers (or the number of receiver lines) hits a certain number, everyone can start getting half-shares or fifth-shares and it would still work the same way.  You'd have a larger number to divide into like 8,000 or 20,000.  I personally am not worried about the unfairness from uneven divisibility because receiver lines are randomized.  If I write every round, some of the time I'll get "gypped" and some of the time I'll get extra, and over time it will all even out.  And even if it doesn't, I still have myself an awesome deal.

There's also merit to the idea of having groups of shares allocated to different parts of the Devcoin project, the Devtome being one of them.  I'm not necessarily advocating for it, but I wouldn't be against it if it seemed right for the overall direction of the project.

As I mentioned before I think there is a natural incentive to the authors to start thinking about what we can do to add value to Devcoin, if for no other reason than to keep this nice little cash cow flowing for us.  But this does take time, and you can't rush it by trying to add punitive "incentives" to get authors to hoard their DVCs.

Yeah, but we can't cap at like 5 shares, or there is no incentive to add extensive information to Devtome. I could write 100k words and never come back.

Great now we are on the same page. Feels good doesn't it?

That would be cool. I've thought about getting a bond thing going if I can afford both.

While we do need to figure out how to make shares more equal (again, a lower cap is really a good solution in the short run) we also need to figure out how to make the other programs as proactive as devtome.

And once I start publishing my history books, I will add about a gram of silver just for novelty value. And I will be getting a tiny print replica of these coins. So I can basically just have the tiniest little circle/square of silver, and "punch" the image onto the coin

Thats the problem its not someone but entire batches of people who are eager to sell at current rates instead of eager to buy.

FinShaggy: I offer that for your store idea we create a bounty so that once you have created it you recieve your payment which would be the upfront cost of getting it going but not including the cost of creating a website portal which you own so I don't think it shoul dbe compensated for.

I do believe we have to find a way to limit writer's shares to be in line with the rest of what people are getting and focus more on the bounty program so people will find ways to get bounties done instead of write stuff that noone will read and is substantially of less value than what the bounties would provide for devcoin.

Well once people see that there is a company that tests the silver FOR YOU on camera, and allows you to go and view that video on YouTube whenever you damn well please... I think you will see a few Bitcoins turn into Devcoins.

I buy devcoins. I have offers to buy at every satoshi of price from one satoshi all the way up to, as I write this post, 38 satoshis.

I offer to buy more when I have bitcoins on the exchange to offer with, which is basically when someone buys one of my sell offers. I have sell offers at every satoshi of price from 41 satoshis all the way up to something like 385 satoshis or so.

Right now people aren't buying my sell offers so I am not adding more buy offers, trade has been very slow lately.

In the past, usually periodically people would buy all my offers all the way up over 200 satoshis, sometimes even over 300 satoshis, which is why I have sell offers up that high.

I have tried several times to get the price up to 40 satoshis by buying all sell offers that were offering to sell for 40 or less satoshis, but someone or someones seem to keep insisting they want to sell for less than 40 so finally I have had to just let them go ahead and do that, hoping that once they run out "we" can start trying again to get the price back up to 40 or higher.

-MarkM-

First I will just sell them on Bitcointalk, but that's once I get through at least 20 books, and can list my summaries and a picture of all the books.

But before that, the silver shop will have started, and I will be able to use money from that to get more books. And even hire other people. And the proceeds I get from Devtome will continue to add to that.

I will probably even be able to publish myself and others if they want.

How are you planning to sell these books for devcoin? I thought your just writing these for more devcoin on devtome? Are you creating a website portal for your bookstore? How are you funding that, or are you an expert web developer? i usually charge $30-$50 per hour after an estimate so not sure how much you would have to write to make a bookstore which may be atleast 25-50 hours of work depending on how flash it is. Silver store the same thing? Have you done a business analysis interms of risk/cost margins of profit vs cost to run? I don't get it.

lol good idea... maybe there needs to be a tutorial typed up on how the price of this crypto would rise fall with authors in mind since it is unique to the crypto community. By using nice pictures and diagrams we can easily convey the message across all spectrum of people here from those who get it to those who need more time. Offer a bounty for this?

I've only been involved for 2 rounds. 1 I wrote 64,000 words. 1 I wrote 13,000... And I came here before about half the authors.

So that is just plain NOT TRUE.

Yep. Just got over 20 Books in the mail, I am reading them and will write summaries to create my own book, and I will post the rough draft on Devtome. All purchased with my leftover devcoins from my first round in May, traded for BTC about two weeks ago at near current rates.

I have another 10-16 books on the way. And a list of over 350 books to buy. If I write over 80k words, my work should carry over and I should definitely make enough to be able to support a small silver store (for the small DVC community), and eventually it will grow as the DVC community grows.

Here's the books I have so far:

Well maybe we can let the rich folk, the authors, prove this theory about how much they will benefit the community with the bitcoins or fiat they dumped their devcoins for.

We could suspend share payments to authors completely, since we already massively overpaid the entire devtome sector of our economy for quite a while now.

The stinking rich authors, using the proceeds of their dumping of their devcoins, will easily rake in enough wealth to pay for more authors if they feel that they need more authors in order to carry out their task of working on devtome, since they will have all kinds of income from the businesses they started plus also all kinds of income to share out that devtome earns from the ads on its pages...

-MarkM-

My first post about Silver:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/silver-293125
September 12, 2013, 08:35:03 PM