That latestrates file is intended for use by shell scripts and basically any script languages in which that simple syntax for assigning values to variables works.
One looks down the list to see which rate is equal to 1.00000000, in the case given you can see that is DVC (DeVCoins), indicating that whatever currency the rates (prices) are being shown in happens to be a currency in which devcoins are worth exactly 1.00000000, so its pretty obvious the prices shown are given in terms of devcoins.
Devcoin are convenient because they have more granularity than most (or maybe even more than any other) thus finer grained prices can be shown by pricing in devcoins than by pricing in, for example, bitcoins, number of decimals shown being equal.
So then, what we have there is the number of devcoins each of various other assets conversion rate is, aka what their price in devcoins is, ready for use in scripts.
The scripts they were originally set up for are market-maker scripts for Open Transactions, which would typically make offers at three different scales (lot sizes of 1, 10 and 100 coins, or lot sizes of 10, 100 and 1000 coins, or lot sizes of 100, 1000 and 10000 coins or even lot sizes of 1000, 10000 and 100000 coins (heck maybe even some pairs, like DVC/BTC might have used lot sizes of 10000, 100000 and 1000000 coins)).
The scripts would place offers in both ways round of the pair (e.g. BTC/DVC and DVC/BTC) at each scale (lot size), with higher markups for smaller scales than for lower scales, in order to facilitate buying wholesale to resell at retail kind of thing.
So basically the rates were intended for use like the rate charts tellers in banks used to look at when you wanted to buy or sell foreign currency at the bank; selling they'd sell with a slight markup, buying they'd buy at a slight discount. Thus only in pure abstract accounting would anyone normally/typically get the actual rates shown in this latestrates file.
As a concrete example consider a galactic mining operation that has debts denominated in devcoins and is delivering a fleetload of "deuterium" resource to a General Mining Corp depot.
General Mining Corp would offer some number of their own currency, GMC, for the resource. The miner says oh I want that applied against my debt, please. So the clerk uses a table that can be derived from that shown table simply by dividing all rates by GMCrate. That is, they use a table in which all rates are shown in terms of GMC, that is, a table in which GMCrate is the one shown as 1.00000000
So they can thus convert to any. In the case where the miner wants it applied against a devcoin-denominated debt obviously the latestrates we have already seen would have worked fine, since it already showed everything in terms of devcoins. I am merely trying to make it clear that by simple arithmetic one can from that table derive a table that gives all rates in terms of whichever one you prefer your rates to be denominated in, which in the case of GMCorp would probably be GMC.
Maybe even in pure abstract accounting ("unit of account") most moneygrubbing corps would do the extra work to apply a percentage service fee of some kind for the conversion. However historically it has often been the case, partly due to the fact that all assets on the Digitalis Open Transactions Server are integers, that miners doing such deliveries typically were not charged by percentage but the corp would simply do the rounding to integers in their own favour. (Presumably paying the clerk out of the rounding on the GMC side not out of some fraction of a devcoin of rounding on the devcoin side!
)
-MarkM-
. So where does the value of <400k DVC per BTC come from, when the value has been above a million for quite some time?