Topic: [DVC]DevCoin - Official Thread - Moderated - page 97. (Read 1058956 times)

With all respect you deserve. Devcoin is Free/Libre Open Source Software, anyone can mess with the code and do whatever they want.

That said, I announced the hard fork already, no way back.

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Indeed! If we just let Devcoin die, its remaining value is lost forever. I believe in the power of the existing community, otherwise I would start a new coin project rather than hardforking.

To answer your question let me comment on what @Shattienator just said:


YES! We don't need to stick to the old source code, we can fork another coin that is better suited for the purpose of Devcoin and the needs of the existing market. We keep the name: Devcoin, because everyone holding the old Devcoin will have a chance to get the new Devcoin through DRS, which should have a good RDS and IRS.

This is what will happen in this proposed scenario:

1. new Devcoin releases with a new blockchain (new genesis block)
2. old Devcoin stays alive
3. Devcoin Renewal Service launches to convert old to new
4. Market switches from old Devcoin to new Devcoin progressively

We should not worry about the old blockchain and coins, because the market will bet for the new Devcoin IF we make it a better option. I strongly believe that Coingather, the only Exchange willing to support Devcoin will contribute to the success of this hardfork.

Regarding ICO / Airdrop and the like. There is enough people holding Devcoin already, no need to make more marketing.

And... there is something after the hardfork: Devtome needs love! and we could build more assets that will contribute economic value to the new Devcoin market. That creation of value should be measured and considered into IRS.

I could not agree more. It's one of the issues I've had with the coin. Back when they were worth 120 sat each, it would have required 180 BTC/month in buys just to keep that stable. Even halving that would require only 90. Then 45, etc.

Deflation is a good move I think. The issue is.. what happens with existing coins if this is hard forked/redone?

Shares reward generates strong sell side without any generation of a buy side for Devcoin.
That is the problem of a Devcoin - constant sell side generation forces Devcoin receivers to sell them as fast as possible because any new block will generate more and more coins going on sale. All the time. So keeping any coins will reduce its value without any chance to increase.

The reward distribution should be designed to provide the reason to keep the coins for some time (or for a long time). It meas that the Deflation strategy should be implemented. Bitcoin have reduction of coins generated. Devcoin should have the same to succeed. Say reduction of generation rate by 0.1% each 144 blocks (once a day) - it will give roughly 30% reduction annually. 50000 coins per block will become 35000 coins per block in one year. From 36K to 24K - for the next year etc.
Just for example.
ATM the sell side generation is about 220M a month. To keep the DVC price at 1 satoshi there shoud be a 2.2 BTC buy side support each month. It can not just come out of thin air.
So any reward receiver forced to sell its share immediatelly once any buy side appears. Even at 1 satoshi per DVC. Coingather right now have buy support for only 64K DVC at 1 satoshi.
Any generation reduction will give (small) possibility that coin will increase in nearest distant future. And possible reduce the sell side generation a bit. Possible for significant amount.
So Deflation strategy should be discussed, not Inflation one.

Why do you need to keep old DVC alive? Currently there are no possibilities to sell DVC say for amount of 1 BTC - whole Coinsource have no such buy support on DVC pairs.
For option 1 this will be just a new coin. In this case it should be a ICO on any notable f. Basically it will give all the options you have mentioned in option 2.

In reality - the new coin with the old Idea is the only option that can succeed at the ICO funding. With new protocol, new features, new RDS and IRS in place. Basically we can start with new whitepaper and get and strategy for ICO. But do we need the old Devcoin with all these "premined" (from ICO point of view) coins?

Just keep in mind that it will be much more easy to build a new coin from a scratch then to try keep old coin alive.

So, in general, there only one option - to kill old coin (not kill, actually, but not to try give it a new birth - with merged mining it will be alive for some time in any case) and start a new one.

I agree that talk of a HF is only in question once the allocation of coins (shares) has been discussed thoroughly. If the Devoin software is the issue, one could also just start a new Devcoin (with a fancy name) 

The coin works fine, there is a tiny change needed to make it compile against boost 1.58+ instead of 1.54 for those who got Ubuntu 16.04 fresh rather than upgrading 14.04 to 6.04 (and thus retaining old Boost 1.54 libs), but other than that it works.

Do not mess with the code, what we need is to get the receiver file folks cleaned up maybe. I see on http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=devcoin_human_resources for example that I am listed as hosting a full node, actually I was hosting five full nodes, one in town house, one in country-house, and three on third party dedicated server machines. Now I am down to only two third party server machines so am only currently hosting three full nodes. I would like to go back to three third party dedicated servers, I lost the old ones as the hosting company screwed me over but the new company sems to work well and I get a very powerful server for only $70+ USD per month, I would like to get another two dedicated servers.

Please stop talking about hard forks, the coin is fine.

We just need to allocate shares more intelligently / effectively.

-MarkM-

I think you should first settle on how exactly ongoing distribution/reward will change. This proved difficult in the past because DVC rationale and goals differed.

As Ranlo's example intimated, DVC is merge-mined and therefore the floor on DVC value = minimum effort to acquire or earn them. If that effort can amount to zero, price trends to zero. This was debated some time ago and I hope now more clear.

Either DVC rewards OS development & effort (and demands more honest appraisal/compensation of contribution). Or it doesn't and joins a very long list of price-speculative alts. Or the new exists alongside the old... etc.

Given likely concentration of existing holdings, I doubt there's a universally fair way to covert old to new. But frankly, whilst important I think generation is secondary to distribution mechanics. There's not necessarily any correlation between coin supply and price or ubiquity (e.g. Ripple, Doge, Nem).

To answer your question though - I think you already know my preference, but I also think achieving non-zero price stability where implied value (average or lower bound on effort to attain them) is dynamic requires dynamic supply.

If there are people on the receiver list who are doing nothing, that is news to me. I thought such things were being reviewed?

Who actually admins those lists nowadays?

All this talk of screwing things around is bad, just make yourself a different coin if you do not like DeVCoin.

This thing has been running many years and is a unit of account for a lot of stuff.

There is way more DeVCoin-denominated debt than all the DeVCoins that have so far been minted nor will BE minted at the current rate for many years to come.

By all means lets go over every recipient on the receivers list to make sure they are still doing what they are being paid to do, and review whether things that actually cost out of pocket money, such as hosting, ae being paid enough to keep them online. Though also I think we might need to review what some are actually paying for hosting as it seems to me some of the begging I have seen from Devtome over they years seemed to want more money than hosting for it ought really to be costing?

Our biggest problem probably has been not having an exchange of our own, we have probably not beeing giving out enough shares for development of free open source exchange software, as far as I know there is still no such software out there, I would have run an exchange myself by now if there was. I have ended up starting to move toward using the HORIZON platform but then that too lost its exchange. We could really use good reliable exchange software so we can set up an exchange of our own that supports the merged-mined (alongside BiTCoin) coins and HORIZON.

A big problem with exchanges, in addition to lack of free open source code for running them, has been that they all seem to focus on volume, because that generates their fees. We need exchanges that are actually invested in the coins, exchanges where what is important is not VOLUME but, rather, LIQUIDITY. If you can at any time buy or sell a huge fraction of the total number of a given coin, that is what is important for determining its value and for whatever occassional actual settling-up needs to take place on an exchange. Maybe that bears repeating: WHAT IS IMPORTANT IS NOT HOW MUCH VOLUME ACTUALLY TAKES PLACE ON EXCHANGES, BUT SIMPLY THE CAPACITY (LIQUIDITY; NUMBER OF COINS AVAILABLE TO BUY OR SELL) WHETHER OR NOT THEY ACTUALLY DO GET BOUGHT OR SOLD ANY GIVEN YEAR OR MONTH OR DAY OR DECADE.  An exchange needs to just sit there year after year after year allowing a relative price to be discovered, that is all. Given the current prices, folks can trade privately or between Corps or Nations or Guilds etc etc etc. That is why we ended up simply putting a list of current rates online at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc though of course the more places offing such rates-charts the better, and the eisier it is for people to actually find folks to trade with at prices close to those shown on such tables the better. Note that we display those rates in terms of DeVCoins (that is, DeVCoins end up being shown as 1.00000000); that is not only because DeVCoin has usually been the cheapest coin thus providing the smallest granularity for measuring values, but also because there is so much DeVCoin-denominated debt out there that needs such tables in order to figure out how many of various other things it will take to pay their debts, given that there are never enough DeVCoins on the market to pay all that debt so they mostly end up using other things to pay it.

Remember that a lot of book-keeping only hits exchanges when there is an imbalance of trade; if two nations are trading and at the end of every year or few years or whatever of trading it turns out they have balanced trade, there is no settling-up needed that time around; if one has bought more goods than it has sold to the other then one big payment suffices to settle up for another years or few years or whatever. The need for an exchange is simply to determine what the actual current rate of exchange is between the two currencies. These balancing payments do not themselves even hit the exchanges.

Actually maybe to an extent the exchanges have served not only to figure out the relative values of currencies but also to manipulate the relative values, for example the fact that the amount of debt denominated in DeVCoins far far exceeds the number of DeVCoins in existence means there are a lot of debtors out there who always like to see a low price for DeVCoins so they can make their debt payments as inexpensively as possible. Some debts have been paid off completely in the last few years that were intended originally to run for at least another decade!

Look at General Financial Corp, its total assets currently show as 2031390503860.48024691 dDVC. Most of that is DVC-denominated debt. More than 2000 billions of DeVCoins! How many DeVCoins have been minted so far? Less than 20 billion still, is it?

Lets find out how much it is going to cost to get the merged-mined (alongside BiTCoin) coins, including DeVCoin, onto an exchange alongside HORIZON, and to get reliable, robust free open-source exchange software developed so we can run our own exchange if need be. Our problem is not with our coin but with exchanges constantly failing to reliably year after year provide the array of coins we need and, according to a recent post here, with who-ever is supposed to be keeping track of receivers not keeping track of them properly apparently. (?)

EDIT: If you really feel we need to mint less coins, we can simply allocate shares to a coin-destroying facility. No need to mess with the actual minting process. Also, note that holders of DeVCoin-denominated debt have a vested interest in increasing/upholding the value of DeVCoins so that the debt payments they receive from their debtors are more valuable, so you could consider favouring such folks when assigning shares, having reasonable confidence they will tend to try not to lower the value of the coin. Heck it is in their interest to simply hoard it.

-MarkM-

RDS is the big thing for me. For the past almost 2 years, over half the people on the receiver list have not only contributed nothing to the project, but haven't even made a statement that insinuates they're alive. Even so, I'm sure there are some that are dumping their coins as they get them (and are dumping because they've had to do absolutely nothing to "earn" them, so a satoshi or fraction of a satoshi for them is absolutely free money and they don't care anymore because they get paid regardless).

Guess your focus is more on the assets than on DVC itself. We need assets in order to create value, and we should care about keeping that value into DVC, otherwise people will just exchange DVC for BTC again. Yet, before working on the assets, I want to focus on distribution of rewards (RDS) and inflation rate (IRS).


Thanks for that! I will give it a try and push new code accordingly.

I have two ideas in mind:

1. Start anew radically, everything from scratch, kill the old DVC, people should SELL all their current DVC stock to preserve a bit of their money
2. Make a hard cut. Implement a DVC RENEWAL SERVICE (DRS) where people can "submit" their current DVC so that it gets converted into the new DVC

#2 makes more sense for me. BUT we should set a conversion rate that pumps the new DVC up. For example a relation of 10,000 to 1. For every 10 thousand OLD DVC sent to DRS, you get 1 NEW DVC back. Maybe it should be 100K or 1 million, I'm open to proposals!

Lets say that DRS is implemented. On every round the new DVC Rewards Distribution System (RDS) should pay to the following FUNDS:

1. Fund to Convert OLD DVC into NEW DVC
2. Fund for Open Source Projects and Assets (Devtome?)
3. Fund to pay the staff (core team, mirrors, nodes)
4. Fund to pay miners

Then we have to figure out the Inflation Rate Strategy (IRS), how much DVC should be generated on every round? Should it be static or variable like STEEM?

If anything new news about devcoin we will wait if there is such as bounty and airdrop I will be very senag about it. thaks you.

DeVCoin is fine the way it is, what needs working on is the shares allocation.

The Devtome wiki was a nice idea, and actually it probably is still a nice idea, but it has not been making money yet has still been getting the lion's share of the generated coins, which has served to massively reduce the amount of devcoins people actually developing software have been getting and the amount of coins paying for hosting for our stable nodes.

So if we have not done so already we should limit how much goes to devtome by dividing only some specific fraction of all the coins among the shares that are about the devtome.

Since so far we have only two categories really, one being devtome the other being everything else, we should probably separate the shares into devtome shares and other shares and assign half the generated coins to devtome shares the other half to everything else.

That should make at least a start toward correcting the huge problem that devtome has turned out to be, and might help get more attention put into software development.

Personally I would like to see three categories reallky, one being devtome, one being the Galactic Milieu, the third being everything else.

That is partly because flooding the markets with devcoins via devtome has constantly undermined the Galactic Milieu's attempts to support the markets, to the point where eventually all the devcoins-versus-bitcoins markets have vanished, leaving us only paired now against litecoin which is a coin most of the Galactic Milieu never wanted to touch. Folks are reluctant to invest in litecoin vs devcoin markets for fear of getting stuck with litecoins.

Also, having a constant supply of DeVCoins coming into the Milieu will greatly help ensure that players actively harvesting resources in the various aspects of the game can always reasonably expect to be able to trade resources for coins, as we can have a budget within the game enabling non-player-character companies nations etc to purchase resources.

I remind you all again of the conversion rates files stored at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

ALSO: It has come to my attention that to compile devcoin, and other coins that old, against Boost 1.58 instead of 1,54 you need the following sed command's effect:


Maybe someone can make the corresponding change in the git repo?

-MarkM-

As Sidhujag noted, if you plan to fundamentally modify generation and distribution then need to start anew. ~14bn existing supply so perception & economics of a change won't fly otherwise:

1) Would look dodgy.

2) Wouldn't make sense to expect fundamental change. Already constant generation = falling rate of supply growth as a percentage of total per period. Simply adjusting that lower means very little at this point (relatively tiny numerator/relatively huge denominator).

3) If you do it anyway and maintain current framework, need to recognise that price is basically pegged to an implied monetary measure of work via distribution. This is primarily a quality/community/enthusiasm/acceptance problem, not a technical problem.

i.e. DVC/BTC currently = Implied $ value of a share/(DVC per share/(BTC/USD)). Getting DVC/BTC higher requires increasing $ value of a share and/or lowering DVC per share.

4) If you do it anyway and maintain a [different] generation/distribution framework you need to seriously consider how you'll overcome (3) and how legacy supply and perception will feed into mechanics and assumptions about the future.

when is the hardfork?
i can still leave my dvc in CoinGather after hardfork right?

I am a sign up administrator and contributing writer to devtome.  I support whatever the general consensus from the community is for what is best for the health of DVC.  I am definitely not tech savvy, but I am still available to assist with any aspects of DVC in regards to writing, writers, etc.

FWIW, I'm still around and do read the PMs. I haven't chimed in on your previous ones because I don't feel like I know enough to really give solid input on its direction. This is an unprecedented area for me (reviving a project like this) and don't really want any mishaps to be due to my ignorance when pushing ideas that may get passed.

As a result, I'm fairly open to what you guys feel is best.

DISCUSSION ON THE FUTURE OF DEVCOIN

First of all, thanks everyone for your patience! I had to take a time to discuss internally with the people that expressed support to my initiative of hardforking Devcoin. I waited a reasonable amount of time for their answers. Now is time to make the discussion public.

Yes! I'm planning to hardfork Devcoin! this is the actual plan:

1. Define a new Rewards Distribution System (RDS) for new generated Devcoins (a new policy for the receiver_xx.csv files)
2. Define a new Inflation Rate Strategy (IRS O_o!), no more wild generation of Devcoins!
3. Implement RDS & IRS in tesnet
4. Hardfork Devcoin

I know Devcoin has many downsides, but we have some strengths: Many people is holding Devcoin! We are not starting from scratch. There is still an exchange site supporting this project and an strong force of miners giving live to Devcoin's blockchain.

Everyone interested on the future of Devcoin, please share your insights on RDS & IRS. We need a fair system that ensures we are rewarding people that are actually serving the purpose of Devcoin, along with managing the inflation rate in a way that promotes Devcoin's ecosystem.

I look forward to your feedback Devcoiners!

Kind of part-time. The original founder still collaborates a little with the maintenance of current Devcoin blockchain. He has not shown any interest on changing how Devcoin works AFAIK. I'm running a plan to rebird Devcoin, all investors are welcome!

are you working on devcoin fulltime or partime? if not do you know what happen to the original founder or any dev is currently working on it? im interested in buying some bc i like its long history and its potential. maybe we can start with community support and create discord or slack. thanks.