Quote from: georgem on January 02, 2014, 03:12:27 AM

Quote from: Hunterbunter on January 02, 2014, 02:28:24 AM

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.

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) ? Grin

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? Cool

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.

Quote from: georgem on January 02, 2014, 03:59:38 AM

and who /how decides how much one is worth?

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.