Quote from: melodiem on January 24, 2014, 08:44:25 PM

Quote from: weisoq on January 24, 2014, 11:08:23 AM

A dvc/fiat exchange, bank or investment fund might be a good idea. But they need to be subject to simple market forces and risk of loss like everything else. I'm not getting how a fund could be managed without reference to the market pricing you said was being avoided, except in just being a new market?

Im not sure what Ive come up with Weisoq, I wrote it up last night : http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=devcoin_fund

Ive never done anything like this and I admit absolute ignorance but the idea wouldnt go away lol

I like it - the idea of a dvc/$ exchange, particularly for devcoin where it makes sense for a project that appeals to non-techies to have a way to buy them without first having bitcoin. Where my view differs is I don't think it's possible to 'manage' with the depth you suggest without undermining the basic premise.

Probably the most important aspect for a trading exchange is liquidity - i.e. getting as many people with as many bids and offers involved as possible. Doing anything to restrict that will limit pricing and trading and leave the fund carrying the constant risk of having to make up the other side of trades. If you limit members to people who basically know about it, we can pretty much assume those people will be those earning or holding devcoin. Which means they will be sellers.

But it still needs buyers. Who will the buyers be and where will they get the $ from? I guess that would mean the $ have to come from the fund, perpetually, which to go full circle seems to undermine the idea of a real exchange with real prices, and is likely to lead to perpetual fund losses b/c it may be the only buyer.

The alternative would be to get basic dvc/$ going - just a normal exchange. If/when it proves to work with enough interest and liquidity then it may be possible to create a general fund that works to build an actual investment model. One option would be to see if one of the existing exchanges is able to add dvc/$, although pragmatically the fact that only really bitcoin has this might imply it's too early?
----
On your devtome suggestions article. Also very good ideas and similar to some thoughts of my own. This is limited right now by expertise and time. Rather than type it out again here's what I wrote before to explain. If a regular with PHP skills was willing to take up the ongoing job (and it would have to be a long-term commitment), and maybe if a couple more detome admins were added, then a lot more is possible. This also depends on the site hoster and others being ok with whoever's involved in maintaining plugins etc.

Quote

...a lot of that (indexing, visuals, categorisation etc) is already doable via dokuwiki plugins but (semi-quoting jasinlee who maintains devtome) it needs someone proficient in php to fix bugs as they add plugins and ongoing. If you google dokuwiki plugins and other dokuwiki sites there's a lot out there, but it's open source and often never debugged.

This is why it's such a laborious, manual process with not great functionality, and always playing catchup with categorising. Focus still is going through all exisiting writing to check the basics let alone improvements.

Anything to improve things would be great by me, so good suggestion for ideas.

Edit: Also want to add that much of what you see on devtome is still in the process of working through checks for categorising, formatting, content. On top of dealing with new articles, giftculturewriting is working from existing Z-A and I'm on A-Z. Speaking for myself, I'm still on A...

I know gift has some good ideas for better front page presentation and usability, but for now it's basically just a tree of topics - categories - subcategories -articles to make the process above quicker and easier, and can then just work on rolling new submissions and look at visuals.

If anyone has ideas (sticking with existing dokuwiki functionality and syntax for now as that's what there is) then please suggest them. It's taking a long time and we just haven't had time to get into that yet.