It would increase early adoption, but harm later adoption, and most importantly wider adoption, due to purchasing a rig becoming a barrier to entry.  No one outside of bitcoin has fancy ASIC rigs, but everyone has spare CPU cycles.

As it stands, it seems there's no currently-available solution that meets everything, right?  So I might as well start brushing up on the white papers, because I'll have to make the new coin along with the thing I plan to do with it?

I'm not familiar with foocoin jargon, can you tell me what implications "Dif retarget: every block, +-1% of mean last hour" has in terms of actual inflation?

Also there's quarkcoin, which I gather is a descendent of sifcoin?  Unfortunately, despite being much more popular it seems to have added back in the gold rush mentality, which for preference is something of a non-starter.

Final bump to attract attention.  If still no replies, I'll write the thread off as lacking interest.

*bump*

Given that this thread is meant to be almost purely discussion, and not a [GREAT DEAL], [Giveaway!!!], or [**SPAMTASTIC**] promotion post, is there perhaps a better forum to put it in?

Hi all,

I'm looking for an altcoin to promote as part of an unrelated project.  Maybe, despite the sea of alternatives to bitcoin, it doesn't exist yet, but maybe it does.  You'd know the waters better than I.

Here's what I'm hoping to find:

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Inflationary - I'm looking for a potentially useful currency.  Bitcoin isn't one; it's tchotchkes to sell to gold bugs.  The coin I have in mind has its difficulty curve deliberately shallowed to match Moore's Law, or perhaps a bit more.  This is so over time, all else being equal, a constant amount of coins will be entering circulation, providing a low but steady inflation rate.  10% would be perfect.  This would have the effect of encouraging users to reinvest their liquid wealth as soon as possible, as it's doing them no good sitting in the wallet, while the crypto prevents hyperinflation scenarios that make cash entirely undesirable.

Not premined/high initial difficulty - although the difficulty will be slow to ramp up, it should start high.  This is to remove even the appearance that anyone jumping in early will "strike it rich" when it takes off later - e.g. every pump and dump scheme ever, and more than half of present altcoins.  We're making a currency here, not a cash grab.

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ASIC unfriendly - Insisting on a not-premined solution doesn't do a damned thing if the wealth generation is dominated by a small cabal of people who can afford specialized hardware.  GPUs okay though.

Some kind of blockchain solution - BTC blockchain is getting a little bit ridiculous in size, and it's still a niche thing.  Something that would let average users participate in the transaction process without having to store the whole damn thing would be nice.

I'm sure I had one or two more desirable traits I can't remember now, but tbh the first has probably alienated 95% of you and narrow the existing solution down to "none" as it is, so I'll turn it over to ask for suggestions.  Anything come to mind?

Does it happen *every* time?  'Cause the log says it's happening ~30-40% of the time, which is attributable to the price changing slightly between updates.  Doesn't take much fluctuation for a 1% change

The red and green indicates profit for me and you, respectively. 

I'm currently selling meat for somewhat less than it's worth (and kol meat can be tied to dollar value much the same way BTC can, so it's an objective measurement of worth), and want to highlight that to encourage trade.

'Course it's a moot point right now - naturally as soon as I leave town there's a power outage, and I hadn't yet bothered to configure the server to bring itself online automatically, what with the low odds of there being a power outage while I'm away.

It should be back up Monday evening sometime.

So, I'm liking the look of bitcoins.  Secure, anonymous, decentralized.  I think they'd work well as a currency for use in tor or i2p, "behind the veil" as it were.

But bitcoin isn't the only player out there.  There's at least a half dozen other alternative currencies vying for adoption.  Wikipedia just has crap, it's made of marketing and herp for a topic this narrow.

So tell me about them, if you'd be so kind.  What makes them good?  What makes bitcoin better?  Which are the players and which are the underdogs?

Oh, okay.  Well, don't prognosticate too wildly.  You'll go blind that way.

In all practicality, bitcoin will forever remain small fry until a) drug lords/enron ceos find a scheme to launder money through it or b) via the vagaries of the internet, some random bitcoin application attains chatroulette-level popularity.  Where it goes from there can be anyone's guess.

[watches]

So, sanity then, but presented as fear by someone who's really butthurt about it.

For the people in the audience who aren't willing to click on every random youtube link, he's talking about it being a bad idea to hire a bunch of armed thugs (Blackwater) to run hog wild without restraint or oversight.

Are you getting these "stages" from somewhere reasonably official, like an economist or something, or are you making them up?  'Cause I'm not an economist either, but I don't think stages are best concept to approach currency adoption with.

The only thing that really matters when increasing the spread of bitcoins is increasing the things you can get for them.  When you can buy something tangible with bitcoins in an easier manner than any other means, bitcoins, for you, have value.

Currency exchanges are a important and useful element, as they tie bitcoins into other measures of worth.  Everyone likes money.  That'll only get you so far though, because other than laundering money, there's no reason to exchange cash for bitcoins for cash.  A market where everyone's an investor can't be much more than a hobby.  Seeing as this is what 80% of the Marketplace chatter is about (with another 15% being casinos), I feel this niche is pretty well saturated.

However, services which only accept bitcoins are where value really comes from.  It expands the economy coming and going: the people who use them need to have gotten bitcoins somehow, and people who receive the bitcoins need to spend them somehow.  This kind of service could be standard internet sites which consciously choose to only accept bitcoins (as my site does), or it could be the only real option for certain commerce markets (like Freenet), owing to bitcoins' security and anonymity.

In any case, before this turns into a real ramble, I don't see any "stages" anywhere.  Just continual growth, or lack thereof, in small or large amounts, with a critical mass somewhere in the hopeful future.

Is that sanity or fear?  It's so hard to tell sometimes.

Due to a sudden but fortuitously timed business trip, I'll be in a position to go to the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in DC on the 30th.  I'm going to bring a rally sign, naturally.  One side will have a reasonably sane message, the other will be baseless fearmongering.  Mongering may not be extreme enough - for this I'd fear for free.

Here's where you come in.  I've got slogans I can make posters of, sure, but I'm not above a crass bribe.

For a sufficiently large bitcoin donation, I'll write your slogan(s) in place of mine and display them at the rally.  This isn't a straight auction, since I want to balance BTC price with the catchiness of the slogan; the better your slogan is the cheaper I'll wave it for.  I'll make a final decision as close to 24 hours beforehand as I can make it, since I don't know what my schedule will be like.

The only requirement I have for your ideas is that they must fit with the rally themes; no bitcoin ads or DISREGARD THIS, but honest reasonability or unreasonable dishonesty.  Even though you can't be there, which I'm sure you have a very good reason for, I'm willing to spread the word about... y'know... the wombats.  Or zombies.  Wombat zombies.  Zombats.

As proof I've done this, I'll post a picture of your poster with something Washingtony in the background.  Like that obelisk, or Lincoln's feet, or maybe the rest of the rally.

Should I for whatever reason be unable to make it to the rally and post pictures afterwards, I'll of course refund your money.

Current slogans:
Reasonable: "Things are getting better" (0 BTC)
Fearful: "Your husband is fucking the babysitter" (0 BTC)

I'm not; before I evaluate a game I kick out anyone without enough credit to play.

Could you make it tell you how many you have in the queue?

A "toggle all" button would be good. I think there is a bias toward not claiming a lot of squares because it's more work.

Done and done.  Draws btw give you your money back, minus the usual 10%.

Since I don't have anything pressing to implement tonight, I thought I'd take a step back and reassess my goals.  What do you want to see added?  

Additional currency exchanges - EVE isk, TF2 items, other (specify)?  

More arcade style games - quick, cheap plays?

Intricate and/or long term games - MMOs, sims and such?  Since I don't have any examples yet, one game I've been mulling is a casino management sim (in keeping with the theme of most bitcoin endeavors).  You'd take out a loan from a seedy shark for collateral - credit - then build a casino and attract customers to pay it back.  Pay back the loan, get back all your credit.  Fail to stay in the black and mobsters break you fuckin kneecaps and I keep the credit.

Or maybe some kinda community thing?  4chan style image board which prevents spam with a very small charge per post (~0.01 BTC) instead of captcha?

By the way, since I've had it up for a few days without losing everything due to a glitch, I decided to add in the rest of my KoL meat.  Meat is selling for 2.5x its value right now, the equivalent of buying bitcoins for $0.03 each.  It will never be this cheap again, and the best profits will go to the first person to claim them.

[EDIT] One thing though - since the gradient in this case is very large, the meat price will fall faster than normal, so orders greater than 3 or 4 btc might see significant changes in price.  Also, whoever just reloaded the page about a dozen times: prices update every six minutes, which is as fast as I can login to kol to check messages.  I need to add that to the page.

[edit][edit] Ah shit, kol maintenance is in 10 minutes.  Might want to wait until afterward so things don't get snarled up.  I'm not expecting any problems (trades should be queued while kol is down), but it couldn't hurt to be safe.

Hrm.  I took you up on that and it gave us BOTH a win.  Checking for bugs now.

[Edit] Nevermind, it wasn't a bug.  We tied, so technically we did both win.  It shouldn't count for e-penis bragging rights though, so I'll fix it to not affect the scoreboard.

[Edit][Edit] 'kay, if the game's a total draw it won't count anymore.

By the way, if you have plays queued you aren't charged for them until someone else joins and the game is computed.  And, when I restart the server it wipes the queue.  I don't wanna make some major change to the rules or how much I charge and leave someone feeling gypped because their queued plays turned out to be a huge waste.  Is that an acceptable convenience-security tradeoff?

Alright, scoreboard is in!  Right now the only people on it are my two testing addresses, so they should be easy to top.

Mkay, it's up and it looks like it's working.  You can queue plays now, and results are easier to interpret.

Do ya'll think I ought to bump the ante up to 1 BTC?  The multiple price levels is a good idea, but not when there's just a couple of people playing.

I'm gonna take an hour break to kill shit online, then we'll see about adding a highscore board.

Wow, thanks for the quick feedback.  These are pretty much all good ideas, I'll try to implement some of them tonight. 

As far as the smoother and more intelligent web coding goes, the extent of my skills runs currently to the late nineties.  You're lucky the whole thing isn't a thirty page description of my cats, with a static background image that clashes with the text contrast and a midi of Queensryche's "Silent Lucidity" playing on a loop.

Re: the hangups, could be one of three things: Cherrypy is occasionally telling me it ran across some sort of error with static files, my vnc viewer into my server is set to "bandwidth hog," and I had bittorrent open.  The latter two should be fixed, so let me know if it continues to happen.

Over the weekend I coded up a quick sorta-multiplayer game.  It's like rock-paper-scissors in two dimensions, so I called it 2DRPS.  I've written this a time or two before in a few different formats, and the people who've played have always enjoyed it at least enough to humor me.  As far as I'm aware, there's nothing quite like it - as a wannabe part-time game designer, I hate games that are carbon copy clones of each other - so atm this is an exclusively bitcoin thing.

Oh, and you can win BTC by playing.  Both players pitch in an ante, the winner walks away 80% richer.  I've temporarily set the play price pretty low (0.10) to encourage playing around without fear of losing much money.  I'll raise it to 1 BTC per play in a few days time, or if ya'll ask me to do it early so you can get the feeling of money riding on the line.

You'll need a credit account to play the game - with under fifteen second rounds, waiting for full BTC transfers would take too long.  There's no charge for doing so and BTC sent as credit is simply saved until it's used or returned (derefore yer money's safe wit' me, promise), so load up an address with a BTC or two and give 'er a whirl!  

The site, again, is derpular.dyndns.org

Bold denotes newly added features of the site.

As always, PLEASE let me know if there's any odd behavior or errors cropping up.  As I add more detailed transactional functionality, it becomes harder to test by myself.  Copy+pasting the nasty red error trace is more useful than anything to me.