Hi! First post.
I came across BitCoin somewhat serendipitously in the course of working on (IRC, eggdrop, TCL) trading bots for Galactic Milieu (
http://sourceforge.net/p/galacticmilieu/home/ ).
I was mostly looking for things like Open Transaction, since I wanted client (player's agent) bots to sit around trading "arbitrary" things in galaxies where one planet's local currency might be of little interest on another planet, especially in a galaxy far far away, but where actual tangible things, or even useful information such as how to build ships that can travel faster than light typically does, might well have value far away if ever it somehow managed to get there.
Part of the "game" with these bots is supposed to be the whole "problem" of why anyone anywhere would think your possibly puny planet's local currency has any value whatsoever, let alone bother buying any of it using anything actually useful to them such as ton-light-months of transportation or quantities of fuel usable to generate ton-light-months of transportation or ice cream cones or face paint (or even blue mud specially formulated for rubbing on your belly).
I have been wondering about a specific tactic or strategy that, when reading this thread, I find myself thinking could in theory maybe "explain" some of the things this thread mentions.
Basically as long as transaction fees are low or zero, and accounts buying and selling can be anonymous, couldn't people interested in creating and maintaining a perception that their national currency (hello, BitCoiner nation! Why aren't you featured in Freeciv as a nation yet? Is the Galactic Ruleset going to have to start adding in nations itself due to some problem of getting a BitCoiner nation accepting into mainline/default Freeciv? But I digress...) has value buy it and sell it back and forth between accounts of their own at ever higher values, only ever actually releasing some to outsiders at higher price than they buy it back from outsiders?
I kind of envisioned some nations deliberately buying and selling their own currency among their own sock-puppets constantly deliberately to create high volumes at high prices precisely for the purpose of convincing speculators that there is money to be made with that currency...
It seems to me it could be interesting to somehow estimate (or would that be guestimate) how many of the dollars seemingly being spent to seemingly buy BitCoins is actually coming from real people who really had no bitcoins previously compared to how much is coming from people buying their own BitCoins from themselves.
Might it seem useful to at least some miners to buy from themselves some of the early bitcoins they created by mining, precisely for the purpose of creating an appearance of the saleablilty of BitCoins, but refraining from buying other people's BitCoins since they are not actually trying to spend dollars they are trying to keep the dollars themselves whilst making it look like people are parting with dollars?
-MarkM-
