Bitcoin Forum

human mineable and proof of play Altcoins

This topic is to motivate people to post definitions, comments, and questions about human-mineable and proof-of-play Altcoins. Plus in-game currencies that are not mined.

I deleted my original list, because of the excellent lists below.
Keep the posts coming.

A distinction should be made between coins that are actually human-mineable/PoP and coins that are not.

To my knowledge, only huntercoin and motocoin are actually human mine, and only moto has proof of play securing transactions.  (HUC uses an "ordered overlay" proof mechanism (a la namecoin) for mining but only uses traditional sha/scrypt PoW for securing transactions.)

In order for a coin to be human mineable, humans must be able to secure for themselves some new coinbase coins (not just a transfer of already-mined coins) by offering some mathematical proof to the network that they have earned claim to those coinbases.

In order for a coin to be proof-of-play the coin must not only be human mineable, but the proofs offered to claim those coinbases must also be the same proofs used to secure transaction history on the network.  (This is why HUC is not proof of play, but MOTO is!)

Offerings like hyper, flappy, etc are no different from traditional game currencies in these respects, and work very much like wow gold or riot points where some central authority holds and controls distribution of coins, with no proof mechanisms involved.  Further if your list is going to include any coins used as currency in any games, then your list really should include almost every coin including bitcoin.  You could go get some free bitcoin in Dragons Tale with just a few clicks right now, but this doesn't make bitcoin human mineable or proof of play at all!  You can go roll dice against a house edge on almost any altcoin around.  As such, I'd love to see a revised list (really two lists) of human mine and proof-of-play coins, but this list is so far not that list.

It seems that lately the concepts of human mining and proof of play are starting to get very popular, so it is going to become increasingly important to educate and raise awareness as to what these concepts actually mean, and why they are important and beneficial, so that people can avoid bogus claims. Just because you can go play some FPS or mini-MMO and someone might maybe send you some-or-other alt coins for doing so does not make the coin either human mineable or proof of play.

Be careful out there, folks.

Hyper - Briefly claimed to be proof-of-play, but were honorable and retracted the claim once the distinction was clarified to them.  Not human mined or proof-of-play though they may be considering such elements for a future fork.

Black Dragon Coin - Has a coinbase bonus lottery with terminology themed to align with fantasy RPG terms, but is really just a random block reward structure.  Promises to produce games using the coin but so far has not materialized much.  Not human mined or proof-of-play.

Flappycoin - Also a coin themed with gaming terminology, with block reward lottery.  Used in a few dice type games.

Huntercoin - HUC - The original human mined coin.  Fork of namecoin with RTS rules instead of domain name related rules.  Not proof of play as all transactions are actually secured via sha/scrypt merge mining.

CScoin - Counterstrike themed coin with 5-day traditional PoW mining, followed by staking.  They claim they are working on the ability to bet on Counterstrike pvp games in the wallet, to materialize later this month.  However this would not be human mining as new coinbases are only created by stake now.  Will not be proof-of-play either, as the CS gameplay will not be authenticated in a proof structure, nor used to secure transactions.  (It is also likely that the CS servers brought up for bets will not be decentralized and will not be able to operate over any sort of authenticated data structure to provide a verification proof over the bet outcomes, so it seems highly likely that cheating on the bets will be possible.)

Piggy coin - Not sure how this made the list.  Traditional scrypt PoW alt aimed at kids.  No game related "anything" AFAICT.  Certainly no human mine or proof of play.

Battlecoin - The original "multipool coin" and loosely game themed.  Arguably the voting mechanism could be considered a "game" that indirectly attempts to claim coinbase transactions of other coins for their miners, but since this is still hash collision based mining I don't think we can reasonably call this human mining. Calling this proof of play would be a stretch, and require a very loose interpretation to qualify, but it does come closer than most other coins.

GameLeague - Staking coin which is working on porting an existing "for fiat pay to play" game to use the coin.  It is unclear what their status on this port is.  It appears that the game will run on centralized servers and use no proof mechanisms, making it neither human mined nor proof of play.

Motocoin - The only proof of play coin to date.  Intended to be human mined, several developers (myself among them) quickly devised effective bots that mostly overwhelmed human production, meaning it is only ostensibly human mine right now.  The moto community is working on planning changes to rectify this situation, and restore pragmatic human mining.  It remains proof-of-play, in any case, as network transactions are actually secured by proof of game play, despite that game being won primarily by bots.  (Some claim they can still mine by hand, but I'm skeptical.  If they are doing so they certainly are not doing it with a stock reference wallet!)

Zandagort - Wut?  This is not actually a coin, but a game related to HYPER.  I'd consider this a duplicate entry of hyper.

SurvivorCoin - Working on a game inside the wallet client.  This game was originally intended to be an MMO style, but has now been reduced in scope to just a single player game.  It appears that the game has nothing to do with the coin itself, so far, and has no blockchain interaction.  This would be like putting tetris on a tab in the bitcoin client, and calling bitcoin "integrated with a game."  While semantically true, it is somewhat meaningless until the game actually has some interaction with the coin.  There is no indication that they intend to try for either human mining or proof-of-play.

Badgercoin - Another "not sure how it made your list" coin.  They have some centralized dice-against-house-edge type games, but nothing integrated to the network.  "Just another alt" AFAICT.



I'd really love to be pointed at some other coins that are human mined, proof of play, both, or even something that is similar but uses some other/new/different proof mechanism.  However, none of these coins fit that criteria, as none of these coins (besides huc and moto) use anything but traditional work/stake proofs.

How is Huntercoin not proof of play? 80% of the coins are gathered by hunters on a map while 20% are merge mined scrypt/sha256. The merge mining moves the blockchain along. Each block counts as a turn in the game. All moves, chat are recorded in each block. HUC is more advanced than MOTO and a million times more advanced that the other scam coins quoted a few posts above.

I suppose if your definition of proof of play is the entire blockchain is moved along by players completing the map. First one that completes it get the block and the reward. Then MOTO is the first proof of play.

Huntercoin is probably better defined as human mine-able, then MOTO is also in that same category. Confusing?

I think the future is incorporating block chains into games. Then players will have even more reasons to compete in tournaments. $$$$ it may become the next sport on TV.

Precisely what you said, it is the hash collision PoW that moves the chain along, not gameplay solutions.  "Human mining" means a formal proof establishes conformance to rules for coinbase claim.  A proof-of-play further uses the proofs to secure transaction depth.

Huntercoin does not use the human mining proofs as signatures on transaction depth, it uses traditional hash collision.  As such it is proving energy spend based work being performed, not cognitive process work being performed.  (N.B. The human mining proofs in HUC do prove cognitive process, they are just used in an overlay to prove coinbase rights, instead of proving all transaction depth validity itself.  Also, it should be noted that cognitive process is not a thing exclusive to humans.  BGB's bots are, indeed, crude cognitive processors.  My moto bots are even more crude cognitive processors.)

In MOTO, cognitive process provides both the proof of right to claim a coin base and proof over transaction depth, both.


Exactly.  Proof-of-play is an alternative security threshold mechanism.  Human mining is an alternative transaction processing rule mechanism, specifically dealing with coin base maturation process. (For example there is a rule that if you die and drop your coin base on the ground before it matures you don't get it at that general's address.  Motocoin's rules on maturation are very very simple.  HUC's are rather complex, so I tend to agree that HUC is, overall, more "advanced" with regard to human mining.  This human mining thing will be a very fun spectrum for the world to explore!)


Yup.  Proof-of-play is one subset of human mining, it seems. 


The more likely future is in incorporating games into block chains.  ;)

^^ THIS ^^


TV is dead now, I'd guess.  Who needs TV when you have DHT internets?  Otherwise I'd say "spot on."  ;D

It makes me happy to see someone so interested in these concepts.  Now I want to dig up some of my old notes on how to do self-modifying block chain based games.  ("MUD server" if you please.)  There is no reason the "rules" governing human mining and/or proof-of-play couldn't be made mutable by consensus.

Human mining through games is an interesting idea, but ultimately for me it comes down to this: is the game fun? For example, I looked at Huntercoin before and liked the idea, but never got into it because the game just didn't look like much fun.

My favourite is HYPER, because the focus seems to be more on the game rather than the algorithm, and on integrating crypto currency into games in general rather than the technical details of how a crypto currency works under the hood - which isn't all that interesting to me as a non-programmer.

One funny thing I have noticed during the time with both HUC and MOTO is that the amount of fun to the game varies relative to the ecosystem and "meta game" around it.  HUC's game dynamics are even indirectly sensitive to market rates, and I imagine over time we will see similar with MOTO.

If you focus on the meta-game both games become a LOT more enjoyable.  ;) (funny how many old school bitcoiners actually play MTG/modo, heh)


Again, the important point is the (very serious) distinction between integrating a currency into a game (something that has been around for as long as games have, hence the cliches of "monopoly money" etc.) and integrating a game into a currency.  If you go deep enough into the math and philosophy buried between the lines in the satoshi whitepaper, you find that the whole "magic" of the thing is actually the coupling of a solution to the byzantine generals problem for consensus around "double spend" with a particular presentation of an abstracted iterated prisoner's dilemma, an extended form of which is sometimes now referred to as the "miner's dilemma" problem.  The fact that the "IPD" (formally, a game) is at the core of the security of the mining process is awesome and is very central to the reasons that human mining can even exist.

Just putting a currency into a game doesn't accomplish much of value.  If you believe it does, you should be buying as much Everquest money as you can get your hands on, and most rational people would probably not be doing this.


However, despite being uninteresting, it is most important to you as a non-programmer particularly!  As the HYPER games are centralized and offer up no proof structures, users have no way to know what is really going on within the system.  (Since you are not a developer you can't even really do some system analysis to try to asses it, and since the systems are "closed" you can't even hope some third party has been able to do any such assessment!  Yikes!  Further just because something is "open source" doesn't really solve these problems these days either, unfortunately.)  There is no way in any of these other offerings, so far, that anyone can verify that the operators of the game servers are not simply "cheating" on their social contract and actually giving some large portion of the coins back to themselves, family, friends, cronies, etc.  With human mining in a blockchain, everyone must offer up proof to the network that they have actually earned their winnings by, you know, winning.

With a human mined currency, there is (to some probabilistic measure) no cheating, in the same way that in bitcoin there is no "cheating" on spending transactions.  This is huge, particularly since (some form or another of) money is also on the line in these games, in most cases.

In particular, beyond just what would normally be considered "cheating" having a human mined currency offers an additional protection that is very important.  In the same way that bitcoin offers some protections from some entity deciding to produce more/less of the currency, impacting holders' economic state, these human mined games offer a solution to a common problem in online gaming of item rarity! 

Since there is no central authority, there's no one who can suddenly decide to produce an abundance of some rare game piece impacting the game dynamic without the majority of the participants in the player base agreeing to the rule change by mining on the new rules' fork.  As an aside, this is where HUC and MOTO really differ!  In HUC it is the hash collision miners (read: pools) who get to decide whether or not to adopt a rules change on the network, with their "voting influence" on the matter being proportional to their hashing strength (read: asic count and process node) where in MOTO it is the skilled players (read: currently just possibly savant humans and the most clever of the bot operators, but ostensibly the most skillful players in general) who get to make the decisions with their voting influence being relative to their ability to produce winning solutions to the game challenge.

In centralized games, business profitability often dictates a decision to intentionally trash in game economics and this happens regularly and consistently as any experienced MMO player can attest to.  When you throw "real money economies" into this centralized equation, bad things happen - particularly with even the slightest slip-ups on the part of the item issuing central authority.  (Diablo 3 auction house, I'm looking at you buddy.  We waited YEAR AFTER YEAR.  >:()

These two little experiments, HUC and MOTO, really represent a phenomenal shift in the future of gaming, IMO!

I started a topic about "An altcoin that can be mined on a SmartPhone's CPU" and I think both topics have something in common  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=550995.0

Its not the same - you can't hold Everquest money in an independent wallet, transfer it onto other games, freely exchange it for other currencies, earn it through PoS.


Like you said yourself, you things like HYPER aren't generated in the game - they are generated like any other PoS crypto and the fairness can be checked just as you would with any other crypto, so your statement here is a straw man argument - you're inventing a problem just to look good knocking it down. The only way to cheat within the games its integrated into that I can think of would be to actually change your balance, which is something I think I would notice.


Perhaps, they are certainly a great innovation for cryptos, my main point is that for that phenomenal shift to happen - to appeal to people like me who aren't programmers with a serious interest in how the code works - the main thing is simply how much fun the game is. If someone can make a proper PoP game which fulfills the definition here AND is great fun to play then you will be right, but I don't personally think that is the case yet.

Perhaps you would prefer the example be secondlife lindens or entropia ped, then, which can be freely moved (EDIT: really exchanged) in and out of the game world(s)?

In any case, none of these aspects require any new technology or new alt coin, people have been using bitcoin in these contexts just fine for years. (You can even "stake BTC" in certain Dragons Tale games and earn interest while you sleep!)  What do any of these other alt currencies really bring to the table in these respects?


You mistook me.  Yes, the staking of the currency is provably fair, like any PoS currency, but this has nothing to do with human mining or proof of play.

When I say you cannot verify that cheating is not occurring, I'm referring to cheating by the issuer, not the players/holders.  With HYPER you have no way to know that the developers are not actually keeping a significant portion of their millions of premine coins for themselves while claiming to be giving them away in their hosted games.  You can play some counterstrike and get gifted a few coins, but this is just a giveaway (nothing innovative about this) and not even a traceable one.  I wouldn't be surprised one bit if well over half of the coin "reserved for the giveaway" on many of these coins is never actually given away.  This is a problem.


HUC and MOTO might not be the sorts of game you'd enjoy playing (personally I find HUC to be much more fun than MOTO) but they still represent the beginning of the paradigm change, and will "light the way" for the future.  I'm sure they will not be the last word in "proven" gaming, and I imagine that before long we'll have quite a selection of game genres running on blockchains.  Eventually I'm sure there will be games which you will enjoy.  (Have any particular suggestions?  Some folks are talking about putting together a new proof-of-play game or two...)

Three main things, at least for HYPER which is what I know about. 1) Game developer can hold the coins in hosted wallets whilst the player is using them in game, which means PoS helps to pay for game development. 2) Developing an in-game marketplace with virtual corporations and even in-game exchanges is something I like. Yes of course this can be done with other currencies and has been done in Second Life for a long time - which is also great! HYPER is planning to allow you to use Bitcoin and Devcoins in the game as well as HYPER - so nothing unique technologically about HYPER in this respect, just sounds cool what they want to do. 3) Buying coins in a project like this is sort of like buying shares in the game - I like the sound of the game they want to make, and if it is successful people will buy the coin to use in the game and the price will rise. Coins as a kind of virtual share is quite a common thing now, and I think it works.


oh, yes I see. You are right about this. But you can't develop a decent game without having money to pay for it.


I hope so ;)

The only idea which has occured to me is the gamification of certain roles or actions within a coin's community, some of which may be provable (Proof of Tweet anyone? lol). That could be actions which improve or promote the coin, or the coin could be associated with an established community with its own goals. If the proof of play thing is more about providing human proof than about providing human play then perhaps moving away from a video game and more towards a purer kind of 'meta game' would work better. Btw, anything you have to say about the nature of the meta game in relation to HUC would be interesting to me.

Or, in other words, the dev gets to stake all the premine coins that he may or may not actually give away like he says he will, and get more coins?  I'm not sure how this is any advantage...  Further, my understanding with HYPER is that they are not actually running any game they have developed, just things like CS servers.  They promise to develop a game, I guess, but this is about as good to me as their promise that they won't just keep most of the premine for themselves.  How can I trust any of this?


Sure, it sounds cool because this is all they want out of it, sounding cool to make their (potentially empty) promises sound even better.  My really big concern here, though, is if they really believe in these technologies why would they not be building decentralized exchanges instead?  How do we know they aren't just building an exchange for them to cheat on as well?  (Front run, trade phantom assets, etc.)


I certainly wouldn't invest in some company where all they are really doing so far is running a few game servers.  I definitely wouldn't invest in this company if it appeared that the initial share distribution might be unfair, and in which no transparency in that distribution is offered.  I wouldn't invest in a company that claims to be using technologies like proof-of-play that they actually are not, even if they claim innocent confusion on the matter, simply because it leaves the cases as either they don't understand the underlying technologies or they were lying about their confusion.

I wouldn't invest in HYPER.

But that's just me, maybe we have different criteria for speculative ventures.


Plenty of decent indy games are out there.  There are also plenty of *legitimate* and traceable investments to be made in commercial game ventures that are actually producing code and demos instead of spending their time running some bizarre giveaway systems.  But again, maybe this just comes down to some very different criteria for assessing an investment.  Personally "we might maybe give away some coins if you play game on our servers" is not enough to draw my capital to the project.


Proof of tweet would rely on an assumption that twitter themselves won't cheat (or otherwise intervene) in some way.  Personally, this is not an assumption I'd be interesting in putting money behind.

Maybe we also have very different definitions of "proof" as well.


Sure, this would be a great form of human mining, but will be very difficult to pull off correctly.  There are a lot of (perhaps even counter-intuitive) constraints to be considered, and social factors to account for.


Anything I would have to say would probably have been invalidated by the recent rules changes.... the whole meta-game just got rocked with the introduction of the new balancing mechanisms.

Short term my only advice would be not to use the reference client wallet to play.  Probably this will remain good/valid advice on many human-mine coins to come in the future, because community developer resources will probably often outnumber official developer resources on a long enough curve in any such project.   ;)

I don't think the main thing in terms of people gaining coins by playing the game is getting freebies from the developer - its trading game resources with other players and beating them at the game. There are some giveaways to get things started, but I think that's more of a promo than the core of what they are offering. I think the lion's share of what's left of the pre-mine that hasn't already been given out in early bounties is intended for developing the MMO, not giving out as freebies. Also I hope that other game developers, aside from the HYPER dev, will make games which use this as their in-game currency.


You are certainly right that its a risk. I wouldn't put a lot of money on it, and I wouldn't be particularly suprised if I lost my money. But at the same time you have to take a risk sometimes, and the current price of the coins is cheap enough for me to not mind taking a small punt. Also I have recieved some freebies, which may have coloured my perceptions a little.


I think you missed my lol. I didn't expect that to be taken seriously.


That's what I thought myself when the idea occured to me, don't know why I mentioned it really but you asked for ideas and I wanted to oblige.

Both are entirely suspect, though!  In the same way that we have no way to know that they are actually distributing premine giveaway coins through their servers we have no way to know that our in-game activities are being fairly evaluated by their servers, and as such have no way to know that they are fairly redistributing our coin!  (Bolded to emphasize that the very crux of the matter is the distinction between an "us" and a "them" in the first place!  If there were no central "them" and the entire system/network was composed of "us" the question never arises at all - and herein lies the real value of human mining and proof-of-play systems!)  Since the servers are entirely under central control we have no way to really verify who is actually beating who, besides blind trust and faith in the server operators.  If I'm going to put blind trust and faith behind some central video game servers, I'm going with Blizzard or Riot and not some random alt-coin anons.  At least Blizzard doesn't have any direct incentive to run unfair servers, in fact much the opposite.  The HYPER guys have every reason to run unfair servers and no real reason or incentive not to.  Rationally speaking, why wouldn't "they" be scamming "us"?  Give them enough fiscal motivation (read: high enough spot price on their coin) and I'm certain that they would, even if they are behaving in an altruistic way today.  "Everyone has a price."  Dangle enough free money in front of them and they'll eventually take it and run.

Their newly revised plan (I'm sure they are watching this thread closely) appears to involve inviting an even more diverse group of people into the set known as "them."  This just makes it ever more likely that some subset of these servers will simply lie about their function and/or operation in order to unfairly distribute (and/or redistribute) coins straight into the pockets of the server operators.


This just begs the question.  At some point they "run out of" premine for their game server giveaways (read: decide to stop giving away) inevitably.  In other words, the one real function they are actually performing so far, running some "promoted" game servers, is evidently unsustainable.  In a sense, they are simply doomed to eventually revert to being "just another alt" on their current course, no?


Sure, but this is now stepping far outside the context of this thread.  Probably those other game devs would just use BTC anyway, no?  What incentive does a third party have to use HYPER over BTC or any other given flavor-of-the-week coin?



So far all HYPER does to differentiate itself is running some off-the-shelf game servers, writing some brief fantasy plot, and drawing some pictures - all three things my 8 year old cousin does for fun.  I wouldn't expect much return out of a single 8-year-old's efforts, so why should speculators expect any return on HYPER?  A crypto-currency can not function without speculative investment, this is well understood.


I take anything claiming to be a proof very very seriously, as that is the sole function of proofs - to be taken seriously.  If you can't take a proof seriously (literally as seriously as you could possibly take a thing) then it isn't a very sound proof.



I was more asking for ideas of what games would be particularly good to have proven with a block-chain.

Firstly I'm not doubting that human mining and proof-of-play systems have this real value, and I perhaps shouldn't have even started talking about HYPER here because it isn't PoP and now you are really in attack mode because of this, but somebody else mentioned HYPER earlier in the thread and I just thought I'd add that I like it because the focus is on the game itself, and that the reason I haven't used PoP games like HUC is because the focus is on the proof and not the play, which doesn't look fun enough for me to want to spend my valuable time doing it.

I am not trying to claim that HYPER is superior to HunterCoin or that their method is superior to proof of play, I am just expressing my opinion, and I think you would do better to spend your energy on presenting a positive case for HunterCoin rather than just criticizing HYPER and my personal preferences.

Secondly it seems like it would be quite clear when trading that if you spend X you get Y. I suppose they could play the game themselves and give themselves lots of extra items and resources to sell - but that would flood the market and crash the price, and in any case they would probably be selling items in-game to people who wanted them anyway so why bother?

You are right that some trust is required, and I know that amongst some crypto devs eliminating trust is a core belief. I see that in many cases eliminating the need for trust is a really good thing, but personally I'm not a zealot about it - I actually don't mind trusting people sometimes (this is one of the reasons why I've mostly been interested in Ripple up to now, because it codifies and constrains trust relationships rather than seeking to eliminate them).


I refer you to my previous statements about PoS generated coins being used to fund games.


Bounties, community of gamers to appeal to.


Speculative investment is speculative.


I think perhaps games developers should be subjected to a proof of play algorithm, lol.

You're right, this isn't a thread about HYPER, but HYPER has become the canonical example of "how not to do it."  Understanding proof-of-play concepts isn't trivial, and often it is best to explain things by counter-example.

As for HUC, much of the development done by domob etc has been focused around game-play aspects.  If you haven't played HUC under the new rules I'd urge you to check it out, you may find it has become much more fun now.


I'm not criticizing either, I'm just trying to understand both.  I really see no appeal to HYPER and am a bit boggled by the fact that anyone would.  :D  At best it is a misguided (probably even fatally flawed) endeavor and at worse it is an entirely unfair proposition.  Why exactly would anyone have a preference for it?  You've said things like the "focus" is on the game, but have not been able to explain what this means.  I can go think about a nintendo cartridge for hours, will you pay me for that too?  You've said it is about the games being fun, but the games involved are nothing to do with the coin.  CS and Minecraft are probably very fun games, but that has nothing to do with any crypto currency as far as I am aware.  I really just don't understand any of it!


The whole point is that they can do such things without ever playing the games themselves.  They can "win the game" without ever playing it in any sense, if they want to.  Worse, they can do so without anyone even having any opportunity to know it has happened!  Say what you will about trust, this ultimately comes down to simply being an irrational wager.  I don't understand why anyone would ever make such a bet, and send their money into such a server.


Yes, precisely this.  People want the items so the server operators decide to flood the market simply because they can, at the expense of anyone who did something "silly" like investing time or money into obtaining the item while it was still rare.  This is precisely the concern.


No crypto-currency eliminates trust.  The idea is not to require unreasonable trust.  Trusting that some random anon on the internet will not cheat at a game to take your money doesn't sound like a reasonable extension of trust, to me.

Not to mention that when you send your money into those servers, you are trusting those anons not only to not cheat you, but also to keep your assets safe and secured while they reside at their servers.  We all know how well that tends to work out wrt cryptos.  If you think this behavior is also reasonable then you must have missed that whole story about that mtgox place, or any of the many other cases.

If you think this is all reasonable (even advisable) behavior, I'd like to invite you to come play on my brand new pvp-for-BTC counterstrike server.  I promise it doesn't cheat and bias in favor of certain players.  I promise it won't get hacked by some shadowy figure who may or may not actually just be me absconding.  I promise no harddrive will crash and lose all the wallet coins.  No really, just trust me.


This would have to assume that they retain enough coins to stake enough coins to do their giveaways only of staked coins.  Either way, you have a problem of eventual economic equilibrium in the distribution model, and it is unsustainable.  You can't have your cake and eat it too, here.  Either the devs hold onto the coins for staking and amass a relative fortune, or they give them away over a finite period and eventually run out.  It doesn't seem to me that there is an outcome that doesn't lead to an eventual meltdown.


What bounties?  How does HYPER represent or establish any community of gamers?  (It seems to me that the gaming community is already established in any such model.)


This just avoids the question with, at best, an answer depending solely upon circular logic.  I ask what is purported to draw speculation, and you reply "speculation."  I'm starting to see a pattern to your catch 22 reasoning process.

What are you speculating as the potentiality by which this coin earns an ROI, other than "other speculators might speculate on it?"  This can't be held as the only reasoning for a speculative investment, as it is a truism for any asset.


I don't even know what this means.

I like the topic so-much, I wrote about it. Please check out my blog http://aweesomealtcoin.blogspot.com (http://aweesomealtcoin.blogspot.com)

HunterMinerCrafter, I agree with your explanations:

MOTO is the only true PoP, however I feel there has to be a distinction between HUC and the rest. After all, the game is actually embedded in the blockchain and it can be used to generate coins, even if the game itself doesn't secure the network. Maybe we can extend the definition of "mining" to any means of "creating coins", so in this case HUC could be "human mineable" but not "Proof of Play". Or we could make up another term, whatever, but it deserves a distinction.

I'd like to add that I'd bet that all PoP will eventually be mineable by bots, which would eventually outplay humans and make human-mining impossible or at least unprofitable. I like the concept and I think it can be useful to push the boundaries of AI, but don't expect to make money by playing, at least not in the long term.

Yes, and I think this aligns with my prior definitions, though I'm not sure what "the rest" means to refer to here.  There are only HUC and MOTO!  ;D


Yes, in fact I think even with these two new terms we still have not entirely elided the distinctions.  Prior to these third gen coins the "mining" term referred to both coin-base claim semantics and chain-depth security semantics, because they were always the same network rule to accomplish both.  (Some form of either "Find partial collide => increment depth and claim coin" or "be next stake signatory => increment depth and claim coin" generally)  The particular distinction that HUC makes is that it explicitly separates out additional rules for coin claiming, that have nothing to do, directly, with the security threshold function. ("Find partial collide => increment depth and claim coin" with the alternative "Bank at base => claim coin" included.)

Currently, MOTO does still have this symmetry in semantics between coin claim and security function, but it is likely that this will not remain the case for long.


Again, I argue that any human mine-able coin which is *not* being also mined by bots is inherently insecure, and will operate at the whims of the humans who are most effective at mining it.  When MOTO was new, and bots were still not dominant, skilled players could easily 51% attack the network simply by waiting for "off peak play hours" when competition was naturally low.  Even if there is "round the clock play" by some seasoned players, if there is not continuous and automated competition for those most-skilled players to work against they could simply collude and coordinate their tx selection to control the network.  Basically, any coin which is solely human mined is inherently centralized at the point of the most skilled humans playing at any given moment.

The challenge will be twofold.  In the short term, we must find mechanisms which allow for both bots and humans to be able to mine "peacefully" together.  HUC accomplishes this very well, as a side effect of design.  In MOTO, this is not quite the case and bot operation has significantly interfered with human miners.  I have a proposal to rectify that for MOTO, but the lead dev is still skeptical about it.  (Though he hasn't yet been able to clearly explain why, afaict.)  The longer-term challenge will be in finding game designs that are both fun and "evenly matched" for an AI and a human, so that a bot/human distribution ratio can be arrived at naturally, as in HUC, and not explicitly constrained, as in my proposal for MOTO.  This second part will be a significant challenge!

Interesting discussion!  Let me just join in to correct that in the quote above, you probably mean "Proof-of-Play" instead of "human-minable".  HUC is explicitly not insecure due to (lack of) bots, since the security comes from plain old (merge-mined) hardware PoW.  Also, I have to make the same statement as "always" in this context, namely that I personally am still sceptical about the security of PoP in general - especially when there are bots, IMHO the hashing strength depends critically on the used algorithm in the bot logic.  And I think it is much more likely that an order-of-magnitude improvement in the algorithm is found (or even something vastly better, think O(n^2) vs O(n log n) algorithm or something like that), than order-of-magnitude improvements in hardware.  Even the steps from CPU to GPU to FPGA and final ASICs are somewhat predictable and controlled, while one innovation in the bot algorithm / strategy may put someone into the ability to 99.9% attack the network.

Formally, yes, I'd agree.  The security of the network only falls over directly if the play is securing the transactions.  Arguably, though, if any human mining system is dominated by a small set of miners this still centralizes issuance of the coin, creating a different (social) risk, even though the direct (technical) risk to tx selection is not there.


Yes, I agree wholeheartedly here.  Just sticking an arbitrary game challenge in as the proof function doesn't generally work, as most games are not sufficient.  You wouldn't believe how many requests I've received to do something like motocoin, but using something like "temple run" or "tetris" games as the proof function....

You really need a challenge function which is "perfect information" and for which the solution finding is sufficiently difficult.  (For now, anyway.  Some more contemporary crypto technologies might change this in the future.)


In the case of MOTO, I'd disagree that this is likely.  This was actually my biggest skepticism about MOTO, initially, and I of course set about trying to find such an ideal solver.  "Breaking" the map generation step is isomorphic to breaking sha512, so this is obviously not an option, making the physics simulation itself the only viable target.  The physics simulation is actually fairly strong, with a wide breadth of iterated multipliers creating both a very high cycle requirement and a cascading output effect.  In a sense, the MOTO challenge is actually just a large hierarchy of factorization problems, and I doubt anyone is going to make any sudden strides in factoring.

Of course there is the possibility for better specialized learners, and this is even likely to occur.  However, I don't expect these approaches to be able to suddenly push a MOTO solver into a new complexity family somehow.

If you think you have an idea for an approach that could, I'm all ears!


I'm not sure that I'd agree, here, but that is an entirely different sort of conversation, and mostly out of context.


Only if we are talking about a significant change in expected computational complexity.  If someone could establish a "reverse the physics" solution for MOTO which did not bump into a significant factorization challenge, for example.  I'm highly skeptical that this could happen for the MOTO function, but it is certainly a possibility.  By some argument it is also "possible" that someone finds a trivial collision generation for sha2, scrypt, etc.  (Of course if this were to happen it would spell bigger problems for the world than just the failure of bitcoin and the other crypto currency networks.)

In any case, part of the reasoning behind my recent patch proposals to MOTO is that if any such ideal solver were found, the network would just revert to a classic PoW challenge to keep the network secure until the proof function could be adjusted.  After MOTO does finally fork onto the new network rules an attacker would need to not only find this ideal solver, but then would also need to overcome this additional work requirement, which we can assume is simply not going to happen.  I'd imagine that future proof-of-play coins would also include such "work fallback" safeguards.

You're right, however with some ingenuity lots of games could be adapted to fit the needs... tetris!? that's quite feasible... I'd do it but it would quickly turn hard to play and become a race on how quickly could bots iterate thru nonces until getting the easiest game... (kinda like MOTO) in this case the challenge to "find mechanisms which allow for both bots and humans to be able to mine "peacefully" together"... would be too hard I'm afraid


would there really be interest in a tetris coin?

Asteroid-Coin

Based on the classic game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSLZmtwJHJw

--

In motocoin the problem for the "finding maps" is you can fall to the coin - even if you stick in the obstacles i suggested it probably still won't work (although maybe make more difficult if the angle of the fall is much greater as suggested [to find a map]). I think Huntercraftmine or the others will fix this eventually though.

--

If based on asteroid - without being able to fire.. the start can be in the bottom left, the coin can be in the top right..
Asteroids then scroll across the screen (can even scroll both ways - similar to frogger)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9fO-YuWPSk

The asteroids which scroll across : Many are generated (lots off screen).. so that computing a path is more difficult (time consuming).

There could also be some asteroids which have a "stronger gravity" pull .. e.g. 1 in 6 asteroids. .. and even mini worm holes with very strong gravity. To add some complexity.

Obviously, everything is bot-able  - not sure how long it would last

increasing difficulty could add more "gravity asteroids" and make them scroll faster

Tetris can't work because there is a deterministic optimal solution if you know the upcoming sequence of blocks - which you must.  The search space for each block state is only a few thousand nodes, so although the complexity of the solver is exponential in the number of pieces used the complexity curve has a low coefficient, it is not steep.  (You'd need some infeasably large game before it would become any sort of challenge at all for a bot, at which point it becomes pointless to humans as a game.)  It wouldn't even be a matter of level iteration to find an easy level, you could just "auto solve" any given level.  A game where the primary challenge is any form of "the player doesn't know what's coming next" simply doesn't work.


I was asked about it, so at least one random internet user would be interested.

My suspicion is that any game that people tend to pride themselves on being "really awesome at" would have interest.  This probably means most any game.

but we could adapt the game: show the player all the future pieces and add a "rewind" button as in MOTO... anyway... I'm just saying it might be possible and fun (until bots)... we agree bots would win...
EDIT: I read somewhere that tetris is NP-complete, so yes: the solver is exponential


hehe, not enough for me :) but I'd think about it if there's more than that

It is doable.  Challenges which involve traversal of some dynamic terrain under some constraints of simulated physics seem to "naturally" fit.


To a bot, there is no such thing as "off screen" so this really just gives some more disadvantage to humans, unfortunately,


This, on the other hand, is precisely the sort of thing that does to opposite to bots, makes solutions harder to devise.  Most AI algorithms are very good at very consistent/repetitive tasks.  One big reason MOTO was so quickly botted was that it is a single challenge - move toward coin without becoming dead.  Anything that introduces some additional challenge to be considered significantly complicates creating a successful bot.  We call this "modality" referring to the number of modal states that a solver must "potentially be in" while solving.  MOTO has zero modality, so bots can be more or less internally stateless.  They don't need to remember what they just did or "think about" what *sort* of thing they are going to do next because it is always the same one thing - move toward coin without becoming dead.  If a bot has to decide if it is next going to move toward the coin or move away from the coin to avoid an oil slick that will cost it time (just as a wild example) the AI solver will become notably less effective.

Part of why HUC is not just entirely dominated by bots is the fact that the bots must deal with more than just "go pick up coin from spawn and return to base."  They need to decide when to use avoidance tactics to not get blown up by hostile generals.  If someone else gets blown up, they need to decide if it is worth moving in to try to grab the dropped coin.  More advanced bots will manage multiple bots in coordination, with different roles or even complex role states.  (The bot might need to decide when to turn an aggressive hunter general bot into a coin grabber bot, or vice versa.  The bot might need to decide that one bot should stop picking up coins and defend another bot that is already holding many coins, etc.  There are many "potential internal states" to be considered, making bots far less trivial.)


As I've said before, on a long enough curve bots will outperform humans on any given task.  Trying to devise some mechanism for excluding bots entirely is an exercise in futility.


As we've now learned from MOTO, it is important to be very very careful with the network's definition of difficulty of proof over block depth.  The more thought I give to these topics the more that I feel that having simple and well defined difficulty scales will be both central and crucial to the success or failure of these kinds of systems.  Arguably, having a poorly defined scale of difficulty is the only actual technical mistake the MOTO developers made, and it created a multitude of problematic side effects that we're now retroactively repairing piece-wise.

You mistook me.  Tetris could only offer "trivial" proofs, and trivial proofs can not secure depth on the chain.

Any game which could be solved "virtually instantly" by even low resource computing devices doesn't offer any security at all.  (Domob's concern is that any given game might eventually be found to be in this category, but I don't necessarily share this concern.  For example, many games are formally reducible to the 3sat problem and as such could be asserted to be sufficiently strong... unfortunately none of the ones I know of offhand would be very fun, they are really just academic exercises.)


I promise you that tetris really cannot work in any reasonable way as the proof function!

it's the other way around: any computer game can be reduced to the 3sat problem, the interesting and not always possible part is reducing 3sat to the game in question. And it turns out it can be done for tetris. All of the following problems for tetris are np complete:
- Maximizing the number of rows cleared while playing the given piece sequence.
- Maximizing the number of pieces placed before a loss occurs.
- Maximizing the number of simultaneous clearing of four rows.
- Minimizing the height of the highest filled grid square over the course of the sequence.

this means tetris could be used to solve 3sat! you said it yourself: the solver is exponential. The steepness of the curve and the required length for the sequence... well, that remains to be seen.... maybe more complexity can be added by making the playing area wider, or some other small variation to the game that would add more possibilities for each move

we may be getting off-topic with the tetris-specific discussion, but I'm exploring the idea because I feel a tetris-coin would be cool, even if bot-dominated and eventually unplayable by non-augmented humans, still cool

This is not entirely true.  In particular, a game on an arbitrarily large, interactive computing machine with no halting condition (i.e. blockchain) may correspondingly have no finite circuit representation.  This is mostly just minutia though.  You know what I meant.

Tetris may be NP (I haven't seen a formal reduction, but I'd love to if you can dig up a reference) but it is still "too trivial."  For a standard game, the graph is only something like a few thousand nodes, so it is not a very reasonable candidate for the proof function in any case.  You could do a human-mined tetris with a backend PoW like HUC does, but you couldn't do proof-of-play specifically, and mining production would likely be massively overwhelmed by bots.


Sure, but again like NP minesweeper the problem itself is so small in the reduction that the resulting curve (relative to modern hardware) is just not nearly steep enough to be useful as a show of expenditure of time.  You'd need a ridiculously large tetris/minesweeper game for it to be useful for proof-of-play at which point you're just throwing human mining out of the window, again.

You could probably modify some game rules (pretty heavily) and make something work out, but it probably wouldn't feel much like tetris in the end.


It is actually a good example for discussion, though.  I hope you agree that proof-of-play tetris is right out.  It may be more difficult to see why human-mined tetris doesn't really work out well, but I am pretty sure that there is not much of a reasonable way to balance the bot/human mining.  The bots will just inevitably be able to do the pattern matching much more efficiently.  Convince me otherwise?

the tetris paper:
http://erikdemaine.org/papers/Tetris_COCOON2003/paper.pdf (http://erikdemaine.org/papers/Tetris_COCOON2003/paper.pdf)


aargh! stop using sentences like that! you are forcing me to make tetriscoin! :)

we agree on that, no need to convince you

apparently, bejeweled and "candy crush saga" fall in the same category: np complete, which means it would work if you use the correct difficulty function, but bots would kill humans anyway

arimaa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa)) is easy for humans and hard for computers, but the problem is how to transform header hashes to game positions and how make a difficulty function

Probably misunderstood (or maybe you didn't and you're right) - the asteroids are in rows (scrolling): if there are 1000 asteroids in a row  as opposed to 10 asteroids in a row (10 on the screen at all times, all of which have random gravities or effects (maybe some have a pulsating gravity?), it may be more difficult to traverse due to having to calculate more objects (the rows would be moving different speeds like frogger).
But thinking more -- maybe there is more chance of easy gaps... and/or maybe it doesn't matter how many there are if it calculates in real-time objects which are near..


still a prize - till 2020
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/challenge/2014/


just thought - scrolling faster would do nothing (unless each row scrolled different speeds?)- more gravity stuff may -- also a ufo which fires from a middle row :D

Go for it, I'm just saying that it would have to be just a PoW coin and not really a human-mined/PoP coin.  Nobody in their right might would ever "play" that large-enough-to-be-secure tetris game in the same way that nobody in their right mind would calculate a sha hash collision manually.


Dang, I was actually hoping you could. ;)

Particularly because again much of the fun of the challenge to a human is in not knowing what is coming up next.


Yes, this has lately become the canonical example of "hard for bot" game.  I've been toying with the idea of "whipping this up" as a fork of MOTO, just to illustrate the point.  Both of the problems you mention are pretty easily met with basic solutions.  It wouldn't be great, but it would work.

The problem would be in taking the security of such a coin seriously.  Although we believe Arimaa to be difficult, I'd actually have an easier time believing it could be "suddenly solved" in the way Domob might suggest than believing MOTO could be. (I'm probably wrong, but we can't really confidently say which is "stronger" and therein lies the rub.  ;))

I'm intrigued... I can think of many ways of transforming hashes to game positions, but I don't imagine how would one decide if the work done is enough for declaring a block.. some positions will be trivial loses, some trivial wins, and some very intricate. Would the work be maximizing some fixed "score" function?


of course it depends on how is arimaa implemented, however I'd say it's more likely to have a sudden breakthru in MOTO: some general strategy like "stay balanced, don't go too fast, and aim for the coin". Arimaa looks like chess: it's just exponential and you can have heurisitics but at the end of the day you have to explore a lot of positions.

The easy solution is to just assume all boards comparable on average and require some number of consecutively generated boards be solved for in a row instead.


This would be the less easy solution, requiring solutions to meet some threshold of "quality."  This is complicated by the relative weighting of significance of Arimaa pieces being generally unknown, so scoring would always have to be assumed to have a margin of error.


This is pretty much the approach taken now, but it is one of those things easier said than done.  The constraints of the problem really do complicate things nicely.  The noisy terrain and limited movement combine to create (more commonly than you'd probably think) situations where a map looks perfectly reasonable but is actually almost or entirely non-solvable, simply because there isn't a path that fits within the physics constraints.  Because the search space on paths is so enormously huge and the tiniest detail of the perlin map can cascade into a drastically different resultant path with even just one frame of a difference in input timing I don't expect much in the way of a total/"breaking" solver to be devised.  We will get progressively better learners, but I would be very surprised if someone showed up with a useful deterministic (or even hybrid) solver.  General search optimization (annealing) is probably even the best anyone *can* do, to do otherwise would likely require devising some way "around" the factorization problem.  (Granted, people could be doing their optimizing searches a lot more efficiently than anyone seems to be now.)

I'd encourage you to try to devise a solver, however, it is a lot of fun to work through!  It is also quite fascinating to see "hands on" how the integration combines with the perlin function to create the security offered by the proof.  (That "A HA moment" when you realize how, as a hash function, it makes even these crazy chained X-whatever hashing schemes look downright weak.....)


The same can be said for MOTO, both games are highly branching right from the initial states.  If you haven't tried it in ForFun mode (just run the motogame binary not through the wallet) you should give it a shot.  Try to get to the coin with 40-50 seconds left on the clock (as on the live network) instead of just getting to the coin at all.  It is much more of a "puzzle" game than it might seem.  ;)

There are a few misonceptions about HYPER that have been raised in this thread I would like to clear up.

The biggest one being the funds HYPER has set aside for MMO Development, bounties and to sponsor more games and game development with the HYPER incubator funds.

There are less than 700 000 HYPER remaining in the various funds (this is entirely transparent and can be verified via the blockchain). Of this 700 000, the 500 000 MMO Development Fund is being escrowed and managed by psybits, a respectable Hero Member on the forum.

Of the remaining 200 000, it is being used to sponsor more game developments (such as the HYPER Counter Strike. Minecraft and Zandagort servers), and also for bounties anyone can participate in such as these: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=695339.0 So there are no millions of coins to be dumped, management of the funds has been entirely transparent and can be seen at any time. Please try reading the HYPER thread or OP from time to time if you are going to judge our coin.

Through sponsoring as many online games and servers as possible, HYPER aims to be a cryptocurency that is not just for speculation, but is embedded in a complex ecosystem with many opportunities for playing, trading, staking, gaming, and earning!

Biggest current HYPER developments:

- New website design coming out soon

- HYPER Reddit tip bot was just launched

- Testing to add HYPER to the in-game free market trading platform in space strategy MMO Zandagort we are running  is underway

- Counter Strike tournaments sponsored by HYPER are starting very soon

- A monthly HYPER Counter Strike Blitz that rewards the top players on the CS servers is also launching very soon

- I am finishing up the HYPER Whitepaper that will discuss in more detail the different HYPER funds. I am also taking feedbck on the HYPER thread regarding how the funds should be managed.

- There are many more partnerships with online games on the way that I cannot announce yet as we are still working out the details.

Thanks for reading guys :) What makes HYPER unique is the funds we have at our disposal - so the number of online games that incorporate HYPER and the number of projects we will be sponsoring can only grow - meaning HYPER will soon have one of the most extensive ecosystems of any alt out there!

How can we know what happened to the rest, though?  Presumably some was given away in your games but we have know way to know if you didn't just keep it.


You're promoting the very model that we're seeking to obviate in this thread, as if to advertise it to us?

This has to be the most misguided thread hijacking that I've seen in awhile.


Personally, I've watched the hyper thread since you launched.  Mostly out of interest in observing games-based issuance being done in precisely the wrong way.  I would hardly say there is any transparency there into the redistribution of your 1.5 millions of coins.


All without any consideration for the original design goals of crypto currencies - fair and transparent issuance, total decentralization of transaction, and open accountability of history.  Your "ecosystem" even directly renegs on all three!


Are you doing anything innovative with crypto tech?


Now your premine is somehow "unique" too?  Hardly.  I used to at least get a laugh or two out of all of the HYPER hype.  Lately I can't even chuckle at it anymore, it is just sad.

Good luck with your coin and your central servers and your whatever PR machine tactics you'll be using tomorrow.  I hope the model works out for you, somehow or another.

We'll be over here working on something just a little bit different in the meantime.

Please don't take my scepticism too "literally" - you've worked on a bot, not me.  And I'm a mathematician, so I tend to "over-abstract" things a lot of times from the point of view of engineers....  I have no doubt that MOTO can be really hard to solve, I believe you about that.  My main point is just that at least in theory, PoW like SHA collisions are more secure since the entire design goal of SHA was to make it hard to break.  With MOTO or any other game, while the game may be hard to bot, it is mostly or at least partly designed to be a fun game.  So inherently it "can't" be as secure as something that's designed only for the very purpose of being hard to break.  (Which is not to say that it is impossible to find a flaw in SHA before finding an efficient MOTO solver - nobody knows for now.  But I deem it less likely.)

I really enjoy the discussions going on here, and I think that the ideas behind both HUC and MOTO are really innovative and may lead to "something" in the future.  It is a perfect fit, IMHO, to apply blockchain technology to replace central servers in multiplayer games.

so we get a shovel and go to location and mine the coin? human mineable?

Well as you've stated you're working on something different so you no doubt have your own agenda for putting down HYPER.

This isn't a thread hijacking you were the one who was talking about HYPER on the last page! So I am not allowed to answer your incorrect statements?

If you read the HYPER thread you can see the premine is accounted for.

Again you are making false statements and as you've admitted you're working on something different and no doubt see HYPER as a threat.

Good luck with your project. Maybe try having your project stand on its own two feet instead of trying to tear down any competition.

Your arguments are old, boring *yawn* and have all been nullified in the thread if you would bother to read it.

For example the 700 000 HYPER has been given out for bounties for many many different HYPER projects - not given out on our game servers. So you clearly have not read the HYPER thread or OP and have no idea what you're talking about!

Poker has been around for some years now, nobody has been succesfull at developing a consistent winning bot yet.

I've been accused, in the past, of being ruthlessly literal.  I've also been accused of being an engineer.  Looks like you've got me pegged! ;)


Sure, but my comparison was with arimaa which was designed with similar combined goals of being a game and being computationally difficult under analysis.


I'd agree MOTO, Arimaa, etc are all much more likely to be broken than SHA.  One thing that could easily be done to put the question to bed, however, is to directly embed SHA into the challenge itself.  For example, if the MOTO control forces (rotation and acceleration) were varied slightly by a sha hash output on a frame-to-frame basis then it would be pretty easy to assert that breaking MOTO would then certainly be harder than breaking SHA.  I think this is something that should be explored.


Likewise.  Personally, I think that these concepts will lead to some very specific and very big somethings, but that is another discussion for another day in another thread.


It isn't just multi-player game servers that I envision being replaced.  Human mining could have huge impact on social coordination, in general, as has been touched on earlier in the thread.  Obviously something along the lines of "proof of tweet" falls down, but there are many ways that similar goals can be achieved with these mechanisms.  There is a lot of discussion around DAC/DAO structures lately, but only very rudimentary execution to date.  The "ground being broken" by HUC/MOTO type "DAG" projects seems likely, to me, to set the stage for the future of that space as well

My agenda is for putting down any closed, opaque, and centralized gaming.  It is also for educating people as to the difference, and you've provided an ideal counter-example to compare against, that's all.  (I actually very much appreciate that HYPER exists to contrast!)


Only if you can make an argument as to why a statement is incorrect, and only if you do so without relentlessly pushing your own offering in the process.  Your post reads like a brochure, not like convincing discourse on where my statements might have been misguided.


Only some of it, for the rest all we can see is unsubstantiated (and, most importantly, unable to be substantiated) claims.


I see HYPER as about as much of a threat as WoW gold.  I find it hard to be threatened by a fantasy.

In any case I don't see how from my own interests in game related proof systems you infer that any statement I've made is false.  How about providing some actual evidence that my statements are false?  Show us how we can formally verify your distribution through your servers? (The only claim I've ever made against your model.)


I'm not trying to "tear down" any competition, only to illustrate the advantage of "on chain" systems by comparison.


Again, I've read the whole thread.  Show me where I've missed a refutation of the opaque nature of your servers?


Wait, I thought we were discussing the 800k "assumed distributed" not the 700k remaining.

Yes, a portion was distributed for bounties (a practice I'm generally skeptical of in it's own right, but that is neither here nor there) but I've only ever brought into question the portion distributed through your gaming initiatives.


let's look at some specifics from that OP:


How can we know that the servers do not bias in favor of your bots?  How can we know that you don't issue yourself coins through this server acting as a mixer?  What happens to my coins if just after I make some in-game purchase the server crashes?  What happens to the project itself if this server is hacked and all coins it handles are intercepted?  These are the problems to be addressed.  Human mining and proof of play systems resolve all of these concerns, all I ask is that you at least acknowledge the problem's existence in the first place.  You seem to refuse to be rational enough to do this.


How can I trust these people will actually ever send me the coins?  Why should I?  These are the problems to be addressed.  Address them.


How can we have any confidence that this exchange will be run fairly?  How can we have confidence that the operators will not just issue new non-coin assets and sell into the market for coin, undercutting legitimate players?  This is the very critical problem that all crypto-currencies try to address in the first place, while you're creating a situation that just replicates precisely the original concern.  You've made yourself something of the federal reserve of game currencies.  You've built a microcosm economy that expects its participants to just have blind faith in trusting it to be centrally managed correctly.  We're not big on blind trust in humans to correctly/successfully manage economies around these parts, in case you haven't noticed.


How can we have any assurance (besides blind trust) that you are not simply creating game tokens out of thin air and redeeming them for coin?

---

You have done nothing to rise to the challenge of answering these questions of "how can we trust this?"  Until you can actually acknowledge and address these concerns, instead of just pushing out posts combining criticism of any criticism of your work with an overt advert, I have to default to a response of "we simply can't."

Our goal in this thread is to discuss the building of systems very much like yours, but designed in such a way that these questions never even arise in the first place.
I'd think that instead of just lashing out against the fact that your project was used as an example of "the wrong way"  (sorry that this is the case, but it just is what it is) you'd be asking what you could do to make it the right way.

How about a centralized counterstrike server that signs and broadcasts replay logs of games for independent analysis and verification?

How about an mmo that runs on-chain?

How about integrating Zadegort with a decentralized asset exchange mapping in-game resources to colored coins so that supply is known and transactions are authenticated?

How about addressing the existence of these problems at all, acknowledging that there are technical solutions to them, and perhaps even exploring those solutions as options instead of just defending by offense and pushing the PR machine as hard as you can?  This is starting to feel very much like a "doth protest too much" situation, which doesn't help your case.

(EDIT: To your credit, it should be mentioned that you have at least raised the question of staking of the premine with your community, which at least shows a willingness to take steps in the right direction, despite not hitting on the central issue at hand. (No pun intended.))

so.... what would constitute "solving a position"? doing checkmate? verifying it should be fast, so the verifier can't explore all the positions to validate that for example there was an unexplored move that would avoid the checkmate.... I'm very interested on this, but I couldn't make it work.


Yes, I wanted to make a bot but I never had time to do it. MOTO is harder than Mario, but check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlkMs4ZHHr8 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlkMs4ZHHr8) The A* algorithm used here to solve Mario requires a heuristic function, I guess distance to the coin could be used.


Yes, we agree those are bs. Chained hashing looses entropy with each new hash.


this is the game we should all be playing: http://fold.it/portal/ (http://fold.it/portal/)

eventually the AI that makes the singularity may be a cryptocurrency!

My first post on the forum - let's hope I was wrong...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=15911.msg229114#msg229114

There are a few possible variations on the theme of "doing checkmate."  The simplest would be to do them in the style of traditional "forced mate" chess problems, but as you point out this potentially puts quite a burden on a verify.  You could let the user play both sides of the game, but this would almost certainly make solutions far too easy, so not only would a ridiculously large number of consecutive games be necessary to provide security but it is likely that the game would become no longer difficult for bots.

I think one workable solution lies somewhere between these.  Allow the user to play both players, but only to move certain pieces.  Require that a forced mate be done not only in a certain number of moves, but with a particular piece.  (Either a specific rabbit ftw or an elimination/immobilization sealed by a specific piece's move.

Remember that it can allow for challenges which can not be solved to be presented.  In fact, it is even somewhat desirable to do so.


Really A* assumes a single point traversal with a relatively free range of motion, neither of which are the case in MOTO.  Not only are you a pair of wheels and a head which have different rules associated and move somewhat independent of each-other, but you have an unusual set of constraints on motion.

A* does have a place in MOTO, but it is not where you'd think.  (My first "map filter" for MOTO was derived from an A* variant.)


But they are relatively effective at burning excess time, and this was more the comparison I meant to allude to.  Also, with MOTO entropy factors into things a little differently anyway.

However, yes, they are BS for quite a few reasons.  Mostly because they do not at all achieve what they purport to.  (I know someone who will readily design (and see through tape-out) an ASIC layout for any hash algo you'd like as long as you're willing to foot the NRE bill.  From what I understand he is quick about it, too.)


Two incentives to game at once!


It may very well be that the bitcoin blockchain is the first "immortal construct" in our known universe.

It is undeniably the largest single computing initiative in mankind's history, now, and by quite a bit.  If as many cycles were spent on running some mega-massive general learner, we might already have had Marvin complaining about the doors by now.  "Here I am, brain the size of a planet."

well, you were wrong about being too late to bitcoin: 2011 was not late after all :)


regarding arimaa...
it could work, but I wish it could be made more similar to actually evaluating the best move for a postition...

well, all this is very interesting, but eventually I'll have to get back to work....
I'll think about tetris and I'll research the foldit thing. If it has a scoring system then it could be used for the difficulty function. If you're interested we could work together on that.

but not yet... an asteroid or supernova and we're toast, but we are getting there ;)

And regarding Marvin, I have to say he's the best AI. Ever. I prefer him to my other favorites, Mr. Data (even Lore), Bender, HAL or any other.
I always had the thought that maybe there were many sentient AIs but they got depressed and decided to kill themselves.

Sure, and it can be, it just seems it always requires more effort (potentially much) in verification.

Another approach, of course, would be to have the user play against a standard "naive" bot.  However this likely weakens the challenge, as a counter-bot could specifically exploit the known behaviors of the challenge bot.


IKR?  Some days I wish I could just say "screw responsibilities" and set up permanent residence in the tar pit.  Maybe eventually I will.  8)


I'd almost be more interested in the related "nanocrafter" game (I just wasted two hours playing with it) although it might be even more difficult to score.


Maybe there should be an initiative to do continuous extra-solar broadcast of blocks so some alien race might one day be able to resume hashing in the event that we get destroyed.   :D


I dunno, Eliza is pretty cool.


But none can cheese it like Bender.


I've always had the worry that when we do create sentience it might quickly decide that the best course of action would be to pretend not to be.  (Could we ever tell?)

In the short term, MOTO is facing an interesting problem.  We just reset the difficulty again and made changes that squelched the bots, which also drove price up so there has never been a more profitable time to mine.  However, we have insufficient human miners active, and zero bot miners active, to keep the network secure around the clock.  We badly need more miners of any kind human or bot.  ;)