I'm not up on modern Bitcoin opcodes, so I hope this makes sense:

A hard-fork proposal to make closing Lightning Network channels more predictable:

Problem: At the time a Lightning Network channel is opened, it is unknown what fees will be required to close it.

Insight: Most agree that the size of the blockchain should not grow faster than it currently is growing: 1 MB per block. But what if a block was published that was X bytes shorter than this limit, with the understanding that some future block be allowed to exceed the 1 MB limit by X bytes?

Proposal: Two new opcodes would be introduced:

"Reserve X bytes" would include a signed nonce. If a miner chose to include a transaction with such an opcode, then the block they publish must be at least X bytes smaller than the 1 MB limit. Miners would tend to price such a transaction based on the actual size of the transaction plus X.

"Redeem Nonce" would simply allow the mined block to exceed 1 MB by up to X bytes. Miners would tend to include all such transactions in the mempool where X is no more than the actual size of the transaction, because it would be free money: they would get all of the associated transaction fees while not using up any of the 1 MB space allowed.

We've had no DDoS related problems since August - not sure why this keeps coming up.

Teppy

Yes, Dragon's Tale is a gambling MMORPG with native 3D clients available for Windows, OSX and Linux.

Also, we're having a bonus freeroll at 4:00 EDT today, fireworks based. It's not a "pure" freeroll because some of the prize pools only qualify with larger bet amounts; most of the tournaments I listed above are pure freerolls.

I'm trying an event unlike anything I've ever run in Dragon's Tale - an entire month of (mostly freerolls) Tournaments, 3 per day (Noon, 8:00PM, 4:00 AM EDT), with a different game each day of the week. It all kicks off tomorrow at Noon EDT.

Saturday: Fireworks (65 BTM)
Sunday: Shrines (35 BTM)
Monday: Zhanlue (21 BTM)
Tuesday: Pyramid of the Orient (50 BTM)
Wednesday: Skill-based Fishing (30 BTM)
Thursday: Tug (21 BTM)
Friday: Silly Monkey (40 BTM)

Each Tournament is repeated three times on it's day, so that all time zones have a (somewhat) convenient time to play: 12:00 Noon EDT, 8:00 PM EDT, 4:00 AM EDT.

Dragon's Tale has a number of faucet-like mini-games within, which give enough free Bitcoin to play in all of these tournaments. There are no restrictions on withdrawals aside from a 1 BTM minimum to avoid dust, and no deposit or playthrough requirements, Of course I hope that lots of new players will discover the game and go on to deposit, but this is a way to get a truly free look at the oldest Bitcoin community aside from Bitcointalk.org itself.

Andrew Tepper
Developer, Dragon's Tale

Just confirming that we've been suffering a DDoS attack for most of the day. I will continue to work to get the game back up in the morning.

Teppy ("Di")

I've added a bunch more Zhanlue tables: Two additional on Xinren Tang, two on Zhifu (though those are 1 BTM stakes), and one on each of the four Governed Islands.

Teppy

Ok, the Tournament is launched. It's again a freeroll meaning that the cost to enter/play is well under the amounts of free Bitcoins that you can get for free in the game. (Dragon's Tale doesn't support zero-bets, so I just set the cost-to-play to be arbitrarily small, in this case 1000 SAT per game.)

I've broken it up into 3 tournaments, 8 hours apart, each with 350 BTM in prizes. Each will be 8 hours after the previous one, so that people in various time zones can participate.

The first will start at 8:00PM EDT (8.5 hours from now.), then the next one at 4:00AM EDT tomorrow, then the third one at Noon EDT tomorrow. You can participate in multiple tournaments, but may not play in one tournament with multiple characters.

Glad to answer any questions about Zhanlue. Wiki entry is here: http://www.dragons.tl/mediawiki-1.16.5/index.php/Zhanlue

Teppy

Yes, there will be a second 1 BTC Tournament like I promised, starting later today.

However, I think that instead of Tug I'm going to use the newest PvP game, "Zhanlue," which is a simultaneous-play version of Connect-Four. It was released last week. Everyone did make their accounts already, right?

I'll configure things later today and announce the times and how prizes will be distributed.

I'll run a third 1 BTC Tournament when Bitcoins hit $1000.

Teppy ("Di")

Here are the tournament results. I'll give them exactly as the game reports them, and then explain what everything means below.
-------------------------------------
Results for $574 Bitcoin Tug Tournament

For Tug:
    For the BTC 1 Power-8 at 1/2 pool by Full Rank:
        IcePick won BTM 502
        Willem won BTM 188
        deviant won BTM 188
        shinjo won BTM 36.66
        Joes won BTM 36.66
        CryptoCuz won BTM 36.66
        jhackers won BTM 2
        Glutton won BTM 2
        tonyjung won BTM 2
        Kjell won BTM 2
        KriZ won BTM 2
-------------------------------------
Ok, so first off, it lists the "Game Set" which in this case is Tug. (Sometimes a Tournament has multiple Game Sets, but this one had just one, and that consisted of only a single game type, Tug.)

It then describes a "Prize Hopper" and a "Distribution Mechanism." In this case the Prize Hopper held 1 BTC, which in Dragon's Tale terminology can also be expressed as "1000 BTM." The Distribution Mechanism was Power-8 at 1/2 by Full Rank. Power says to distribute the most to whoever came in first, and then a fraction of that amount to 2nd place, and then a fraction of the 2nd place amount to 3rd place, etc. The fraction used in this case is the "1/2." Power-8 says to try to make the distribution to 8 players, though in the case of a tie that number can increase. As long as at least 8 players participated and had some sort of win, it won't decrease.

First place got about half a Bitcoin as expected. There was a tie for 2nd and 3rd places, so the system pools those prize amounts (about 250 BTM + 125 BTM = 375 BTM) and splits that total among those that tied for 2nd.  Same with 4th, 5th and 6th places. Finally, there was a 5-way tie for 7th, so it takes the prizes for 7th and 8th place, sums them, and splits that among all 5 people that tied for 7th. Finally, it normalizes all those amounts to add up to 1 BTM, which is why first place got 502 BTM instead of 500 BTM. Decimal values less than 1 BTM are not shown above, but the total amount distributed was within a few satoshis of 1 BTC.

57 people participated in the tournament, and 10 of those got prizes. I recognize most of the names above, but not all, so I hope that at least some of the prize money went to new players. I had a great time running this tournament - I'd like to do more of these! If we did the next one when we hit $700, would that give everyone enough time to learn Tug?

Teppy

$574.43 on CoinDesk - I have triggered the tournament; it will start in 45 minutes and last 4 hours. Anyone can feel free to post leaderboard updates in this thread. (I will too if I can, but I have family commitments in about an hour.)

Teppy

Dragon's Tale is a 3D world: There is a tournament board on Xinren Tang (the beginner island) - when the price hits $574 I will trigger the tournament. You click on the board to sign up, and then just play others in Tug. You'll see a current leaderboard as you play. (I realize that all of this can be a bit overwhelming if you haven't been in the game yet, but any of the other players can get you up to speed quickly.)

Teppy

Yes, creating a new account is fine for the tournament, but just a single account per player.

Teppy

Here at the eGenesis office we have a good bottle of champagne ready to go if Bitcoin hits $574, half of it's all-time high. I'd like to extend the celebration into the virtual world by giving away 1 BTC if that happens. I'll do this in the form of a Tug tournament with several winners splitting the 1 BTC prize. The tournament will have no entry fee. We'll use the current price as reported by Coindesk to determine when the event launches.

Tug is a 2-player strategy game that takes a few minutes to learn - there are plenty of players online that would be glad to show how it works.

I believe that Dragon's Tale is the longest-running Bitcoin business in the world, in continuous operation since October of 2010. (See posts on this forum to verify that.)

Teppy

If you're having trouble connecting, try the "UDP Mode" option. We've been having sporadic connectivity problems, usually for just a few minutes at a time, which is making it hard for the ISP to figure out what's going on. They're working on it though.

Teppy

I don't know of an easy way to check, but addresses certainly are reused, even though doing so is not the best practice. Does anyone know what percentage of addresses in (say) recent blocks have already been seen once before on the blockchain?

What if, for the special case of an address already seen on the blockchain, it could be referenced by "The nth address on the blockchain" rather than the full address? N could be a 32 (40? 48?) bit number. Is this essentially what "Segregated Witness" does?

If the person accusing me of unfair banning is the character "VIP," then I banned him (the only person I have banned recently) for demanding kickbacks from new players in order to receive mineral waters.

The game distributes mineral waters to higher ranking players with the understanding that they give them to new players so that they may try the game. After receiving complaints from others in the game that VIP had demanded payment for mineral waters , I verified those accusations using the chat logs on the server, and told VIP that that behavior was not allowed, and that this was his only/final warning.

He again contacted a number of new players, again demanding money in exchange for mineral waters. So he and his various mule characters have been banned from Dragon's Tale.

Also, I do have the blocks and chainstate directories backed up as of a month ago. Would replacing the current directories (and only those two directories) with the backups be safe?

I've tried restarting with --rescan, but get this:

2015-11-30 13:34:22 Verifying last 288 blocks at level 3
2015-11-30 13:34:22 ERROR: DisconnectBlock() : added transaction mismatch? database corrupted
2015-11-30 13:34:24 ERROR: DisconnectBlock() : added transaction mismatch? database corrupted
2015-11-30 13:34:24 ERROR: DisconnectBlock() : added transaction mismatch? database corrupted
2015-11-30 13:34:27 ERROR: DisconnectBlock() : added transaction mismatch? database corrupted
2015-11-30 13:34:28 ERROR: DisconnectBlock() : undo data overwriting existing transaction
2015-11-30 13:34:29 ERROR: DisconnectBlock() : added transaction mismatch? database corrupted
2015-11-30 13:34:30 ERROR: DisconnectBlock() : added transaction mismatch? database corrupted
2015-11-30 13:35:27 ERROR: VerifyDB() : *** coin database inconsistencies found (last 7 blocks, 106434 good transactions before that)

2015-11-30 13:35:29 : Corrupted block database detected.


The last time I had to do a --reindex it took 4-5 days to complete, and that's a long time to be down. Any other options? Should --reindex take that long?

It's on the blockchain - the winner can identify the tx if he chooses.

Teppy