What is going on with I0coin? I am seeing now a difficulty of  7.68080166 with 7 connections, and my merged mining seems to be getting a lot of blocks at that low difficultly, though listtransactions doesnt show any actual transactions, giving a warning instead "WARNING: Displayed transactions may not be correct!  You may need to upgrade, or other nodes may need to upgrade."

Is there an official version to upgrade to? Last I heard checking with doublec I was using same version he was...

-MarkM-

Does all this talk of a -qt version mean there is not a normal bitcoind to go with it? Or is it a normal release where you can compile the bitcoind by itself without having to make the -qt thing?

-MarkM-

First make sure you will be able to provide it with enough mining power to secure it, otherwise it will simply become a victim of 51% attacks.

-MarkM-

Most pools are still not doing merged mining, except maybe for NaMeCoin in some cases. So securing all the merge-able altcoins might require investing heavily into merged mining projects such as those the DeVCorp folk want to set up. (They plan to merge all the coins they can and sell all except DeVCoins *for* DeVCoins to help keep up the value of DeVCoins.)

-MarkM-

A really nice thing about MUDs is that it is absolutely normal and expected that players will use scripts/trigger/macros, all MUD clients provide such things, and thus they are ideal for 24/7 play using triggers/scripts to keep your character(s) toiling away while you sleep, which in turn means staying connected 24/7, which itself is actually valuable in itself. (Think of all those downloadable toolbars all the marketeers try to get everyone to use so they can get messages sent out to them without having to resort to email.)

MUDs over i2p and/or Tor can thus act as a step toward using cryptocurrencies to reward people for running i2p/Tor nodes, without having to institute accounting into the i2p or Tor systems themselves. People can simply "mine" game items and game gold and "level up" game characters to sell for cryptocoins, with the actual running of the i2p or Tor node to do so being just a side-effect.

Over the long term if lots of money gets involved I expect people will start optimising their nodes to allow them to play over them without actually providing connectivity to others, but typically such networks already have some balance involved so that the less bandwidth you provide for others the less others provide you so the more stingy the players are about providing network bandwidth the more lag they should experience in the game, thus lowering the income...

Running the thing over i2p has actually turned out to be a great idea by the look of it, as it lowers the number of useless timewasters attracted and involves those who actually are interested in being part of the i2p network, which helps all i2p users; and once these serious investors/players get enough infrastructure built to be ready to bring plenty of products to the markets we can still open it up to the normal internet for the johnny come lately folk who can't be bothered to, or don't want to, support the i2p network directly by actually running i2p themselves.

-MarkM-

Maybe running it as an i2p and/or Tor "hidden service" would be the best approach if your own connection to your own machine (the only machine with much hope at all of not being as accessible or more accessible to third parties than it is to you) does not support running an unhidden server from your own in-your-building in-your-locked-room machine?

It really does seem very irresponsible, stupid, and negligent to use third party servers for anything involving bitcoins and/or privacy.

-MarkM-

I am using Open Transactions as the software platform for my exchange, which I feel gives me a better chance of keeping it secure than a website would; and the identities one uses in that are cryptographic key pairs somewhat similar to PGP / GPG; but the idea of also optionally keeping on file an actual gribble/OTC compatible identity for those users who do wish to associate their Open Transactions "nym" with a more widely known identity does sound like a good idea.

-MarkM-

The closest thing I have found to that that actually works is Devana, which I have running at http://villages.mygamesonline.org/

I tried a so called "Travian Clone" for a while as it looked prettier and if it had worked would have had more "features" but it turned out not only that the graphics were all stolen but also that the thing didn't actually work, thus Devana is now the sole remaining example of that type of game as all the others tested turned out to be broken.

That type of game has a fundamental economic problem though in that it gives out villages for free to anyone, there is no accounting for the resources requiired to actuallly establish a village in the first place. Thus they tend to become littered with free starter villages created by simply creating a free email account somewhere and using it to start yet another player-account as yet another free village to raid.

One thing that attracted me to HYIPs long ago and to coin mining nowadays is the idea that maybe requiring a deposit to start a player account in a game could help cut down the number of "stuff from no-where" startup accounts that never actually get played, by being able to give people back their deposits plus interest (from the HYIP or mining or something, whatever there is that actually works) at the end of the game if they are still active by then.

Another approach I have been trying is simply to have smaller scale games in which individual characters can work their way up to having enough influence (or oratory skill or whatever) and resources to be able to launch a village-building expedition. so that all players in the villages scale game originate from the smaller scale game instead of being random unidentified characters who mysteriously pop up out of no-where with enough followers and resources to create a village.

I suppose if there is demand for it though I can do like I have done with the 2Moons system: run a second server which does cater to these random passers-by, giving them free villages out of no-where like they normally expect from such a game.

Is there demand though?

-MarkM-

I think it has to do with how much trouble it is to go cash them in at an exchange compared to how useful they are in the game. At some low value per coin the huge number of coins you would need to make the whole taking them to an exchange thing worthwhile starts to look like a lot of game goodies, and just spending them in the game seems easier and more worthwhile than going through all the exchange hassle for a few cents, especially with coins that are not perceived as really having any use outside of the game.

It will be very interesting to watch clans grow up around each coin, each trying to offer better in-game goods for the coin they are championing than the clans who back other coins are offering, as that could make the relative values of the various coin types change quite a bit in the game as compared to on the exchanges. On the exchanges people are mostly looking to maximize the fiat value of their holdings, whereas in games maybe people will, at least with the cheaper coins, be more interested in what specific goods the clans accepting a particular coin have on offer.

-MarkM-

I have been finding that litecoins and bitcoins are both not very popular for games compared to the coins you can merged-mine since the merged-mined coins seem more "free", they are something people just get automatically as a side-effect of mining, instead of being the main product that "justifies" the cost of mining.

Basically once you get p2pool set up to mine bitcoins, you can add a whole bunch of other coins too as "freebies", and people mostly seem to prefer to use such "freebies" for games rather than their main coins for which they have to justify electricity costs and maybe also equipment costs.

-MarkM-

What humans are going to do in a world where robitics provide all goods/services if they are expected to justify their existence does seem to be a fair question. Are they all to become personal servants of the owners of the roots, doing arbitrary tasks for their amusement or something? Will it be a status symbol to be served by human bodyservants rather than robots? Are those who the rich do not consider attractive enough to be seen with to be deprived of sustenance or what?

-MarkM-

If by skill you mean twitch-time, human reaction-time to pull a trigger, accuracy of aim type thing, that is actually pretty hard to do on arbitrary client-machines. Trying to maintain control of someone else's machine is not only a hard problem it is also arguably something we ought to hope you cannot accomplish being as how we probably would prefer our own machines not to be that easily controllable by others.

That is part of why I myself have been aiming not to discourage robots at all but rather to figure that since I have a computer anyway I would like my computer to play games for me as much as possible, leaving me to guide its overall approach rather than to have to hand-hold it every twitch of the way.

-MarkM-

Well don't worry about it a lot, anyone who was really gung-ho made it and there isn't much point flooding people in who aren't into it. Unfortunately it turns out that basically any game is mostly going to have idle people, as no matter what the game if initially trying it is free tons of people are "just looking" and never really "play" the thing. That is awkward for game economies if each new player brings some kind of resource into the world whether that resource is geographic like a village for them to rule or a planetary colony for them to exploit or even just a whole bunch of technology and supplies they get as initial equipment.

Also it turns out that most free-open-source multiplayer online games you can find code for are broken. It has taken a long time and a lot of testing to find just a few codebases that actually work. Actually with MUDs I guess plenty work, but most have ancient license heritage forbidding them from being associated with making money, even donations for bandwidth/server costs.

It is just as well that only the hardcore testing people who helped test all the other games over the years showed up for the i2p MUD since it just blew up its "fake database" simple starter database that it provides to save people from having to set up a real database to try it out. It is being set up again using a real database currently.

I set up another intergalactic mining game just as an initial player-funnel to look for long term players and am throwing traffic at it expecting that most people who sign up will end up idling out, but I cannot really include it in the overall large scale long term economy that is what I really want because each player starts out with a whole mining setup which in the proper larger scale economy plan would be expensive to set up. Financing all those startups simply would not be practical because of the vast "failure rate", the vast number of them that will never actually grow and build and expand. So basically the aim with that one is to have it out in streams of traffic acting as a filter to try to find some players who do stick around. I expect it to end up as galaxies full of long-abandoned mining colonies but have not got any really good storyline yet for why most such colonies fail. Maybe they are a first round of attempts long before the technology was perfected or something.

The first attempt at an intergalactic mining setup used the XNova Redesigned code, and has been closed to new players because of the dropout rate. The mining operations are very lucrative in the long term, but there are still several abandoned operations there for which no suitable repossession corp has been able to get set up for yet so there is no point inviting the creation of more operations that will also end up being abandoned before paying back their startup loans.

WIth that one I know some of the abandoning happened because the XNova code itself was broken, its combat code looks like it could never have worked at all as it mentions database fields different from those that actually exist. It looks like it was only part-way through being ported from some quite different earlier version or something. That has worked out well for the players who were not actually looking forward to combat, and for the homeworlds who prefer not to have such nearby galaxies be full of dangerous combat-capable robotic fleets, but isn't what most players of that genre of games are looking for.

I set up one based on the 2moons code too, and that code seems to work, so the storyline for that will be that they are a farther-away set of galaxies, far enough away that the civilisations that sent robots to the XNova Redesigned galaxies are willing to allow the robotics corp to activate the combat capabilities of the robots sent to the 2moons galaxies. We "know" from the existence of many games of this type out on the net that vast numbers of galaxies are full of very offensive, very dangerous factions so the premise is that this 2moons layer of galaxies will be the outer defenses of the civilised worlds, robots being sent that far away more as a defense initiative than for any resources that might be found out there. However because of the distance premise, startups in this distant, 2moons based set of galaxies will only be possible once jumpgates have been constructed in the XNova Redesigned galaxies.

Thus we have so far one set of 500 galaxies run by XNova Redesigned and thus unable to have combat until someone actually wants combat badly enough to arrange to have that code's combat subsystems fixed to allow it, and a farther set of 500 galaxies that cannot be reached until the operations set up in the XNova Redesigned galaxies have built suitable jump-gates to allow the (very expensive) sending of colony ships to the farther set of galaxies. All of that within a larger setting known as the Galactic Milieu, whose main focus is Freeciv-based civilised worlds inhabited mostly by humans and mostly focussed in one galaxy.

The new 2moons-based setup is at http://twomoons.mygamesonline.org/ and is NOT part of that larger economy because the expected failure (going idle) rate makes it not seem economically reasonable to finance startups there. It thus has no storyline (yet at least) for where the resources came from or come from, and where the technology was developed or is developed that its startups use, how they get their startup gear, where they come from and so on. It is basically a pretty normal 2moons game except for the fact that it too has 500 galaxies and its galaxies are about as far apart as a galaxy is wide. It is having traffic thrown at it so that it is expected to forever acrue random passer-by players who mostly will just go idle leaving abandoned mining colonies scattered across the first few galaxies. It has no backstory of any common set of civilised worlds the mining colonies were sent out by so no pre-existing politics of why any given outfit should or should not be hostile or friendly to any other. Its players start out without any indebtedness to any investors who invested in getting them started and thus expect some return on the investment. It is just the typical game that happens in a vacuum featuring factions that appear out of no-where equipped with resources and technology that appeared out of nowhere.

-MarkM-

P.S. This "out of nowhere" stuff presumably means there should also be no objection to the site administration selling stuff out of nowhere for cryptocurrency. In the proper larger game I am really aiming for, the site admins will not be conjuring stuff out of nowhere to sell, everything will arise in game in the normal in game ways so players will mostly be buying from each other.

Its not i2p, as most games were web based. I think its more they just want some giant existing game like WoW or EVE to suddenly start accepting bitcoins, they aren't interested in populating some startup game and themselves being the enthusiastic core population of players that convinces all the newcomers that bitcoins are a great idea; and they aren't really interested in games per se, just any existing large population of people.

Basically they want populations of people to convert out of the blue, not to create community etc using the coins convincing others that such use is a good idea.

Also though I think bitcoins are too much like "real money". People holding cryptocoins worth far far less per coin seem more willing to play games with those lower-value coins. Especially coins that basically have no use outside of games except maybe to get some pointlessly small pitance of fiat for them in some minor/obscure exchange that still deals in their obscure coin type.

I would expect though that i2p or Tor would be important for any core site where the initial core group of players/investors work on the core seeds that might eventually end up dealing with large sums of money. It might be okay to have a bunch of throwaway random passers-by games at the fringes that deal in small sums and expect to shut down at any moment, but I think wherever the central banking of the whole collection of games meets should plan to be on some kind of anonymising system otherwise the core wealth that makes all the peripheral outliers attractive (they could lead a player into the big leagues if they do well in them  type idea) could be at risk.

Remember ultimately we want to retain the option of going full blown three-dimensional immersive environment type of interfaces to these universes, that will take big money. The core people who get involved long before all that eye-candy is in place to attract the ignorant masses will likely be dealing in large values of virtual goods / resources / populations / etc by that time. (It has already been quite a few years the core players have been working toward this, already a surprising amount of value has been thrown around just getting it this far.)

-MarkM-

In general the Technology tab on the main menu on the left should show what the requirements are for each technology, building and ship.

It is worth a look as you develop because in general these types of games tend to have nothing to gain beyond a certain point in some of the technologies. For example I do not think your lasers, ion cannons, and so on - the individual weapon types - get any better by improving their own technology, so once you have enough to build the top ship or defense that uses that type of weapon increasing it further probably does nothing. The "weapon tech" and "armour tech" and "shield tech" keep going up and up, with weapon tech improving all they weapons instead of each weapon's own individual tech continuing to be useful.

In Zorg Empires they customised some of that, making for example the plasma cannon tech able to keep making a difference, but its not usually done because to keep the combat simulator accurate you'd also have to add to the simulator inputs for the individual techs too. I think I would prefer to customise the ship flight formula somewhat before I would do that, as I think improving drive tech only increases speed not distance you can reach nor fuel consumption improvement.

Notice that I have 500 galaxies and they are about as far apart as they are size across, that results in colonisation ships being able to skip one galaxy to reach the next, with 10% speed, but it would be nice if keeping on improving the drive could eventually enable them to go further instead of just going faster, so you could maybe go down to 5% or less speed ad maybe make it to a distance of three galaxies.

-MarkM-

There are already two intergalactic mining servers operating, one using XNova Redesigned codebase (and thus bereft of combat capabilities) and one based on 2Moons (and thus seeming to be fully operational and featuring several more-advanced ship types than XNova and a whole bunch more features you can access using "Darkmatter" which is kind of the internal currency but also can be found in the game).

However, both of these existing servers are part of a larger multiverse which aims to have a whole working economy and thus cannot readily just hand out free intergalactic mining startup equipment and planets to mine on to every random idle passer-by, most of whom never stick around long enough to have any chance of creating a profit for who-ever invested in equipping them for their startup.

Thus, a separate new 2moons server has now been set up at TwoMoons.MyGamesOnline.org which caters to this largely-useless crowd of random passers-by by handing out complete intergalactic mining startup sites, technology and equipment to all comers.

Obviously that is a crazy thing to do for any intergalactic investors looking for actual profit, thus this server is not economically related to the larger game. It aims, rather, to serve as an elimination funnel where all the idlers can sit and idle without bankrupting the real larger-game economy by having investors invest in useless, unqualified people / corporations / CEOs.

Hopefully in the long run it will find for us some real players who will be worthwhile executive officers for operations located in the "real larger game" multiverse where investing in such startups is a non-trivial investment.

It will also serve to give people a chance to try out the 2moons system, get acquainted with what can be done in there, and maybe make some cryptocoins selling stuff in game to new players in the process of introducing them to your favourite cryptocoin(s).

As you play, bear in mind that in the "real" aka "larger game" multiverse, starting up such a mining operation will not be cheap, at least not cheap as compared to the paltry pittance you could acquire by foraging for berries to eat, wood to build huts and clubs with, ore to make metal implements with and so on as in individual character or bunch of individual characters on a single-character scale. The kinds of salaries CEOs of intergalactic mining corporations earn could probably hire gosh knows how many planetbound scavenger types who run around on planets foraging and fighting and crawling around in sewers killing monsters and so on, but to prove you are qualified for such a position this new server could prove useful. Think of it, perhaps, as a simulated CEO position/course your character could be taking somewhere in the process of learning the skills such a CEO will be needing to get such a job in "the real game"...

Check it out: http://TwoMoons.MyGamesOnline.org/

Many cryptocoins accepted,,, basically all those that I support in my Open Transactions server, plus LiteCoins whose contract didn't quite make it into that server before the last Open Transactions upgrade/fixes cycle.

-MarkM-

I have been wondering myself whether Litecoin users are as uninterested in games as Bitcoin users. I have been trying this kind of thing over and over again and learned every time that Bitcoin people are just so totally uninterested that Bitcoin seems to be the last coin of all to bother with. Even Ixcoin garnered one player, just one but still that is more supporters than Bitcoin has.

CoffeeMUD, which is the engine used by MUDgaard.i2p has a huge range of crafting skills, plenty of resources that can be foraged, chopped, mined or dug and lots of things you can build with them. But setting its internal currency to millbitcoins was a big mistake, alienating the players who prefer other cryptocoins because not one single player actually advocates using Bitcoins. The Ixcoin player felt it very unfair that despite having actively promoted Ixcoin within the various games for a long time, suddenly Bitcoin instead of Ixcoin got set up as the default currency of the game.

So, MUDgaard.i2p is now switched back to using its own native default currency. Maybe once each altcoin has an active clan working to establish it as useful in the game the idea of making one of them the default can be re-visited. Does Litecoin have enough advocates to form and keep active a clan? We'll see, Supposedly it has more advocates than Ixcoin, but maybe they just aren't into games?

-MarkM-

EDIT: Note that done right, latecomers who bring cash should only be able to prosper disproportionately if the original settlers who did the actual work of gathering the resources, crafting them into tools and buildings and so on undervalue their own work and thus end up in effect having acted as insanely dirt-cheap labour for the money-wielders. If on the other hand they hold their work as valuable, selling its proceeds only at good prices, and charging good money for their labour, then it should turn out that actually hiring other players to work in your factories would be a lot more expensive than creating characters of your own to work in them...

Yet another experiment has shot down the idea of using bitcoins in games. Not ONE, not a single ONE player advocating bitcoins turned up. Even Ixcoin has ONE player promoting their use, but for bitcoins, NONE. It was thought unfair to switch the currency to bitcoins rather than to some other currency that at least one player actually advocated. Point taken, so until we do some kind of formal battle of the coins wherein the players advocatign each coin can fight out among them to establish dominance of a particular blockchain we will just use normal default game-currencies as the actual main in-game currency.

-MarkM-

Well the system definitely works, trading is happening, but people are having a hard time actually finding interesting offers to respond to.

Right now offers simply default to having a 24-hour lifespan, so most offers expire without any response, quite likely without anyone even getting around to seeing them before they expire.

Once the scripting system updates are in place people can set up scripts to automatically re-create their offers daily, but even when the ability to add an expiry time other than the 24-hour default is in place people are going to need easier ways of finding offers that might interest them... Right now the markets are not even sorted, so just finding all the markets that involve an asset you are interested in is a bit of a pain.

Probably what is going to be needed is a client or report-generator or somesuch that is specifically designed for people who want to play the markets, that will find for them the kinds of offers they are interested in and maybe even have hooks for automatically reacting to them.

-MarkM-

Hmm, try looking at it from a slightly different perspective.

This new company seems to basically be proposing to buy in-game perks for game-players, paying the game companies fiat currency for those perks.

How much of a discount will game companies want to give this middleman? Normally that would depend on how much the middleman is willing to pay for how many perks for how many players compared to how much that might lower the perceived value of the perks to the game company's existing population of players.

From the sound of it this middleman doesn't actually have any players to bring to the deal, they plan to leech off the game company's own player-aquiring efforts and player-populations.

How competitive will this new pool company be compared to existing pools that could quite possibly offer competing "we will handle the mining pool end of this for you" offers?

And what the heck do they need half a million bucks for? Marketing? Ten 50,000/year salespeople to run around trying to talk games companies into going for this scheme?

Maybe it would cost any already operational mining pool a similar amount to be able to talk game companies into mining with them instead?

Maybe they plan to make an even more GUI miner than GUIminer and sell the code to the game companies to integrate with their clients or webservers? Or are offering to do that integration for them? Somehow trying to lock them in to using this company's pool rather than shopping around existing pools?

-MarkM-