Mock Election 2016 is a blockchain voting game developed on the EmpireCoin platform. For more information about EmpireCoin, an open source blockchain gaming platform, please see the EmpireCoin announcement thread.  Or read this thread about one of our previous games: Red vs Blue.

Mock Election 2016 runs once per day.  Elections are held in each of the 50 states, with 2 state elections held simultaneously each hour.  Candidates accumulate electoral votes based on the states that they win.  At the end of the game, the candidate with the most electoral votes is declared the winner and players lose or win money depending on how many votes they cast for the winning candidate over the course of the game. Three candidates are included in the mock election: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton & Gary Johnson.

At any time, players can buy more in-game coins by sending bitcoins to the game's escrow account.  For the first game, $5 worth of bitcoin has been donated to the escrow account to set the initial exchange rate.  In EmpireCoin games, in-game currencies are pegged to another currency such as dollars or bitcoins.  For Mock Election 2016, empirecoins are stored on the bitcoin blockchain but pegged to the US dollar.

At the end of the game, funds from the escrow account are split up and sent back to the players in proportion to the percentage of the in-game currency that they hold.

In this game, empirecoins experience an inflation of 10% per hour, for a total inflation of 983% by the end of the game.  Then at the end of the game, the currency supply doubles and the new coins are given out to players in proportion to the amount of the votes that they had for the winning candidate.

In each state election, players can win coins by staking their coins on the candidate that they expect to win that state.  For winning votes, players win a small number of free coins, but for losing votes, players do not lose any coins (except for transaction fees paid on their voting transactions). Unlike real elections, the candidate with the most votes does not always win the state election.  Any candidate with greater than 50% of the votes at the end of the election is disqualified, and the candidate with the next most votes wins.

You can join this game for free right now and receive 500 empirecoins.  To sign up, please visit EmpireCoin.org
Or post in this thread and I will send you an invite by PM.

Payouts for the 20 player promo game have been made.
0.0005 BTC in TX fees were subtracted for each payout transaction.

Thanks to everyone who participated.  I will be making some updates to the code based on feedback from this game, then will post another promo game soon - will try to explain things better in the next game, as it seems some players did not understand the concept this time around.

Please post in this thread to get an invite to one of our promotional games:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1550513

BTC will be paid out once the game is over (should be less than 24 hrs from now).  Empirecoins can't be converted to BTC until then, because the promo is intended for getting people to try out the game.


Ok, I've invited you to the game.

Once the game is over, everyone will be paid out in BTC.  For the 5 player promotional game, $10 worth of BTC was donated to the escrow, for an average of $2 per player.  When that game started, every player had 20% of the empirecoins.  But when the game ends, the best performing players will have more than 20% and will be paid out more than $2 worth of BTC, while the poorly performing players will have less than 20% of the empirecoins and will therefore be paid out less than $2 worth of BTC.  Sorry if I didn't make this clear.

Ok, I have added smodern, grandFX, darwin72 and soflyrly to the game.

The original $2 giveaway is no longer available, but I have added you to the 2nd game with a smaller giveaway amount.

Hi jikin, I was not able to find an account under that username, please create an account first.

For everyone else who has posted on this thread, I have added a second promotional game and added all of you:
http://empirecoin.org/wallet/20-player-battle

I have donated $10 worth of BTC to the game, setting the initial exchange rate to 2,050 empirecoins / dollar and giving each player an initial balance of about $0.25.  If you are an active player you will likely have more than that by the end of the game since some players may not participate.

This game starts in 5 hours.  It consists of 50 rounds of about an hour each, so the game will last for about 2 days in total.

You are recommended to log in now, claim your coins and then cast your votes.

Once the game starts, I would recommend logging in and voting once per hour, or you can plan out your votes ahead of time via the "Strategy" tab.

$10 was donated to the pot, therefore the five players (including myself) are effectively getting $2 each.  But the $10 will not be paid out until the game ends. The BTC payout at the end of the game will be proportional to the user's in-game coin balances.  So players may receive above or below $2 depending on their performance in the game.

Players can buy more in-game coins by sending BTC to the game's escrow address.  If a lot of players buy in, the pot could get very large, resulting in big bitcoin payouts for the players when the game ends.

No, these games are running on a single server.  We are still working on a fully decentralized coin which can be traded on exchanges.

For those who were not able to join the first game, I have added a new game which will begin when 20 players have joined:
http://empirecoin.org/20-player-battle/

This game is free to join but bitcoins will not be paid out at the end unless anyone chooses to donate BTC to this address:
1Q6ZbSHACuyvaG9uJK7bNTSJyQZHGqbv7d

You can vote your coins towards red, blue or both.  In general the color with the most votes wins.  But there is a voting cap such as 60% or 70%.  If a team goes beyond the cap, it is disqualified and the other team wins.  A fixed number of coins are created by inflation at the end of each round. When the final block of the round is mined, the winner is determined and those coins are divided up and split among everyone who voted for the winning team.

There is also a rule that votes cast early in the round count more than votes cast late in the round.  This is because people voting near the end of the round have more information about the likely outcome of the round, while early voters have less information and are therefore rewarded with more votes.

EmpireCoin is an upcoming altcoin where anyone can compete to win coins by casting votes on the blockchain.

To test out this new coin, we are inviting BitcoinTalk members to join this test game.

The first 4 members to join will receive in-game coins equivalent to $2 in BTC.  Please visit http://empirecoin.org

Coin Battles, previously branded "EmpireCoin", is an open source P2P application which enables trustless voting on the blockchain.  In coin battles, players cast votes on the blockchain by moving coins between their own addresses.

This open source web application allows anyone to define their own protocol (aka "game") & deploy it to a blockchain such as Bitcoin.

In coin battles, players can vote on more than one option.  Stakeholders receive voting rights proportional to the coins that they hold.  This protocol also supports voting based on coin age: (ie votes = "coin blocks" or coin days destroyed). 

This idea has many applications such as:
 - Deterministic voting games
 - Parimutuel prediction markets
 - Decentralized decision making (DAO)
 - In-game sports betting

Coin battles may be defined with several different types of inflation: no inflation, linear inflation, or exponential inflation.  Currently, this project fully implements the deterministic voting application. In these games, an exponential inflation model is used and payouts are made to stakeholders by gamified proof of stake.

For more information, please read this whitepaper:
http://empirecoin.org/EmpirecoinWhitepaper.pdf

To try it out, create an account on CoinBattles.com or install empirecoin-web:
https://github.com/TeamEmpireCoin/empirecoin-web

Software development & marketing expertise is sought from the community to make this project a success.

This sounds very interesting!  I'm sure you have heard about Eris which also uses docker and is targeted towards helping companies develop their own custom blockchains.  How do you differentiate from Eris, and how do you expect people to use cloner?

The internet's DNS system is already fairly decentralized - DNS servers are geographically diverse and anyone can set up a DNS server.  Good luck getting anyone to go through your DNS server unless you are an ISP though.

For a fully decentralized system, you could try something like Namecoin, then convince Apple, Microsoft, Google and the Linux community to modify Windows, iOS, Linux and Android to route DNS queries through this new network.  I think you would also need to work with Godaddy, Namecheap and all major webhosting companies so that everyone who currently owns domains can be given private keys so they retain control of their domains when the new network is rolled out.

In other words, it would be pretty hard!

Seems like preventing bots would be a challenge for this business model - if you're paying per pageview or even minutes spent on site, how do you ensure that you're tracking real people rather than a script/program?

Of course you can avoid that problem by paying out for conversions rather than pageviews/minutes on site, but that's a much different proposition to pitch to your users.

Nice work.  Is this open source?  (Not saying that you should make it so - just wondering).

There's a lot of competition out there (bitcoin-abe, iquidus and insight.is).  I like the block visualization in this one though.

Very interesting!  Which games have you incorporated so far?  I assume you are using existing HTML5 games rather than developing your own right?

This response by Ethereum is completely against their stated ethos, but compared to letting scammers run off with $50 million, probably worth it.

Decentralized technology and decentralized governance are two very different things.  There's no question that Ethereum is based on decentralized technology, but their response to this incident (taking away someone's money by reversing a bunch of transactions) proves that Ethereum isn't decentralized in the same way that Bitcoin is - I cannot imagine the Bitcoin core team reversing a bunch of transactions to a particular Bitcoin address in response to a bitcoin scam.