Something like this has been tried since very early times, one of the oldest altcoins: DeVCoin.

Even limiting itself initially to free open-source causes, historically it is still struggling.

The Galactic Milieu was basically built around it and seems to have been the most successful part of it, adding a number of very early classic altcoins to the collection of free open-source causes supported.

To my mind a large part of DeVCoin's problem though lay in supporting stuff that wasn't helping by feeding back into the DeVCoin ecosystem.

For example the "DevTome" wiki idea was not only a too-late attempt to set up a "content site" as a revenue source (content sites was already far far too competitive an industry by then) but also was paying out far too much for articles that were not sufficiently focused onto specific projects that fed back into the ecosystem; it ended up paying for any free open source articles at all, even including dusty old attempts at novels people wrote decades ago in high school were unable to do anything with and were willing to turn into free open source for huge sums of DeVCoin, and also even mere re-wordings in one's own words of existing wikipedia articles.

Maybe if DevTome had kept a tighter focus, specifically articles directly about projects that, like the Galactic Milieu, specifically worked toward building up the DeVCoin ecosystem, it would have done better; nowadays it is currently just an archival read-only collection of articles retained mainly because most of the Milieu's early documentation exists as such articles.

If you are truly interested in this kind of crypto-project I suggest you review the history of DeVCoin and the whole panoply of other ancient classic coins woven together with it co-operatively to support all of them by the Galactic Milieu...

One achievement that hopefully really helps all those coins and eventually maybe a whole lot more over the coming decades is the "treasuries" system, whereby each of the coins has been provided with a "treasury" whereby a value-per-unit can be calculated for it simply by dividing the total value of its "treasury" by its number of units minted. Sort of like market cap in reverse.

That system has allowed the ecosystem to function even during periods when most of the coins were not on any third-party exchanges and the platforms the Milieu used to provide markets for them were not populated with enough active market-makers and arbitrageurs to make such markets "efficient" or even approach being "rational"...
 

-MarkM-

To me one of the biggest risks that I see is "thinking in fiat".

If you really cannot bring yourself to "think in crypto" then maybe try thinking in "pounds of butter" or "dozens of eggs" or "pounds of bacon" or somesuch.

Even if you have only been at this a few years surely you must have noticed by now that such commodities go up much faster than fiat?

In fact you likely ought to be excruciatingly aware by now that fiat goes forever downwards, that it is not in any way a decent investment, it is in fact something to be avoided as much as possible but which unfortunately a lot of your local retailers and of course your local tax authorities and such "force" you to "have to" buy some of from time to time to take care of bills.

So to me a very important first step in risk management is to avoid "holding" fiat or fiat-equivalents.

I thus choose my trading-pairs from crypto-vs-crypto pairings not crypto-vs-fiat, even though from time to time to pay bills I do end up having to sell some crypto for fiat, since my income is in crypto, not in fiat.


-MarkM-

The overheads I worry about are the actual costs of deploying the games and infrastructure; even using free open-source off-the-shelf games comes with a bandwidth and install and support cost, the potential overheads involved in having custom art, music, code and so on and so on and so on developed would be horrendous by comparison, and since I am aiming at "play to earn" type scenarios every cost is less money going into the pockets of the actual players... since I do not aim to have the actual players be the source of funds.


-MarkM-

That sounds like just another token, out of thousands or maybe by now even millions with the same bullshit blurbs.

What differentiates it from all the many it is basically just another clone of?

What is it that it enables that no others already do?


-MarkM-

You are sounding like one of those people who just wants to make yet another shitcoin and are just making up excuses for doing so.

Most likely your "use case" can perfectly well be taken care of using bitcoin, but everyone keeps trying to make up arbitrary excuses for "needing" a whole new "token".

Bitcoin already has almost all of the potential "technical issues" taken care of, including, importantly if you really do plan something long-term rather than yet another scammy money-grab, security.

I find it very hard to believe whatever your supposed "use case" is really "needs" yet another shitcoin, let along yet another shit-token.

The more you write the more it seems to become clear that this is nothing to do with any real use-case but, rather, just another attempt to bullshit yet another shitcoin or shittoken into existence, the real goal being to have a token to scam people with not any real use-case at all.


-MarkM-

Since you say it is the use-case that is the real treasure, I suggest you first make absolutely sure there truly is nothing already in existence that is capable of addressing that case.

The technical capabilities available nowadays in blockchain are so numerous it seems extremely unlikely nothing already existing has enough capabilities to allow it to be applied to your use-case.

It thus seems very likely that something already existing can do enough of what your use-case needs that you can proceed directly to your real treasure, your use-case, without any "reinventing of the wheel" as it were; focus directly on the use to which it is put.

Indeed I suspect it is very likely thorough-enough research into technical capabilities already in existence will reveal more than one already-existing "wheel" which can do the job, so that you will even be able to be free of reliance upon any one underlying architecture /platform, giving much more flexibility than a "solution" that locks you in to just one underlying.

If what you want to do truly is impossible using existing technology your target industry or demographic is probably already trying to adapt existing technology to their use-case so you might do better, and find sympatico team-mates along the way, starting with helping them make the best use they can of what already exists while running by them your ideas about whatever fundamental architectural features you think would revolutionise the applicability to their use-case yet think is not actually already out there albeit maybe not currently recognised as applicable or even just not yet stumbled-upon by the industry or demographic...


-MarkM-

Well if you are only interested in the coin, not any games etc that might use it, you could just look at the arbitrage opportunities between FreiExchange and the Stellar platform, both IXCoin and I0Coin tend to fetch much better prices on Stellar than on FreiExchange.


-MarkM-

Oh that is so yesteryear, nowadays we have a whole fantasy-milieu Play-To-Earn (PTE) Crossfire-RPG server where a new kind of mage, the Cryptomancer, lives the Life of Play...

Tell your Crossfire-RPG client to connect to Server1.Knotwork.net... and be any of the species, professions, cults, Cryptomancers do it all...


-MarkM-

Sounds a bit like the Galactic Milieu, but maybe even harder (and more expensive, with higher overhead costs) to pull off since you seem to be intending to mint all-new assets rather than using already existing coins that already have followings and free open-source games that likewise also already have followings...


-MarkM-

Currently I seem to have lost contact with machines in my houses that were or maybe still are running it, so my two main node-servers only seem to be talking to each-other.

Yet it seemed to be taking 50 minutes or somesuch between blocks so possibly it has a minimum difficulty of 1, I had only had one of the servers using one CPU core on it; I sped it up to 3 cores and it moved a lot faster then dropped it back to two cores for now to see if that is enough to keep it at a not too slow block-speed. It currently mints 2.5 CLC per block. Seems it was many months ago likely over a year even that I last had looked at it but it only accumulated 28k+ coins in all that time.


-MarkM-


EDIT: It just occurred to me that like IXCoin and I0Coin, CoiLedCoin is ancient, so I just checked its holdings of "shares": sure enough, like those other two coins, CLC holds 1000 "shares" of General Hosting Corp aka Galactic Holding Corp, which is basically the "political capital" of the Milieu. It seems that way back when we started it was just naturally assumed that all those old coins would have a "Civilisation" in the FreeCiv scale of the game thus they all equipped themselves with GHC shares since the idea was and is that only Civilisations can have such shares and also that in order to have a Civilisation you must have such shares. Thing is, for some of those old coins no-one ever came forward as players playing those coins thus many of them have never yet picked which of the civilisations FreeCiv offers is the one whose currency the coin happens to be, so all these years they have sat around without anyone knowing what civilisation's currency they are and no-one playing such a civilisation and presumably building up an ever-growing Civilisation maybe getting star-travel and colonising more planets and so on and so on and so on. I guess most folks just don't care about whatever civilisation or Corp or guild or clan or group or team or whatever coins are actually associated with they just buy and sell tokens and coins oblivious to what they are supposedly used for on what planets in which galaxies or whatever...

Probably haven't compiled it for years, a lot of these old coins won't build on Ubuntu any later than 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver).

Seems a lot of apps stopped being updated beyond that point so Bionic seems to be quite a common "old" version still being used for a lot of things; some of the old coins I even managed to build for the Bionic Puppy version of Puppy Linux, for some old 32-bit boxes I happened across. I don't think I tried building CoiLedCoin for that though so not sure if it is one of those it would work with.

Sometmes one needs also to mess with boost version and for some I never managed to get GUI version but I typically only use the daemon not the GUI.

Once I built for Bionic 64-bit many years ago I just copied over my binaries year after year machine to machine.

Often though I have to get some libraries too to make the binaries work. Again not sure which for which coins though nor whether CoiLedCoin was one such.

Years go by without anyone wanting to trade real coins for tokens or vice-versa, mostly we use HORIZON and STELLAR tokens instead of the on the blockchain coins, for all the coins we use in the Galactic Milieu.

For all of them my two main node servers are LFM.Knotwork.com and Server1.Knotwork.net


-MarkM-

Its blockchain is still moving, so yes.

It is of course also still traded on HORIZON and STELLAR platforms as posted previously.

According to the Latest Rates include-file its treasuries-based value is CLCrate=109.77811321 DeVCoins per CoiLedCoin.

Converting the values to be denominated in CoiLedCoins instead of in DeVCoins we get:



-MarkM-

Even if people only play for the sake of making money though, they need not play as pillagers, they could at least in theory take the position that there is not going to be a lasting income from it if they drive other players away, make it not fun to play for other players, or maybe even just make it too unprofitable for other players.

In other words if ultimately the game is about building, about making rather than taking, it ought to boil down to whether the builders can build fast enough and strong enough that the pillagers drive themselves to extinction, if only by taking out wealth that could maybe if put into defenses have kept them alive and profitable.

It does seem important though that the income players are earning not come directly from other players; I still think the game needs at least one, and preferably many, "outside" incomes to work with.

Even if something so simple as a huge bitcoin-mining farm whose profits go to the players of the game in response to their in-game activities instead of going for example to traditional "shareholders" or whatever.

Heck you could have a bunch of mining farms all over the world each mapped to a different part of the in-game geography for example, each one's profits becoming the productivity of that part of the game's geography.

So that basically in a competetive game players would be competing for how much of the production of such outside sources they get.


-MarkM-

More than a decade doesn't necessarily mean sustainable.

The Galactic Milieu has been around for far longer than a decade and is really just barely starting-up, so it is possibly still too soon to tell about sustainability.

It is certainly feasible for unsustainable things to take much more than a decade to fall apart, weren't a whole lot of the various eco-catastrophes, both generally-accepted and still by many denied to even be real supposed to take well over a decade to become undeniable?

I definitely suspect that among the things learned so far from the Galactic Milieu is that if it had "enjoyed" the popularity that Axie did it would have gone down in flames (as Axie maybe did?)

Basically it seems to me that the game ultimately has to be huge compared to the population of "value-extracting" players otherwise, simply, all value will rapidly be extracted and it will die.

In other words it must be a store of value, and, more, it must accumulate value to store.

Thus ultimately it needs to be an economic engine that "ratchets" value, building layer upon layer upon layer much like the history and pre-history of human progress, with deeper layers thus becoming "less liquid, more infrastructural" as it were.

Presumably even now many bridges, roads, monuments and so on can in principle be bought and sold, but in practice I think a whole lot of that stuff tends to end up more like "public works" where it is not so much bought and sold between entities but, rather, where entities form around it, municipalities, nations, civilisations, foundations and so on grow around it.

In "Civilisation" type games like FreeCiv you do see buying and selling of cities, but by-and-large at that scale there is more involved in the changing "ownership" of things than just markets, there are gunships and gunship diplomacy and so on, ultimately empires and death-stars and on and on and on.

Thus ultimately I think it has to be about building accumulating and retaining value, not about "extracting" it.

Maybe almost like bitcoin's 51%-attack idea there has to be at least a slight majority of "makers not takers" else it simply all gets "taken" until nothing is left...

Fortunately for the Milieu it has not grown in player-base faster yet than it has grown in "take-able value", basically the pillagers have not yet overwhelmed the builders.

But it might very well be that ultimately that will come down to the players, can the builders out-pace the pillagers?

It is understandable that builders might see an incentive to keep the thing quiet and just build and build and build, rather than make noise attracting the attention of pillagers...


-MarkM-

Not sure if Lolcust is still around here, you might try the IRC channels if freenode is still running.

This coin is still running, and also has tokens running both on HORIZON platform and on STELLAR platform.

So it is itself in itself its own "meme", there is no need for a scam token that you indicate no intention to actually redeem for real hard specie coin on its own real original blockchain.

So please clarify whether your tokens are actual IOUs representing real XGG coins on their own blockchain and redeemable for such or are just another scam shit-token trying to scam people by pretending some fictitious relation to an existing classic coin...

Here are some real links for anyone interested in obtaining or trading real XGG coins:

https://makemoney.knotwork.com/horizon/assets/hzxgg/

https://horizon.blockspotter.org/asset/9135223305704161249

https://makemoney.knotwork.com/stellar/xgg/

https://stellar.expert/explorer/public/asset/XGG-GBHAQ252S4Z4AQOM4BWIRC3UHAOJIKCZQBUJGD336YH2O7W2NKRXMHA5


-MarkM-

This is kind of silly, because why do we here even need hype?

Just the long long term users here could almost certainly take almost any of our ancient coins and make vast successes of them without "outside" help, we just don't seem to have much if any "grass roots" efforts going on along those lines.

I am actually somewhat surprised it is taking so long for sentiment here to drift toward hey lets just go with what we already have and do it well instead of chasing more and more suspicious crap...


-MarkM-

There doesn't seem to be any character named Vlad on that server so should be no problem.

The name on that world of the deity that seems to be basically JCI (Judeo-Christio-Islamic) is Valriel, enemy of demons, cult monsters being angels and archangels and such...


-MarkM-

Well since you have not provided a Github repo or whatever - source code - it seems the only way to find out how you propose to secure a blockchain is to ask...


-MarkM-

I have yet to see anything using blockchain directly in the game that impresses me, in fact I have seen a lot of things ruined by directly using blockchain.

For example a whole category of card games that used to be played using cards and that often were played to win the other player's cards got ported to using NFTs as the "cards" and revealed a big flaw, since typically the NFT units or creatures or whatever never get consumed, except maybe by combining duplicates to forge a higher-level NFT of the same unit or creature or whatever; and with no ability to kill (destroy) the other player's cards let alone to win them from them by beating them in play.

But I totally disagree that blockchain has no use in games.

Way back when I made my Digitalis D'ydii Cluster game ( see my "curriculum vitae / Galactic Milieu" page, https://MakeMoney.Knotwork.com/ ) on the Apple IIe I made all local currency on the billions of trillions (or thereabouts, astronomical numbers) of planets be local to the planet because having a galactic or multigalactic currency was far-fetched given that ultimately a balance of trade would need to exist, a way to visit the planet(s) the currency was issued by or arrange to have goods "backing" the currency shipped to wherever one happened to be, or to have services provided by that planet, or some way of "backing" the currency that could not be blocked by barricading fleets and such.

Even when bitcoin was invented, revealing a plausible way of transferring actual value via communications rather than physical cargo carried in vehicles, I realised that if communications could be blockaded similar to how actual vehicles could be, there would still be the potential for sufficiently-blockaded planets' currency to be basically worthless in other solar-systems, galaxies, clusters of galaxies and so on, but still bitcoin seemed enough of an innovation to make it at least more plausible that a currency could become galactic or intergalactic given sufficiently-fast faster-than-light communications.

Of course the D'ydii Cluster, being inspired pretty directly by the pencil-and-paper tabletop Traveler RPG game, did not have FTL communications other than mail carried by FTL starships, but still, bitcoin seemed enough of an innovation to inspire me to go with a more Star Trek type mythos, in which faster than light communications does exist and thus blockchain-based currencies ought to be feasible.

Thus, although I do not have the component games of the Galactic Milieu directly use blockchains within the (free open source off the shelf already-existing often with at least a decade and maybe by now more than one decade of proven persistence and playability and often very dedicated populations of players) code of each component game, I tie them all together (the Knotwork slogan, "Tying it all together") with crypto...


-MarkM-

Not clear how you can have a blockchain and not a wallet, I am used to bitcoin-based coins where the wallet is usually built into the node.

Do you have github or sourceforge or suchlike?

Also though to be honest not clear why you even need a blockchain, what exactly does it record / provide?


-MarkM-