- On vacation for a week. wont be able to bugfix or develop in that time -

If you see any errors or have suggestion please note them here. I will try to batchfix it all in one week and set the stage for the final launch of the game.

Good question ;0)

First of all the game will run on real bitcoins once it is tested enough to make sure that people wont loose hard earned BTC due to my bugs.
Those virtual forks (named: chains) are what you say, virtual coins. But what else are i0coins, ixcoins or SolidCoins? Basically they are comparable. People trade them with real BTC although they have but only virtual value that stems from the computing power put into them. And that is the aim of this game - adding another way of trading virtual currencies (or valuables if you want to call them that way) with real BTC with the big advantage that noone would have to put their miners away from the main Blockchain.

That is right. Currently everything is purely virtual as there is no point asking you people to throw money at my bugs. In the Alpha version i have had to redesign stuff ever so often that using real BTC would be not right now...

Yet once the game is opened you can add real BTC to your account and pay with these certain fees and of course, gamble on the exchange on the page. if enough people would do this the main aim could be reached with this game: lower the need for pump&dump forks of bitcoin. You could pump and dump on those viortual forks and try to make some BTC on the exchange which you then, of course, could withdraw.
But until i am sure noone looses his hard earned real BTCs due to any programming errors i will keep it as is: purely virtual.

I think that the coming week, when i am not home, might be a good.. shakedown cruise. If noone finds any major bugs in that time i gonna start the game early october.




Todays work:
- A lot of work on the codebase. Many optimisations
- Numbers check fixed (again..and again.. and again..)
- Maximum global Hashrate and Pushing the limit by donating to the faucet
- Faucet code (offline due to the simple reason that no real BTC is involved yet
- Single Click / Double Click behaviour
- Change your Desktop's background color (wallpaper maybe later..)

There has to be a reset before i ca really start the game. Currently the game has more than 30 virtual BTC floating arround in its economy.. i cannot afford to put these into the game to make it work with real BTC right from the start. BUT i am not sure on how i gonna benefit the testers. might be i just leave you guys your rigs as they are but just reset your balances. Again, some matter for discussion , but at the moment i'd say that testers of course get some advantage, but i dont know yet which...


Deposal and withdrawal are already tested and work as it is. I would not recommend sending Bitcoins yet into the game since i cannot add them to your account without starting much confusion. Thing just is, that all the money that will be on the wallet (some of mine so far) will be directed into the faucet so that this feature will be available right from the start.




So.. what did i do the last days.. i have rewritten some larger chunks for performance reasons and to ensure future compatibility with coming stuff. What you see now on the page is a "control center" which is not connected to the system yet but may work as a starting point for the upcoming changes. This includes the "power costs" system. There is always an upper limit for the global hashing amount. With a donation of 0.01BTC to the faucet this limit is raised by 100,000vH (equal to about 20 fully upgraded rigs).
My Goes is to do the following on sunday:

- Change background color, maybe add a personal wallpaper
- Set the icons on the desktop to either react on Click or DoubleClick
- Add E-Mail alerts for various Events (new Chain e.g.)

If there is time for it:
- Add the Faucet code
- clean up some exchange code, add transaction cancelling capability.

"Problem" is that i will be gone for a week (till Oct. 4th) and therefore not able to continue developing this for that time frame. So i will try to make it as usable as possible by tomorrow evening.
Going to bed now.. 3:20am

Fixed. Had a typo in the Database query. Sorry for that. Had to delete your account ><


Of course this will be done only once the game is launched. Looking at the DB i have roughly 25 users right now (most of which are inactive) and so this wont be of use yet. Also i dont use real BTCs yet, which is also a reason not use that faucet already.



Thanks for liking the UI :0)
That is doable. Will do that tonight.

I think about adding a customization center somewhere where people can edit this behaviour as well as wallpaper and so on. But this is low on my list of priorities at the moment.


I will also add a testing environment under virtualminer.eu/testing/ where i upload most recent changes for testing them myself so they wont interfere with the regular stuff. Once i have found them working there i will add them to the normal game. So - if some of you want to play this game the way it is developed just use that link but be warned that not everything works as supposed there..

Ok.. changes i did to the game this morning:

- Chrome compatibility:
From what i can see the game is fully chrome compatible now. If you still encounter problems dont hesitate to tell me

- Number checks:
These vile number checks are now re-enabled and should work as supposed. For some reference or help i have made this file http://virtualminer.eu/test.php to test various formats and look if they fit. If someone here spots something missing or obviously wrong then tell me.

- Rename Rigs
You can now rename rigs. If you click on the managment page on the rigs name a form will be presented to you. Note: When the name is changed the browser needs to refresh.

- Power costs
I've been thinking a lot about this thing and i think i will somewhat include this in a way. I dont want to impose fees for playing, what this actually would be (like draining .0001 BTC from your balance each 24hrs.) so i need to find another solution. My idea is to have a maximum power allocated for ALL USERS and when that is reaching critical levels people have to "donate" BTC in order to increase it. The money from these donations would go into a faucet for new Bitcoiners and would be unrelated to the game itself. So i have a cap for "network power" and no fees that could make me look greedy.

Of course the game keeps running even when youre offline :0)

You can register now. The changes to the validation code i did earlier this night for numbers somehow made every registration invalid. I will totally rewrite the number/word-validation tomorrow. Its now 2:30am and i take a nap. Afterwards i will

- rewrite number/word validation
- Chrome compatibility
- rig renaming

Thats on my list :0)

Should be fixed. There was a copy/paste mistake between the old and the new version..

The thing with the multiple new rigs is due to using the back button. In the end it shouldnt be needed at all on the page.. but happens when an error occurs. I will just say that this bug will be gone once no more "back" is needed ;0)

Still cant reproduce.. but i will try to change the validation tomorrow morning again... strange.


The idea is good.. but what should i charge? Could i possibly drain on the submitted BTC? Thats not what i want (dont want to impose fees that arent really neccessary..). I have prepared a global maximum on hashing capacity that people will be able to rause in future with donations.. its only prepared atm and not yet decided upon. But electrical fee has some appeal..

Can you give me examples of what numbers you enter? Valid are formats are "1" "1.1" "1,1" - should be working.. basically..

Got to look into that again. Both pages used different approaches on validation of the imput..


Ok.. confirmed. I will try to make this chrome compatible.



Thats right. prices are, at the moment, pure random numbers i entered once. My idea was that noone will invest 1BTC right from the start into the game so it would make a difference if you pay 0.025 for a rig or 0.0025. But its good that you start that topic here and now. Prices are all discussable and i am also thinking that it is, as it is too cheap atm (except for new chains)

Alright.. i have updated the game to the newest version and it now is in the Beta phase.

Rules apply again as before. New users get 1 virtual BTC to play with, deposits and withdraws wont work yet. Existing user accounts have been resetted.
Please comment on any bugs you find as well as on the game itself in general.

Thanks :0)

i might add that this version in the picture is not online yet, but will come online this night (CET) or tomorrow...

Just to show what is now being build:

Well.. thats a good idea and it has been noted..
But - currently i rewrite the game (for the third time in its existence) so dont worry if you dont see updates atm. The version you all test was meant to be the final one day but now is just some testing ground for most functions.. i will release soon version 3 which then should finally be the one to call "final" ^^

Alright.. after the first few days of testing i came accross several bugs and some ideas on how to improve the UI. If everything goes well i can start the Beta phase next week

Just solved some minor bugs that were noticed during the night. ..

API Information

I currently offer a limited API for interaction. All functions return JSON statements and can be called via virtualminer.eu/api.php

Syntax for the currently available commands:

   api.php?a=action&p1=param1&p2=param2&p3=param3&p4=param4

   Action: GetChains
   Params:
   Return: List of all Chains and their Parameters

   Action: GetTicker
   Params: p1 = ChainID
   Return: High/Low/Last of the Chain defined in p1

   Action: GetLast
   Params: p1 = ChainID, p2 = Number of Items
   Return: Get the p2 last transactions for the Chain defined in p1



Planned:
- Rig managment (rename, upgrade etc)
- Trading (once the exchange works as expected..)
- User to User Coin Transfer
more?

What is it about?

„Virtual Mining“ is a game unlike any other currently found in the BTC community. In contrast to most other games VM is neither a gambling site, nor a Ponzi scheme to give most money to only a handful of people. In VM every user has the chance to make the same amount of money, no pyramid anywhere.
So in just a few words – what is VM?
As the name says: Virtual Mining is virtual mining.
It seemed to become sort of a trend to spawn new forks for fast pump and dump. This lead to some serious opportunities to make money but It always had an impact on the BTC network since it had drawn computing power away from the real network. Also most of the chains were rather short lived. So this game is meant to put this on a different level. In VM you are meant to create virtual rigs and point them on virtual forks, here called “chains” (short for Blockchains). As of now there will be up to 5 parallel chains around and everyone can mine with as many virtual rigs on those.
As in real BitCoin you earn coins from mining which can be traded for Bitcoins on the site’s exchange. Therefore this game is basically a virtual BitCoin network.

So what are the rules?
Currently the game is running in a testing phase – therefore all of the rules are negotiable, except the one about cheating

-   Every user may “Buy” up to 30 rigs per account
  o   A rig can be upgraded 7 times
  o   A rig costs 0.025 Btc (including 100vMH (virtual MegaHash)) any upgrade 0.005 BTC per 100vMH

-   Users can create new Chains
  o   There can be a maximum 10 parallel active chains
    x   A chain is flagged inactive after 24 hrs. of no one mining it anymore
    x   A chain is deactivated (unminable and untradeable, 24hrs after flagging inactive)
    x   Every new chain costs 0.125BTC for every Chain already in existence. The first one is free, the 2nd costs 0.125, the third 0.25 and so on..
  o   There is currently no upper limit on coins created nor a way to premine coins. This might come later.

-   To prevent bubbling on the exchange a fee of 0.3% exists on all trades. Fees go into a Faucet

-   Deposits are handled with a unique address every time. A deposition is “valid” and added to the account after 4 confirmations.

-   There is a small fee of 0.01BTC on withdrawal. This is to keep the server alive and cover transfer costs.

-   “Cheating”
  o   “In theory, as the service operator, I could keep the bitcoins for myself. I'm not going to do this, but I completely accept that people do not trust the service operator. It is their freedom of choice, and Bitcoin is about freedom.” (slush)


Screenshot:


Have fun and please report every bug or suggestion here