[ANN][HUC] Huntercoin - Worlds First Decentralized Game/World on the Blockchain

[domob]

If I am playing Huntercoin on the Mithrilman version, can I earn Huntercoin that are valid in the main chain?

Yes.  Mithrilman is just a nice UI client for the same game on the blockchain that everyone shares.  (A "somewhat exception" is wiggi's client with gems and other features - those are an actual extension of the core protocol, so that gems are only "valid" with the wiggi client or potential other clients that implement the same protocol in the future.)

[wiggi]

If I am playing Huntercoin on the Mithrilman version, can I earn Huntercoin that are valid in the main chain?

Yes.  Mithrilman is just a nice UI client for the same game on the blockchain that everyone shares.  (A "somewhat exception" is wiggi's client with gems and other features - those are an actual extension of the core protocol, so that gems are only "valid" with the wiggi client or potential other clients that implement the same protocol in the future.)

Not only the coins are the same, wallets are 100% compatible between Mithrilman's client (on v1.3 daemon) and betterQt client.
The code to read and write the wallets is exactly the same.

[Enticed87]

So a question I need to ask is how does one get started with HunterCoin from fresh ?

What does one need to have a wallet to solo mine to ?

Play the game with ?

What is the latest software and is there a fork or something ?

[The Bitcoin Co-op]

https://www.huntercoin.info/ seems stucked at block 1285244   (actually it's 1286064)

still stucked....

SnailBrain's in Italy at the moment, maybe hiding until the Brexit fallout is over, but he informed BGB, the site operator. Should get taken care of.

So a question I need to ask is how does one get started with HunterCoin from fresh ?

What does one need to have a wallet to solo mine to ?

Play the game with ?

What is the latest software and is there a fork or something ?

I'm not sure about mining, but there is set-up info on the website about it here: http://huntercoin.org/information/how-to-mine/hardware/

MithrilMan's client is currently the easiest to play the game with, in my opinion: http://www.mithrilman.com/Huntercoin

There's no forks going on that you need to worry about. We have been discussing the possibility of soft fork-esque things in the future, however, to add optional new gameplay features and content

[wiggi]

playing with a clean new Mint18, 64bit, in virtualbox. I like this one, it doesn't feel like secretly coded in java (17 did)


In the dependencies as stated in http://huntercoin.org/downloads/compile-guide/
libdb++-dev has to replace libdb5.1++-dev
so:

Code:

sudo apt-get install libboost-chrono-dev libboost-date-time-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-program-options-dev libboost-serialization-dev libboost-system-dev libboost-thread-dev
sudo apt-get install libboost-dev git qt4-qmake libqt4-dev build-essential qt4-linguist-tools libssl-dev
sudo apt-get install libdb++-dev

The install order is important (otherwise can't build from Qt Creator menu). First full update with the console (sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade)

Then Qt Creator (search "qt" in Software Manager), and then the dependencies.


git clone https://github.com/wiggi/huntercoin.git
This huntercoin-qt.pro file will also allow to load the old v1.3 release (https://github.com/chronokings/huntercoin) in Qt Creator. Perhaps it makes still sense to create wallets with it.


It was rather difficult to get it to load the blockchain (copied from a 32bit mint17.3) for the first time. iirc deleting "database" folder + starting with an empty wallet (but not with no wallet) finally made the difference between "EXCEPTION: 11DbException  Db::open: Invalid argument  huntercoin in Runaway exception" and no complaints at all -- need to test this with chain.huntercoin.org too.

A non-safemode build with some extra features for 64bit Mint18/Ubuntu 16.04 will be in the next binary release (for block 1300000).

[wiggi]

What does one need to have a wallet to solo mine to ?

I'm not sure about mining, but there is set-up info on the website about it here: http://huntercoin.org/information/how-to-mine/hardware/

If you compare the difficulty and price per coin of Huntercoin vs Litecoin then all scrypt blocks currently produced are merge-mined, but they don't look like f2p blocks...

[The Bitcoin Co-op]

I think losing mining pool support was good for the price; HUC is uptrending, now. New theory: the remaining Huntercoin miners are now more likely to be Huntercoin fans who keep some or all of their HUC, instead of selling all their mining profits immediately

[Icon]

So here is a question, how is a solo miner going to mine a merged mined coin.. ie: huc?

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[jwinterm]

So here is a question, how is a solo miner going to mine a merged mined coin.. ie: huc?

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You don't have to merge mine HUC or any auxpow coin, but it'd be kind of a waste not to. Typically you setup a p2pool node for the main coin, and configure it to solo mine the auxpow coin(s). I haven't actually tried mining HUC, since it has been dominated by f2pool for so long (and I don't have any ASICs anymore), but here is a guide I wrote for merge mining Unitus with parent coin Myriad. I think the steps would be generally the same: sync both daemons, setup p2pool node to mine LTC or BTC, then configure p2pool node to merge solo mine HUC.

[MithrilMan]

I'd like to know how the sha256 decay over time, because I think that soon any solo miner could try to mine

using setgenerate command on QT/daemon should start mining using the configured algo i don't remember if default algo is sha256 o scrypt


so the question is: now that there aren't sha256 blocks since days, what's current difficulty, would be possible to solomine on a PC "soon"?

[jwinterm]

I'd like to know how the sha256 decay over time, because I think that soon any solo miner could try to mine

using setgenerate command on QT/daemon should start mining using the configured algo i don't remember if default algo is sha256 o scrypt


so the question is: now that there aren't sha256 blocks since days, what's current difficulty, would be possible to solomine on a PC "soon"?

Difficulty doesn't retarget until a block or some blocks are found. Not sure what the retarget is on HUC, but since it's an older coin I'd guess it's probably closer to Bitcoin's 2000 block diff retarget than a lot of newer coins single block diff retarget. In any event, diff won't budge until someone finds a block or coin hard forks, afaik.

[domob]

I'd like to know how the sha256 decay over time, because I think that soon any solo miner could try to mine

using setgenerate command on QT/daemon should start mining using the configured algo i don't remember if default algo is sha256 o scrypt


so the question is: now that there aren't sha256 blocks since days, what's current difficulty, would be possible to solomine on a PC "soon"?

Difficulty doesn't retarget until a block or some blocks are found. Not sure what the retarget is on HUC, but since it's an older coin I'd guess it's probably closer to Bitcoin's 2000 block diff retarget than a lot of newer coins single block diff retarget. In any event, diff won't budge until someone finds a block or coin hard forks, afaik.

Difficulty is updated per block, I think using something similar to PPC at the time (but I was not involved in the original design there).  But yes, you need to find at least one block at current difficulty, I think.

[MithrilMan]

I'd like to know how the sha256 decay over time, because I think that soon any solo miner could try to mine

using setgenerate command on QT/daemon should start mining using the configured algo i don't remember if default algo is sha256 o scrypt


so the question is: now that there aren't sha256 blocks since days, what's current difficulty, would be possible to solomine on a PC "soon"?

Difficulty doesn't retarget until a block or some blocks are found. Not sure what the retarget is on HUC, but since it's an older coin I'd guess it's probably closer to Bitcoin's 2000 block diff retarget than a lot of newer coins single block diff retarget. In any event, diff won't budge until someone finds a block or coin hard forks, afaik.

oh, it's bad

looking on blockexplorer, one of the last (if not the last) sha block generated is this:
https://www.huntercoin.info/blockExplorer/block/77a1c71bf465baf598cf4cef7273d31c31e3aced84a85a26187001e313d02f2f

that's block 1289071, and its difficulty is 2260481872.0455 that sounds huge to me...so we are pretty stuck now, because it's unlikely that anyone will be able to find a so difficult block in 2 minutes (scrypt block time)

Didn't we need that f2pool at least generate a single block again now?
at the moment game is very very slow and only script blocks are generated (and less frequent than 2 minute)

[domob]

I don't really know the current state of ASIC miners, so I don't really know how hard it is to find a block at that difficulty.  But note that "within two minutes" is not really the correct point of view:  Mining is a Poisson process anyway, and the chances of finding a block are just the same at every moment.  It is not like recreating your block after a new scrypt block comes in somehow "invalidates" the work you did before - you just keep trying and at one point you are lucky.

[MithrilMan]

I don't really know the current state of ASIC miners, so I don't really know how hard it is to find a block at that difficulty.  But note that "within two minutes" is not really the correct point of view:  Mining is a Poisson process anyway, and the chances of finding a block are just the same at every moment.  It is not like recreating your block after a new scrypt block comes in somehow "invalidates" the work you did before - you just keep trying and at one point you are lucky.

correct me if I'm wrong, but i knew that (speaking simple) the block generation depends on previous generated block and the pending transactions it has to include, so you compute block hashes using transaction as inputs (and other stuff, nonce, etc..), and then look for a result that satisfy the expected result of the block generation formula (and difficult comes into play because it requires that the result is more precise, technically the number of leading zeroes in the computed hash change depending on difficulty)
I don't want to dive too much on details about nonce, merkle tree, etc.. but just trying to figure it out

Anyway the point is that afaik, in the blockchain computation formula, you have to consider the previous block hash, this mean that if a new block is generated by scrypt, your currently computing block is invalid and you must throw away your work and start recomputing using the new block header (so you must discharge the already included transaction in the other block, etc...)

this mean that if the formula is hard to compute and your chance to find it requires lot of GigaHash, it's unlikely that you'll ever find a block

Isn't this right? If yes, than we have a problem.

[snailbrain]

on vacation atm - but :

the difficulty for sha256 won't adjust until a block is mined.
it uses PPC's original smooth re targeting algo, so re-targets every block.

for sha256 we would need someone to mine one block or merge mine it - to lower the difficulty - the issue with it is that once it's lowered it's more open to abuse i think (could be unavoidable no matter what without the biggest bitcoin pool mining it).

Personally - i'd vote at changing the sha256 algo to something else anyway - something we could all have a go at mining? ... it could coincide with huntercore release which i think is good to go pretty much or wait till later.
maybe change scrypt as well (keeping dual algo though?)

1 advantage is the coin distribution could work out better? it may also give it a boost - coins that can be mined by many seem to do pretty well i believe.

we could even change the coin distrubution for the game - so maybe 80% of coins are collected from mining and 20% from in game - until there are more players? - just a random thought but i think we should be thinking about this sort of thing.

i may not get chance to respond until Monday.

[jwinterm]

I like the suggestions from snailbrain.

Another option would be to add more algorithms a la myriad, where sha and scrypt are merge mineable and the other three are targeted towards GPUs and CPUs, although this increases the complexity of the system, it reduces the impact if one algo stops finding blocks.

At the other extreme is switching to a single algo like cryptonight that is supposed to be pretty equitable in terms of CPU and GPU performance, or even just scrypt - Doge et al seem to do ok just merge mining with LTC.

I'm not sure about changing distribution of mined to game coins, since the focus of the currency is the game (human mineable), I think at least 50% of rewards should go there, or just keep current setup.

For the short term, someone could rent some hashing power to try to get sha unstuck.

[The Bitcoin Co-op]

I don't really know the current state of ASIC miners, so I don't really know how hard it is to find a block at that difficulty.  But note that "within two minutes" is not really the correct point of view:  Mining is a Poisson process anyway, and the chances of finding a block are just the same at every moment.  It is not like recreating your block after a new scrypt block comes in somehow "invalidates" the work you did before - you just keep trying and at one point you are lucky.

correct me if I'm wrong, but i knew that (speaking simple) the block generation depends on previous generated block and the pending transactions it has to include, so you compute block hashes using transaction as inputs (and other stuff, nonce, etc..), and then look for a result that satisfy the expected result of the block generation formula (and difficult comes into play because it requires that the result is more precise, technically the number of leading zeroes in the computed hash change depending on difficulty)
I don't want to dive too much on details about nonce, merkle tree, etc.. but just trying to figure it out

Anyway the point is that afaik, in the blockchain computation formula, you have to consider the previous block hash, this mean that if a new block is generated by scrypt, your currently computing block is invalid and you must throw away your work and start recomputing using the new block header (so you must discharge the already included transaction in the other block, etc...)

this mean that if the formula is hard to compute and your chance to find it requires lot of GigaHash, it's unlikely that you'll ever find a block

Isn't this right? If yes, than we have a problem.

It is true that transactions are used as inputs to the Merkle tree that composes a block, and that when a new block is mined, you start crunching new transactions and data as old ones have now already been confirmed and included in the chain.

However, this has no negative impact. Effort spent hashing from a previous block header is not wasted, as hashing does not make future hashing more likely to find the correct answer. Every time you calculate a hash, you have the same chance of calculating the correct one. The most work you could have to "throw away" would be a single hash calculation (if somebody found a block in the middle of it), but those are tiny. We make millions per second.

[The Bitcoin Co-op]

Alright, guys, I think we're not going to be having any problems. A friend here in Canada (where electricity is cheap and excess heat is welcome) owns a mining facility, and he says that at our current SHA256 difficulty he could solve it in approximately 1 week by dedicating 1 terahash. He will do this upon the Halvening if we set him up with our stratum, and username/password if he needs that.

The Halvening will be upon us before SnailBrain is back from Italy, so anybody who wants this to happen more immediately is welcome to reach out and help with set up.

[Icon]

1 th/s ? Well hack i could do that with nicehash, thing is.. is there even a server running to mine too?

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