VirtualMiner 2.0 - Discussion (Closed)

[EnergyVampire]

Hello Nachtwind,

This game looks very interesting and I would like to play it but I'm a still a bit confused (sorry, slow learner here  ).

Q1: Is this a browser based game only?
Q2: The mining rigs are purchased with BTCs, if I understand the rules correctly, but why would someone buy the newcoins I find?
Q3: Can mining rigs be purchased with newly found VirtualMinercoins?
Q4: Is there a "Guest" account so I can take a look around without having to register?





Edit: Added Q4

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[Nachtwind]

Hello Nachtwind,

This game looks very interesting and I would like to play it but I'm a still a bit confused (sorry, slow learner here  ).

Q1: Is this a browser based game only?
Q2: The mining rigs are purchased with BTCs, if I understand the rules correctly, but why would someone buy the newcoins I find?
Q3: Can mining rigs be purchased with newly found VirtualMinercoins?

1) Yes, its purely browser based (but you dont have to be logged in all the time.. (i say that because i have users that keep thinking logging off removes everything they have...

2) Well, the basic idea of Virtualminer almost a year back was to have an alternative to that trend to spawn altchains all over the place (i0coin, ixcoin, solidcoin, tenebrix..). There was not a single week without it's big new bitcoin fork.. and i just wanted to enable people to experiment with some characteristics of bictoin-like blockchains. So.. imho a virtual coin has about the same "value" as an altchain coin because people invest time and money - jsut like on Altcoins..
Also to bring some "real" value into those virtual coins i will start to sell virtualminer shares ingame for virtualcoins - so virtualcoins will gain some value due to that as well..

3) No.. this is a feature i would love to have but due to the low trading volume a single user could cheat that game by raising or lowering the value of a coin too fast.. i am working on an alternative though. I will enable people to sell THEIR rigs for virtual coins so people have to trade the price for virtual coins up to make a profit by selling stuff.. but as i said, i am still working on it and in quite an early stage with lots of RL getting in my way at the moment.

[EnergyVampire]

Thanks for the reply Nachtwind,

Sorry, I have one more question:

Q4: Is there a "Guest" account so I can take a look around without having to register?

[Nachtwind]

No there is not.. but you dont have to pay anything to start playing. Just register and look arround all you want

*edit* not even the mail address is really neccessary

[Matthew N. Wright]

We heard you liked mining so we put some mining in your mining so you could mine while you mine.

[Nachtwind]

We heard you liked mining so we put some mining in your mining so you could mine while you mine.

Umm.. am i allowed to quote that?

[NothinG]

We heard you liked mining so we put some mining in your mining so you could mine while you mine.

Umm.. am i allowed to quote that?

Only if you're Xibit.

[rjk]

We heard you liked mining so we put some mining in your mining so you could mine while you mine.

Umm.. am i allowed to quote that?

Only if you're Xibit.

[Nachtwind]

Development is a bit slowed at the moment... University is keeping me busy at the moment..

Still i will implement the following stuff later tonight:
- Limitation of vASICs.
The demand was higher than expected.. so i will limit the vASICs tonight...

Habanero: 1000x
Single: 250x
Bug Bomb 20x
Exterminator 10x
Beetlejuice 5x

That way those crazy speed increases i have seen in the last few weeks should be a bit smoothed..

- Rig Managment
At the moment you can only manage your rigs in the Desktop mode and i finally want to implement (if possible to finish debugging today) a second layer of managment in the website mode. Here you will be able to:
Set chains/pools for rigs, delete them or flag them for selling

- Rig market
Continuing the thought of aboves idea i will offer users the chance to sell their rigs/vasics to other users for virtual coins

- Stock market
I will add the final touches to the stockmarket for virtualminer shares.. Dividend will be consisting of fees for global upgrades and exchange fees. Currently the dividend pot is 0.25BTC.
This way i want to add some incentive to trade and to use the game and maybe add some more value to the virtual chains...

[wrend]

As a halve Joke:

I would like to develop some banking application, and an online wallet for Currencies in VirtualMiner.

Is there anyway to design applications compatible with VirtualMiner.

P.S. I see your game as the most original, I had ever came across.

[Nachtwind]

Hm... since coins are just numbers in a table here and not tied to a blockchain any form of offsite storage would lead to cheating or at least the chance of cheating.. if you like i can extend the existing (minimal) api till you can build stuff surrounding it.. we can PM about it..

[drakahn]

Hm... since coins are just numbers in a table here and not tied to a blockchain any form of offsite storage would lead to cheating or at least the chance of cheating.. if you like i can extend the existing (minimal) api till you can build stuff surrounding it.. we can PM about it..

just have a complete api, when you make a feature, have a way to do it by json (or whatever api) then we could make lots of offsite tools, hell even a fake bitcoin client and address system

[Nachtwind]

Basically thats true, but i have no way (yet) of securing transactions since i dont have a real blockchain running... but i will give it some thoughts...

[Nachtwind]

With regret i have to inform you of some... unprecedented actions.

Until now i only have banned a single user (with multiple accounts) for attacking the site with multiple mysql injections - none of which worked by the way. Turned out it was someone from this community who tests gambling and gaming websites for their security.

When i was redoing some work on the database i have had the.. excellent sensation of seeing strange values in there.. it seemed some users owned more coins than some chains would ever produce... which of course is not so fortunate for all the other users. One single user had put up sell orders of a volume of 6000+ BTC with a single coin having a value of 0.00000001 BTC.. you can imagine the numbers i suppose.
Therefore i deactivated some parts of the code (as in the good old times) but i also have banned the users that were identified cheating.

If you see your account not being able to log in anymore or receiving a message about being banned you should send me a pm and clear stuff up. As for the others... you will of course understand that i wont keep developing new features until i found that hole.. but its 1am and i have enough for today

[Nachtwind]

Luckily at least one case was solved right away: i banned a user who wasnt cheating but an old regular who has already played a few tiers of the game in the past.. so thats a relief :0)

Still the bug is here and i cannot seem to find the time to hunt it down.. sorry for that delay.
Currently deactivated:
Exchange
Cancelling trades

[wrend]

If you are able to secure it it you game would be very interesting. Please let us know when/if you find an issue.

This experience must be priceless to you, it terms of how much a developer learns in a process of development.

And if you would be able to give others ability to develop apps for your base system(which has to be secure), maybe it would be interesting to some? (is anyone interested?)

So in principle if people are able to make money your game will be popular.

As for cheating do you have a rollback mechanism, so that the numbers could be returned to before attack level.

Another thought: for some people best part of your game would be ability to cheat.

[Nachtwind]

I think i found the exploit and fixed it...

Anyway.. i have now added some minor stuff to the game and finally added the option to buy shares.
Dividend will be paid every 1st of the month automagically and consists of Trade Fees and the fees for upgrading the global hashing power. Therefore some of the money flows back to the users. Shares can only be bought with actively traded virtual coins - it is somewhat cheat prone in a sense that you cant just buy your own chain up easily, but this has to be tightened.. but as i dont have a real 24hr volume (yet! i hope) i have to do some workarround. Once i have real 24hr volumes the 24hr average algorithm will change.

About the API: I am still quite busy here but leave me a pm and let me know what API calls you need.. i then will implement them.


*edit*
vASIC prices are all 25% reduced till July 21st.

[Khanduras]

vASIC prices are all 25% reduced till July 21st.

They seem to be the same price they always were.

[film2240]

This is interesting as a concept and I hope it does well.So this is like:
1.Buying a 'virtual' mining rig which you then buy with BTC
2.Then buy virtual upgrades in hashpower to mine more coins.
3.You then exchange these coins for BTC/another currency.
If I understand correctly and explain this in a simplified manner,the steps I wrote above shoul more or less reflect what you're doing in this 'game'.

There are pros I see in this:
1.You don't need physical space to store regular mining rigs that physically exist.
2.No need to use electricity at your end so no utility bills for mining.
3.No noise and heat as this is hosted elsewhere and virtualised.
4.No need to constantly tweak and struggle with miner settings as this is all standardised (from what I can see) when you buy an upgrade.
5.You can still make BTC/alt currency while doing this.

The only con I can see is that you need BTC initially to start off with but it's easy enough to acquire (buy at an exchange,mine them normally for we short while,offer services/products,etc) but that's kind of obvious since nothing is free without a catch.

[Nachtwind]

vASIC prices are all 25% reduced till July 21st.

They seem to be the same price they always were.

Yeah.. i just checked it.. they SHOW the same price, but buying them is cheaper than regularly. My bad *changing this*

This is interesting as a concept and I hope it does well.So this is like:
1.Buying a 'virtual' mining rig which you then buy with BTC
2.Then buy virtual upgrades in hashpower to mine more coins.
3.You then exchange these coins for BTC/another currency.
If I understand correctly and explain this in a simplified manner,the steps I wrote above shoul more or less reflect what you're doing in this 'game'.

Thats the most basic idea.
The whole Virtualminer idea started back when Ixcoin, I0coin, Tenebrix, Fairbrix, Soiledcoin etc started. I was rather tired of this game that everyone needed to spawn his own little Bitcoin clone in order to test one or two features.. so back in the days Virtualminer was more aimed towards simulating a BTC like chain with somewhat changed parameters (payout, blocks till diff change etc). Within a short time very very early testers (Aug 11) found this to be rather a game then a simulation and since then i followed that idea and kept writing a game out of the main idea.

There are pros I see in this:
1.You don't need physical space to store regular mining rigs that physically exist.
2.No need to use electricity at your end so no utility bills for mining.
3.No noise and heat as this is hosted elsewhere and virtualised.
4.No need to constantly tweak and struggle with miner settings as this is all standardised (from what I can see) when you buy an upgrade.
5.You can still make BTC/alt currency while doing this.

That was yet another idea of having a total virtual cryptocurrency... for mining i0coin (e.g) people always removed physical mining power from the bitcoin blockchain and also chance was higher a newly created altcoin could get killed off by only a small amount of users. Therefore this total virtual approach

The only con I can see is that you need BTC initially to start off with but it's easy enough to acquire (buy at an exchange,mine them normally for we short while,offer services/products,etc) but that's kind of obvious since nothing is free without a catch.

Well... yes. You need BTC initially to start competitive playing - but the reason for this is simple: if people dont invest money, how should they give value to the chains? In real life you have to invest in mining equipment as well. If mining was completely for free Bitcoin had no value (in my opinion...). So this game bases arround the idea that users have to pay a little something in order to give them a feeling of "a coin has value". I have tried to strengthen this now by allowing to buy shares of the game with virtual coins, so users get real BTC for something they buy with virtual coins.

And thats one of the main problems with the game: with about 280 users there is still only a low amount of players who really invest time, and money and really try to make the chains work with some real value. Unfortunately the volume is so low that it is still cheat prone (sell a few days your own coins to yourself for a few BTC and you have the best selling chain) but i hope users can control that... at the moment the market is quite self regulating and i hope it will stay that way.. and of course that more people will join of course


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By the way. There was a short downtime between 2am and 9am today morning (CET) when the database somehow died.. nothing was lost though and the game continued normally.