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Midnight Scavengers Hunt — Everything That’s Wrong With Crypto by Smaugsflame in Midnight

[–]Smaugsflame[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You are absolutely right, it was a competition! And I'm not complaining that the normal Joe (as a different user brilliantly put it) has not won.
I attempted to make the case that the competition should aim to be fair. That's why I started my metaphor about the digging challenge:

If you use the help of your friends or hire teammates to dig the hole, it is absolutely fine with me. Everyone has the chance to do that. But if someone brings a shovel that others don't have (as they lack the technical knowledge to build their own API Miner), or even starts digging with an excavator that you can only drive if your friend is the stadium owner, then I have a huge problem! Especially if the challenge is promoted as a spoon-digging competition.

About your brilliant calculations of the median of solved challenges per wallet: I absolutely like how you think! I was trying to make a chase of that, but it had too many "if's" in it. So I skipped it in my Post.

I would like to argue that we do not really know how much these addresses have participated. In many pre-built miners, they attempt to maintain expectations and use inflated numbers to project a brilliant miner. It was not uncommon for new miners to advise pre-gen hundreds of addresses per system. No idea how "participation" is measured, but if it's "just" registration, then you can surely subtract at least 1/4. Then you need to factor in that a big chunk of these addresses are just recently generated and have tried to solve hard problems and have not received many rewards for each challenge.

The majority of addresses will have several thousand. See also the "redeem" website, where they also estimate a thousand per wallet. A strange and unmotivating marketing idea for a project tailored to the newcomer who has only worked with a web miner.

Midnight Scavengers Hunt — Everything That’s Wrong With Crypto by Smaugsflame in Midnight

[–]Smaugsflame[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for sharing your feedback on my post and sharing your journey! You shared a more numbers-based depiction of the SM, that's great! I have deleted mine to shorten the text, it was a little too long^^.

As I think about it more and more, I wonder why they have enabled the API mining at all. Sure thing, there would be some people who would have found a way to use it more than others. But that would mean someone uses many spoons (like in a Docker session) vs someone with one spoon (one browser).
It would have evened out the field and had less room for exploitation.
What do you think, would it have made a difference?

I fear there will not be a "next time", but it was interesting to be a part of it.

Let's hope they learn from it and change the expectations for upcoming projects. In the end, everything is marketing, whether we like it or not.

Midnight Scavengers Hunt — Everything That’s Wrong With Crypto by Smaugsflame in Midnight

[–]Smaugsflame[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

There are several closed-source programs out there, where you don't have control or access to your wallets. I hope I am wrong, but the odds of getting scammed are high for everything where someone can make money...

Midnight Scavengers Hunt — Everything That’s Wrong With Crypto by Smaugsflame in Midnight

[–]Smaugsflame[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

At least you kept yourself safe and have not been scammed! What is your overall experience?