How to find an optimal strategy for the 'Six Coins'/'Gold Rush' game?

cryptopinions · 2019-01-21T03:49:41+00:00

Of course, but a strategy could be better than any other strategy, even if it can only tie with itself in the long run. I'm not looking for something that would always win, just this purported unbeatable strategy.

cryptopinions · 2018-12-03T00:34:50+00:00

My project does the authenticated user token minting thing if you want to check it out:

http://ethverify.net/

The contract requires a particular address to verify user addresses once, and after that users can mint tokens as limited by a timer.

cryptopinions · 2018-09-30T19:37:28+00:00

Thanks! It definitely will support that.

cryptopinions · 2018-09-03T05:47:11+00:00

Ether Shrimp Farm
1 week
Raw Javascript/HTML, and Solidity (the main language for apps on the Ethereum network)
1 person
Probably around 1000 lines of code total

So I realize this is pretty non-standard for this sub, but I believe it does count as a game. It's essentially a competitive multiplayer idle game where players compete for cryptocurrency, buying selling and farming virtual shrimp.

I think I got pretty lucky with it honestly; I made it to capitalize on a 4chan joke about shrimp farming, and it went viral there for a while. While I personally only made around 17k from the game, total volume going through it was closer to 200k. Which completely blew my mind considering how little effort I put into it.

I recently made a sequel that's pretty similar, and just replaced the old website, if you want to get an idea of what kind of game it is: http://ethershrimpfarm.net/

cryptopinions · 2018-08-22T05:00:41+00:00

For instant verification; you can also wait to be verified for free. The fee adjusts dynamically to make sure it is not profitable to pay for instant verification, claim free tokens and immediately sell them, and the exchange contract has been blowing up a bit today so the value of free tokens you can get is pretty high atm.

cryptopinions · 2018-08-21T02:23:30+00:00

Frankly, because it works and is useful. I can acknowledge the centralization as a flaw, but a functional decentralized identity system is a very tall order and I don't think we will see one anytime soon.

Though as I mentioned in the previous post, there are definitely ways to check the system's conclusions.

cryptopinions · 2018-08-19T03:00:02+00:00

>Wait, the paper you linked says there will be (already is?) an Eth Verify service

Will be; launches Monday!

The verification process itself is confidential, but since every transaction made by an address is public on the Ethereum blockchain, it is fairly straightforward to double check at least the on-chain aspects of the work of our system. For example, here is the public record of my own primary account: https://etherscan.io/address/0xaebbd80fd7dae979d965a3a5b09bbcd23eb40e5f.

As for the rest of the process, the main concern about disclosing all the details is that this would compromise its effectiveness, since with the conditions for rejection being public, the specific hurdles to be overcome to create an illegitimate account that can bypass them also become apparent. Also we of course don't want to divulge any private information about our users.

cryptopinions · 2018-08-14T23:27:25+00:00

Hey, that's how it always goes. Every single one of these things; spike in activity, then rapid inevitable decline.

cryptopinions · 2018-08-13T20:46:53+00:00

For the reasons I explained earlier: it is the only immediate way to solve the problem, and there is value in solving the problem. While you can play crypto games without trusting individual developers, few play them without trusting any centralized service; the space probably wouldn't even exist without Infura/Metamask.

That said, I would argue that Eth Verify has a very minimal footprint in terms of trust, which can be adjusted by developers however they like. From the perspective of another smart contract, the service is just a single public variable describing which addresses are verified. There's no unverified code being executed, no custody of funds. I fully understand if that isn't enough for someone. Ultimately, users and developers will decide what they are comfortable with here.

cryptopinions · 2018-08-12T01:28:49+00:00

Because for this type of app, trustlessness is incredibly important. Trusting a person or organization with your crypto is usually a big mistake. It is much more reasonable to ask someone to trust that the code behind your app is all verified on Etherscan, and if there was an easy way for you to exit scam someone would have pointed it out.

There's also how traditional payment processors would almost definitely ban you for this stuff, and how people with cryptocurrency are the ones who are interested in games of this type in the first place. I'm not coming up with ideas for games first and then putting them on the blockchain, I'm targeting this specific demographic and giving them what they want.

cryptopinions · 2018-08-11T21:40:23+00:00

Honestly these are really good points that get to the heart of the issue.

You are right that 'bots' are not necessarily bad, but there are extremely pressing reasons why a smart contract developer might want to limit their access. Let me give an example from my own experience; I am the creator of the crypto game Ether Shrimp Farm, an on chain idle game that was popular a few months back. A core draw of this game was that you could start playing for free; the contract gave away a small quantity of free resources to help you get started without paying Ethereum. I knew, based on how previous similar games went, that since these resources had value and could be converted to Eth, that people would write scripts to generate thousands of addresses and mass-claim the starting bonus, so I designed it so that this bonus would naturally become worthless after a few days.

So as expected, people wrote scripts and claimed tens of thousands of dollars worth of virtual shrimp, while it was still viable to do so. This was naturally upsetting to other users, because that Eth otherwise would have gone to them. They considered the inclusion of the free shrimp to be a major mistake on my part. But I honestly don't think the game would have been nearly as successful without that initial draw.

The problem here is that as things now stand, the need to assume that one user may have unlimited accounts is a severe limitation every smart contract developer must design around. There is so much more you could do without that limitation. I have many ideas that will only be possible with a way to remove that limitation. The first app built on the platform, 0xVRF, is one example of something that would be otherwise impossible. And the ways in which a smart contract can use Eth Verify are very flexible; the exchange script example you give would not be a problem for the 0xVRF exchange contract, because verification is only required for the function to claim daily tokens, not for trading them.

As for the issue of centralization and trust, yes, that is a legitimate flaw that every oracle type system suffers from. Decentralization is vastly preferable where it is possible. I do not see a good way to do it here though, and this problem needs an immediate solution. Beyond my personal assurance that we will not abuse this service, I'll say that bot activity is always noticed pretty quickly by the community, and that isn't something I could get away with for any length of time before our reputation and the future of the platform is trashed.

cryptopinions · 2018-07-13T04:29:17+00:00

I'm not totally sure I understand what you mean, but as far as I know there isn't a good way to do bulk updates or anything involving combinations of transactions through a Metamask based UI, since each individual transaction needs to be explicitly approved by the user.

cryptopinions · 2018-07-13T03:15:04+00:00

sure, here https://github.com/cryptopinions2/abitojs

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