Topic: [ANN] HORIZON (HZ) New ANN thread - page 2. (Read 1880 times)

I joined also - to forge Horizon...

Thanks for the kind words! I didn't do much really. Just saw that STELLAR was getting all the attention and HORIZON was left a bit out.
Hoped, maybe, that a guide could introduce new or curious people to the platform.

After all, curiosity can be very profitable sometimes

First of all, thank you for actively trying to help people get up and running in this topic! Seems a little lonely here

Second, I do have those in my conf. And a few other addresses I found from a Wizard's web UI.

Let's just say this guy might be the first WINDOWS user to successfully download the complete Horizon blockchain as well as actively run a Java server while forging blocks from his own locally hosted UI

I just wish more people understood but its devs and community members like you that help people like me realize the value is as (secretly) strong on this platform as it is in the humanity of these devs/business figureheads who get constantly shit on in the media. Perhaps that protects the chain from self centrists. And maybe I'll never get a USD value out of HZ that one would think worthwhile to put in the effort. But I will run this server forever, so long as I can maintain it. It was the most challenging experience in setting it up - but I learned so much and persistence paid off. At least in what I find valuable.

I had the same problem syncing it for the first time. Have you tried adding these to the config file?
nhz.defaultPeers=lfm.knotwork.com; ufbsh.no-ip.org
nhz.wellKnownPeers=lfm.knotwork.com; ufbsh.no-ip.org
nhz.minNumberOfKnownPeers=1
nhz.minNumberOfForkConfirmations=1

Don't know if that's is the best solution but it worked for me the first time. The nodes I set up are currently offline. Will get one up once I can.

Unfortunately I have tried version 5.2, 5.3, 5.4 of the Java client. I am updated to Java 8. My firewall allows TCP connections for 7774 and 7776 and I'm still getting a message that I am finished downloading the blockchain using the nodes mentioned all over these Horizon threads... Everytime around 25% of the blocks have downloaded and then done. It won't start again if I restart and exec run.bat. I'm using Windows 10 and would really love to run my own node since I just bought another 5,200+ HZ tokens on STELLAR and sent them to knotwork on keybase to exchange for blockchain coins. Just being responsible. What if LFM.knotwork.com:7776 disappears? I want to support the network

If I could merit you I would! Thanks for sharing just saw today!

Been using mine to buy the various assets MarkM listed on HORIZON platform but I do have 30 or so HZ left

Also, I'm happy to share I finally got this thing running and downloading blocks on Windows 10! Before paper wallets and MarkM's hosted web UI gateway got me access to Horizon. I'm glad I finally figured out how to get it to sync and not stall

Considering doing a tutorial to help others. What a great great project to run a node for

Anyone out there still holding HZ and wanting to sell some? Asking for a friend...

HORIZON (HZ) IS still running!

HOW-TO GUIDE:
https://medium.com/@Raf21/horizon-hz-a-how-to-guide-bda4e415819a

Nodes currently active:

lfm.knotwork.com
ufbsh.no-ip.org
157.245.160.26
192.214.140.198
157.245.138.247

Hi markm,

not to be snarky, but I believe VirWox could be a reason that decimals tend to be a bit of a problem when trying to create more than one currency using a decimal point.  In Nova Scotia, I'm sure you are used to using "." whereas over in French Canada it is common to use "," (comma). I found out up to 75 countries uses commas, with some not using decimal point or decimal comma seperators at all. For instance, Sierra Leonean Leones use "Cents" as a subdivision, just meaning one hundred cents make up one (ISO 4217) "SLL"... SLL happens to be used by the Paypal to Virwox "SLL" (Second Life Linden) trade which is a common way people get PayPal deposits onto an exchange (VirWox is a virtual currency exchange) for BTC, which they can exchange for their SLL. Perhaps the HORIZON network knows this since Stellar/IBM World Wire use ISO 4217 codes already. Therefore, whatever currency you created with a "decimal point" is likely "the" decimal point currency in HORIZON platform's mind.  I would assume HORIZON communicates with enough API to help relay info from IBM World Wire to Stellar.

Then again, I'm just a noob. Maybe try using a "," for other currencies to as the decimal point. If you want 0.0001 BTC/(any "currency" - money in circulation) try 0,0001.  If none else works, consider 100 stroops is a denomination of XLM and used on Horizon already as well since it communicates with both horizon.stellar.org and the testnet.stellar.org (or whatever the stellar or horizon testnet site is).

Maybe VirWox trading SLL as a virtual currency for "real life" currency such as EUR and USD as seen on virwox.com is the problem here.

The three latest virwox updates are pretty sporadic but with one around the time of some chaos within AXIOM splitting from the Milieu in part and HZ seemingly "abandoned" but kept alive as part of the Milieu maybe some of these VirWox changes and future actions mean something:

HZ can now be traded on the Stellar network.

See http://makemoney.knotwork.com/stellar/

-MarkM-

Someone created a "Discord" for HORIZON, here is an invite link: https://discord.gg/CG4n5MQ

-MarkM-

Well I managed to make my minimalist change take effect (by killing and restarting my browser), only to discover that they are not relying just on preventing you from typing in decimals; there are also further checks so although my change let me type in some decimals for HZ price of an asset that itself has 8 decimals, I was on submission of the form told there was an error in the input.

So I don't think I am going to persevere with the change, in case there are all kinds of places checking this, like maybe it could check when creating blocks, or when transmitting transactions, or gosh knows where else.

I am just going to assume they must have good reasons for the restriction, and avoid making assets with 8 decimals in future even if the asset is intended to represent coins that normally, on their own blockchains, do have 8 decimals.

In the meantime this does mean cheap coins will run into problems more and more as their price falls toward the price of a HZ, and the HORIZON platform will cease to be useful for actually doing non-manual trading of them when they are worth less than a HZ.

For now what the heck folks can always go ahead and use the STELLAR platform instead for such assets if they want to use an automated market rather than just do manual trades with trusted partners by sending them something and being sent something in return.

(The spot markets are so far mostly used just as a way for folks to easily get a few HZ to pay fees with anyway, by trying to keep some small buy offers in place for each asset so when folks get their assets on the HORIZON platform they can sell one or a few for a few HZ to get them started; really most actual trading takes place manually, generally by consulting the current prices shown at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/latestrates.inc and adjusting for whatever markup or markdown the parties agree to and for any drift they feel may exist between the "latest rates" when they were calculated and the current state of the actual, possibly quite volatile, markets.)

A bit of a pity maybe for players who do not like the idea of having to commit ten STELLAR Lumens per trust line in order to trade on the STELLAR platform, but then again once you have committed that the actual transaction fees on the STELLAR network look like they could be a lot cheaper than the 1 HZ fee on HORIZON, depending of course how expensive a whole Lumen gets to be and how cheap a single HZ turns out to be.

I guess it is a bit of a pity for DeVCoin too since it means it will take longer for us to be able to get around to starting to try to get folks to actually buy DeVCoins in order to pay debts that are denominated in DeVCoins. (Currently because DeVCoins are so cheap compared to the size of the debts typically we just let folks pay in some other currency by looking up the current price in DeVCoins of the asset they want to pay with in the above-mentioned "Latest Rates" include-file, which has had the unfortunate result of allowing the vast amount of DeVCoin-denominated debt to not actually cause the price of DeVCoin to increase.)

-MarkM-

sorry, I can't remember off hand right now- the information does exist somewhere, though.
there were very lively discussions about decimals in the NXT community.

I was not an NXT core dev (no java), but I wrote a bunch of apps in python using the NXT API and I also issued a bunch of assets.
most of them testing assets on the Phoenix blockchain.

all too long ago to remember details- you can trawl the old NXT forum for info on this, I am sure the discussions are there, or you could ask on the ARDOR slack, the devs are still there, and also some old timers.

https://nxtforum.org
https://ardornxt.slack.com (invite should be on NXT forum or ARDOR forum, or in ARDOR thread here)

my personal recommendation would be to start with a fresh blockchain for your own purposes if it is feasible for you,
the code has matured considerably since then (HZ is very old codebase) and you won't have the ballast of HZ
- but maybe just continuing HZ blockchain could be a neat and lean way of doing it also, if you can keep it going

Does NXT have this weird thing about the decimals?

You do get warned when creating an asset that it is best to use 2 to 6 decimals, but it does not tell you WHY, and since normal bitcoin-tye coins all have 8 decimals I naturally used 8 for tokens representing such coins.

I am trying to decide what to do now; I could issue duplicate assets but with less decimals, or I could find out how to make my attempted change go into effect, or I could maybe even just start from scratch with a new blockchain with a fresh new clone of the latest NXT or somesuch code...

I am wondering whether just going ahead with my change would be a good idea or lead to compounding series of math errors or something.

The DISTRIBUTION of HZ was nice, the way anyone could get some when they started it just by running a node.

If I started from a fresh new empty blockchain the game would start with all the coins, which could have advantages but might not be viewed favourably by the players.

-MarkM-

Nice use case for an abandoned NXT clone!

I was involved with the other NXT clone that merged with HZ - forget the name right now, had a Phoenix logo (may have been called 'Phoenix', cant remember), but it was a community takeover of another NXT clone ICO exit scam, hence the name...
HZ itself was a shady deal, the lead guy (not dev) Pizpie is a slimy scamming weasel w/o any tech competence, and he took over another failed NXT clone (NHZ, New Horizon), renamed it to HZ and just tried to latch on to that creepy Bitnation scheme, but that seems to have evaporated too  
in any case, NXT is solid tech, and it is a cute move to use it for gaming stuff!

I tracked that "Fractions not allowed" problem all the way to html/ui/js/nrs.assetexchange.js

In there it sets the number of decimals for everything except quantity to 8 minus the number of decimals in the quantity.

That means it is only assets that have 8 decimals themselves that do not allow any decimals in the price-in-HZ field.

Of course most coins do have 8 decimals, so thgis glitch prevents most coins from having a price less than 1 HZ as well as preventing them from having a price per coin that has decimals in HZ.

Maybe the coder was thinking you are inputting the price per quantity rather than the price per unit for each unit of the given quantity or something like that.

However, I tried changing 8 minus decimals to just 8, and even after restarting the server nothing changed.

So it looks like maybe that .js script file is not actually loaded when a browser hits the page but, rather, is somehow cached or accumulated somewhere so that my new copy did not actually go into effect. Maybe some part of the build process to build the server bundles all those .js files into one place or some other such thing that means the actual .js file I modified is not live but needs to be compiled in or incorporated into something during the build process or something.

I did refresh my browser tab and log in again after restarting the server to try to ensure it was not my browser somehow retaining the unmodified .js script.

So my progress so far is I think I know what I need to change but I have not discovered how to make my change actually go into effect.

-MarkM-

Great, thanks!

I realised that because my dvcstable01.dvcnode.org server also runs my LFM.knotwork.com website, the HORIZON node on that machine is configured to announce itself as LFM.knotwork.com instead of as dvcstable01.dvcnode.org; and I am not sure whether that causes problems for folks who just add dvcstable01, dvcstable02 and dvcstable06 on the dvcnode.org domain, especially with dvcstable02 and dvcstable06 being offline nowadays.

By the way I have noticed that the buy and sell offers do not let you use fractions in the price (in HZ coins).

This is a big problem for coins such as DeVCoin (DVC) which probably tends to be cheaper than HZ is.

On DeVCoin's thread we are considering issuing a DeVCoin bounty to get that fixed.

It kind of seems likely to be dead simple to do, probably just removing the popup that pops up when you try to type a period (decimal point) or comma into the price field; but its been a few years now since I last had a java development environment set up and familiarity with how to build with it so the fact that even if I made the probably trivial change I would then have to build the thing means it might take me a while to ever get around to doing it myself.

I am thinking it is probably trivial because (1) you can send HZ to people using eight decimal places; and (2) HORIZON is a clone of NXT and I am pretty sure NXT lets you use fractions of a NXT in prices, though I do not actually have NXT installed anymore. (I looked at it back when choosing a platform, but chose HORIZON and STELLAR rather than NXT and Ripple because they were cheaper to use and because Ripple didn't even have a real client anymore as far as I could tell, becoming a centralised big-brother know-your-customer anti-terrorism pawn of the establishment whereas STELLAR you can actually use the way the original Ripple (whose name the new Ripple folks bought) was intended, that is, to trade arbitrary IOUs among friends. (Like, IOU dinner, you owe me five beers, she owes us a drive, or whatever arbitrary IOUs friends want to invent and trade amongst themselves.)

-MarkM-

I managed to sync my client. To help you:


1) Edit (or create) the file: %appdata%\Horizon\conf\nhz.properties

(for instance: C:\Users\__YOURUSERNAME__\AppData\Roaming\Horizon\conf\nhz.properties )

2) Add this:

nhz.defaultPeers=lfm.knotwork.com; nhz.woll-e.net; crossciv.no-ip.org; nhz.ydns.eu

3) Restart the client.

Quite some time ago, when I first tried to use the "Currencies" feature of HORIZON, I managed to create just a few currencies then after that no matter what I tried to name a currency the system always rejected it as already in use.

I thus continued inputting the coins and shares the game uses, and only just now have I finally gotten around to actually trying to use one of the currencies that I did manage to create.


I tried exchanges and offers, and they just do not seem to work. Each account is seeing only its own buy or sell inputs, none of anyone else's, no matching is happening.

So basically it looks like currencies are totally broken.

So I am now going to have to re-issue the things that I had managed to issue as currencies, making them as assets instead.

I suppose this is just as well actually since breaking up your holdings into separate categories, assets vs currencies, is a bit awkward anyway.

If players run a HORIZON node, it is a good idea to include at least dvcstable01.dvcnode.org, dvcstable2.dvcnode.org and dvcstable06.dvcnode.org as well known nodes, to ensure you manage to get onto the same network as the rest of the players. (It is unfortunately true that only one of those is actually on line right now but hopefully they will be coming back online eventually.)

The source code that I and most other players that I am away of run is available for download inside my http://LFM.knotwork.com site, and the pages I am building about assets, both those implemented on HORIZON and those implemented on STELLAR, are on my http://MakeMoney.knotwork.com site.

Pages of historical prices of assets are still those at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html (it calls them Open Transactions assets but we are migrating from Open Transactions to HORIZON and STELLAR).

Wiki pages about the game start at http://devtome.com/doku.php?id=galactic_milieu though I am not positive all the pages about the game can be reached following links from article to article; all the pages I authored are listed under my username on that wiki, which is knotwork.

Keep in mind that it is a game, and even maybe currently still somewhat closer to being a prototype for a game than an actual finished product game.

Basically the focus of development has been forced more and more into economics, using free open source components to weave together a multiverse whose economics might hopefully eventually enable the game to be able to finance development of such modifications and "glue" as might be ideally desired to make all the components work together more smoothly, and eventually to start serious work on a fully immersive virtual reality interface into the game multiverse.

-MarkM-