Topic: [ANN][BLC] Blakecoin Blake-256 for GPU/FPGA With Merged Mined Pools Stable Net - page 34. (Read 409641 times)

for whats being done here current code base is fine and stable and improvement bitcoin wise can also mean bugs  

really not having much time taken by pools/network issues does allow more time for dev work, I can see teething issues by a rebase hence why I not really keen to dig in  

some of the improvements in bitcoin xt help with sync time thats good rest of the features/improvements in bitcoin core/xt/classic are a moot point as too few people are using what is already available and is it really worth spending time/blc for so few users? also worth pointing out you would also want to remove some of the stuff they added e.g v3 blocks

*note Bitcoin core is not only one you could/can rebase with imho but it needs a good use case people doing work with it and decent user base or some kind of technical/efficiency bonus to make it worthwhile else time will be wasted chasing features that just a handful of people use/might use

as I said for what I am doing it would make more sense to do stuff in mono c# and unity as any work could be integrated not just a wallet app  

Thanks for the update! Sounds like you are making good progress, despite the inevitable headaches that come with such endeavors. Keep up the good work

As for community contributions, I'd be happy to help however I can, just let me know if you have any ideas. I was thinking, the Blake source bounty I tried to organize a while back did not pan out - I suppose it was premature. However perhaps we could use the donations from that to start a new bounty for something more useful. For example, maybe for updating the BLC codebase? There have been a lot of improvements to btc code since blakecoin was forked from it. Any other suggestions for a bounty?

Also, I was considering redoing/relaunching the blc wiki I had up for a while. Do you think that'd be helpful?

v1 was supposed to go closed beta last year but after a few things changing it became unstable *the patching was not updated by author and did not include source to fix which messed stuff up + started streaming world to improve frame rate
v2 was to rush patch and roll out a reduced set but found a floating point issue which was screwing up the ai and spawning *4 months wasted trying to do this  
v3 rewrite based on v1 that avoided so many fixes and I only completed this just before xmas *this has been a solo task as Andrew has been busy with other projects

bit like ground hog day with game development heck of a lot of doing same thing a few different ways until it is working right(well at least until unity change the api again) and sometimes best to just rewrite the thing than try rush fix which only resulted in frustration and even more bugs  

so far:

• new patching
• streaming of world
• remade some of the terrain tiles used by streaming using some new procedural tools which look better and more realistic *also saves quite a lot of work vs manually (easier to pack textures to reduce draw calls)
• improved occlusion culling and LOD levels and been testing using an imposer system for more distant object *can keep high draw distance but still get good fps but needs more testing
• with unity 5.3 switched from Blinn–Phong to GGX shading model so have been updating assets to look right in-game and update api calls for 5.3 in all client scripts
• testing some new shader assets that extend 5.2/5.3 so can get almost exactly same effect/level/quality you see in current top FPS titles but still testing due to frame rate hit also need to extend the option menu for enable/disable *SSRR/SSAA/SSAO etc..
• doing some other testing to see what else can be done for rending performance e.g DX12 *still got some assets in the project that dont render correctly so wip

also done some work on unnamed again using procedural generation for levels which speeds things up and due to lower complexity it is faster to develop/makes nice change vs BlakeZone which is a far more complex client

hope you all feel more enlightened  

*from 16th been validating the BlakeZone project with both unity 5.3.4/5.4 beta (shame unity delayed 5.4 but from my testing so far I can see why) expect to be doing this for next few weeks especially with BlakeZone as it is a large client project

*also note I have said about progress in BlakeZone Chat when asked

I do hope when the time is right the community becomes more vocal and proactive in tasks that take time out from dev work like promotion/marketing/services/documentation/tutorials/videos/blogs/articles/papers not just for Blakecoin/BlakeZone but also for the whole Blake Eco so far most stuff seems to be piled on me/other Blake eco devs

I have to echo that sentiment.

Blakezone was supposed to be ready for at least beta-testing nearly a year ago, and not one word about its' progress has been written since. As long-term supporters of the coin, the ecosystem & the use-case, I feel we are due just a little more 'enlightenment' about progress.

Price is fairly low for a few reasons. Mainly like BlueDragon747 said, there aren't any services/stores where you can use Blakecoin yet - it's main purpose is to be used with MMOs (starting with Blakezone) which take time. Although, if you are a dev or experienced game modder, you would certainly be encouraged to use Blakecoin in your homebrew games or port it into existing games. Someone had added Blakecoin to Counter Strike in a mod, for example. There has not been much publicity to Blakecoin since the coin itself is not the main focus, rather Blakezone is. As for people buying/selling BLC, I think volume is low because most of the people interested in it have already invested what they're willing to risk and are waiting for news about Blakezone. If you look on Bittrex though, it sure looks like we hit the floor in December/January, and past few months have started a nice uptrend. There may not be many people buying BLC right now, but no one is selling large volume either. So if you think the Blake Ecosystem looks promising, now is a pretty good time invest or get involved. if you are a miner, nows a great time to mine some Blake

And while we're on the topic, if it's not too much to ask, I think it'd be helpful for the community if you (BD747) could communicate more about your progress,for example maybe once a month if you post a few bullet points about what you've been working on, I think that would help keep people interested in the project.

low demand and people dumping?

no flaw I am aware of and as with all coins use is why not many buyers are buying/trading *if thats what you mean?

I dont have a beard, I am working on other things so not actively doing any promotion for Blakecoin but will be used in my main projects (working on mmo framework before Blakecoin ~5years now) >> https://www.blakezone.com is going to be the first title we will release currently ingame currency is BLC/PHO and all the games should be F2P when in open beta

why mmo and free to play (F2P) see my post here

worst thing about Blakecoin is that it is simple, makes sense and works but thats not what a majority of miners/investors are looking for as it does not necessarily = "Profit"

note for a real economy(games, internet, point of sale) and not an investment Blakecoin does not reduce the block reward over time!!

no scams and we do have https://blakecrypto.com which is for the whole merged mined blake ecosystem

for now am continuing Game development it is why Blakecoin was made, stuff takes time and there is not a huge team behind the scenes and most work only in spare time or between other projects

Why is this coin so cheap?

It was fine last night. Faster than usual, even

Blaketrader is still down.

The transaction server for blaketrader is down. Trading will be stopped for a few days until I can make repairs  

Edit:  Everything should be up and running now. Sorry for the downtime.

been quite a few changes from what I can see but I am glad the exchange has not gone for good and has found a way to stay 

I take it that this is good news for our ecosystem?

I asked Decred to use 8 round and maybe merge they said NO and used 14 round blake256 = cannot merge mine with Blakecoin as hashing is totally different + they have changed headers too
Vanillacoin has a sha256d in the hashing serialization and no auxpow = cannot merge mine with Blakecoin *could work with a hard fork



wallets can be integrated but will be a lite spv*WIP! currently separate via json and you can have account balance(server) and a wallet balance(local) and not just BLC, account transactions are instant but wallet transactions are not still need confirm, already have webshop which only requires 1 conf *yes I could make BLC 1 conf network wise too, in-game shop is currently account balance only BLC/PHO, eventually in-game store will take/create a wallet tx for purchases and yes you will need to wait for 1 conf as the coins are held on your machine and not the servers all purchases account/wallet will have blockchain tx *WIP not output to client yet!, zombies dont have any rewards or loot drops only experience, boss, mission/quest, random encounters and events have rewards

I could do a credit chip to allow fiat payments but currently I would prefer to avoid this and have crypto only!

I am confident that gamers are smart and can use wallets and coins just makes it easier if wallets are in-game as you still need the miner separate so game+miner *assuming you want to mine and play which is going to need a decent GPU which most gamers have  

Edit:
Why focus on the Games industry - I was already working on a prototype MMO framework in unity, Its a Huge industry, plenty of transactions, millions of people everyday, loads of fun and it just makes total sense to use blockchain(s) for premium credits within online games  



Source: https://newzoo.com

@electron-coin the larger font helps a lot, thanks!

@kahir unfortunately no, as discussed earlier in this thread, decred and vanilla and a few other coins do use blake256, however their developers chose to use a different # of rounds (blakecoin uses 8-round blake256, decred uses 14-round I believe) plus there are other design choices that prevent merge mine compatibility.  It's a real shame if you ask me, merge mining has so many benefits and no downsides. It could be possible in the future but would require decred/vanilla devs to do a hard fork to implement compatibility

is it possible to mine all the new blake algo in merged mining like Decred and Vanilla

When you say merge wallets within game, do u mean that it'd be integrated into the game UI instead of having to run the regular QT wallet separately? On a similar note, I'm curious how you will be implementing the in-game currency. If you used blc directly,  that would obviously cause some  inconvenience since you'd have to wait 3+ minutes any time you loot a zombie or buy gear. not to mention price fluctuations. So I'd guess it'd be like an exchange where u deposit blc and then all in-game transactions are handled by a database on the game server until u are ready to withdraw. If so would the in-game credits be pegged to blc or usd?

1) yep ~3x number of transactions per second compared with BTC without any changes    *~10x for ELT  
2) no plans to do anything about non-transaction data in BLC blockchain as it just is not an issue atm time is better spent on other things
3) yes merged are better than side chains imho as they can still work if there in an issue with main chain *merged blockchains are not so fixed to main chain in the real world (merged spec paints a very fixed picture to aux chains and main chain which is not quite accurate beyond work for miners) so I never seen an issue with having auxpow its a win win
4) for sure I was looking at this some months back only issue is picking right compression library that is supported cross-platform which turns out to be slightly tricky
5) not interested in increasing the block size of BLC but that said still keeping an eye on what solutions are being done with other blockchains, interested in reducing average size rather than just increasing as that could be more useful so "flexible or variable" is the way to go

What I have been talking about for some time is blockchains within games even Intel are working on this now although for a fantasy sports game, merging a wallets within my game projects on unity is what I am aiming for it solves a few issues and allows easier cross-platform *I hope  

Thanks for the support everybody.

Yeah, trading with BlakeTrader is not even close to covering the cost of the servers, supporting the block explorers, etc.  But I hope it is a worthwhile investment for the ecosystem.

@bzyzny, thanks for the suggestions. I have enlarged the fonts a bit. The front end is in need of a redesign. Unfortunately, I just don't have time and it's low on the priority list. I hope at least the bigger fonts will help.

For ELT, PHO, BBTC, UMO, LITH, because there are no liquid exchanges for them, I set their rates internally with whatever I feel I can trade with. This is certainly arbitrary. Depends on how the trading goes, I will change them periodically. And once they are on an exchange, I will use the exchange rate for benchmark. I used to offer a discount to these rates, but this was abused so it was removed.

BlakeTrader is pretty great, I've used it a few times and it really couldn't be any easier, unless you had someone literally hold your hand while clicking a few buttons. One suggestion though, the font could be a little bigger for easier readability, although it could just be my screen size/resolution. How do you calculate exchange rates, now that banx.io is closed?

On another note, with whats currently happening regarding bitcoin block size limitations, I'm curious how Blakecoin et al might tackle this issue. Currently it's not an problem, but always good to look forward. Some points I thought of:
1) Am I correct that since BLC has 3 minute block time target, it should handle ~3x the number of transactions per second as BTC?
2) I think a key issue is that the bitcoin blockchain is getting bloated from other projects using it to store non-transaction data. Would it be possible to prevent that in our blockchains, and only allow transaction data?
3) Instead of placing data in the BLC blockchain, 3rd party applications could just use their own a merge mined blockchain, right? If i understand how these things work correctly, I believe it should be possible for a merge mined blockchain to be used solely as an application blockchain (i.e. not another currency).  Instead it could use Blakecoin for any payments/fees
4) would it be possible to compress the data in the blocks with lzma or something? or would that interfere with the crypto magic?
5) is flexible or variable block size possible?