People don't seem to notice the potential for huntercoin. Even people on this thread. If huntercoin adapts a little by letting people play the game and possibly earn huc when they do not have any yet, the price will skyrocket and there will be more huc fans than a person can count.
Huntercoin, as far as I know, is the only coin that can be mined by human power, in fact requires it. This is probably going to become the norm within a year or two as crypto gains traction in the third world and innovators try to make distribution more egalitarian.
Huntercoin really is ahead of the game right now, it seems stuck though. If there is support for making the coin more widely available, and easier to earn by newcomers i.e., people who don't have any, I can put some effort into promoting the coin.
since you wrote me on PM but the reply could be shared, let me reply to your pm here too:
from your PM:
If things are changed so that a) any person can mine, even if he or she has no coins, and b) the mining can be done on a minimalist machine, a tablet, phone, etc, and c) that mining cannot be automated, i.e., a person must mine manually... then at the current market cap you would support several thousand people at least. In other words the coin would easily, organically, have several thousand individuals 'playing' per day with very little publicity needed.
hi, while i can agree on some considerations (not all, details will follow) I've to say I'm not part of huntercoin dev, I'm not a decision maker. I'm an indipendent developer that spent thousand hours on my client version to allow users to play better and leverage bot advantages.
about your consideration, i don't think the model you are describing is feasible, here why:
a - if hunters costs nothing, people will create thousand of them, causing the system to collapse and each block being huge. At early stage, creating a player costed 1 HUC and you had 1 general and 2 hunters, so 3 movable characters, and the map was crowded and unplayable, even because of bots. then snailbrain rised the cost to 10 HUC and with only the general, so 1 moveable player, that caused a popolation reduction, game more playable and game faster because less time is needed to parse a block (because of less transactions)
b - for the game to be played on a tablet, phone, etc... a centralized version must be done, or at least a remote machine running a daemon should be available (actually 1 for each user, because daemon can't handle multiple wallets), otherwise the costs to parse all transactions,generate the game state and validate moves would be too much for any "minimal hardware", there was a moment, when the map was crowded, that even a PC wasn't enough and an SSD or RAM Drive was needed to play properly...
if you add up on that that hopefully playerbase will rise in future, it would be a real problem (but here pruning and optimizations will help a lot)
c - that's technically impossible to prevent bot to be used, period. daemon and QT wallet expose an RPC interface that's used to read information and send transactions, etc... so you can't prevent bot being created, you just need to face it. A possible future scenario is that human players play using bots too, that's why now i'm implementing a bot system right into my client.
an ending note about making a live out of huntercoin:
every game state 8 hucs are placed on maps. considering an higher users population ( = > players on maps) this will mean that gaining money would be harder and best players will gain more.
if you do some math, with an even distribution, considering 80 players are playing (this is a very low count, they should be much more to be successfull, something like x100, but i've said 80 just for math purpose) , everyone should gain 0.1 huc/block
0.1*1440 (1440=average numbers of blocks per day) will mean 144, at current rate, in $, means ~2, so for 30 days of play, this will mean 60$ month
now considering that in this game even distribution doesn't exists because is a matter of skill, this mean that will be fewer people gaining more and others less
now add on top of that that the costs is 10HUC (could and will be changed in future when player base will increase, i think), this mean that you can actually loose instead of gain (on the other end best players could have a big income)
so at the end you should consider this a game that could make you a good income, or loose your investment, it's all up to you (your playing skill and attitude)
(try to remove from the equation the 10 hucs costs and you'll understand another reason why a player cost is better then a free one)
my 2 cents