Damn, wish I'd known this before using my spare funds to buy HUC, or else I'd contribute to the listing. At least I got some cheap coins below 300 satoshis!
Not sure where you bought so cheap but all-time low on Poloniex was 334 Satoshis. Some people are unfortunately working hard to beat that record. Given that most effort lately was put into developing bots so not even player time is required to gather coins I'd say we will see a new all-time low soon, with no signs of significant recovery. Then "Human Mining" part should be removed.
no bot development our side btw - not sure what you mean?
From early on, this perception issue has been Huntercoin's weakness.
Devs work to make a "human mineable" coin, meaning a coin that can only be mined by someone using their own brain, hands, etc. But everyone recognizes that there is a huge industry around overcoming "human only" algorithms, whether capchas, online surveys or whatever, in this case an innovative cryptocurrency.
Whether bots mine HUC significantly or not, that threat, and the challenge devs face trying to negate it, are HUC's big permanent issues.
One way to capitalize on this....
The biggest jump in the development of algorithms, eventually, will be the development of a process that mines coins in a way that creates an artificial intelligence that has practical uses. Huntercoin is the closest coin right now to that future process, for many reasons.
Right now the "human mining" aspect of HUC is entertainment, a game where people try to conquer stuff and win this or that. Sometime in the future the human mining aspect will be specifically aimed at competing with bots which will have been created to imitate human thinking in some arena more practical than an online game.
This coin has devs used to dealing with all of the issues that a real artificial intelligence algo will face, but for the coin to actually develop in that direction it needs some "developer interface" that allows others to come to the coin and create their own algorithms.
In other words if the core HUC dev group continues with the HUC game, but also tries to develop a secure simple way for other devs to create their own "HUC mining programs", and if the focus is always on enforcing the "human mining" aspect then HUC will develop into a coin used to advance ai for practical uses.
Any competition between bots and humans is negative right now for a "human mineable" coin but at some point someone will put that tension to good use and a whole new type of algorithm process will develop. Huntercoin is in a better position than any other coin to start that, even though it is a very small coin right now.
I've kept watching the game during those months and what i see is that there are just a couple of (human) player that creates a lot of hunters, monopolize the map and play the whole day (could be a group of person maybe, but i think are very few) and i think that actually there are almost no bots (and i repeat, in bold, this happens since MONTHS)
Actually the game is in a state that's not so funny and profitable to be played, i've been silent to not flame or put the project in a wrong spot, but I've to say actually I've stopped upgrading my client (i still have ready a new version to release but since i don't see much interest around i'm wating to release it)
A mean-minded person might thinks that previous/actual game state is favoring the few players who are now playing supporting them to collect most of the coin generated during last months and since i felt this way, i prefered to step away from this coin for a while, waiting some update that hasn't happened yet
I will be interested to carry on this if I'll see finally some movement around the coin, actually an average joe could just perceive this coin as abandoned and this is what make me sad.
Having said this, I link to what you say about the "bot arena" you are talking about: this is exactly what i saw since first days of the game and one of the aspect i elaborated during the development of my client and i can say to you that I've already an SDK that could be used to implement custom artificial intelligence and it's at a good point, i was working on the "cooperation" aspect (making different automatic behaviours coordinate and exchange information) but i've stopped that too, as i said, anyway I've developed a lot, commented the code and i planned to write a good documentation about how to use it, etc... but since it needs a lot of effort, actually i wasn't enticed to continue the development (my client and my SDK is just a personal initiative, not backed up by funds or other kind of income)
my vision was having a smart client like mine, that's linked with a "Smart Behaviours Market", a place where people could publish their creation, rent/sold them, etc... and with many potential other features like offchain/sidechain 1 vs 1 fights / 5 vs 5 fights, etc...
I was even tempted about implementing a standalone game just fueled by cryptocoins, but since it would mean abandon current Huntercoin: Mithril Edition client development, i put on hold this idea, but never forgot about that. I still hope to see some kind of resurrection!
