Topic: human mineable and proof of play Altcoins - page 3. (Read 3255 times)

I started a topic about "An altcoin that can be mined on a SmartPhone's CPU" and I think both topics have something in common  https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/an-altcoin-that-can-be-mined-on-a-smartphones-cpu-550995

One funny thing I have noticed during the time with both HUC and MOTO is that the amount of fun to the game varies relative to the ecosystem and "meta game" around it.  HUC's game dynamics are even indirectly sensitive to market rates, and I imagine over time we will see similar with MOTO.

If you focus on the meta-game both games become a LOT more enjoyable.  (funny how many old school bitcoiners actually play MTG/modo, heh)


Again, the important point is the (very serious) distinction between integrating a currency into a game (something that has been around for as long as games have, hence the cliches of "monopoly money" etc.) and integrating a game into a currency.  If you go deep enough into the math and philosophy buried between the lines in the satoshi whitepaper, you find that the whole "magic" of the thing is actually the coupling of a solution to the byzantine generals problem for consensus around "double spend" with a particular presentation of an abstracted iterated prisoner's dilemma, an extended form of which is sometimes now referred to as the "miner's dilemma" problem.  The fact that the "IPD" (formally, a game) is at the core of the security of the mining process is awesome and is very central to the reasons that human mining can even exist.

Just putting a currency into a game doesn't accomplish much of value.  If you believe it does, you should be buying as much Everquest money as you can get your hands on, and most rational people would probably not be doing this.


However, despite being uninteresting, it is most important to you as a non-programmer particularly!  As the HYPER games are centralized and offer up no proof structures, users have no way to know what is really going on within the system.  (Since you are not a developer you can't even really do some system analysis to try to asses it, and since the systems are "closed" you can't even hope some third party has been able to do any such assessment!  Yikes!  Further just because something is "open source" doesn't really solve these problems these days either, unfortunately.)  There is no way in any of these other offerings, so far, that anyone can verify that the operators of the game servers are not simply "cheating" on their social contract and actually giving some large portion of the coins back to themselves, family, friends, cronies, etc.  With human mining in a blockchain, everyone must offer up proof to the network that they have actually earned their winnings by, you know, winning.

With a human mined currency, there is (to some probabilistic measure) no cheating, in the same way that in bitcoin there is no "cheating" on spending transactions.  This is huge, particularly since (some form or another of) money is also on the line in these games, in most cases.

In particular, beyond just what would normally be considered "cheating" having a human mined currency offers an additional protection that is very important.  In the same way that bitcoin offers some protections from some entity deciding to produce more/less of the currency, impacting holders' economic state, these human mined games offer a solution to a common problem in online gaming of item rarity! 

Since there is no central authority, there's no one who can suddenly decide to produce an abundance of some rare game piece impacting the game dynamic without the majority of the participants in the player base agreeing to the rule change by mining on the new rules' fork.  As an aside, this is where HUC and MOTO really differ!  In HUC it is the hash collision miners (read: pools) who get to decide whether or not to adopt a rules change on the network, with their "voting influence" on the matter being proportional to their hashing strength (read: asic count and process node) where in MOTO it is the skilled players (read: currently just possibly savant humans and the most clever of the bot operators, but ostensibly the most skillful players in general) who get to make the decisions with their voting influence being relative to their ability to produce winning solutions to the game challenge.

In centralized games, business profitability often dictates a decision to intentionally trash in game economics and this happens regularly and consistently as any experienced MMO player can attest to.  When you throw "real money economies" into this centralized equation, bad things happen - particularly with even the slightest slip-ups on the part of the item issuing central authority.  (Diablo 3 auction house, I'm looking at you buddy.  We waited YEAR AFTER YEAR.  )

These two little experiments, HUC and MOTO, really represent a phenomenal shift in the future of gaming, IMO!

Human mining through games is an interesting idea, but ultimately for me it comes down to this: is the game fun? For example, I looked at Huntercoin before and liked the idea, but never got into it because the game just didn't look like much fun.

My favourite is HYPER, because the focus seems to be more on the game rather than the algorithm, and on integrating crypto currency into games in general rather than the technical details of how a crypto currency works under the hood - which isn't all that interesting to me as a non-programmer.

It makes me happy to see someone so interested in these concepts.  Now I want to dig up some of my old notes on how to do self-modifying block chain based games.  ("MUD server" if you please.)  There is no reason the "rules" governing human mining and/or proof-of-play couldn't be made mutable by consensus.

Precisely what you said, it is the hash collision PoW that moves the chain along, not gameplay solutions.  "Human mining" means a formal proof establishes conformance to rules for coinbase claim.  A proof-of-play further uses the proofs to secure transaction depth.

Huntercoin does not use the human mining proofs as signatures on transaction depth, it uses traditional hash collision.  As such it is proving energy spend based work being performed, not cognitive process work being performed.  (N.B. The human mining proofs in HUC do prove cognitive process, they are just used in an overlay to prove coinbase rights, instead of proving all transaction depth validity itself.  Also, it should be noted that cognitive process is not a thing exclusive to humans.  BGB's bots are, indeed, crude cognitive processors.  My moto bots are even more crude cognitive processors.)

In MOTO, cognitive process provides both the proof of right to claim a coin base and proof over transaction depth, both.


Exactly.  Proof-of-play is an alternative security threshold mechanism.  Human mining is an alternative transaction processing rule mechanism, specifically dealing with coin base maturation process. (For example there is a rule that if you die and drop your coin base on the ground before it matures you don't get it at that general's address.  Motocoin's rules on maturation are very very simple.  HUC's are rather complex, so I tend to agree that HUC is, overall, more "advanced" with regard to human mining.  This human mining thing will be a very fun spectrum for the world to explore!)


Yup.  Proof-of-play is one subset of human mining, it seems. 


The more likely future is in incorporating games into block chains. 

^^ THIS ^^


TV is dead now, I'd guess.  Who needs TV when you have DHT internets?  Otherwise I'd say "spot on." 

Post more!!! This is excellent!!!

Hyper - Briefly claimed to be proof-of-play, but were honorable and retracted the claim once the distinction was clarified to them.  Not human mined or proof-of-play though they may be considering such elements for a future fork.

Black Dragon Coin - Has a coinbase bonus lottery with terminology themed to align with fantasy RPG terms, but is really just a random block reward structure.  Promises to produce games using the coin but so far has not materialized much.  Not human mined or proof-of-play.

Flappycoin - Also a coin themed with gaming terminology, with block reward lottery.  Used in a few dice type games.

Huntercoin - HUC - The original human mined coin.  Fork of namecoin with RTS rules instead of domain name related rules.  Not proof of play as all transactions are actually secured via sha/scrypt merge mining.

CScoin - Counterstrike themed coin with 5-day traditional PoW mining, followed by staking.  They claim they are working on the ability to bet on Counterstrike pvp games in the wallet, to materialize later this month.  However this would not be human mining as new coinbases are only created by stake now.  Will not be proof-of-play either, as the CS gameplay will not be authenticated in a proof structure, nor used to secure transactions.  (It is also likely that the CS servers brought up for bets will not be decentralized and will not be able to operate over any sort of authenticated data structure to provide a verification proof over the bet outcomes, so it seems highly likely that cheating on the bets will be possible.)

Piggy coin - Not sure how this made the list.  Traditional scrypt PoW alt aimed at kids.  No game related "anything" AFAICT.  Certainly no human mine or proof of play.

Battlecoin - The original "multipool coin" and loosely game themed.  Arguably the voting mechanism could be considered a "game" that indirectly attempts to claim coinbase transactions of other coins for their miners, but since this is still hash collision based mining I don't think we can reasonably call this human mining. Calling this proof of play would be a stretch, and require a very loose interpretation to qualify, but it does come closer than most other coins.

GameLeague - Staking coin which is working on porting an existing "for fiat pay to play" game to use the coin.  It is unclear what their status on this port is.  It appears that the game will run on centralized servers and use no proof mechanisms, making it neither human mined nor proof of play.

Motocoin - The only proof of play coin to date.  Intended to be human mined, several developers (myself among them) quickly devised effective bots that mostly overwhelmed human production, meaning it is only ostensibly human mine right now.  The moto community is working on planning changes to rectify this situation, and restore pragmatic human mining.  It remains proof-of-play, in any case, as network transactions are actually secured by proof of game play, despite that game being won primarily by bots.  (Some claim they can still mine by hand, but I'm skeptical.  If they are doing so they certainly are not doing it with a stock reference wallet!)

Zandagort - Wut?  This is not actually a coin, but a game related to HYPER.  I'd consider this a duplicate entry of hyper.

SurvivorCoin - Working on a game inside the wallet client.  This game was originally intended to be an MMO style, but has now been reduced in scope to just a single player game.  It appears that the game has nothing to do with the coin itself, so far, and has no blockchain interaction.  This would be like putting tetris on a tab in the bitcoin client, and calling bitcoin "integrated with a game."  While semantically true, it is somewhat meaningless until the game actually has some interaction with the coin.  There is no indication that they intend to try for either human mining or proof-of-play.

Badgercoin - Another "not sure how it made your list" coin.  They have some centralized dice-against-house-edge type games, but nothing integrated to the network.  "Just another alt" AFAICT.



I'd really love to be pointed at some other coins that are human mined, proof of play, both, or even something that is similar but uses some other/new/different proof mechanism.  However, none of these coins fit that criteria, as none of these coins (besides huc and moto) use anything but traditional work/stake proofs.

A distinction should be made between coins that are actually human-mineable/PoP and coins that are not.

To my knowledge, only huntercoin and motocoin are actually human mine, and only moto has proof of play securing transactions.  (HUC uses an "ordered overlay" proof mechanism (a la namecoin) for mining but only uses traditional sha/scrypt PoW for securing transactions.)

In order for a coin to be human mineable, humans must be able to secure for themselves some new coinbase coins (not just a transfer of already-mined coins) by offering some mathematical proof to the network that they have earned claim to those coinbases.

In order for a coin to be proof-of-play the coin must not only be human mineable, but the proofs offered to claim those coinbases must also be the same proofs used to secure transaction history on the network.  (This is why HUC is not proof of play, but MOTO is!)

Offerings like hyper, flappy, etc are no different from traditional game currencies in these respects, and work very much like wow gold or riot points where some central authority holds and controls distribution of coins, with no proof mechanisms involved.  Further if your list is going to include any coins used as currency in any games, then your list really should include almost every coin including bitcoin.  You could go get some free bitcoin in Dragons Tale with just a few clicks right now, but this doesn't make bitcoin human mineable or proof of play at all!  You can go roll dice against a house edge on almost any altcoin around.  As such, I'd love to see a revised list (really two lists) of human mine and proof-of-play coins, but this list is so far not that list.

It seems that lately the concepts of human mining and proof of play are starting to get very popular, so it is going to become increasingly important to educate and raise awareness as to what these concepts actually mean, and why they are important and beneficial, so that people can avoid bogus claims. Just because you can go play some FPS or mini-MMO and someone might maybe send you some-or-other alt coins for doing so does not make the coin either human mineable or proof of play.

Be careful out there, folks.

human mineable and proof of play Altcoins

This topic is to motivate people to post definitions, comments, and questions about human-mineable and proof-of-play Altcoins. Plus in-game currencies that are not mined.

I deleted my original list, because of the excellent lists below.
Keep the posts coming.