@Pikalek Definitely want to chat about PCG. (just pinged you on LinkedIn--hit me up at my personal email)

PS- re: origin of Mbrane, thought this might interest you:

(extended page here: i.stack.imgur.com/Xy5m7.jpg) The entry on Mu (game) is fairly interesting as a metaphor for meta-strategy

@DukeZhou Certainly! Thanks!

@Almo Ever play with cloudminer.biz/?a=5133927

I'm thinking of just milking the free version until I have enough to get a paid one. It seems unlikely to really be true, but...

I figure it's worth a shot, if I'm not paying for it, right?

@PearsonArtPhoto I don't get it. If it mines more than it costs, why do they require people to press the button? Why don't they just run all the machines themselves and keep everything?

Yeah, that's my thought exactly.

Especially if there is a rate of return on the order of days...

I mean, if I could double my money in days, and I knew I could do it, I'd invest my life savings, and keep reinvesting as quickly as I could.

I think they want you to do exactly that. That's how they make money. Now I understood it.

Yeah, it has the feeling of a pyramid scheme.

But hey, they claim to give free coins, so...

Also, really strange is the fact that you don't need to have a password...

I figure I'll keep the free one going at least until I see some kind of payment.

Maybe they are doing a Javascript miner on the computers running the website?

There's something very odd about the whole thing...

Try to buy a pizza with the free coins. I predict it will somehow not work.

Doesn't it cost 10000 BTC for a pizza?

It seems like it might be legit, but the payouts aren't nearly what advertised.

1 bitcoin is ~10-20$, which should be enough for a pizza.

Actually, 1 BTC is more like $10,000

But the first sale of a pizza was 10,000 BTC.

Huh, ddg agrees with you.

Looking at the list of payouts, I bet the 0.5 BTC plan really pays out something closer to 0.01.

ddg?

duckduckgo

Cost of bitcoin?

Yes.

So 0.001 bitcoin would be reasonable. How much did they give you?

What, the website? Haven't gotten anything from it yet.

And in any case, I was doing it wrong, so... Sigh.

I'm just trying to get a basic grasp on bitcoins. It's interesting, to say the least...

I didn't do the right address at all, so...

Now I've used my bitcoin wallet, will see if they actually pay out anything.

Or your wallet mysteriously ends up empty :P

Well, it is empty.

And that's hard to do without the secret key.

Give it a shot. Go to bitaddress.org , get a key set, print it out, send the private key to cloudminer.biz/?a=5133927 , come back 5 days later.

See if you can transfer BTC to the wallet you created in step 1.

And let me know if it works.

That costs pretty much nothing, and might end up with a free dollar per day, if it actually works.

Which might be upgradeable.

I think I'll stay away from free money. It feels wrong and frustrates me.

LOL, okay.

bitcoin is probably better seen as not money but a speculative investment, akin to stocks

Yeah, that's more or less my thoughts as well.

I thought the point of investments was financial gain.

@nwp And that is the point of bitcoin nowadays

Buy bitcoin, wait until it increases in value, sell it, make net financial gain.

Ah, so your point is that buying pizza with bitcoins makes about as much sense as with stocks or real estate and instead you should keep using regular money for buying stuff.

There seem to be a lot of people who really want to use bitcoins as money though.

Correct

@nwp I agree, and it was the original concept. Nowadays if I'm buying a house for 10 bitcoins, it's because the house owner acknowledges the value of those bitcoins and considers them good enough as payment. Or it's because I sold the 10 bitcoins for $150,000 first and pay them that, and I'm just using "I bought this house with ten bitcoins" as a shortcut in my storytelling of the event.

The one that Almo mentioned is interesting, vcash.

It seems like it is a digital currency built as one from the ground up.

One thing bitcoin makes me appreciate is the amount of effort that goes into making sure the currencies we use day-to-day are actually viable means of paying for things and being paid.

I think a lot of work was done, not so sure how much is done these days. Probably there is a fair bit, but...

I heard the kik messenger gave every user a wallet and is trying to make paying with a bitcoin-like system practical for everyone.

@PearsonArtPhoto Economists do a lot of work to control currency appreciation & inflation.

@PearsonArtPhoto yes, kind of looks like pyramid scheme to me. Not sure though.

ponzis are common in the cryptoworld

@Tyyppi_77 I might be able to

I studied E&M at graduate level

but that was around 1997

@Tyyppi_77 sounds like a "potential energy" problem

you can know the potential at the two locations

since the sum of potential + kinetic is a conserved quantity, I think you can figure out that you need

I think

anyway, that might be enough for you to go on

@PearsonArtPhoto yes, VCash was a ground-up project. Original dev was some weird genius. Went insane and tried to destroy the project about a year ago

it's been picked up by some very competent people, so I'm still invested in it (still, no real money ever)

So that's when it went from VanillaCash to VCash?

no, he changed it

it was sometime after that change

bad idea, in my opinion

new logo looks like every other crypto logo; a letter with lines on it

people were thinking it was Vertcoin

Yeah, it's a bit confusing...

just one reason crypto is not ready for prime time

I'm playing with mining a bit of VCash, figure why not.

I've got a chunk of 10k, which is the minimum to run a voting node So I get about 1 a day from that

Not doing any crazy stuff, just mining when I would have my computer on anyways.

What's a voting node?

voting is low-power; doesn't chew on your GPU like mining does

Ahhh.

the Zero Time transactions happen by nodes voting on whether they think it's a valid transaction

that system approves it in about 0.5 sec; then it goes on the blockchain with the next found block

Will have to save up then to 10K.

Of course, if I actually make any "real" vcash, I might consider buying a dedicated miner, or at least a decent GPU.

The one that I have is about 900 MH/s, not great, but...

@PearsonArtPhoto :D

@Tyyppi_77 yeah, I don't think acceleration would be constant in such a field configuration

@PearsonArtPhoto it's pretty volatile

i made most of mine buying low and selling high

The Poloniex wallet is still closed for withdrawal, since the crazy episode

so if you want to trade it, i recommend Bittrex

Sure, any time! :)

Right now I'm just going with the paper wallet.

the VCash slack channels are great for support and other info

Will keep that in mind.

It took me a while to get CCminer to work.

Also, not having a lot of luck figuring out pending blocks in the vcash pool, pool.vchain.info/tbs

But, I'll get it figured out I'm sure.

:)

VCash also stakes at about 0.7% annual

but you can't stake and vote at the same time

so if you get to 10k, you'll want to turn off staking.

people at the slack channel can help with how to do that

Staking?

Same thing as mining I guess?

@DukaZhou after some long thought, I decided to make "Into the Dark Dungeon" a 3D game instead with actual design instead of random terrain (still will include features we discussed and a large world!)

staking is not mining

mining is testing hashes to find the next block

staking is proving you have a stake in the blockchain by owning coins

I think VCash only stakes if the client is running

RDD stakes just by having the coins. running it occasionally stakes the same number of coins as running it all the time

Interesting...

it's a way to encourage people to run the nodes to keep the network functioning, and is more "equitable" way of distributing new coins than just brute hashing power.

it also consumes less power

Interesting.

msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/…

trying to get this example to work

but I just get

		_tprintf( TEXT( "Usage: %s <dir>\n" ), argv[0] );

This doesn't seem to work properly from a Win32 console application running in the cmd window

It seems like the encoding set for the program and the encoding used by the system passing the text is not the same.

For a quick hack you can change the unicode setting for the project. For a proper solution use the print function that fits to argv.

I created a "Win 32 console application" in VS 2015.

I find it weird that the print function isn't the right one if it's code from MS, but i'll try messing twith the unicode settings

I don't remember what the defaults are, but I though VS and Windows would both default to (almost) UTF16.

The print function fits to the code, it just doesn't fit to whatever your program was given as a parameter.

ok

maybe because it's taregeting windows 8?

it's set to use unicode

i've herd cmd doesn't like that

hmm same thing in powershell

What is the source of the parameter? Just > the_program some text in cmd?

if I execute with no parameter, I get the output above

which is just printing uysage and argv0 which should be the name of the program

@PearsonArtPhoto Boy does that look shady

executing with parameter fails, but I'm guessing that could be related to the args coming in wrong

argv uses the current code page, whatever that is.

I can't see how this would be profitable for anyone if bitcoin doesn't drop at least 50% in value every day

For anyone at the company

I guess you would use MultiByteToWideChar using CP_ACP as the code page.

I found a C-hash example; I'll try that instead :)

msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/…

Or you do what they suggested on SO, ignore argv and use GetCommandLineW.

C-hash one works :)

$ ./AutoShortcutDeleter.exe test
Press 'q' to quit the sample.
File: test\New Text Document.txt Created

@Bálint I suspect that it's semi-legit, but they are way overstating the return rate. By a factor of at least 50, maybe 100.

Bitcoin started going up btw

It has been at 9000 at one point

the best thing about low bitcoin is that alts go up relative, and you can thensell them high

BTC goes up alts go down, buy back in

It would be nice if all of them flopped though

Just imagine the amount of cheap hardware we'd get on the second hand market

:D

Hardware that was run at 100% for months on end all next to one another with no idea how much ventilation they had... yiiish.

They would have to be sold at 1/5th new price to be worth the risk IMO