alex_greene
Guest
Blockchain in the Far Future. Traveller meets Bitcoin.High Guard 2e said:
Virtual Mining Software in HG
- Thread starter alex_greene
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alex_greene
Guest
So let's look at costs to set up.
Say, we have a surplus quantity of Model/5s, TL 15, and for the sake of it we make them all +2 Specialised, running Virtual Mining/7 each.
Costs per computer:-
Base cost - Cr. 5000
+2 rating - Cr. 2500
VM/7 - Cr. 700
----------
Cr. 8200
So you invest in two hundred of them and run them in a big beowulf cluster during down time while the planet is in port. Material outlay - MCr. 1.64.
You would be earning Cr. 7 x 15 x 200 per day. That's Cr. 21000, per day. The investment would pay for itself within 79 days, and after that your Virtual Mining software would be just totally coining it.
I know what my character is going to get if he wins the TAS lotto.
Say, we have a surplus quantity of Model/5s, TL 15, and for the sake of it we make them all +2 Specialised, running Virtual Mining/7 each.
Costs per computer:-
Base cost - Cr. 5000
+2 rating - Cr. 2500
VM/7 - Cr. 700
----------
Cr. 8200
So you invest in two hundred of them and run them in a big beowulf cluster during down time while the planet is in port. Material outlay - MCr. 1.64.
You would be earning Cr. 7 x 15 x 200 per day. That's Cr. 21000, per day. The investment would pay for itself within 79 days, and after that your Virtual Mining software would be just totally coining it.
I know what my character is going to get if he wins the TAS lotto.
AnotherDilbert
Emperor Mongoose
A shipborne m/5 costs Cr 30000. Not that it changes the conclusion...
PsiTraveller
Cosmic Mongoose
That's how the tramp traders break even, skip passengers, put extra computers in the staterooms! 
Between Virt Mining and 10 000 Cr per day for refining hydrogen, why would a ship actually Travel anywhere?
Between Virt Mining and 10 000 Cr per day for refining hydrogen, why would a ship actually Travel anywhere?
PsiTraveller
Cosmic Mongoose
All the tech can break the game. You just have a table agreement with the players to ignore the inconsistencies and play the game and stick to the adventure. Who wants to play "Run mining Drones with robots" spreadsheets? or "Take a TL 12 -15 Autodoc and go to a lower tech planet and sell high tech surgery to the rich and planetbound? or just sell Autodocs to hospitals at an obscene markup. Or the healing drug and a cryo cooler, or just TL 14 computers and some targeting software for lower tech military.
Don't get me wrong. I have spreadsheets to automate trade and starport production output calculations. A couple of players in my group are playing around with economics, trade and technological uplift for profit. Playing as traders and tech merchants can be fun for folks. (So the geeky answer to who wants to play Traveller with spreadsheets is me and the folks I play with....)
There have been various explanations why a Tech level 14 planet can be next to a Tech 5 planet like Tobia and Attee or Pichot in the Trojan Reach. Nobody has had the idea to bring in a few high tech engineers to bootstrap a production facility in the asteroid belts or the gas giants? You could pay for that with the Virtual mining money.
GM's may want to tinker around with the income, but applying creativity to a lot of tech in the game can make some pretty interesting amounts of money for players.
Don't get me wrong. I have spreadsheets to automate trade and starport production output calculations. A couple of players in my group are playing around with economics, trade and technological uplift for profit. Playing as traders and tech merchants can be fun for folks. (So the geeky answer to who wants to play Traveller with spreadsheets is me and the folks I play with....)
There have been various explanations why a Tech level 14 planet can be next to a Tech 5 planet like Tobia and Attee or Pichot in the Trojan Reach. Nobody has had the idea to bring in a few high tech engineers to bootstrap a production facility in the asteroid belts or the gas giants? You could pay for that with the Virtual mining money.
GM's may want to tinker around with the income, but applying creativity to a lot of tech in the game can make some pretty interesting amounts of money for players.
alex_greene
Guest
No, I'm saying that this is how blockchain works. You literally create wealth through data mining. What is a problem is how much wealth. You should be able to create hundreds of thousands of creds by just sitting there. There are blockchain billionaires out there, Please don't nerf it just because of some ridiculous and entirely non-canon idea that the Travellers' lives have got to be made more difficult, and NPCs can have it easy.-Daniel- said:
They're already engaging in criminal careers, risking getting shot, contracting a disease, dying of radiation poisoning or worse - they might as well be able to run VM software, set the ship's computer on a slow cooker while it's sitting in the port, go out for a few days running about in some plondak-infested nightmare of a lost temple and then come home to find that they've just won the jackpot.
alex_greene said:
There are a few problems with this basic premise. First is that this envisions SETI-style problems, whereby the computer owner allows a 3rd party to do distributed processing. It ONLY works when you have the necessary computing infrastructure that can logically break the problem up and correctly assign problems, retrieve the data and then put it back together so it's not useless. It's not really practical to do this if there is any sort of time delay with the requests, so the ships would need to be close (within a few light seconds) of the primary system doing the problem solving.
Secondly, this is really only going to work on planets/systems that have enough potential spare computing power AND the necessary industrial infrastructure to have the companies to do it. This means that high tech/high population planets are going to have a LOT more spare computing power than lower tech/population planets and systems. This sets up an economic data problem because high supply = low prices. I know Traveller tosses aside nearly all economic demand models, but even in the Merchant book there's some acknowledgement of this. Thus the model is on extremely shaky ground. Also, as has been pointed out, the economic payback is WAAYY to beneficial to anyone doing it.
In reference to the blockchain computing issue, that's not really a good analogy. Blockchain computations require the systems to stay connected to the network to process the data. I don't claim to be an expert on this, but for this to work properly you must have some expected times that you will be connected to the network to properly distribute the backoffice computational work. If you connect/disconnect multiple times a day/hour, the network can't function efficiently because the transaction work is constantly disrupted. Bitcoin farms are running continuously to make their money. If they don't complete their blockchains, they don't get paid either. Granted if you could stay connected for 24hrs it's possible to make it work, but in the long run it's still disruptive if your overall processing is constantly changing.
While it sounds like a neat idea, I don't see it bringing anything positive to the game from a gamer's perspective. One of the key tools a referee has is control of the economy and the ability to positively or negatively influence players behaviors and direction with money. At least in all the games I've been in. There have been a rare handful where money/items was immaterial to the game, it was just for the mental challenge of overcoming obstacles. But those have been the rare exceptions.
alex_greene said:
Bitcoin mining (or Ether, or it's derivative now) rewards miners with free bitcoins because somebody has to do all the overhead to process the transactions. Mining is how the processors are rewarded for providing the free overhead to the bitcoin users, and the users provide the market for the coins to have value.
BUT, in all the coin models, there is an upper limit to the amount of coins that can exist. The Imperium has thousands of worlds and there are hundreds of billions of sentients on those worlds. While electronic funds will be the norm in the future because of the nature of the economy, I don't see the Imperium allowing bitcoins to be the coin of the realm. Bitcoin et. al, works today because the entire network is online and transactions can be run. The vastness of space and the fact that the networks can never be up-to-date, mining would be heavily penalized due to travel times. And think of the miners in the Marches processing a transaction that then is stored on a fob and transported to say Terra. The may take years. The question then becomes can the network still recognize the block chain, or would the quadrillion of transactions since have obfuscated the data? And with the disparate network, it would be possible to counterfeit the blocks and then simultaneously use them on multiple planets before the distributed system would be able to validate them.
Granted this issue is similar to every other currency issue the Imperium will have with Credits. However, with credits you are getting, well, credit, from another planet. This information is heavily encrypted and protected for transport between systems. Unless you are taking hard script, which will also have it's own protections against duplication. Though no system would be safe from hacking or thefts, so in that they would share many similar risks.
To be fair, I suppose you could hand wave all that away and say "they've figured out how to make it all work", and viola, for the game it just works. But to me it seems far too close to the something for nothing you would want to avoid in a gaming environment.
Annatar Giftbringer
Emperor Mongoose
I don't own high guard (yet) so I don't know if it's still there, but in the beta document the following text can be found:
"Rumours that this software is actually part of a government-based surveillance network are likely to be completely unfounded."
So, if someone wants to break the economy through virtual mining, the GM could always apply a creative interpretation of that quote, and make the player's lives miserable/force them into other business/(insert other plot plan here)
"Rumours that this software is actually part of a government-based surveillance network are likely to be completely unfounded."
So, if someone wants to break the economy through virtual mining, the GM could always apply a creative interpretation of that quote, and make the player's lives miserable/force them into other business/(insert other plot plan here)
Annatar Giftbringer said:
Yeah, that's just a bit silly though. IBIS has better ways to spy on you. And what are they going to find out through distributed calculations? Any paranoid player worth their salt will wipe any data from their system prior to making a few easy credits.
AnotherDilbert
Emperor Mongoose
If the players want to run data mining as a business, I would treat it like a business.
A single shipborne computer takes negligible space and power (in a space craft), but hundreds of them will take measurable space and power. To run hundreds of computers would take a data centre (using power and AC using more power) and staff, the staff would take offices and bureaucracy, the offices would take janitors, etc...
After deducting salaries, locale rental and power costs the income from mining will more reasonable, or more likely non-existent.
A single shipborne computer takes negligible space and power (in a space craft), but hundreds of them will take measurable space and power. To run hundreds of computers would take a data centre (using power and AC using more power) and staff, the staff would take offices and bureaucracy, the offices would take janitors, etc...
After deducting salaries, locale rental and power costs the income from mining will more reasonable, or more likely non-existent.
alex_greene
Guest
Typical. Someone comes up with something wonderful in canon, someone else thinks of a way of turning it into something profitable, and someone comes along after the fact and tries to nerf it because Travellers are not supposed to have nice things for no reason at all, and they are supposed to slog like goodness just to earn enough for toilet paper.
Guns, big guns, yes they can have them. But not high Social Standing or money, because that's some sort of game breaker.
Guns, big guns, yes they can have them. But not high Social Standing or money, because that's some sort of game breaker.
they will run it and succeed outrageously. They'll always find a way to totally ignore all the things that everybody is scared of like failure, because they're Travellers, and that is the sort of thing that Travellers are supposed to do.
Annatar Giftbringer
Emperor Mongoose
Good points from both Dilbert and Alex, one simple solution to keep it from being too profitable and one very valid point about perhaps it being better to just let it be the way it is.
I had another suggestion, but either the forum ate it or (more likely) I forgot to press submit and just closed the tab...
Anyway, my idea was basically to build upon the quote about secret surveillance, something like this: What if the virtual mining software not only mines for Bitcoin, but also secretly data-mines and records everything that the ship computer does? Remember that time there was only your ship and another (unarmed) trader in-system, you opened fire, boarded them and stole their cargo? Yep, recorded.
Each time the mining software gets in touch with an X-boat network it automatically uploads your mining results, turning it into money as per the program description. Of course the logs from your fire-fight is also sent, without you knowing.
Something like that
I had another suggestion, but either the forum ate it or (more likely) I forgot to press submit and just closed the tab...
Anyway, my idea was basically to build upon the quote about secret surveillance, something like this: What if the virtual mining software not only mines for Bitcoin, but also secretly data-mines and records everything that the ship computer does? Remember that time there was only your ship and another (unarmed) trader in-system, you opened fire, boarded them and stole their cargo? Yep, recorded.
Each time the mining software gets in touch with an X-boat network it automatically uploads your mining results, turning it into money as per the program description. Of course the logs from your fire-fight is also sent, without you knowing.
Something like that
alex_greene
Guest
It is known that blockchain can actually be traced back to its origin, if you have cutting edge software. That means that those creds could be tracked back to the Travellers if they use them for, among other things ...Annatar Giftbringer said:Something like that
Spec trading.
Contraband selling and purchasing.
Arms purchasing.
Bullets fired.
Oh, and if they use it for day to day ship operations, blockchain could be used to keep track of ship mortgage payments filed and missed ...
Blockchain's never as secure as people think it is, even n the present day ...
Also, if you really want some fun, all that blockchain bitcred is stored virtually. And someone with Intrusion could swoop in some time, while the Travellers are out, and make off with the lot ...
But that, you see, is where an adventure is born.
