FAQ

Why are you giving free bitcoins ?

I wanted my own original project in the bitcoin/crypto space, I have a fixed amount that I am willing to sacrifice for it and if does not succeed, the fun I had and the skills I have acquired building it are already worth 100+ times what I plan to give

Also as Michael Saylor would say I am not giving "money" (dollar, fiat money...) but the energy it represent, to be more clear 1 dollar dont have the same value for a guy living in a poor country than for someone from a rich country, but if this poor guy have access to electricity and a computer he will be able to compete equaly with the guy that has the benefit of living in a rich country, so nethackcoins will also try to reduce this gap so that finaly 1 dollar or 1 sat have the same value anywhere on earth, this seem kind of fucked up but as Jack Dorsey would say the bitcoin community remind him of the early day of the internet, and I am sure they were project even more crazy than this one.

And yeah, I am not gonna give away all my bitcoins in this project, I own less than 1 and I know how precious bitcoin is, but the thing with bitcoin is that it can be divided 1 bitcoin = 100 000 000 satoshis and also it is a programmable money, I can decide how you acquire it on this website, the current rules are written in the "Rules" section, so yeah for now it is 1000 sats per ascension, but I can change it to 100 sats per ascension or 100 000 sats for 100 ascension in a row ^^

What is your project ?

The idea is to have a place where people can challenge themself arround the best solo game ever made (nethack) and are rewarded and judged equaly regarding only the skill they have put into the game. What I mean is this guy from the other part of the world can, at least in this website, play with the same rules as you, and be rewarded for its effort in the same way with a common value currency (bitcoin)

Nethackcoin is also perfect to promote cryptocurrencies and nethack, think about it this way, there is no easy way to win this game even the best one need a couple of hours to finish it, and currently 1 ascend is rewarded by 1000 sats (0,48 dollar at the current price) so yeah it is a way to distribute wealth, now if you hear someone, especially a newcomer that said he doesnt want to buy crypto ( yes he shouldnt, newcomer should spend some month studying the space before FOMO in ) said to him to try nethackcoin, free crypto for the worthy. And everyone should know about nethack, especially with modern games where the only difficulty is to follow the script some game dev written to avoid you any difficulty or obstacle

Why did you pick nethack ?

Nethack is the most interresting game I have played, and one of its properties is that it is very hard, it took me 3 years to ascend (win the game) with cheats (saving is not possible but if you play it localy you can do it ) and then another 2 years without cheat, we often see someone on https://www.reddit.com/r/nethack saying that he had played the game for multiple decade and still not ascended 1 time ever. I suppose if you pick a good player, like a speed runner he could finish it in a week, or even a day if he was assisted by a veteran, but you get it this game is very hard.

How are you gonna prevent those good players from taking all the coins ?

This is a complex question, the solution would have been to release nethack today so that nobody got and early advantages, but well, somes have already trained for this game for 33 years, more if you count the first rogue (1980) so 2 things:

1 - at the release nethackcoins, the rules will be 1000 sats for any ascension, but it will change later to limit the drain of the vault (the coins available) I have some idea, some already ready to be deployed:

- increase the difficulty of the game, you see nethack make have use of random number generator, if you play 1000 games you will have one where you are very lucky like multiple wand of wishing (best item in the game) early in the game, and one where you are very unlucky, like a master lich ( one of the stronger monster ) in the mines To do that players will get credit ( or extra credit ? ) only if they win multiple in a row, what I mean is that each time you will win the next game will have more chance of being harder, because if you die one time your counter is put to zero, so something like 1 credit only if you ascend 2 times in a row and if you picked a random race/class, because female dwarf valkyrie is the easiest

- auto equilibrate the reward based on the amount left in the vault

- Allow credit only if the next block hash finish by 0 (will not work because of bots) but something around this

- unique super reward for a big achievment, like beating Tariru winning streak

- Simply diminish the reward amount, it start at 1000 sats but it can go lower to 1 sats or even less, yes that is possible on the lightning network

2 - For the veteran players that still want to play on nethackcoins but dont want to abuse the project there will be an option to transform those earned credit into "nethackcoin point" that will for example give you NFT or ERC-20 nethackcoin coins later in the future, all your achievements are recorded on my database, so I hope this will limit the drain of coins, at least in the begining...

There is also the problem of bots, if someone succeed in making a bot able to win nethack 3.6.6 I guess you deserve the coins left in the vault ( I resplenish when necessary ) Facebook and Google are currently working on it https://nethackchallenge.com/ but I think they have not succeed yet, it would be funny if the cost in electricity to run a single AI agent to beat the game is supperior to the current nethackcoins reward

Why did you pick Bitcoin instead of another crypto ?

I am somewhat of a bitcoin maximalist but I like other coins as well, especially ethereum, EOS or dogecoin, more coins will come in the future, if you want your favorite coin listed, just contact me

Also I could have used fiat money, but it is way less fun, and I dont know if I could offer it to anybody like I do with bitcoin

Andreas Antonopoulos said that the best way to acquire bitcoin is to earn it link Nethackcoin hope to be one of those way.

How can your project succeed ?

I often see those thread on https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/ about play 2 earn games, and they seem shitty and based around NFT, with nethackcoins you will get your NFT only if you deserve it, not because you used your mother credit card or you simply are a rich dude, pay to win games are stupid, in this case I hope we will have some sort of equilibrium with nethackcoins

Saifedean Ammous with The Bitcoin Standard introduced me to the concept of time preference(link) the idea is that if you have a high time preference you will go toward easy and fast weak reward whereas if you have a low one, you will be able to work hard to get good rewards, games those day tend to favorite the first behavior with almost no learning curve, or worse you can pay to get those instant reward, nethackcoins hope to be the contrary, we will reward you if you are able to put the effort

So yes, if nethackcoins is cited in those thread when people ask what are the different games or way to earn crypto, it will have succeeded

How can I contribute to your project ?

You can go to the contribute page and give us some crypto so that we can grow the vault and the overall hashrate/coinsrate, or simply introduce people to nethackcoin on the internet. Also I plan to make the whole project open source in the future

What is the vault ?

The idea is to have a system similar to bitcoin proof of work hashrate recalculation(link) The more the players accomplish the current achievment for example 3 ascension in a row, the more difficulty will had proportionaly, it can for example go to 4 and if less players succeed at that, it will go down

nethackcoins should be the place where value is exchanged equally for monney

there will be a transitionary period where nhc will go from a period of "easy coins", where only 1 sucessful ascend give 1 credit to a period where we will use a more sophisticated and sustainable system where something like a "vault" which will contain a fixed amount of coins given by me plus the one given by communauty and those coins will be distributed with a system inspired by proof of work. I have lots of ideas but there is nothing to rush for now.

What does Nethackcoin (Official Nethack 3.6.6) in rules mean ?

I have just modified the official version to add Satoshi Nakamoto and Hal Finney, two figures of the Bitcoin history to the list of names merchants can have in the game, I will maybe add more stuff later but nothing that change the gameplay

What is the link between Nethack and bitcoin

- They are both open source
- They are both old 1987 for nethack ( one of the longest maintained project, even older than linux ) 2009 for bitcoin (oldest crypto by far at least) and search to be sustainable, the blocksize war shown that bitcoin user had a long term view
- They both search the maximum efficiency in ressources, bitcoin are constrained to optimize its bits size usage by block are small and so we have to put lots of data inside, and nethack was build in 1987 a time were they had little computer power available at this time to make their game, they were not even playing it on personal computer but on terminal with mainframes - They are both are to grasp