April Fool's: Presenting FLARDCoin - Powered by the Sponge Blockchain

The Sponge Powered team has been busy working on our latest integrated product. We know our community loves to have new ways to engage with Sponge and to explore new server experiences. So we are pleased to announce latest product inspired by recent activity on the Sponge Docs Crowdin:

Sponge Blockchain is the first integrated in game solution that allows for synergy between players and their actions in game. It allows players to mine FLARDCoins by synchronously mining ingame blocks, enabling Sponge to enhance our world-leading position as the first blockchain economy based Minecraft server platform.

@worm424 has been spearheading this development effort and as such has recently been promoted to our new Sponge Blockchain Brand Ambassador. Also a big shoutout to @Phase for his work on the online backend (Soon to be integrated with Ore) and @mumfrey for getting the hard yards done using Mixins to embed blockchain technology into the core workings of Minecraft via the existing Sponge Platform.

We will be integrating it into various Sponge platforms starting with the Community Server which will switch to exclusively using FLARDCoins for the in game currency. A beta version of the official FLARDCoin miner will be available on Ore later this week. At a later point we will be introducing the miner and blockchain code in to both SpongeVanilla and SpongeForge. Rest assured, we will only use what system resources you have spare in order to contribute to the Sponge Blockchain, with that in mind we shall be dedicating a minimum of 40% CPU time towards mining.

Moving forward? We would like to expanded Sponge Blockchain and FLARDCoin beyond Minecraft to other games and server based economies. We plan to diversify into virtual real-estate, and establish our own virtual nation to help propagate and leverage the more interesting applications of FLARDCoin, and perhaps establish our own Iced Tea company.

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I wholeheartedly approve of this step Sponge is taking into the future. Blockchain is an exciting technology which promises to create a fool-proof chain of ownership, thus ensuring all value created within The Internet of Value will be evenly distributed. FLARDCoin looks like a very exciting way to exploit the blockchain hype, and perhaps in the future it may even lead us into Blockchain 2.0. The ecosystem will surely benefit from this great addition.

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The Ore team is working swiftly on integrating FLARDCoin into Ore. I can’t wait to see where this technology goes!

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Guessing this is the April Fools post XD

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I can assure you this is no joke. We’ve been discussing this idea internally for a while now. :slight_smile:

Note: It’s also a bit early for April Fools.

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Interesting idea, reminds me of what Sevadus said a few weeks ago. The first plugin that contains a miner, but this takes it one step further. Completely integrating the miner in the server software makes much more sense.

How will mirrors of the blockchain be handled? Are they stored in any special format? Do you require everyone to have a copy or can I toggle a setting that allows me to grab a copy when I want?

/s

@tomudding Obviously we’re not the first blockchain economy, however to my knowledge we are the first to integrate blockchain into Minecraft. We’re still yet to determine the official client format as we’ve been focusing on the actual protocol and mechanics of the system. As such we’d appreciate community feedback regarding these matters.

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Looks exciting!

It looks like an April fool, I could not find anything about that on github… But if that’s true I hope it will be optimized enough not to make the minecraft server overloaded or anything like that… 40% of a cpu can mean A LOT for small moded servers

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I’ve added features to HuskyCrates that boost mining speeds for all my users every time someone opens a crate. Make sure to get that latest version for l33t mining speeds.

I didn’t actually check the date when posting this, sorry for any mix-up.
We’ve been working on this in a private repository while we finalize how we want the blockchain to operate before actually launching it.

As you’ve probably seen elsewhere making major changes to an operating cryptocurrency is incredibly difficult due to forks, outdated software and the like. We wanted to make this announcement to just let everyone know what we’re working on, as we will be pushing some hooks into SpongeCommon and Ore over the next few hours (but not the actual blockchain code).

Once we’ve ironed out all the details regarding the blockchain we will of course push to a public repo and then integrate it into our existing codebases.

Obviously there’s an incentive to increase player’s mining speeds in-game to increase their payout, however as the per-block payout will be determined based on the server’s FLARDCoin reserves, ultimately such an action will just reduce the amount of FLARDCoins the player recieves for breaking each block.

Every block use counts as a block mine when using HuskyMixins, being sure that you don’t actually want to use any other mixins or core mods.

Time to become a FLARDCoin billionaire.

I always wanted to make easy money. As of now, cryptocurrencies seemed to be too risky(see Bitcoin). I am glad that you are filling the gap for this need. The market situation currently is great for this type of announcements. In all honesty, since the first commit on the Sponge repo something was saying to me that this step will come (I have been saving some money since then). The combination of all the technologies (Mixin, Minecraft, and More) is perfect for this type of goal. I am sure that this project will be supported by the whole community with much effort.

We agree, so in order to ensure that every server is equal, we’ll be reducing server’s TPS by 40% to 12. That should solve these concerns! :slight_smile:

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Reducing the server’s tps would be absurd for common usage. That can be helpful for debugging… But for standard usage !? Have you ever tried to play with the tickrate at 12? (Writing a mod to do that is fairly easy)
If the goal is to create a Minecraft server, reducing it’s performances for mining cryptocurrency would be pretty dumb to do on the server…

This confirms that this is a joke. Well played with this one, it could have been taken seriously.

I understand your concerns, but don’t forget it’s still a work in progress, so things can change. As everyone loves to remind us Minecraft runs mostly on a single thread, so instead of limiting the TPS to 12, we could reach an unofficial agreement to aim for 18, or even 20, depending on future benchmarks, and spend more development time offloading the mining to unused threads.

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