AdamSC1

Hey folks this is AdamSC1 the creator of BitBums and I wanted to tell you a little bit of background about the project and my journey with it.

I love a good satire, and I love a good incremental PHP tick-based game (you know, the classics like Dominion, A3, Hobowars, Neopets, Ogame, etc).

I've always wanted to build a game. I had thought about building a game of my own, but, I always worried I wasn't good enough to do that.

I've always viewed game design as a unique art form, especially these text/flat-image based games, as they aren't relying on flash to keep you hooked so much as the story and world they build, and I didn't think I could compare.

Almost two years ago, I was going through an emotional struggle and in the past it was escaping into video games that had helped me to get through challenging times. But, this time it was to no avail, video games didn't seem to grasp me the same way anymore. I struggled to find ones I enjoyed the same way, and while part of the challenge lay with me, I also realized that part of the challenge was the shell that many video games had become. Most games had become pay-2-win flashy apps that all had the same core. (Don't get me wrong, there are exceptions, but this dominated the marketplace).

Usually with my side projects, I find I become exhausted. I always want to build something people will love, I get launch anxiety worrying what people think, and I spend so much time trying to worry about promotion and monetization. But, when I was looking for the game I needed at the time something finally clicked. I realized that I didn't need to build a flashy game. I didn't need to build for anyone else. I was going to build a game based on the games I used to love playing, the communities that brought me joy when I was young, and the humor that I always found comfort in. I was going to build a game for me - and if along the way other people liked that great! Maybe it ends up only having 4 or 5 players, but, if they get the joy from the game that I was looking for then I'm thrilled.

So 2 years ago, I cashed out a lot of my savings account and my crypto, and I set about building a game. I started with an existing PHP game script (which was a mistake in retrospect as I had to entirely rebuild it in the end) and I spent nights and weekends outside of work improving my development skills. I hired a junior developer, and an amazing comic artist and we started building. I found myself learning so much but also being filled up by pouring myself into the creative process and bringing to life something that resembled the games that were so important to me growing up. Some people find themselves in their writing, and I got to find myself again in building out a game.

Now, as I mentioned BitBums is a satire. I believe that we as humans can laugh at anything, it's how we deal with the challenging times, and there is nothing better to laugh at than yourself and the communities you belong to. As someone who has been deeply involved in the crypto community since late 2012, I couldn't think of anything better to poke fun at than magic internet money! (Let's face it, its petty crazy and certainly filled with memes and tropes).

The game follows your character, a 'BitBum', who was previously a highly-paid San Francisco engineer. You left your job, cashed out your stock and sold your house at the height of the Bitcoin boom to buy more Bitcoin at the super reasonable price of $20,000 per coin. While the market tanked, your still a strong believer in the future of crypto and found a group of likeminded BitBums living in a make-shift city beneath an underpass. The BitBums of CryptoCity live in their cardboard community, using spare parts to build make-shift potato powered mining rigs, and run their entire society on a crypto called Bottlecaps. What you do in CryptoCity is really up to you, you can refine your skills at mining, use make shift weapons to fight your way to glory in the arena, start a gang and engage in turf wars to try and become the mayor, or become the best at Tiny Soldiers 30,000 the table top RPG that BitBums love so much.

While the game is littered with hilarious references to crypto, and will actually have a number of features that are blockchain related (such as being able to move items and accounts out via the blockchain) the entire game is not on a blockchain. There is no complicated MetaMask login or issues with sending delays, and the game is designed so that even someone who knows next to nothing about Bitcoin can pick up the game, play it and still find lots of laughs along the way.

I've published a detailed FAQ here: https://medium.com/@bitbums/bitbums-faq-45b31a194deb

And our full sneak peak blog post can be found here: https://medium.com/@bitbums/your-sneak-peak-of-bitbums-the-o...

Most of our writing keeps the strong satire tone, but, in sharing this journey with HN I wanted to take a moment to step back and discuss how the development journey impacted me, and encourage others that if they have a dream side project, dive on in, make mistakes and figure it out along the way. Your end product won't always be flashy, it may not be well received, and it likely won't be the next big thing - but, if you start truly building for yourself, you'll be happy with the outcome either way!

Thanks for taking the time to read!

If you are interested in following along with updates you can follow us on a social channel of your choice:

-Facebook: http://facebook.com/bitbums -Twitter: https://twitter.com/bitbums -Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/bitbums

Or on the mailing list sign-up found on https://bitbums.co/

I'm also happy to hear any feedback about the site and project so far!

And only a few select cities in Canada.

It could be a great use of time to get the initial core nugget of info, but, unlike the Masterclass course itself you now have to find your own way to repeat and reinforce it. If you are the kind of person that can give yourself a structure of daily practice to implement a new concept more power to you!

I used to fall into the camp of being frustrated at Gladwell's books.

I would buy them, read them, learn from them, but be frustrated I spent that time and only really got one nugget from the book.

Then I became an adjunct professor. Teaching in my first course, I noticed that even the brightest students would ask me to go over content again with additional examples and it brought me back to these debates about Gladwell's books.

I decided to split my class in half, into group A and group B and run an experiment (that wouldn't impact the student's marks).

For Group A, I would give a detailed two hour breakdown of "Topic #1" explaining each element of it carefully and slowly. For "Topic #2", I would give only a thirty minute breakdown of the topic comprised of three anecdotes applying the topic.

For Group B, I would give the detailed two hour breakdown on "Topic #2" and the thirty minute anecdote series on "Topic #1".

Then I quizzed them.

Both groups performed better on the anecdote topics by a fairly significant margin, and not only had the class average performed better, but, I found that many individuals who often struggled on tests were performing FAR above their averages.

When I look back to the business concepts I remember, it's never long convoluted blog posts, or books covering an array of concepts. It's ideas that can be expressed in a few words (Jelly Effect, Tipping Point, Purple Cow) and then are beaten to death with examples.

There seem two be two reasons, first and foremost, not every anecdote, example, or explanation resonates the same with each person. So by increasing the number of examples you give, you are increasing the likelihood of an individual reader being able to understand.

Second, just like we learned in elementary with spelling and times tables, to truly 'learn' something repetition and reinforcement are really important and increase the likelihood of people being able to recall and apply the concepts that are taught.

Gladwell and others present just one or two nuggets of brilliance across their books, but, I think most educators would agree with me, that it is because of that repetition and variety of example's that most of us understand and remember the concepts they were trying to teach.

The Canadian startup scene is brutal. We have all of the downsides of valley startups with very few of the benefits.

About five years ago, during my last job search, I interviewed at a well funded (Series B) AI company that was looking for a VP of Marketing. After a few months of interviews, including many early on where they had asked me for my salary expectations, they offered me a starting salary of $70,000 CAD saying that they had to "save money for Engineers because AI is expensive and engineering is more important."

Another company I had worked at early in my career had two "co-CEOs" (who constantly bickered all the time in a power struggle). The claimed to have "flexible work hours" as long as you put in your regular hours and were there between the core hours of 10-3. Since it was a long drive away from me, I started doing a 7-3 shift to avoid the traffic. I noticed that the younger staff would arrive around 8:30 or 9am, but was told that they were staying until 7 or 8 at night and ordering pizza each night because nobody dared to leave before the CEOs, who were two young single guys just out of University. I felt guilted, and would end up putting in a few extra hours here and there, but, when it came time for my performance review, I was told I wasn't a "team player" because I wasn't staying to tough it out with the rest of them. The one other employee who had a family and didn't stay late said "You don't pay enough for this to be my full life" and the CEO said "well you make more than we do and look at all the time we put in" - he couldn't understand the difference in the fact that this was his company that he owned, and for others it was just a job.

I've got probably a dozen stories of Canadian startups who expect top 0.1% talent, pay below market rates, and want you constantly in the office. They try and make themselves seem great with office dogs, and catered lunches but they are classic underpaid corporate jobs, with even higher expectations.

After a few years, I could see why Canada faced such a brain drain of talent to the valley. Even the University of Waterloo, which is famous for its Engineers notes that Canada even companies in the city of Waterloo have trouble retaining their grads from going to the valley.

I started working remote and haven't looked back. But, it's a real shame because I think Canada has such potential to be a great startup market and yet the culture is way off course.

Among other features DuckDuckGo's extension blocks third-party trackers on a website (duckduckgo.com/app) and gives each site a privacy grade.

Unlike other vendors, there is no pay-to-play option.

We aim to take a principled rules based approach to blocking and raising the standard of trust online.

(Disclaimer: DDG employee)

There is a lot that can be said about Elon Musk, some good, some bad.

But, one thing that I think is really valuable is that he seems to consistently put his money where his mouth is and that's admirable.

Love the map! Anyway to view a non-globe version?

Most companies tend to have more than one employee - especially when they decide to buy an employee chat software.

That's based on one current implementation of a gaming DApp.

It's worth noting that you can achieve semi-privacy through either on-chain/off-chain hybrids, as well as some other emerging efforts.

One example I've been playing around with is to use the multi-address approach:

In your database each "player" consists of multiple addresses each which are OR-multi-sig wallets, for various inventory elements and stats.

When they log in via a system like metamask, their main wallet (PlayerID) is unlocking an account which in your games database (off-chain) ties together another set of "master wallets" together with you've given the player private keys for - for each item, or each set of X items, in the players inventory you are setting up a new smart contract that is a OR-multi-sig wallet.

For this wallet, which holds the item, there are two possible signatories the first being the game's main contract, so that the game can add/remove items from players based on game events, and then one of the players private keys.

While you'd likely need a custom fork of metamask to handle the multi-key environment, you've made a system where:

* Player's inventory cannot be know from one private address.

* Player's retain full control over the items.

* Player's have private key access to the items in case the service goes down.

* You store player data off-chain, but in a way that your service is not crucial to the game.

* Player assets can be traded off-game without updating the game service.

* Data about individual items is still public, and does not need to be obscured, oraclized or stored off chain.

The current blocker isn't any specific blockchain technology, but just having a good multi-key management UI for users.

You tell them it was the title for a customer support role at the startup you worked at.

Most of those people will likely end up at other startups anyway.

Yeah it's not like the good old days where I had to use my 'dial-up' 'modem' to connect to the 'world wide web' and go to AOL and use my 'keyword' to load a 'website' from their 'server' and 'download' my 'emails' - it was so simple back then without that jargon.

Usability isn't about only using existing terms, it's about explaining the process well during on-boarding.

Human language is malleable and we all now know 100x the technical terms we did in the 90s. The same will eventually happen with blockchain tech, you're just seeing it in the early stages.

No one has classified Bitcoin as a security.

Per Wikipedia:

>The U.S. Treasury classified bitcoin as a convertible decentralized virtual currency in 2013.[1] >The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, CFTC, classified bitcoin as a commodity in September 2015. >Per IRS, bitcoin is taxed as a property.[2]

[1]https://www.fincen.gov/news/testimony/statement-jennifer-sha...

[2]https://www.irs.gov/uac/newsroom/irs-virtual-currency-guidan...

In the US it is classified either as a currency, piece of property or a commodity, and as of Monday it will also be available as a futures contract of a commodity.

Neither commodities nor futures contracts are consider securities, as they fail the clause of the Howey Test that would make them dependent on a single entity or management group.

This is why commodity futures trade is managed by the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trade Commission) rather than the SEC (Securities Exchange Commission).

In fact, while some other tokens and ICOs have been found to be securities both in the US and abroad, no country has formally noted Bitcoin as a security - many treat it as a currency under a new classification for eMoney, Digital Currency or Virtual Currencies.

For passing strings between a contract you can return the string as Bytes32 and let the remote contract query a function to access that.

Example, I had a friend who was recently looking to start an wholesale business in Canada. Let's pretend for sake of the example that he was selling widgets.

He found he could import 300 widgets from China and have them landed in Toronto for a shipping fee of roughly $17. To ship that same set of widgets from Toronto to a store two cities away was going to cost him $349.

In fact for $17, he could send 1 widget within the same city he was in directly to a customer.

It gets even worse if he wants to send that package of widgets to the states for something like Amazon FBA. Once again, it would cost $17 to ship directly from China but would run him $1400 from Toronto to New York.

It's not "punishing you" it's just the mechanics of the game. If you want a more casual game, play a more casual game.

The guy is making a simulation based game, and is free to make it however he wants.

Got an email?

A non-profit is legal considered to be a type of business that simply gets a different tax treatment.

A business is considered to be a type of entity (just like a person) that gets different tax treatment.

Anyone who transfers money, by any manner including, but not limited to, electronic, financial, debt ledger, cash or traditional methods like hawala, hundi, fei ch'ien, and chit is considered to be a "Money Transmitter."

Money Transmission classification and registration varies by state, to receive money from, or transfer money to someone in said state (regardless of your jurisdiction) you must register with the state and usually put up an insurance bond.

Then you must also register with FinCEN and enact an appropriate AML policy that would include KYC.

If you want to look at the nitty gritty we have a very simple and straight forward privacy policy:

https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

We do not collect or share any information that can be used to personally identify you.

Hey Andy,

Do you know what firewall system your work uses? We were blocked in a few of them but found that reaching out to those companies got it fixed.

Would be happy to help investigate!

Disclaimer: DDG staff.

Still advertisers. It's a nuanced but important difference.

Case A - if you type in "Car" we show an ad about cars. Advertisers are paying to appear at the top of that page. They do not know who you are or what you previously searched.

Case B - if you type in "Car" you are shown an ad about cars. Advertisers are paying to target based on your interest in cars, and possibly other websites you've visited, online actions you've taken, re-marketing pixels from third-party websites, or your affinity to other demographic groups.

In "Case A" the search page is the product.

In "Case B" you are the product.

If you look at the most recently public posted qSearch report on Feb 2016[2] you'll notice it talks about "Explicit Core Search" and "Powered By Reporting."

Powered By Reporting is listed as any search that is handled by Google or Bing. "Google’s “powered by” share is composed of searches conducted at "Google entities", as well as searches on AOL and Ask’s MyWebSearch "[3]

In Comscores qSearch product that you can subscribe to, when you hit "Google Sites" it provides a drop down detailing the breakdown of all the properties. Search is hard to define when companies get to that size, and searches on other Google properties are indeed 'searches' but they are also different than searches on DuckDuckGo.

[2]http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/comScore-Releases-... [3]http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/comScore-September-201...

Our engineers have been working really hard on international results - I'm sure they will be happy to hear it's making a difference for our users!

Disclaimer: DDG staff.

DuckDuckGo uses multiple sources for our results, as well as our instant answers and bangs.

But the most important feature is that DuckDuckGo is the search engine that doesn't track you. We don't store your personal information and we don't sell you out to advertisers.

Our goal is to raise the standard of trust online, and so at DuckDuckGo you are not the product, search is. We think that's an important difference.

Disclaimer: DDG staff.

Whenever you do a search you'll notice there is a "Feedback" button in the top right-hand corner of the screen.

This allows you to lets you share your feedback about the site or specific results with us. Your personal information is not recorded.

If a query isn't returning as expected you can share it there!

Disclaimer: DDG staff.

Hey graphitezepp,

We do have some of those tools, at DuckDuckGo they are called "Instant Answers."

For example the query: "2 lb to kg" will bring you to this results page https://duckduckgo.com/?q=2+lb+to+kg&ia=answer

You can see all our Instant Answers here: https://duck.co/ia

If something isn't triggering for you - let us know with the feedback tool on the site!

Disclaimer: DDG staff.

If you'd like to go by searches rather than visits:

At DuckDuckGo we are averaging roughly 17 million searches a day right now (duckduckgo.com/traffic.html)

Google says they did 2 trillion searches last year[1], and while usually their search metrics include Youtube, Google Maps and Gmail queries let's assume it was all searches. That'd be roughly 5.5 billion searches a day.

So now we're talking ~1/322 or just shy of 40lbs. That's roughly the size of a Hamadryas baboon or about 22 Mallard ducks - not a bad little flock! :)

Disclaimer: DDG staff. Opinions are my own. No animals were harmed in the poor construction of this analogy.

[1]http://searchengineland.com/google-now-handles-2-999-trillio...

Email is a tough one, but I've been using FastMail.

No advertising, strong privacy policy, based in Australia (a country with a decent privacy track record that we know of).

It's $3/month which is a decent price for liberating a lot of data from advertisers.

The spam filter is playing catch-up to Google so that's a bit of a shock at first, but you can train it up well or use second layer measures like Sanebox.

Disclaimer: DDG staff - but personal opinion.

DDG staff here - Instant Answers aren't going anywhere :)

I'm not a developer but I do serve as an adjunct professor for some technical courses at a local college.

I had some students ask me the same thing this semester and so I tried to really dig in to the different offerings and these are the points I made to the class:

1) I believe you will learn the most from EdX IF the institution putting the course on is reputable (MITx, HavardX etc)

2) The credential I think carries the most weight is Udacity, because they have the most rigorous testing. It's not an honor code.

3) I'd put Udacity's weight on par with most online colleges in Canada or the US (Walden, Athabasca, etc).

4) This credential won't matter to other colleges, or to large workplaces (thousands of employees) who have HR departments who want to just "have a checkbox"

Lastly, it's important to be able to sell the value of the credential. I have a degree from an online college that I got part time. The college isn't all that reputable. But, I have that degree because I was working full-time and still wanted to validate my skills in a different field.

So I worked evenings and weekends to make that happen, and to many employers that shows commitment and work ethic.

I personally think the best path forward is to learn what you can, and create a good portfolio. Shop it around, if you can't get anywhere with that try a Udacity nanodegree (watch the videos for free first, then pay the monthly fee and speed through the tests).

Finally if that doesn't work get an EdX honor certificate from one of the big name schools like MIT, they don't have much weight, but it may give a hiring manager cause to take a second glance.