WAX CPU - What really happened?

A lot of players will have noticed an increase in 'out of CPU' type error messages recently when trying to do anything using the wax blockchain. Everything is transaction based; every time you claim a mine in Alien Worlds or buy something from the AtomicHub market or claim a free drop (if you can still find one). While wax is often touted as not having transaction fees, this is not entirely true. For example if you use the Anchor wallet and you don't have enough staked, it will actually tell you this and kindly (sic) offer to let you pay an additional sum of wax to complete the transaction. Let's dig deeper.

What actually happens is you receive a few wax when you set up your cloud wallet which is automatically staked for you so that you can interact with the blockchain. There is a finite amount of CPU and net resources which are shared among all the active users in the ratio of how much wax you have staked to how much of these resources are available. This is explained here using a really bad analogy to airports. So why did this system work fine a few weeks back but not so well today?

The answer can be found here. From the narrative of this statement using an equally poor hotel metaphor,  a lot more players are visiting resulting in the available resources being shared among more people so everyone gets a smaller slice of free pizza.This is only one part of the explanation. The article continues '...previously influential customers in the space reserved a large amount of “rooms” that they did not use every day, so new accounts got extra resources for free. However, now these extra resources are taken up by a larger user base, so customers are only allocated the resources that automatically came with the account.'

So to use a better metaphor, the whales had superfast wi-fi but weren't using all of it so we got some free wi-fi off them but the whole neighbourhood started using it and now not even their unused wi-fi is enough to cope with everyone wanting to Netflix & chill; so everyone needs to fork-out for their own land-line (i.e. stake wax to CPU). The problem here is that everyone is competing for the same CPU resources. The result is that when the system is busy, only those with a large CPU stake are going to be able to transact. While this is ok for some on YouTube who will be able to continue scamming people, the rest of us will need to fund our transactions by buying and staking more wax or choosing times when the system is least busy - which is harder due to the influx of more players. If we all continually increase our CPU stakes, the system will not improve as we are just competing with each other for the same resources so gradually more and more of us will get priced out of the system. 

Can you imagine going into Tesla and being told 'Yes we have a vehicle for you and we understand you have the money for it but unfortunately our cash-registers require you to hold a minimum of fifty million dogecoin now that our vehicles are more popular and our big dogecoin-holding board members no longer want to foot the bill for us to use our registers?'. The question we should be asking is 'if you're now making more money from more customers, why aren't you investing some of it into more resources?'. There is also the question of who benefits and who gets hurt by this change. If users need to invest more and more into staking, they have less to actually spend on digital products so artists releasing their NFT's now have a bigger market but this is combined with downward pressure on prices. There's also the knock-on effect of users now thinking they were conned as all the free-to-play games suddenly require increasingly bigger deposits to actually use.

The original article explains the benefits of staking as getting to vote on things which many of us I'm sure have very little interest in. I've also previously explored how you can earn interest on your staked wax, but this is a tiny, trivial amount compared to what you could earn from just 5 wax if you were lucky enough to get the first mint in a new series of NFT; if only you didn't need to stake ten times that amount just to transact. 

What then is the solution? Well we can continue to compete with each other for limited resources by continually staking more wax rather than spending it on things we would otherwise buy, or we can resign ourselves to a decreasing allocation of transactions and progressively higher staking levels. I'm not sure if anything less than collective action is likely to see a reversal of this change. If enough people were to unstake all their wax before the next big launch event, bad publicity might force a reversal when stories emerge of lots of people having enough tokens to buy the products but the blockchain resources being insufficient to support the sales. 

As for me? Well I'd rather be able to continue playing than not. I decided to sell off my standard drills, stake the wax and continue being able to mine, but back to using shovels. Hopefully I can drop a valuable NFT before the next round of stakeflation kicks in. If not then I will be writing about the best times to avoid heavy CPU usage (which at the moment seems to be weekends; short post!).

Usual disclaimers at the top of the page.

Crypto Round-up or What I (L)earned during April

The world of crypto is very different to how I remember it from way back in 2009/10. It's been good to see how things have progressed. Now instead of a single blockchain they seem to be in double-digits (possibly even triple or more). Things which have stayed the same include wallets with 12-word security phrases to secure them and the odd opportunity here and there to earn a small amount of crypto-currency. Things which have changed include the number of exchanges to swap coins and tokens, games using blockchains and collectible NFT's with built-in provenance.

I think I can safely say that those with wealth have a lot more opportunities to invest in digital assets but only time will tell if the current plethora of chains and systems will continue; maybe some will contract or consolidate. It's hard to imagine what will happen at that point. A lot of their data appears to be provided by decentralised storage-providers while the blockchains appear to just hold account and transaction details. Will we eventually see entire blockchains being archived and if so, what happens to the items being traded on those chains if there's no way to update them? Maybe they will be moved onto other chains as 'wrapped' assets. Is the current situation a bubble and if so, when the first blockchain gets archived will we see a nervous shift back to physical collectibles and assets?

One thing I have learned recently is there are things called 'faucets' which are like dripping taps in that they reward you with tiny amounts of crypto for fulfilling certain tasks. I hadn't realised that these are very much a part of most modern blockchain systems, usually intended to whet the appetite and incentivise investment. I had no idea there were so many different versions of these until I saw this article about them from coinmarketcap.com. 

I suppose this will continue to be the case with blockchain games. While Alien Worlds has the potential for you to drop a valuable NFT, this does not seem to occur frequently so the trickle of trillium which can be converted into wax could now be considered a faucet in my opinion. Mining yields from basic tools have not recovered since the whole Binance project took off a few weeks ago. I would have liked to have been able to own land in the game however the current cheapest listing on AtomicHub is at 55,000 wax (about $14,000) which makes virtual land ownership very much a rich persons game (as in real life). At the moment it really feels like developers are selling off the treasure before they've built their game(s).

For those coming into crypto without capital (like myself), this world is full of barriers to entry. There appear to be those who get early access to crypto games who continually jump to whatever the latest game is only to cast it aside the following day for the next new best crypto game ever. As someone who put in many hours of gameplay into Guild Wars 2, developing a character and building up an inventory of relatively rare items I would urge developers to consider equalising opportunity for those likely to stick around. If you are always poor in-game, then you eventually stop playing. Those you sold your treasures to early on are not the people likely to be your long-term customers. They will sell their magic staves and swords the moment they show a nice profit. Unfortunately so will many newcomers to a game who suddenly find themselves torn between keeping a lucky drop or taking value from it to help with real-life problems.

Still I have digressed again and that was not the purpose of today's post. I said I would review how far I've got from an initial investment of absolute zero (when I said I had no capital, I really meant it). I am therefore very grateful of the people and developers out there who have enabled me to have greatly increased the value of my initial investment (of absolutely nothing). Rest assured once life gets back to normal, I shall remember where my crypto-victories came from. For now, let's have a look at those who've been a praise-worthy part of my recent crypto-exploration.

Theta.tv (article): (TFUEL)

==============================

I've been running their edge node software on this PC and more recently on my older laptop. So far it has netted me 4.0427 tFuel. I love this project even though it's far from profitable. I have yet to see if they will transfer these earnings into my wallet. At a current price of $0.39, this equates to $1.58 which is more than I earned from watching content on YouTube during the same period. Last night I was watching the CryptoStache channel and the show ended with a raid. Essentially all the viewers jumped onto another streamers channel. This guy (Stumpie) then proceeded to dish out a bunch of freebies to the new audience. He had some interesting things to say about the crypto-verse and I wish I could have stuck around for longer but it was after 2am. I will be checking out his channel again soon (if only to find out what he uses on his rig to mine Etherium).

Update (9thMay21): Today my 4 and a bit tFuel have moved from the pending section in the node software to my Theta wallet. I will now have to work out what use it has from my perspective. I'm unlikely to ever stream myself so it may be a good way to support those who are building communities on theta.tv. It's great that I got this reward just for supporting something I believe has great potential. 

CryptoTab: Bitcoin (BTC)

======================

I still can't decide if it's a scam or not but it definitely pays out. This is faucet territory though. My main system varies from 2k to 4k hashes per second with my old laptop running at about a quarter of that rate. So far I've only hit the payment threshold once but after that I tried out NiceHash and have now decided CryptoTab is the lesser of two evils. It is definitely more of a mini-me than an Austin Powers but did pay out the 0.00001 BTC within 24 hours. I'm currently running it on my main PC, old laptop and now also on an antiquated system which I use as a crypto-heater in my office and I'm half-way towards the next pay-out. I gave CryptoTab a green-light after the first payment came through but have since revised this to an amber-light (use with caution). Their twitter account lacks any attempt to create an online profile and was also suspended. I also think it may be problematic to uninstall for many people should this ever be needed and they also show no interest in responding to their critics on TrustPilot.

WAX: Blockchain (WAXP, TLM, AETHER +more)

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Wax was great for me, partly due to timing and partly due to some inspired decision making on my part. I was lucky to get some above base-level mining tools in Alien Worlds which I sold when prices started rocketing. I was then lucky to discover selling TLM on Alcor. I was lucky to have found channels like CryptoStache on YouTube and I was lucky that I opted to buy a couple of R-Planet NFT's from the AtomicHub market because I liked the art. These rose in value just like the mining tools of Alien Worlds. I haven't sold them yet as I have them staked in the game and they are currently earning a small amount of passive income. I just have to log in now and then to claim the Aether (the reward token which can also be traded for wax via the Alcor exchange). So far I have not taken a penny out of the wax system as I believe it has the potential to grow huge. I also reinvested some into KOG's (Keys to Other Games) as I think their project looks interesting.

I staked some wax and reinvested my remaining wax into NFT's from the AtomicHub marketplace. When I sold my Alien Worlds tools I actually earned over $200 worth of wax due to an influx of new players. I started to buy NFT's from new artists - just art I liked and intend to hold. This included my R-Planet rigs NFT's which I bought not knowing they could earn staking rewards. Since the process of going from wax to other mainstream crypto still confuses me, I just keep reinvesting everything back into wax projects and I continue to play Alien Worlds. It's kind of hard to say how much I've earned from wax as it's all reinvested. Just like CryptoStache, I want to stash it rather than cash-out. The TokenHead wallet suggests my accounts are worth around $250 at present but this includes some dubious valuations of NFT's (it's not clear if these are based on listings or actual sales). Even so, this propels wax to the top of my earnings list for the month. It wouldn't be enough to live on but as a side hustle with long-term possibilities, I'd say it's the next bitcoin.

Brave Browser (BAT)

===================

Almost bang on-cue to ensure I don't forget about it comes Brave browser. Not only has it just announced the months earnings are ready to claim, but I think I also got a bonus 5 BAT for dragging the logo symbol onto an empty template space. My balance currently stands at 7.250 BAT (currently just over $10). I'm still a good way off the 25 BAT required to set-up the uphold wallet but it does appear to be growing slowly and it's more than I earned from using Google Chrome last month (which was nothing). 

Pi-Coin (PI)

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It was the discovery of this on 3/14 that got me looking into the crypto-world again. It's still under development which means you can't use it for anything yet but you can still get involved by downloading the app to your phone and pressing a button every day. As yet I can't see a need it fulfils but hopefully that will come around before or soon after the launch.

So that's the good guys, now for the ones I'm dropping this month.

NiceHash

=============

It was inevitable after my experience with trying to withdraw my earned bitcoin from their custodial wallet to my own. I now refer to them as Not-So-NiceHash and they will not be getting any more of my mining resources. It appeared more efficient than CryptoTab but it's quite boring to watch. Using CryptoTab instead allows you to turn any browser-game into a crypto-game so the slower earning rate can be offset by using it to play Alien Worlds or any other faucet you might want to try out. 

XMRig

=========

This is the miner I previously ran on my crypto-heater. It was great for producing heat, but I only earned 0.00001247 after 8 hours. With a minimum of 0.1 XMR for the payment threshold (about $42 at the time of writing), I've estimated it will take 334 days of running 24/7 to reach that threshold. Even if I was assured the $42 return and that would cover running the rig for all that time, I still wouldn't need to run it for 334 days per year. Here in the UK we usually get at least a brief summer when my heater is not needed. So XMRig has been relegated and the heater now adds a small extra boost to my CryptoTab earnings when it's running.

Still lots more things on my radar to try out so I will keep the articles coming for as long as I can. This week I've discovered chain(o) games and been hearing about music NFT's on Phantasma and a secret society experimenting with a human blockchain?. I also saw an advert for an interesting looking project called Kanaria however as the image below shows its already beyond my means.

There always seems to be so much going on in crypto.

Totally Free NFT's

 

So far in this series of articles, I have covered getting paid in crypto while you browse the web using Brave browser and yesterday I covered getting started with Alien Worlds; a free-to-play digital card-game which occasionally pays out random NFT prizes. Yesterday I went over getting started and the process of trading in your mined TLM virtual ore for other crypto or actual cash.

Todays tip is how to get completely FREE NFT's.

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Yes there are some genuine artists out there creating NFT's and giving them away. There are others asking for trivial amounts. Who can say whether these people will ever achieve glory or not. Maybe you could support the next Beeple before anyone has heard of them?

Today's link is how to find NFT drops. Just follow this link

Scroll down the list and you might just find some listings for FREE or very low priced NFT's. You can use the tips from my previous posts to get a few free wax tokens to help support unknown artists. As an unknown EDM musician, I know just how much a little support is really worth. If you put months into a YouTube video and nobody watches it, you can soon reach a point where you consider giving up. Of course true artists can't as it's a core part of their being so if you now have some free wax, consider supporting those who are giving away their life's work for nothing in return.

Free Crypto - Part 3

So far in this series of articles, I have covered getting paid in crypto while you browse the web using Brave browser and yesterday I covered getting started with Alien Worlds; a free-to-play digital card-game which occasionally pays out random NFT prizes. Yesterday I went over getting started and the process of trading in your mined TLM virtual ore for other crypto or actual cash.

There's one more aspect which needs to be covered. If you continue to play Alien Worlds (in the hope of a free valuable NFT), what happens if you get duplicate NFT cards? Luckily there's already an online marketplace where you can trade in your duplicates and maybe swap them for other more useful cards. Today it's time to have a look at AtomicHub.

To get started, you need to give AtomicHub access to your wax wallet. You do this by clicking the wax symbol on the right of the magnifying glass at the top of the screen. Once you've allowed the site to access your wallet, you will see your wallet id (top right corner). Click the down arrow here and you can select inventory which will show all the NFT's you have collected. If you just want to offload duplicates, you can tick the box to only show duplicates.

Clicking on the individual card will bring up details about it and if you scroll down on this screen you will see a recommendation for how much you should sell it for. There's also a trading graph so you can see how much these items have been worth over time.

It's probably right to assume that most things will go down in value over time as the market place becomes flooded with them. As rewards are random though, it's not impossible to get something worth more as you continue to play. Should this happen, you might consider trading the valuable item for wax tokens and maybe consider using some of this to buy better mining tools.

You may have noticed your basic shovel card has a pick-axe in the top-left corner with a value below it (usually 1). This value affects how much trillium you will gather from each mining session. You might also have noticed the snowflake in the cards bottom-right corner. The value here is how much luck the tool has (higher luck = better chance to find NFT's). The best tools have higher mining-power (the pick-axe value) and/or higher luck (the snowflake). They might also have higher recharge times so there is also a strategic element. If you want to focus on mining trillium, you might want long recharge times but higher yields which means fewer clicks with longer delays between them. If you want to find more NFT's, maybe shorter delays and higher luck will be your focus. 

If you decide to invest in more tools, it's worth remembering you can only use three and your recharge time is based on the combined value of the two highest. The charge time multiplier of the plot of land you mine on will also affect your results. If you choose to hunt NFT's, try to get tools with the highest luck (snowflake) level possible. If you want to focus on earning trillium, choose cards with the highest mining power (pick-axe stat) and shortest recharge time. In this case it's also worth changing where you mine. Look for a planet with a spot where you pay less commission to mine there (while the default is 20%, there are plots which only charge 1%).

Free Crypto - Part 2

 Yesterday I posted about setting up Brave browser to earn free tokens while you surf the web. Today I have an internet card game for you.

Some info

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This game is well suited for anyone who spends a lot of time browsing the web. You can leave it running in a browser tab. It won't slow your computer down like traditional crypto-mining. You will however need to go back to the browser tab running the game every few minutes.

Get a free wallet

==============

If you already know what a WAX wallet is and have one, you can skip this step. If not you can get a free wax wallet here. You will need a wallet to store all the free goodies which will soon be coming your way. All you need to set-up the wallet is an email address. Just follow the instructions.

Ready to Play?

===========

Alien Worlds is the game we will be playing but read this whole article through before you start. This video on YouTube explains how the game mechanics work. Essentially it boils down to a couple of mouse-clicks every few minutes. As you get in-game rewards the time between rounds will get longer until you only need to click once every couple of hours.

Before You Start

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The good stuff I didn't know about when I first started playing this. Each time you click the 'mine' button you will earn a small amount of trillium (TLM) which you can think of as a virtual metal ore. The amount of ore you mine is added to a total amount in the 'Tokens' section of your WAX wallet (see the pic above). There are factors which affect how much you will earn each round of mining but for a beginner with no additional tools  you should expect 0.05 to 0.3 trillium per mine.

As you earn trillium, you can also TRADE IT for real dollars here. I  reached around 100 trillium before finding out it had real world value and only learned this by watching this video which explains the trading process. 

Random NFT drops.

================

There's also a chance you will get free NFT's from mining. This game attempts to combine learning about how crypto works with digital card collecting. These are intended to be similar to Pokemon cards or the football stickers many of us collected in our youth (or cigarette cards if your memory goes back further). There is no 'album' yet although I suspect that could appear at some point. The problem with albums is that some of the cards are so limited in supply that it would be impossible to complete.

The digital 'cards' are pushed into your wallet when they are discovered. An important note here is they might not show up in-game until next time you log in. I played for a fortnight before I discovered I even had any. For this reason I suggest keeping your wallet open in another browser tab and reload the tab every couple of hours. The game is still under development so not all cards have use just yet. Character cards are being rewarded ready for the 'Thunderdome' button (left side on the home screen). This is for some sort of battle mechanic which the developers intend to implement in the future.

The Marketplace

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There is clearly a push to create a digital version of collector cards whether we want it or not. This means there has to be a way to trade with other people. If you want to trade with people you know and trust, you can click the transfer arrows at the top of the NFT cards to send them to another persons wax wallet. You can also send trillium to another user by clicking on the send button (right-side panel of the wallet). There is also a marketplace where you can trade with other people online. Just follow the link and click on the alien.worlds filter on the left side to see what others are selling. The sales history button (bottom left) will also let you see what trades have taken place - useful for research.

If you keep playing you will eventually end up improving your tools and finding more NFT's as you mine. You will get duplicates of the same cards. You can offer these for sale using the WAX trading tab in your wallet or you might like to explore 'Shining' if you have four or more of the same card. More about this in a bit.

Land

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It's worth mentioning at this point that you may see NFT's for various plots of land listed at some eye-watering prices. NFT's for land DO NOT drop as random prizes. They were available from the developers website in very limited numbers (3,000). There is nothing ruling out the possibility of further planets being created at some point in the future but as it stands there is currently no way to acquire land (except from another ridiculously generous player or the marketplace). Sadly these are too much of a stretch for me at the moment so if virtual land is appealing, I suggest a search on YouTube.

Where can I find out more?

======================

Try the Alien Worlds Community Portal

What is staking?

==============

As far as I can tell, staking is lending your mined trillium to a planets reward pot. As you don't need trillium for any sort of in-game replenishment, I opted to stake mine once I had earned 10. I don't know how much of a factor this was in affecting my NFT drops but it did seem like I wasn't getting them before I started staking. Once your trillium is staked it takes several days to get it back so you risk being unable to remove it from the game and convert to $USD etc. when you stake. This means your in-game currency is tied-up in-game and you might miss out on a really good exchange rate. I haven't yet un-staked any trillium so I don't know if you get back more, the same amount or less. 

Any other tips

=============

Once you have multiple mining tools, you can equip them in the mining hub. When you do this, a trash-can icon appears in the cards title box after its name. This does not delete the card, it unequips it - useful if you want to unequip an item to trade or gift it to someone else. Hopefully this will be replaced by a more obvious unequip button below the tool in a future version.

Shining

========

Nothing to do with Jack Nicholson films. If you obtain 4 identical NFT's and a lot of trillium, you can convert them into a higher-level shiny version. This destroys the four originals but creates a new card which might have minor stats improvements. See this video for more information.

Does free really mean free?

=======================

After a couple of weeks I got a message about 'not enough CPU'. This is not about the Alien Worlds game but a feature of the WAX crypto network it runs on and suggests that all WAX-based games may eventually have this issue. It appears that the blockchain requires investment from time-to-time in the form of WAX tokens. This is explained with a really bad analogy to airlines, airports and tickets. My understanding is that if you run out of NET or CPU, it's possibly because there is a lot of trading of the underlying crypto-currency. RAM on the other hand seems to be about the amount of data on the blockchain you are using at the time. My solution for now is just to stop playing for the day once any of these events occur. It's not helpful to intermix computing terminology and airports into a wacky explanation of blockchain (after all my network is fine, I have enough ram to play this and my cpu temperature is ok according to the read-out on my PC).

You can keep an eye on your CPU, NET and RAM usage using the 'resources'  button on the right side of your WAX wallet.

Final Verdict

===========

When I first started playing Alien Worlds, I didn't really think of it as playing or collecting. I think there are things which need improving. It would be nice to have some animation on the mining screen and while you wait for your tools to recharge. It would be nice to have an audible prompt when your tools are recharged and you can mine again. It would be great if little animated miners could jump up & down on-screen if you unearth an NFT reward. It would be good to have a digital sticker-book page in the wax wallet which shows all the in-game NFT's and highlights which ones you have. Yet for all these things I am still playing it, just to see what else there is to discover. It can be quite complex with six planets comprising 3,000 plots of land, which are linked to different planetary reward pots, have different luck factors to influence your NFT drop rate and also different charge time multipliers affecting how frequently you can mine there. I imagine some people will try it and just cash-out anything they earn. Others will stick around and collect the NFT's and hope the developers build a bigger game around this NFT lucky-dip system. I'm undecided yet but will likely keep the good finds but use some of the trillium to complete my challenge.

The Bottom Line

===============

Ok so the final target for me is some coins in a crypto-wallet but maybe you don't want WAX tokens? Well you can always use an exchange like CoinGecko to convert the WAX into something else as explained in the previous video on the subject. At this point I also want to mention Bitrefill which allows you to turn crypto into gift cards for various UK stores. As crazy as it sounds, we are sort of there with that virtual game world where a random number in a game might just pay for your next console. We should probably expect to see more of this to come. Let's just hope it doesn't turn us into a nation of gambling addicts or day traders. If you are currently working from home or able to use this as a timer between tasks then why not have a go. My first challenge is complete at this point after trading in just over 10 TLM. Sure I'm no bitcoin billionaire but after a few clicks today I now have a whopping (sic) 0.8 WAX. It's a start. Yes it might have been cheaper to turn the computer off and save electricity but I have also been entertained, kept warm and avoided parting with any debit/credit card details.

CHALLENGE COMPLETE - YAY !!!!!