Data Center

Mining is now a contest between the miners, a coin's cap is a real ceiling, and the technician stops walking in circles.

Fixed

• A machine no longer races the history books alone. Every payout computed its share as my hashrate / (real historical network + my hashrate), which on a server meant players were invisible to one another and that a player's own machines did not dilute each other: ten rigs each claimed the same 96% of the 2009 network and were paid ten times the whole chain's emission. Measured live on the public server: one rig at 211 MH/s against a 7.16 MH/s network, share 0.967. Every machine now reports into one census per algorithm and divides by the same total, so the shares of everyone mining a chain add up to at most one - ten identical rigs in 2009 get 9.97% each instead of 96.7% each
• A coin can no longer be mined past its cap. The caps were the real protocol's schedule - the subsidy halves until it rounds to zero - and nothing counted what players were actually credited, so a server full of miners could be paid past 21 million BTC unnoticed. A world ledger now books every mined coin and refuses the overshoot: 21,000,000 BTC, 84,000,000 LTC, 28,704,026,601 KAS, 18,400,000 XMR. ETH, DOGE and XCH have no cap, as in reality. Buying a coin at the Trading Terminal moves coins that already exist and is not counted
• The technician's own profit estimate asks the same question the payout does, so retasking cannot be decided on a different number than it is paid on
• The technician no longer walks in circles, and no longer needs a shove. Two faults with one shape: the room scan is a cheap test and said "work here" where the work then could not be done, and nothing recorded the failure, so the next scan picked the same machine again, for ever. The clearest case was a room already at maximum cooling - he wanted the fan one step higher than the fan can go, every time. A fan at its stop is now simply not a job; the room needs another fan. On top of that he now remembers any machine he could not deliver at, and any he could not reach, and leaves it alone for a minute - so an unreachable machine ends with him going back to his rounds instead of standing still until somebody pushes him. When he gives up in front of a machine he says so, because a man silently walking a circle looks like a broken game
• He can reach a rack mounted above the floor. His standing place was always the cell directly in front of the machine, at the machine's own height - which for a rack in the upper block of a two-high room is the cell at head height, where nobody can stand and where pathfinding therefore finds nothing. He simply never went, and that held for any rack above floor level, in a room of any height. He now looks for a cell he can actually stand in - the one in front, else up to two blocks below it - and reaches up, exactly as a player does without jumping. A three-block wall is therefore serviceable from the floor; anything higher needs a floor in front of it, for him as much as for you. A machine with nowhere at all to put his feet is treated as unserviceable instead of being walked at

Added

• The game says so when a chain has nothing left. The first time a coin's last unit is mined it is world news once - "all 21,000,000 coins that will ever exist have been created" - and the fact is saved, so a restart does not announce it again. Whoever keeps hardware pointed at a dead chain is then told directly, at most once every five minutes, because a machine pays twenty times a second and a line per tick would be unreadable. Without this the payout just stops and looks like a bug

Changed

• The real network counts for less the bigger it gets. The historical figure is raised to a power (0.85 by default), measured from each chain's own first day, where it is used untouched. The early years are therefore exactly as they were, while the top end is held back: a thousand era-appropriate ASICs hold 31% of the chain in 2016 and 3.8% in 2026 instead of 0.03%. Deliberately a power and not a decay - a decaying weight made the 2026 network smaller than the 2020 one, which would have made waiting pay
• Four new settings under mining.: whether players count toward the network, the compression exponent, and whether the cap is enforced

Notes

• No per-player share cap, by choice: someone who throws everything at mining in 2009 may genuinely take almost the whole chain. The ledger is what stops it from minting coins forever
• An existing world keeps its coins, and they are counted. On first load the ledger adds up what every wallet already holds, so the cap covers the whole world and not only what is mined from now on. It matters: the public server's team alone holds 1,044,850 BTC - five percent of every coin there will ever be - mined under the old formula, and without this the world could have emitted a further 21 million on top