CoinLab

Yes! If you are running the client on another machine while playing Wurm, you will see notifications about every 10 minutes in the :Event pane as we deposit your irons into your Wurm bank account.

We plan on adding video encoding and protein folding compute jobs before the block reward halves. By diversifying the types of work that are offered, we will be able to insulate gamers who use our service (and ourselves) from Bitcoin price drops. If Bitcoin prices rise, however, the amount of Silver you can generate will rise proportionately. You hit the nail on the head: Honesty is to crucial the success of our service. We will always be forthright about whether your computer is efficient enough for our service to make sense, and plan on making resources for people to estimate their power consumption, etc. For our Alpha, we want to test everyone to get a diversity of data, but when the Alpha ends, we will recommend that some users don't use our service. Everyone in the Alpha will get a baseline bonus, regardless of their hardware, as long as they participate.

Eventually we will make our program a service, but I don't think we'll get it into our Alpha client. You should continue earning while you computer is locked (but not logged off) in the Alpha version.

You download a special client program, which connects to the coinlab servers and receives instructions on a certain mathematical problem. Your computer, more specifically your graphics card (graphics cards are better in calculating in this special case due to how they are built), tries to solve this problem by brute force (trial and error). Once one of the connected clients solves the problem and once the solution has been accepted, Coinlab receives 50 Bitcoins. Coinlab in turn gives everyone who participated a share based on how much work they invested (that's basically what the MHashes tell you in the page I linked earlier). Bitcoins are worth something to people, because in the algorithm it's limited how much Bitcoins can be produced (the term usually used here is "mining") and how fast they can be mined. The algorithm is set so one block can be found every ten minutes on average. If more people with stronger computers participate, the network raises the difficulty to keep this average. The network is a (now) uncontrollable peer to peer network consisting of all the connected clients. They all together decide in a democratic way if a certain solution is valid and about the difficulty to use. Great explanation of Bitcoin and our service! To elaborate, when we earn Bitcoin, we sell them for dollars or euros, and use the funds to buy Silver (or Iron) coins from Rolf, which we send to your account. PS: I noticed people call Silver Coins, "Silvers". What is the right shorthand for "Iron Coins": "150 Iron" or "150 Irons"?

I don't think the current top-of-the-line hardware could exceed 3 silver per day. This might cost 1 EUR/day in power consumption (closer to 0.5 EUR if you subtract the cost of leaving computer on idle overnight). If you want to ask specific questions about what hardware to choose to optimize the machine you are building for mining Silvers, PM me. Happy to help :-)

What are the exact specs of your gaming PC? I have 2 Radeon HD6970s on Win7 64-bit. The GPU(s) are the relevant specs that tell whether our service makes sense for you or not.

It totally depends on your hardware. My work laptop that is ~4 years old can earn 60-100 iron per day, give or take. My work laptop is not efficient enough to justify the energy costs. My home gaming computer can earn 1 - 1.4 silvers per day. Because I tend to leave my computer on all time anyways, the additional power consumption only costs me around 0.38 EUR/day (I have two beefy cards), meaning I can charge silvers to my electric bill for 1/2-1/4 of what I would pay through PayPal. For our Alpha, we want to test a diverse set of hardware, so we will be giving bonuses to make testing worth everyone's time. At the end of the Alpha, we will tell some participants that our service is not right for them, and they should buy silvers with other methods.

You should explain the costs and get permission from your school's IT administrator before installing our client on any of their machines. But yes, that would work. We don't restrict the number of clients that can compute for the same user at the same time. We think it will be interesting to let players earn coins for each other. The members of a settlement could point their compute earnings at someone building a "public works" project that will benefit the whole group to compensate them for their time. Or it could be a way to fund mercenaries/security. When someone is the victim of a robbery, the community could all point their earnings at the victim to help them recoup their losses. We look forward to seeing what interesting ways Wurm players will use our service.

Our Alpha client will be available for Windows, and possibly Mac (time permitting). Thanks!

Hey Xandra, Our Alpha client has only a single speed. It sleeps until your computer is idle, and then starts computing. As we move forward, we plan to add the option to allow you to keep computing (and earning) all the time in a low priority process. When another program needs the GPU, it will have priority and get as much as it needs. Then, when the program stops using the GPU, our client will notice and start using the spare cycles. Detecting GPU load is tricky: if you get it wrong games and display drivers crash and it isn't pretty. Because of this, we need more time before including the features you mentioned. We make money when you make money, so we want our client to be as unobtrusive as possible so you'll run it all the time. It's coming as soon as we can do it right. Thanks for the question!

Hey Wurm Online Players! We saw you have a lot of questions about our service, so we created a FAQ. Check it out in this thread: http://wurmonline.com/forum/index.php?topic=74224.msg662316 Thanks! The CoinLab Team

What is your service and how does it work? CoinLab lets players pay for in-game virtual goods with the computational power of their graphics card. We offer a small, downloadable Wurm Online-specific client. Players can sign up, download it, enter their Wurm username, and let it run in the background to earn Silver Coins. Is this going to be built into the Wurm Online game client? Not as far as we know! Running the client while you play may reduce performance in-game for players with older hardware. Our client is separate from the game client, and runs in the background from the system tray. Our client runs as a low priority process, so for most users it will not cause a decrease in performance. It can easily be toggled on and off for when you are doing other computationally intensive processes. You can also turn on idle detection, and the client will only work when you aren't using your computer. Using our client is completely voluntary: you get to choose whether to download the client and when to run it. Are you paying people to download spyware? Absolutely not! We NEVER record or send personally identifiable information about you. We only send information to our servers that is relevant to your computer’s computational performance and paying you: Wurm Account name, hardware specifications, solved compute problems, etc. We NEVER install third-party software on your system. So, if I connect my computer, I get Silver Coins completely for free? Not quite. Running our client will increase the electricity consumption of your computer. If you have a top-of-the-line gaming rig and low electricity prices, you will be “buying†Silver Coins for significantly less than you would pay for them using PayPal. Many of you will get some savings below face value. Many others will find it almost free, if they do not currently pay for their electricity. If you have old hardware, it is likely your computer will not be efficient enough for our service. When you first run our client, you will see an earning rate for your hardware (denominated in Silver Coins). If the value in Silver Coins is not greater than the cost of your increased electricity consumption, we do not recommend that you use our service. If you don’t pay for your own electricity, you should speak with the person who does before using our service. What kind of computation are you doing? At launch, all computation will be Bitcoin Mining, because it is the most valuable compute job today. We plan to add video encoding and protein folding jobs to our platform by the end of the year. Bitcoin is a distributed peer-to-peer value-transfer system. New Bitcoins are created by adding computational power to the network. Bitcoin transactions are irreversibly sealed into a permanent public record that the entire network shares and maintained. The last 10 or 20 minutes of the history of this ledger can only be undone with a greater amount of computational power than created it, which is exponentially harder the further back in history you try to undo. Because of this, the bitcoin protocol pays people to add computational power, making it harder and more expensive for people to attack the network. Part of why people think Bitcoins are valuable is because the Bitcoin network is now the world’s largest supercomputer. CoinLab loves Bitcoin. Email chris@coinlab.com if you have any questions about Bitcoin. Does my computer connect to the Bitcoin network? No. To maximize your privacy and security, our client will only communicate with our servers. We connect to the Bitcoin network to get the most recent computation job, break it up into bite-size pieces, and send a piece to every idle computer that is running our client. Will you overclock my card? We are not including any overclocking features in our beta version. Which Operating Systems do you support? We currently only support Windows. If you use Mac or Linux and want to use our service, fill out the sign up form and we will contact you again when we release clients which support your OS. Would it be possible to describe all the kinds of data that is being transferred with the [bitcoin] mining application? In our Beta, the only information we send back to our servers is your Wurm username and the "answers" to solved computation problems, which we use to measure how much to pay you. We plan to eventually add some system specification reporting : OS and version, model of GPU(s), driver versions, etc. (We don't plan on collecting MAC addresses, or anything else specific to your computer). Here is our Privacy Policy and here's our Terms of Service. How do I sign up? Go to http://pool.coinlab.com/partners/wurm/ Did we miss something? Have a question? Email us at wurmsupport@coinlab.com, or post it in this thread.

Open Beta! CoinLab had a great Alpha test period. Thank you to all of our current testers for your great feedback and questions. We are now opening up our Beta to all Wurm online players. To sign up go here: http://pool.coinlab.com/partners/wurm Fill out the form and you will receive an email with instructions to get started. Contact wurmsupport@coinlab.com with any questions or feedback. Leaderboard Download the client here. If you are having issues with the new client, try using the old one. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media.coinlab.com/clients/32/wurm-1.0.5.msi Thanks! The CoinLab Team