The Aetiology Of Neurosis

In this tutorial I will show you how to kill enemies with bricks, using Unity collisions. Whole project available on my github.

Yarn Editor and Yarn Spinner is a framework for creating conversations easily, created by the authors of Night In The Woods. You create them as a tree of nodes, save it as json and the framework takes care of the rest.

Everyone thought about having telekinesis as a kid. Why not fulfill that fantasy and actually give yourself that power, in a game? If you ever wondered how games like Control or Psi Ops: Mindgate conspiracy do it, you’ve come to the right place. It’s easier than you think!

In this part I will show you how to generate enemies on the NavMesh. I will make them chase me and collide with objects properly.

If you ever wanted to make Space Invaders in Python, but were too lazy to do it, here’s a short tutorial with GIFS!

This is a second part of my gamedev series. For setting up walking (and other animations) see the first part.

Several years ago a revolutionary technology called blockchain showed up on the scene. It’s probably the biggest invention since the creation of the Internet. The first cryptocurrency using the blockchain was Bitcoin and since then, thousands of other alternative coins arose. Blockchain has no central point of failure, so it’s very difficult for authorities and corporations to control or regulate it. In this article we are going to take a look at the inner workings of the blockchain technology, its security, ways of storing bitcoin, and the meaning of the Bitcoin halving that happened last week. Note: “Bitcoin” references the network and the payment system, “bitcoin” references the currency and the currency unit.

Blockchain

Cryptocurrencies represents a type of decentralization, which takes the power over money away from the banks. Thanks to the blockchain, no institution can directly tamper with the cryptocurrency progression. One of the primary goals of the Bitcoin blockchain is to provide people with a secure way to store money, so if another financial crisis was to come, your funds would stay safe and independent of the banking system. Blockchain is a globally distributed ledger, implemented as a chain of blocks. Each block stores the completed transactions using strong cryptographic functions in a way that it’s practically impossible to hack. Almost anything can be saved on the blockchain, and it’s possible to do so without any third parties — the value is transferred directly between people and nobody is taking any fees, at least not directly (more on that below). Everything that was stored in the blockchain will remain unchangeable and permanent due to the high cryptographic security of the blockchain. It‘s politically and architecturally decentralized, so it cannot be controlled or regulated by any institution. It’s divided into multiple computational units, typically a global network of computers. But logically it is centralized, because it behaves like a single entity, like a powerful supercomputer — doing only a single set of tasks.

Bitcoin “Halvening”

Bitcoin is created when a new block is mined. More precisely, the reward is given to the miner who found the right “solution of the block” (hash). The reward is currently 6.25 bitcoin + all of the transaction fees in the block. The reward is halving every 210000 blocks (so every 4 years (1 block ~= 10 minutes)), so next time it will be 3.125 bitcoin in 2024. Presumably the price of bitcoin will be way higher at that time. (Previous block reward was 12.5 BTC, so 12.5BTC@9395USD = 117,437 USD) The transaction fee can be specified by the user, but the miners will of course prioritize the higher fee transactions, because it means a higher reward for them. When you use a low tx fee, you can wait dozens of blocks (or hundreds of minutes (1 block ~= 10 minutes). In any case, it’s still a better score than bank payment has — you have to wait anywhere between a few days to a few weeks, considering the overseas payments. Alternative coins (altcoins), i.e. Litecoin or Dogecoin have the time on the block set to lower values, LTC is on average 2.5 minutes and DOGE a minute.

Difficulty and Mining

Solo mining is already obsolete today. The difficulty of finding one bitcoin on your own, using your hardware, is about the same as searching for one particular seed of sand on the whole Planet Earth. That is why the miners started to form groups, so-called pools, where is their computational power shared for mining bitcoins. When they are successful, the found coin is democratically shared between everyone, depending on the work done.

The current computational power of the Bitcoin blockchain is ~120 Exahash/s. That means you would need at least 60 Exahash/s super-computer to do the 51% attack.

The strongest super-computer in the world, Summit, operates on 144 Petaflops. Taken that 1 hash/s is ~12700 flops/s, you would need a few million super-computers to change ONE transaction in the blockchain.