Huntercoin

Huntercoin (code: HUC) is a cryptocurrency, peer-to-peer payment system, and Massively Multiplayer Online Cryptocurrency Game (MMOCG) developed in 2013 by "Snailbrain" and Mikhail Sindeyev ("the coder") and released on February 2, 2014. As a cryptocurrency, Huntercoin facilitates payments without any third party risk.
Huntercoin is a fork of the Namecoin source code. There is a limit of 42 million Huntercoins, with each Huntercoin being divisible down to 8 decimal places.
Huntercoin is the first human-minable coin. It achieves this in part through parallel merged mining of the SHA-256 and scrypt cryptographic hashing algorithms.
History
As with most crypto currencies, Huntercoin has its roots in the Bitcoin source code. Namecoin forked the Bitcoin source code in 2011, but it wasn't until Huntercoin that the Namecoin source code was forked.
Work on Huntercoin began in 2013 when Snailbrain and the Namecoin QT wallet developer Mikhail Sindeyev started work on Chronokings.
The Huntercoin release was made public on January 27, 2014 in the Bitcoin Talk forums after over 8 months of development.
Death of Mikhail Sindeyev
On February 14th, 2014, Mikhail passed away at the age of 27 due to a severe stroke. Mikhail's death was a serious blow to not only the Huntercoin project, but also to Namecoin as he developed the Namecoin QT client.
Mobile Game and F2Pool Funding
On March 27th, 2014 Snailbrain announced the planning stages for a mobile version of Huntercoin that would eliminate the need to download the blockchain and that would run on virtually any device. Along with the announcement came news that F2Pool, the largest Litecoin mining pool in China, would donate 100 HUC per day for Huntercoin "bounties, promotion and further development."
Mining
Huntercoin is the first cryptocurrency to combine traditional cryptocurrency methods with human mining. It uses hardware parallel merged mining of the SHA-256 and scrypt algorithms with in-game human mining. Each parallel algorithm targets 2 minute blocks with the average being 1 minute per block, which the in-game players directly experience.
For human mining, players in the game "mine" coins by playing the game.
At any time a hunter can return to its spawning area to cash out its coins into a wallet address chosen by the player. Wallet addresses do not need to be in the same wallet as the hunter.
The nature of human mining in Huntercoin is radically different from traditional hardware mining, with one pundit speculating that it could have an insulating effect in downmarkets saying, "It is unclear why this particular cryptocurrency is bucking the downward trend, but the fact that around 80% of the coins are only obtainable inside a virtual universe which resides inside the blockchain, could have something to do with it."
Block Time
Where Bitcoin, Litecoin, and all previous cryptocurrencies use either a single hashing algorithm or multiple hashing algorithms in series, Huntercoin uses the SHA-256 and scrypt hashing algorithms in parallel. Each algorithm is mined separately with a block time target of 2 minutes. This results in an average block time of about 1 minute per block.
Block Rewards
The Huntercoin block rewards scheme differs from other cryptocurrencies in that only 10% of Huntercoins are awarded to hardware miners, while remaining 90% of coins are awarded to game players. In-game "miner taxes" result in transaction fees that bring the hardware miner percentage of coins to over 19%.
Of the 90% of in-game coin rewards, 87.5% are randomly distributed across the map, and 2.5% are awarded to whoever holds the Crown of Fortune.
Division of hardware mining rewards between the two hashing algorithms varies, but oscillates towards an equilibrium through difficulty factor adjustments. That is, each block found garners the basic block reward of 10 coins plus in-game taxes and transaction fees irrespective of the hashing algorithm used to find the block.
In-game Miner Taxes
In-game "miner taxes" consist of a 4% "death tax" for whenever a hunter general dies and a 10% "banking" tax for when players cash in their in-game coins at a spawning area to redeem in their Huntercoin wallets.
* 10% of coins to hardware miners
* 90% of coins distributed on map
** 2.5% of map coins go to the holder of the Crown of Fortune
** 96% of coins a killed hunter holds dropped on map
** 4% of coins a killed hunter holds go to hardware miners
** 10% of coins cashed in by a hunter go to hardware miners
Overall, the amount of coins going to hardware miners is 19% plus the "death tax".
The Game
Players put up 1 HUC per team plus transactions fees of 0.005 to 0.01 HUC. Of that, 0.141 is spent while the remainder is redeemable after playing.
Players then send their hunters around the map to gather coins and/or kill other hunters and steal their coins.
No Servers
Unlike any other MMO, Huntercoin runs entirely decentralized and requires no central servers. This makes the game and currency more robust than other centralized systems that have a single point of failure. With Huntercoin, there is no single point of failure, and even if multiple nodes in the network are taken down, the game continues unabaited.
In-game Chat
Unlike many games where chat simply disappears or is only available through specific chat logging functions, the in-game chat in Huntercoin is decentralized and censorship resistant, with messages permanently stored forever on the Huntercoin blockchain.
Third Party Software
Huntercoin is a protocol and amenable to third party software being written overtop of the Huntercoin protocol just as third party software is written over top of the Bitcoin protocol.
"Khal", a core Namecoin developer, wrote the Huntercoin block explorer hosted on the Namecoin dot-bit.org server at http://huc.explorer.dot-bit.org/. He also maintains a player funded HUC giveaway for new players.
The http://huntercoin.info/ site shows statistics, visual statistics on a game map, and has a player search feature.
A full view of the in-game world is available inside of an Internet browser at http://162.243.175.205:3000/.
The first publicly announced piece of client software running on the Huntercoin protocol is "Huntercoin: Mithril Edition". As of March 16, 2014 it had not been publicly released.
Bots
Within a short time of Huntercoin's release, bots began to appear.
The game creator publicly predicted bots and that humans would out-compete them.
Source Code
The Huntercoin source code is available from its Github repository at https://github.com/chronokings/huntercoin.
Major Markets
Huntercoin can be traded for other currencies through two online exchanges, Poloniex and BTqian. HUC was traded on CryptoRush but was dropped from the exchange after a blockchain fork issue.
Austin Global Exchange announced their intent to add HUC trading to their platform on March 21st, 2014, but recast HUC as "TBD" 3 days later on March 24th.
Cryptsy, the largest altcoin exchange, added Huntercoin internally at least on or before February 24th, 2014 , but as of March 28th, 2014 had not activated HUC live trading.

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