Introducing Crazy Career Games stake pool (CRAZY)

Hello all,

I’ve just seen this and thought we should introduce ourselves. I’m Carl, an I/T Solution Architect with some 25 years experience; having worked for Big Blue (IBM) for 21 of them and now operate through my own Private Services Company. Alongside this, I’ve been growing the idea of creating mobile and PC games, with a team of like minded people from around the world on a few ideas; unfortunately nothing has yet to be delivered of anything substantial, but we’re still in experimental mode. The ideas we have all required one feature that is now becoming readily available, Smart Contracts! Each game idea has led to this need of in game tokens, such as a mining game we’ve been toying with, but instead of running around collecting gold, wouldn’t it be great if we could gather ADA? Setting up the pool is our way to meet the long term mission of creating games that utilise Smart Contract capabilities (specifically ADA). During the Shelley Test Net, we put together a couple of proof of concepts using Adrestia and managed to get wallets hooked up with fake ADA. Alas, with the four or five STN’s, we had to concentrate on the pool testing and missed a golden opportunity with a Blackjack game that we have nearly developed! Thanks to those in the community that helped test what we did have!

Ticker: #CRAZY
PoolId: 6a4a39566f5c45f0f6de34ef5e674b892e517ddeebd4eafcfd8583ef
Website: https://crazycareergames.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CrazyCareer
Location: South of England, Portsmouth
Pledge: 200k (to raise between 250 and 280k when Bittrex withdrawal opens)
Fixed Fee: 500 ADA (allowing 100 ADA per day per epoch)
Variable Fee: 0% (given our hosting costs, see below)

Given our expectation of major competition with big names and celebrities in the space (such as youtube) and being new to this space (i.e. we didn’t have time to operate in the ITN phase), we decided to dedicate one of our development Beasts in one of our home offices:

An i9 with 8 cores (16 threads) running on Windows with with Ubuntu 20.04 VirtualBox. Plenty of head room with 64Gb’s, 512Gb SSD + 16TB NAS (not that we need that storage for now!). We’re connected with 340 down / 30 up Fibre ISP and are currently investigating a second line or 4G back-up; however, if we gain any traction from you, we have always held open a migration to a private hosting solution (it needs to be financially viable; to ensure funds remain available for development). We’re fully automated including the build, install, deployment, monitoring and alerting with our own scripts and processes; in fact, we’re built some of our own GUI tools so that we can remain above the Command Line; i.e a click of a button in a Kotlin Tornadofx GUI is much easier to use!

As proven during the STN phase, we managed to sustain a 99.95% uptime and managed to mint blocks as reliably as any pool in the top 50 of each! In fact, the only issue we faced were those pesky Window updates! At some point therefore, we’ll migrate to a dedicated Ubuntu beast instead, to reduce any down time; which will be invisible to the running operation (mere seconds to switch over when ready). Given this, we know how we can stand-up a new instance within minutes of anything other than a major disaster at the location (that’s our biggest concern and risk; but is countered by low overheads and ability to adjust quickly in these initial times; hence giving back to the variable fee’s to you). Telegram alerts tell us when something occurs; or not. For example, each component pings every minute and any not generated, causes an alarm to the on-support operator (a couple of us monitor).

As previously stated, I’ve got 25 professional years experience of designing, developing and delivering large scale systems. A pool operation is actually far easier than a huge cluster of IBM Wesphere machines, Big Data solution or a large public sector project I’m currently delivering for 2021!

Why should you check out our pool? That’s a really difficult question. We don’t have that answer for you right now. Why? The ADA pool operation is a new thing for all. We have good friends and YOU have all the power with your Delegation. You will decide which pools are successful and which will close down. Our pool’s fixed fee would be used to fund development of the Smart Contract solutions that we have in our plans; however, we’ll run the pool at a loss (any 0% or 1% pool operator will be!). Our costs are minimal because we DONT run in a data center. We’d really love to have the reliance and security that brings, but we know funds are tight! 100 ADA per day (i.e 500 ADA per epoch % 5 days = 100 ADA) at current rates would be ~£11 per day; which is insignifant in-fact. However, that will be enough to secure the team of people I have currently working with me for free. These become the incentives for them to do great things.

We’ll soon bring the Blackjack multi player game to our website without ADA due to certain issues. If there is enough interest via pledging, we’ll then connect up Adrestia for ADA wallets and will open up our first casino game as soon as Goguen and Smart Contracts are usable (to lift us away from centralised sessions and player management); subject to gaming licenses (there are laws, even in the Blockchain industry!)

We’d really love to build popular games that people will come and play. They’ll not be AAA standard, but will offer ADA or tokens as a form of currency in them. For us, this seems like the logical direction that games will go; in fact, lots of articles have recently appeared on the scene, so we are looking in the right direction.

However, to make any of this work, we NEED YOU! If you don’t delegate, no matter how small, then we will accept that there is no need for this innovation. For us, that’s not a problem. We’ve got trading bots, smart contract apps and many other side projects to continue in. Me personally, I’m considering taking my PSC into Smart Contract consultancy, therefore spreading the love of ADA into the UK I/T field as companies grasp blockchain technology.

Kind regards

Carl (Crazy Career Games pool and development company)

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If you have any doubts about what we are trying to do. Here’s a great article that came out today. We are exploring the holy grail and believe Prism, Goguen and Shelley enable us to do this with Blackjack. I.E. You download the client or connect via our webpage and play other players and NEVER once connect to our services because the coins and management is all kept on chain! We REALLY need your support if you would like to see this sooner rather than later.

BIG updates to our website today. Working away to get the information laid out for you. Just hope it’s not too late for you to notice us.