A few good men (and volatile woman)

It is quick translation of this original article

Did you miss the good stories, my dears? Me too. And today we have an event that might make for an (unpleasant, painful and depressing, but still) interesting story.

This story begins (as a good story should) long before its protagonist was born, with one sexy (oh, she often appears to me in my sexiest nightmares) cryptocurrency smart-currency developer. Molly Wintermuth. A mercenary, anonymous, and the most volatile promoter of the HEGIC project. If you are not familiar with her yet, be sure to read the most interesting research from Sanguine Ham (Rus): the ghost person who does not put Binance itself down — is a most interesting character. Perhaps it’s [SPOILER!]

Andre Kronje himself

Anyway, Molly is not sitting still, and while her two main risk hedging projects are slowly taking over the market, she (like Cronje) has hit the blockchain game. But while Andre has been busy emulating Dungeons and Dragons on the Phantom blockchain, our protagonist has plunged supporters into the NFT madness, not just by releasing more pictures of punk cats, but by adding mind-boggling (in its cruelty) mechanics to it all.

Here enters Fewman

Shortly before all this madness began, Molly announced that anyone could donate Ether (ETH) to her next project. What kind of project, in what field, on what, and when it would come out, she didn’t say. Just give the money away, it will be fun.

Any sane person would have passed by, but not Molly’s followers: accustomed to the style of behavior of their volatile leader, they started sending Aether to the specified wallet. No one knew the minimum amount or what to expect, but the money was collected.

A few more days later, the contract and the Discord server appeared:

Molly starts an NFT game in which 10,000 fewmans (a combination of few — means ‘a few’, and men —means ‘people’) will fight to preserve their genome in future generations. Two people, a male and a female merge in one last ecstasy, bring forth offspring of one fewman and immediately die, leaving behind some few-gold.

It was immediately clear that each successive generation increases the rarity exponentially. Ideally, only one will be left at the end (Highlander soundtrack Queen’s “Who wants to live forever” plays in the background).

Also, there are only 16 fewmans with one of their attributes having 3 stars:

One of the 16 rarest Fewmans. He’s really smart.

Only four fewmans have 7 stars and none of them have 3 stars in a row

There was chaos on the card market for a whole week: the prices were set from a flashlight, no one knew how rare their attributes were, what was more valuable — two stars in one attribute or three in different ones. I think many will regret that they sold cheap, even more regret that they bought expensive with no opportunity to resell.

A week later, Molly released the first part of the rules of the game by which the fewmans would merge (breeding). First of all, it was worth considering that in addition to the two fewmans, a rare mineral, few-gold, was involved in the breeding. It takes 1.5 times as much gold to produce the next generation of fewmans as is produced by their fusion. Generation Zero fusion does not require the mineral.

So, it would take 1 FEWGO to merge the first generation. After the merge you can gather 2 FEWGOs. The next generation merge will cost 3 FEWGOs, but will bring 6. And the third generation will empty your pockets for 9 FEWGOs.

At the beginning 1 FEWGO was 10$, but after giving away 100 000 GOLD to everyone who put more than 0.01 ETH for development of the project (remember those Degenes, who were sending ether to uncertainty?) — many people decided to drop mineral, and dropped the price to 8,5$.

But even at the current price, already the 6th generation fewman will require a serious investment in the mineral. Not to mention getting a suitable fewman for breeding. The higher the generation, the more stars will be needed in one of the parents.

Also a big limitation, stretching the process, are the “fertility windows”: Unfortunately, female fewmans cannot mate more often than three hours a week. At the same time, these moments are dictated by the position of the celestial luminaries, which means that we have to wait for the moment to bear offspring (and some few-gold).

Future of Fewmanity

I hate math, but that’s the part I sat down to write this article for: to understand what the future holds for the Fiuman race, you have to figure out the possibilities. And so far I’m extremely pessimistic about the emergence of the last Superfew.

Of course, not all the information is available yet, but we can build some models from what we have.

It’s not clear if different generations can merge. If so:

1 SF =
1 Gen 12+1 ‘Rarest 16’ =
(parent 1)1 Gen11+(parent 2)1Rare+1‘Rarest16’ =
1 Gen 11 + 2 ‘Rarest 16’ =
1 Gen 10 + 1 Gen 0 + 2 ‘Rarest 16’ =
1 Gen 9 + 2 Gen 0 + 2 ‘Rarest 16’ =
1 Gen 8 + 3 Gen 0 + 2 ‘Rarest 16’ =

~= 13 Gen 0 + 2 ‘Rarest 16’— But that’s ideal, since there are no Gen 0s with 8 stars and picking up a good Gen 0 for the higher generations is going to get harder and harder.

If not, the progression is more depressing:

• It takes 2¹¹ (2024) Gen 0 +2 rare Fewmans (1 rare father + 1 rare grandfather)

That said, you still have to take care of the number of stars. There are no 8-star cards available at the moment, and Generation 9–10 will obviously need them.

Of particular concern are the “accidental loss” and “maliciousness” factors:

• Accidental loss — the fiuman owner has fallen ill, died, or otherwise lost access to the fiuman wallet.
• Malice — the fuman owner is unwilling to participate in reproduction, sabotaging progress, in the hope of getting a high price for redeeming his card (I don’t approve it)

If there are many such cases, WNGMI (We Not Gonna Make It) momentum will happen. Figuring out the progression of 14 generations, the merger would have to involve 2 048 fewmans to achieve SuperFew:
(1(SF)–1+1R(G12)–1+2R(G11)–2+2R(G10)–4+2R(G9)–8+2R(G8)–16+2R(G7)–32+2R(G6)–64+2R(G5)–128+2R(G4)–256+2R(G3)–512+2R(G2)–1024+2R(G1)–2048+2R(G0)). That is, we cannot afford to lose more than half of the brood.

Yes, the final fewman will be a historical card. Yes, it will be an incredible journey. But for now, we stand on the edge of a clif, and wait for the Fewsun to rise over our 10,000 survivors to see the miracle of the fewsion.