6 ms·
Minecraft Server with a Bitcoin-denominated monetary system
- stephengillie 10y agoI call my server currency "Gil" and "Gilcoin" would have been the crypto currency. Server is named Gilcraft, and it uses iConomy for its economy plugin. I had the idea at least a year ago, but never got around to implementing the crypto part.
- odonnellryan 10y agoI was thinking about this recently: it'd be really cool to play even a text-based game that had crypto-currency backed econ.
- wingerlang 10y agoWhy? I mean it seems like everyone just wants to slap 'crypto currencies' and 'blockchains' onto everything nowadays.
- mpnordland 10y agoMaybe it encourages immersion if there's real, or at least pseudo real money involved
- jdmichal 10y agoThere are other ways. I'm a big fan of Eve Online's PLEX system. PLEX is an in-game item purchasable with real money which can be cashed in for one month of play time. It does a great job of linking the in-game economy with real money. Basically, PLEX is Eve Online's equivalent of a gold-backed currency. There's something real behind the play money, even if it cannot be extracted once committed.
- odonnellryan 10y agoNo reason, just think it'd be neat.
- bowmessage 10y agoThis is really cool. Sounds like you can earn bitcoin just by playing, without an initial investment? How are these monster drops funded? I'm also curious to see if the latency of the blockchain has any affect on gameplay.
- phaser 10y agoHi, BitQuest developer here. In a nutshell, every item bought from villagers goes to a "loot" wallet where sort of randomly faucets out back to players who kill monsters. This post explains it a little bit more: http://bitquest.co/2016/05/19/bitquest-2.html http://bitquest.co/2016/05/19/bitquest-2.html
- bowmessage 10y agoNice! How do you feel about gambling? Plans to do anything similar to BitVegas[1]? [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BitVegas https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BitVegas
- phaser 10y agoI've never gambled IRL or online and I won't feel comfortable to write gambling code as opposed to skill based games, which is what i've been playing my whole life. I'll be happy to help, by making the bitquest repository easy to understand so people who want to make it can use our code.
- ben_jones 10y agoYou didn't by chance write the Phaser JS game engine did you?
- phaser 10y agoI didn't. I've been told it's a really good engine.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- flashman 10y agoHow do you handle cheating? If you're hosting all the wallets, what's to stop you (or someone who gains control of the server) taking off with all the money? Don't get me wrong, this is very cool and using real money might solve a whole lot of Minecraft's social/"tragedy of the commons" problems, but I'm interested what other issues it brings up.
- bduerst 10y agoOr prevent skimming? The owner could programmatically create and distribute the pooled bitcoins to fake player account wallets, and it would look like business as usual.
- zimbatm 10y agoOver a population of 32 with transaction consisting of 1/1000000 of bitcoins ? It wouldn't even pay off the servers.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- bduerst 10y agoIs bitquest capping at 32 players? Because the max population size for a minecraft server is over 2 billion. 10,000 faked kills for 100 fake players is ~$442.
- krisroadruck 10y agoI'm gonna guess you've never ran a server. A single survival server (like this is) rather than a big linked network of minigames with bungee cord, even on the best hardware available & an optimized minecraft server (spigot, paperspigot) starts to seriously struggle well before the 250 players online mark. You can squeeze out a little bit more by nerfing some core game mechanics (limiting render distance, redstone, entity spawning and tick speed) but that's it. Keep in mind that the game is mostly CPU bound and has little in the way of multi-core threading. The bottleneck then is single core CPU performance (a good amount of ram and a fast SSD help a bit but only so much). While you can of course have 1000s of players so long as only 250-300 of them are ever online at the same time no pure survival server is going to be doing anything like 2 billion players.
- mhluongo 10y agoCongrats guys! Stoked to see BitQuest evolving.
- zeta0134 10y agoIsn't this against the EULA for Minecraft? I thought selling in-game items for real world money was prohibited.
- phaser 10y agoI can't answer your question but i want to clarify that All Bitcoin spent in items go back to the players in form of 'loot money' and not used for monetisation. I hope that makes the difference, I will try to get legal help for intepreting the EULA and hopefully if we break it we can modify the server so it meets requirements. (Charging for access? Sell only cosmetic items?)
- zamalek 10y agoAs I recall Notch specifically used the word "monetization" in his announcement blog post. This is the intent of the EULA, so if there's a problem I assume it would be adjusted.
- SquareWheel 10y agoCosmetics are allowed, as well as charging for overall access to the server. But "secondary currencies" or buying in-game advantages for real money are disallowed. You may be thinking about the original terms for mods, which was a more general "don't monetize it".
- zamalek 10y ago> mods, which was a more general "don't monetize it". You're right, I was mistaken.
- tomc1985 10y agoA while back I launched Bitcoin Armory for the first time only to discover it had to download the entire blockchain(!) before it could seemingly do anything. Does a game like this bloat the blockchain, and if it does, do people care?
- phaser 10y agoI am very looking forward to SegWit and the Lightning Network and if it makes sense (probably will) to make a sidechain for BitQuest servers we'll try to implement that. In the meantime, we only process a limited amount of transactions per user per second so we don't spam the Blockchain
- martindale 10y agoEric Martindale here with Blockstream! Let us know if you need any help setting up a sidechain for this. It makes a lot of sense for your use-case.
- kordless 10y agoMinecraft's database, and the elements worth value inside of it, are not based on a blockchain. This makes the entire server's economy as secure as the underlying code around exchanging items of value, mob kills, etc. Proposing they use a sidechain solves no problems for their use-case, as far as I can tell. Given sidechains are already fairly complicated to understand[1], I'm not sure I get why suggesting their use without showing the use-case here makes a lot of sense for building Blockstream's business model. I guess that's the difference between promoting a company and contributing in a conversation. [1] https://blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf https://blockstream.com/sidechains.pdf
- martindale 10y agoTake, for example, the Asset Issuance Element [1]. Not only could the currency become a tradable asset, but individual items and mobs in shops could be tracked as digital assets as well. There is much opportunity for expansion with a sidechain implementation here. [1]: https://www.elementsproject.org/elements/asset-issuance/ https://www.elementsproject.org/elements/asset-issuance/
- Joof 10y agoAs a game player and hobbyist game designer: please don't do this. It's pretty much guaranteed to become exploitive by design.
- DennisP 10y agoEthereum could work even better for this. You can implement some of the logic in smart contracts, store arbitrary data on the blockchain, and the block time is 15 seconds. It's also easy to use multisig schemes to keep the money more secure.
- Shorel 10y agoI concur. This is fantastic use case for a smart contract.