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People have spent over $1M buying virtual cats on the Ethereum blockchain
- iamthirsty 9y ago> First off, it’s important to understand that since it’s played on the Ethereum blockchain there’s no central entity managing the game. This means users literally own their kittens. Unlike playing Neopets where everything was stored on a central database and your pet was deleted when the company shut down, CryptoKitties is decentralized and will live forever on the Ethereum blockchain. If people just stop playing, and the community dies, isn't that the same thing (in effect)?
- AlphaWeaver 9y agoNo, because the data is always stored in the blockchain's history, so it can always be accessed.
- JetSpiegel 9y agoIf the community dies, who stores the blockchain?
- einarvollset 9y agoCome on now... this is literally the main value prop of a block chain.
- firstplacelast 9y agoIt’s something I’ve wondered too. If no one uses for a long time, why would anyone be incentivized to store that block chain? Could anyone explain?
- JetSpiegel 9y agoWhat, that it magically creates network-accessible storage? What is a peer-to-peer system without peers?
- chrisseaton 9y agoI think they mean that anyone with value invested in Ethereum blockchain (anyone holding ether) is incentivised to stay a peer. They don't need to care about the game, just about ether in general. Nobody thinks it magically does anything. There's an incentive built into the system for people who have nothing to do with the game to keep the blockchain and so the game data alive.
- AlphaWeaver 9y agoI was under the impression that you were talking about cryptokitties community. Nothing can save it if the entire Ethereum community walks away.
- ric2b 9y agoAny single person that cares about it can keep it going. If literally no one cares that means there's no problem in it disappearing.
- Spooky23 9y agoHow? When I was toying with Bitcoin when it was $0.05, a hard disk crash lost me some. How would you recover it?
- rubyfan 9y agoWe’re all asking ourselves that question aren’t we?!
- iamthirsty 9y agoSeriously. I cry every time I think of my exploded 2013 MacBook Pro. Who knows what it could've been worth today.
- rubyfan 9y agoI was aware of and experimenting with bitcoin really really early. I never got too into it though but I’m certain I generated coins really early. This is probably what the kid that lost his Babe Ruth baseball card feels like.
- Spooky23 9y agoIt’s a good story anyway. On the upside, the tiny sliver of my $20 investment that I printed out is worth low 4 figures. The downside is that I probably could have paid off my mortgage with the rest.
- thesmok 9y agoYou can't recover the private key but you can still check the balance if you got the wallet address somewhere in chat logs ;)
- fermuch 9y agoAs long as you have more than one kitten, you can still breed between them. This mechanic still works, even if you're playing alone. And the prices (AFAIK) are also totally handled with smart contracts, so even if it's just you, you can still claim the price.
- mattpk 9y agoThe devs have made the rendering algorithm secret. So even if you have the cat token, you can't know what it looks like unless you go through their front-end.
- iamthirsty 9y agoSo... not much different from a centralized service, eh?
- mesozoic 9y agoWhich also means if they stop supporting it you can no longer render kittens
- cryptodogemoon 9y agoIt's not really decentralized as there's only one source of the gen0 assets. No one else is allowed to generate the supply.
- KVFinn 9y agoAre the auctions for cats actually executing on the blockchain via smart contracts, instead of the website? If so, this might be the first time I've seen something actually kind-of-useful implemented via smart contracts. (Well, to the extent that virtual cats are useful...)
- DalasNoin 9y agothe auctions are handled by a smartcontract[1], breeding and storage too[2]. Smartcontract are used for a lot of other things, tokens are basically mappings in a smartcontract between accounts and balances. Multisig wallet are also based on Smartcontracts. Ethereum has spend a lot of effort on integrating the blockchain into web applications. You can use metamask to log into websites with your ethereum address and websites like etherdelta, that exchange tokens, can lock your tokens in a smartcontract. [1]https://etherscan.io/address/0xb1690c08e213a35ed9bab7b318de14420fb57d8c#code https://etherscan.io/address/0xb1690c08e213a35ed9bab7b318de1... [2]https://etherscan.io/address/0x06012c8cf97bead5deae237070f9587f8e7a266d#readContract https://etherscan.io/address/0x06012c8cf97bead5deae237070f95...
- 0x4f3759df 9y agoHere's a list of other dapps coming https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7gltfs/the_dappening_is_almost_upon_us_2018_will_be_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7gltfs/the_dappen...
- spraak 9y ago> the dAppening Brilliant :D Thanks for sharing this.
- smaili 9y agoAny thoughts on how apps built on Ethereum will impact the price of its Ether currency?
- charlesdm 9y agoIf you have many successful dApps, it's not unlikely the price would go up.
- ryanSrich 9y agoI would say the price should go up, but the price of ETH is anything but predictable. As we've seen with the rise of BTC, there's no rationality in the market. It's all based on hype. If price was based on tech, ETH would be $10k+ and BTC would be a dying relic.
- frakr 9y agoIs there anything like Bitpay for Ethereum? I haven't seen any major retailers that directly accept ETH, which is a pretty significant use case for any currency.
- ryanSrich 9y agoWhile directly accepting ETH is certainly beneficial, it would make more sense for retailers to accept an erc20 based alternative to BTC (see BTH [1]). Ethereum is a platform. Digital currency is but a single application. 1. https://medium.com/@bitether/introducing-bitether-bth-the-new-erc20-bitcoin-2-0-b6c6e0d14acd https://medium.com/@bitether/introducing-bitether-bth-the-ne...
- lettergram 9y agoAnd that guy was in my startup school class.. lol well, if you're reading this - congratulations! I'm impressed
- AlphaWeaver 9y agoI participated in the alpha for this, and it was pretty cool. I'm glad to see that it's been successful, but I'm not sure why anyone would pay to play the game beyond transaction fees.
- JetSpiegel 9y agoJust because the current Ethereum value is $1M, doesn't mean people actually spent that much money. They could have a bunch of Ethereum from when it was dirt-cheap.
- rudiger 9y ago> Right now about 15% of all Ethereum network traffic is dedicated to the game, making it the most popular smart contract on the network. If I still had ether, this would be a pretty strong sell signal.
- sheeshkebab 9y agoPeople have been spending billions on in app purchases in app stores for ages. I say it’s all scam, However, that’s the internet economy for you - the value is not in tangible stuff anymore.
- charlesdm 9y ago$50bn a year, in fact, on digital goods, such as avatar skins, special weapon skins, etc
- tlrobinson 9y agoOn the contrary, I think virtual worlds will (eventually) be one of the killer applications of blockchains. People will be more likely to invest real time and money into virtual goods/currency/reputation if they can’t be confiscated by a corporation for arbitrary reasons. The idea will really take off once virtual goods are “portable” between games. At that point you don’t really have disparate “games” but rather a... Metaverse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse) (I don’t imagine all virtual goods will be universally portable. You might be able to bring your CryptoKitties into Second Life but not World of Warcraft, for example...)
- rudiger 9y agoPeople are "breeding" cryptokitties to profit from cats that "literally print money": https://mobile.twitter.com/tomkysar/status/937505684928602112 https://mobile.twitter.com/tomkysar/status/93750568492860211...
- matthberg 9y agoThis reminds me of the Oasis from the Ready Player One book, where digital currency used in a game gains value enough to replace the USD and other currencies as the standard.
- pmoriarty 9y agoWhenever I hear about people spending outrageous amounts of money for something that should be really cheap, the first explanation that springs to mind is money laundering.
- Blazespinnaker 9y agoYes, absolutely. This is a cornerstone to a lot of p2p markets. You take a % of the cut and let money launderers buy and sell between themselves via your market. For example, let’s say I want to sell x$ illegal goods. I just tell the buyer to bid up my 1 million virtual cat and I’ll transfer the goods to you. The transaction goes unnoticed. What’s even better, the buyer can sell the cat at a lost and recover some Cash. What’s more the money launderers buy and sell the virtual pets so as so mix up their money in the market. There was a huge art deal recently. You have to wonder how much of the money laundering factored into the purchase of Salvator mundi. It goes even further. Participants in the market know that money laundering is taking place and rely on it for profit. They bid up the virtual goods. Of course, there is also a pyramid scheme / hot potato at play as well. Last one holding the bag loses. And yeah, there are the naive folks whose out there with their money in not a understanding what’s really going on. Valve profits from this quite nicely, and second life. Lots of these games with virtual goods.
- anonymous5133 9y agobut this doesn't make sense at all because you can just send eth to someone else relatively anonymously.
- jacoblambda 9y agothe point is that the game can be used to give the trading a "legitimate" purpose
- eric-hu 9y agoThis sounds plausible, but it seems like speculation. Given two hypotheses: "the Valve hat economy is used for money laundering" and "many Valve gamers are willing to spend money on hats", I'm more inclined to believe the latter without more solid evidence.
- searealist 9y agoThis is so obviously the creators of that game making fake transactions to establish fake value in their product. It's not hard to send 100k to yourself for something that has no value to make people believe that it does.
- cryptodogemoon 9y agoIt's called wash trading, and it's what's allowed Bitfinex to falsify trade volume and increase the spot price like MTGox did with the wiley bot. https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/latest https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/latest
- dete 9y agoThere's no way to prove it, but all the members of our team have pledged not to trade in cats in any way. We are definitely not manipulating the price. I can assure you that we're as surprised as anyone at the speed that this thing has grown!
- searealist 9y agoWell if you can't trust a Director of Blockchain, who can you trust?
- Jonovono 9y agoSo all 1500 users (500 online now) and all the comments on this subreddit are just faked by axiom zen? https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoKitties/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoKitties/ Okay...
- frakr 9y agoOnly a small number actually have to be faked to build momentum and FOMO. Greed is very powerful and seems to bear a lot of influence on those participating in crypto.
- mrep 9y agoI could definitely see that. Rumor is a lot of ICO's do something similar in that they buy their own coin's with another coin like bitcoin which then goes right back into your wallet so you can buy more with it creating the illusion of tons of demand when you are really just cycling the same money through.
- cdetrio 9y agoI met a couple guys from their team a couple months ago at the ETHWaterloo hackathon (post from then [1]). They presented a contract analytics tool to graph the number and type of function calls, like an etherscan.io but for custom queries/reports. The queries they showed had function names like SireKitten(), it was all quite funny and I assumed the analytics tool was the main product and that the kitty contracts were a joke example. Never would've guessed that it would take off, but I didn't see all the cute avatars then either. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15479945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15479945
- jimjimjim 9y agoCats are fine and everything, but how about something more traditional, like flowers or something. i don't know, tulips maybe?
- spraak 9y agoNot cute enough. Cats have long reigned supreme in internet meme culture, it's the perfect choice.
- cycrutchfield 9y agowhoosh
- mojoe 9y agoI think you're on to something. Probably spark some kind of mania.
- dete 9y agoWhen we started the project, we expected to use a standard, eBay-style, rising auction with successive bids, but that resulted in way too many on-chain transactions. So, we had to find a kind of auction that required just two committed transactions: Starting the auction, and claiming the winning bid. The answer was a descending clock auction, where you set some start price and gradually drop the price over time until someone chooses to pay. (It's formally equivalent to a first-price, sealed bid auction, if you're an auction theory aficionado!) The common name for a descending clock auctions? "Dutch Auction" or "Tulip Auction". The irony is not lost on us...
- mattpk 9y agoFrom their FAQ (https://www.cryptokitties.co/faq https://www.cryptokitties.co/faq): The developers levy a 3.75% fee on every cat purchase. Doesn't really seem like a decentralized app in that regard.
- dete 9y agoWe take a cut of all auctions facilitated by our smart contract, but we put no restrictions on owners' ability to transfer or sell their Kitties outside our site. In fact, CryptoKitties is the first smart contract to implement the draft ERC-721 standard, which attempts to make NFTs (non-fungible tokens) as interoperable as ERC-20-compliant fungible tokens. https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/721 https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/721
- asdfjjjasdf 9y agoHey, they're the ones that designed the smart contracts. I think the fact that you can design a marketplace that allows someone to take a cut assures the success of smart contracts since people now have an economic incentive to design marketplaces.
- aqsheehy 9y agoTotally not beanie babies
- junkscience2017 9y agookay, no more complaining about not being able to afford houses
- mr_toad 9y agoHow long before we see crypto doggies, crypto magic swords and crypto spaceships?
- panarky 9y agoCryptokitties now accounts for nearly 14% of all Ethereum transactions. https://imgur.com/a/XdQ5B https://imgur.com/a/XdQ5B Looks like this caused the pending transaction queue to increase from around 700 yesterday to over 9,000 now. https://imgur.com/a/il6UD https://imgur.com/a/il6UD
- masonlee 9y agoAre the founders hoping for additional kitten games? It seems that the game art is protected by copyright and trademark. And the breeding game itself is possibly covered by a patent. But what about representing this kitten data as cats elsewhere? I can't tell from the Terms of Use if this is encouraged or discouraged. https://www.cryptokitties.co/terms-of-use https://www.cryptokitties.co/terms-of-use "A. You acknowledge and agree that we (or, as applicable, our licensors) own all legal right, title and interest in and to all elements of the App, and all intellectual property rights therein. The visual interfaces, graphics, design, systems, methods, information, computer code, software, services, “look and feel”, organization, compilation of the content, code, data, and all other elements of the App (collectively, the “Axiom Materials”) are owned by Axiom Zen, and are protected by copyright, trade dress, patent, and trademark laws, international conventions, other relevant intellectual property and proprietary rights, and applicable laws."
- archagon 9y agoI was recently struck by the thought that the blockchain might be ideally suited for the creation of some kind of "digital stamp". As with real stamps, different artists could publish and sell stamp designs of varying quantities. For uniqueness, perhaps aberrations could be algorithmically introduced based on each stamp's unique blockchain hash. The stamps could then be used to creatively sign communications and transactions, with inbound stamps showing up in the recipient's digital stamp collection. (Or maybe they could somehow be tied in to miner fees, to make them function more like the real thing.) With the blockchain, it seems we finally have a way of assigning scarcity to digital assets. The only problem would be the social value of such goods, but things like CryptoKitties make it clear that this would hardly be a problem. People seem to love collecting rare things, even if the rareness is strictly algorithmic. I think it would feel great to receive a communication signed by a particularly rare or interesting e-stamp!
- paulsutter 9y agoWhat’s to stop someone from creating a marketplace for identical stamps at 1/10 the cost?
- archagon 9y agoDunno, it's a super wishy-washy idea! This is mostly me thinking out loud. I was recently looking through my dad's massive collection of old Soviet stamps, and it really made me wish for some sort of digital equivalent. Intuitively, it seems to me that there probably exists some alignment of cryptocurrency concepts to make it work.
- RexetBlell 9y agoWhat's to stop someone from making a painting that's practically identical to Mona Lisa and selling it for 1/10th the cost?
- paulsutter 9y agoThe Mona Lisa isn’t yet a digital good. But in time it will be possible to make perfect copies, and that raises all sorts of interesting questions.
- neuralzen 9y agoSimilar to Cryptopunks 6 months ago, although they hit only 250,000 USD in sales. Total Value of Punks Sold 518.47 ETH ($241,413.99 USD) Average Sale Price 0.46 ETH ($213.83 USD) Estimated Market Cap 2,899.15 ETH ($1,349,933.50 USD) https://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks https://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks
- Frogolocalypse 9y agocats.com?