Minecraft Server with a Bitcoin-denominated monetary system
bitquest.co
bitquest.co
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.
The owner could programmatically create and distribute the pooled bitcoins to fake player account wallets, and it would look like business as usual.
10,000 faked kills for 100 fake players is ~$442.
Or a hacker.
We suggest to players to keep the minimum stored in their game wallets and cash out frequently as a precaution.
We are experimenting with Wallets that need to be signed by both the Client and the Server to make operations and when the time comes I'll be happy to share my findings.
When a user wants to buy something he needs to make it outside of minecraft, or use a custom minecraft extension that handles the wallet client-side.
That way you can simply monitor the blockchain for every player's single Bitcoin address, without having any private key.
Any transaction from those accounts should be explicitly initiated by the player, and for that you show QR codes in the game.
I've only player single-player. What are these problems?
> Don't get me wrong
I've found people occasionally say things like that right before they make a comment full of dissonance, such as "this is cool, but I'm concerned about X". When we try to simulate a new thing so completely we find all the flaws in it, we paralyze ourselves by creating dissonance that is unresolvable. With Bitcoin this happens frequently because money, or stored trust, is a common source of dissonance (i.e. who wants to lose money? Answer, nobody.)
Even thought it has historically had some rough beta testing periods, Bitquest has shown itself to be an extremely interesting concept to explore. It is a game and it's Open Source, so I would expect discussions to focus on the positive aspects of Bitcoin, not the negative ones. Recognizing dissonance in the conversations being had around a given technology and keeping the discussion going is where the cool stuff happens.
P.S. I take credit for the land ownership idea. :) I still think it needs a timer on it though.
I'm also curious to see if the latency of the blockchain has any affect on gameplay.
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:
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.
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?)
You may be thinking about the original terms for mods, which was a more general "don't monetize it".
You're right, I was mistaken.
This is fantastic use case for a smart contract.
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://www.elementsproject.org/elements/asset-issuance/
Then only deposit or withdrawl of coins will "spam" the blockchain.
Blockchains are cool because they solve the problem of a global ledger without centralised trust. If the problem you're solving does not require the lack of centralised trust, it's just a really complicated and resource-heavy way to implement a balance database.
It's also worth mentioning a sidechain or payment channels can be "flushed" to the Bitcoin Blockchain (syncing up the balances of off-chain debits and credits) and this is not a trivial operation. If there is a community effort to a robust solution to this problem that other virtual worlds can also implement and inter-operate, makes total sense for us to test it and support it.
I mean it seems like everyone just wants to slap 'crypto currencies' and 'blockchains' onto everything nowadays.
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.