CryptoKitties: breedable cats on the blockchain – ETHWaterloo winner | Hacker News Reader

CryptoKitties: breedable cats on the blockchain – ETHWaterloo winner

alpha.cryptokitties.co

168 pointsrohamg36 comments

This is, of course, pretty cool. But I don't really share much enthusiasm for the blockchain. It reminds me of Bit Torrent in the early 2000s. Sure, it had a decent impact on the Internet, but not really as revolutionary as everyone was hyping it to be.

Smart contracts are cool, but it's nothing you couldn't achieve with any other decentralized protocol. The only interesting part of cryptocurrencies (imo) is the ledger, and from what I've seen, the BTC ledger is becoming a bit unwieldly. ETH will probably follow suit.

> It reminds me of Bit Torrent in the early 2000s. Sure, it had a decent impact on the Internet, but not really as revolutionary as everyone was hyping it to be.

It forced two gigantic industries (music and movie) to re-invent themselves, how can you say it only had a decent impact?

The hype around BitTorrent was a lot more hypey than that, and the revolution you're describing was already well underway by then by means of Napster and LimeWire and what not.

I think the "let-down" is akin to what it would feel like if the end-result of the blockchain in a decade would amount to little more than cheap, low-friction international payments (and those not even powered by a blockchain, but simply by the banks getting their shit together). That's great and all, but the blockchain hype is way up there with enabling anarchist utopia.

> It forced two gigantic industries (music and movie) to re-invent themselves, how can you say it only had a decent impact?

Seriously! It completely up-ended entertainment and forced new business models on multi-billion dollar entrenched players. Hundred of billions of dollars later it's no longer a question if it had a revolutionary impact IMHO.

> Smart contracts are cool, but it's nothing you couldn't achieve with any other decentralized protocol.

What are those other ways?

Wow, you built all this from scratch in a 36-hour hackathon? How much experience did you have with Ethereum?

Please do Pokemon next. It's about time I get some respect for my shiny Mudkip.

Wouldn't be too surprised if something like that is in the works at Nintendo or The Pokemon Co.

If a fan made this and hosted the web frontend to the contract on ipfs (initially hosted just by nodes behind Tor, and then pinned/rehosted by many users), then Nintendo would have a very hard time taking it down, even if the original creator was known to them.

Indeed, it would be nice to actually test the censorship resistance of these platforms. Although it will have to get quite big for Nintendo etc. to care. Then you have the side-channel attacks or rather entry attacks, where it would be easier to take down any mobile apps that use this as a backend. We shall see.

Final Fantasy 7 on the PlayStation had a Chocobo breeding mini-game. Chocobo were a type of flightless bird and by breeding there was a chance to get birds with different characteristics, denoted by different colored feathers, which granted you access to different parts of the game.

You know, when I think back to FFVII (I never played any others after this). Trying to breed the correct chocobo is probably the worst part of the game. For the gold, did you not need a special potion or something (and many guesses) bred with different colours of chocobo? It makes stressed just thinking of it.

A friend of mine once worked on a prototype for something like that.

It would solve the hacks and return the value of shiny and perfect IVs pokémon, someone must build that solution.

> Challenge 1: Solid grey fur pattern + no tail + teeth (1st place - Cat #105, 2nd place - Cat #135, 3rd place - Cat #177)

What does this mean? Has cat #105 already won? I thought it wouldn't start until late November.

Stray cats.

We ran an alpha challenge during ETHWaterloo this weekend, on one of the Ethereum testnets. The official, mainnet release is still scheduled for November.

In all seriousness, this seems useful as an educational tutorial on how smart contracts work.

I agree, and I think the author should write a blog-post/tutorial about it, it might be useful for a lot of people that are looking into blockchain/ethereum/solidity, me being one of them.

Hi all, trying to fulfill requests for the kitties! We got over 100 while we were on the plane back from Waterloo.

Finally, the killer app for blockchain tech.

I knew it would be porn or cats.

And cryptocurrency/blockchain enthusiasts tell me it's not a hype train and/or bubble!

Because people have fun with it? I don't think this is valid argument. That does not mean it is not a bubble, but I can't take project like this as indication of it.

figures 3 and 4 are swapped?

Will I have to buy ether to participate in this?

The first release will be Ether only, but we hope to enable non-crypto payments soon after. (Behind the scenes everything happens in Ether, on the Ethereum blockchain.)

We’re all doomed.

Why?

mining cats, thats finally some useful blockchain tech, has to be first for everything

Relevant SMBC:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2932

So I was going to point to http://www.ratemykitten.com/ ... but it's gone :(

And so is http://rotten.com/ :(

Finally, after almost a decade in zombie mode. That's impressive. I wonder where it was running.

Damn, I was browsing rotten only a few weeks ago. Related and more (though only slightly) on-topic was bonsai kitten. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten

tldr;

Please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Shut up and take my money!

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