Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamthirsty | Hacker News Reader

> 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)?

View on HN

As 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.

The 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.

So... not much different from a centralized service, eh?

Which also means if they stop supporting it you can no longer render kittens

It's not really decentralized as there's only one source of the gen0 assets.

No one else is allowed to generate the supply.

No, because the data is always stored in the blockchain's history, so it can always be accessed.

If the community dies, who stores the blockchain?

Come on now... this is literally the main value prop of a block chain.

It’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?

What, that it magically creates network-accessible storage?

What is a peer-to-peer system without peers?

I 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.

I was under the impression that you were talking about cryptokitties community. Nothing can save it if the entire Ethereum community walks away.

Any single person that cares about it can keep it going. If literally no one cares that means there's no problem in it disappearing.

How?

When I was toying with Bitcoin when it was $0.05, a hard disk crash lost me some. How would you recover it?

We’re all asking ourselves that question aren’t we?!

Seriously. I cry every time I think of my exploded 2013 MacBook Pro. Who knows what it could've been worth today.

I 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.

It’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.

You can't recover the private key but you can still check the balance if you got the wallet address somewhere in chat logs ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com