CryptoKitties craze slows down transactions on Ethereum
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It's a very important stress test for the network on something less risky than pure financial transactions, for example.
Also it's educating a lot of people across the entire spectrum of individuals (in terms of cryptocurrency awareness).
For example, I'm a software developer with a high level knowledge of crypto, but I'm now running an eth node locally in order to be able to breed cats more reliably. I've learned a lot more about Ethereum in the past few days, which is cool.
On the other end of the spectrum is my wife, who now has a cursory understanding of the blockchain concept thanks to the fact that there's a polished front-end on top of it as well as the fact that we're generating Ether regularly by breeding cats (she's less enamored by the Cat aspect and moreso by the dividend opportunities). I imagine plenty of spouses/friends/colleagues/etc would be interested in the cute cat aspect, however.
It may appear totally ridiculous (and parts of it absolutely are), but it's a really great thing for cryptocurrency overall, imo.
[1] https://twitter.com/cryptokitties/status/937794977848897536
Is it weird that I think that the cat that was sold for 100K was a wash trade (someone trading with themself)? Who would honestly pay 100K for a 'rare' digital cat? Just because something's rare doesn't mean it's valuable.
I think it's interesting foreshadowing that the developers are calling these "breedable Beanie Babies".
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
With cryptokitties we're talking about 100K for a picture of cat. From what I've read the platform is dedicated only to buying and selling these cats.
There are also entire off site communities dedicated towards selling items and neopoints
the site was bought from its founders by Viacom for 100m
I used to trade digital assets on games like this exactly like people trade crypto currencies today.
Both the interest in having a digital collectible and using electronic points as a store of value
While the site did have those features you mentioned, they were glitchy and never updated past the original 1990s php code. xss everywhere losing your account was inevitable
what people used the site for was the same as the crypto kitties. Collecting digital widgets and participating in the markets the buying and selling of those things created.
100k for a crypto kitty is pretty nuts but its the most rare and valuable not like they are commonly hitting that.
on neopets you could buy "wearables" to dress your pet but these couldn't be sold for the in game currency and buying in game points and items was illegal.
Neopoints went for $3 per million (now maybe a buck or two) on the forums dedicated to cheating which hosted off site marketplaces.
if you were a cheeky 13 year old and figured out how to use xss to steal a lot of cookies or even better their database with an sql injection you could easily amass trillions in neopoints.
When the off site marketplaces stick the price at a few bucks per million that is a lot of money you could make when you have thousands of stacked accounts with rare items and pets and neopoints.
I would say it is extremely likely someone spent 100k in a single purchase at least once. I personally saw people selling what they amassed at a bulk price of 10k many times.
The real money maker was selling hash lists and database leaks of account info. Sell accounts for a buck a piece, maybe one in 50 had anything decent, so just selling lists worked out to be a better way to make money because you aren't responsible for securing the hacked goods, and you make a profit every time even if the account is empty
gosh this makes me want to play again. maybe not violate the cfaa stealing their database, or performing xss to steal cookies, even though that is the most fun part of the game. Maybe looking for bugs to report them rather than to steal accounts items etc would be fun. Either way If you want to hang out and rum some fuzzers or figure something out let me know.
i will for sure rejoin to make bots again. writing bots for neopets (containing password stealers) was my very first taste of programming, and the code I wrote was surprisingly succinct and elegant.
There is nothing stopping people from building on top of even the cryptocat system, making a game where these cats are usable for any of your listed game mechanics.
It doesn't need any kind of api-integration to cryptocats, it just needs to reference the already public cat compendium.
1) it's not just an investment in the asset.
It pays dividends. The asset can breed once per week, so that could be $1k+ per week generated.. paying for itself over time. Since this is the lone genesis kitty, its offspring could fetch a totally arbitrary value.
2) This is ethereum we are talking about. If the ether was bought 1 year ago today, it would have cost $1,557.1. Someone could have made a $1.5k investment 1 year ago which is now paying for itself weekly.
It doesn't pay dividends in ETH, it pays dividends in more kitties. Is that really a dividend?
If apple shares could only pay dividends in more apple shares instead of USD would they have any value?
> This is ethereum we are talking about. If the ether was bought 1 year ago today, it would have cost $1,557.1. Someone could have made a $1.5k investment 1 year ago which is now paying for itself weekly.
Ethereum at least has a purpose, cryptokitties do not seem to have one. Besides, you can't just say that the price of one crypto asset will go up because a different one has gone up in the past!
Um, yes.. as long as Apple shares can be sold for USD (which they can).
And it sounds like these “cryptogkitties” can be sold for ETH. Your analogy confuses me.
The same cannot be said of these kittens... that this obvious point even needs to be stated is just sad.
To suggest that these things are anything other that highly speculative is intellectually dishonest at best, gambling at worst.
Neither do collectible stamps, yet people buy them regularly. The most expensive one costing $200K, with the face value of 15 cents.
"On May 22, 2010, the yellow stamp was auctioned once again by David Feldman in Geneva, Switzerland. It sold "for at least the $2.3 million price [that] it set a record for in 1996"." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treskilling_Yellow
Google shares don't pay any dividends at all.
Why exactly do people pay 1,000 USD for one share of GOOGL?
Are they buying an option on the right to receive dividends at some indeterminate point in the distant future?
Do they think they'll receive a fraction of the enterprise value when Google gets bought by a bigger company?
Will Google get sold off piece by piece and they'll get a pro-rata share of the liquidation proceeds?
Why would you pay "real money" for an electronic entry in the broker's ledger for an intangible asset that may never get converted back into USD?
> Do they think they'll receive a fraction of the enterprise value when Google gets bought by a bigger company?
> Will Google get sold off piece by piece and they'll get a pro-rata share of the liquidation proceeds?
Yes, but also a bet on other people's demand for those things - its asset backed. Since they all are based on USD I think they're a little safer bet than a cat fad.
Exactly.
> its asset backed
Not really. Google's assets minus its liabilities are $139 billion. The value of its stock is $724 billion.
So 81% of the company's value isn't "backed" by anything -- not the company's assets, not the promise to pay dividends in the future, nothing.
No, that’s not paying dividends, that’s diluting share value.
The logical thing to do for a recipient of more shares is to sell them into the market for currency, thus diluting the value of remaining shares.
After few years of IPO we all know where Zynga virtual pet compapny is .
If I had a game like this, I would want people to think they could make a lot of money by playing.
An easy way to create that impression and to generate hype would be to make some high-value self-trades.
If the game founders or early adopters didn't do this, they probably should have.
It's not proof they did but there's means/motive/opportunity.
Project entropia is a notorious MMO that ran on real money, more or less. Your bullets literally cost real money. $330k for a space station in it, that the person hoped to make money off of.
LN proponents have put LN forward as this magical scaling solution were you can effortlessly transact Bitcoin off-chain both cheaply and inexpensively. The nontechnical believers have lapped it up not knowing that LN is an incomplete idea that starts with locking your coin up in one or more channels and end with some magical and as of yet undiscovered distributed routing network that finds a path through existing channels from channels you've already committed to, to channels your payee has committed to. That such a path exists, is cost effective and is reliable, in that your coins don't get stuck somewhere along the way, is an open question. In short, LN is half baked at best.
"In this video Laolu (co-founder of Lightning Labs) demonstrates a multi-hop payment on Bitcoin's mainnet which travels across the 3 major Lightning implementations. In the demo Laolu (a.k.a roasbeef) sends a payment from our Lightning desktop app (https://github.com/lightninglabs/ligh...) to Starblocks, a coffee payment demo."
"This payment marks the first multi-hop, cross-implementation payment on Bitcoin's mainnet. All transaction performed in the video were performed completely off-chain, instantly, and with virtually zero fees. Lightning allows instant, low-fee payments on Bitcoin, enabling the system to scale further for the next wave of adoption. Additionally, Lightning unlocks a new class of use cases for Bitcoin enabled by the ability to instantly send low-fee payments on the system."
It is a reasonable argument and while you may not agree with the desire to avoid trusted third parties but there's no reason to dismiss it as trolling.
Modern proof of stake systems have a concept of "finality" which I think is what you're referring to when you say "checkpoint" (older POS systems also had a more traditional checkpoint concept, but I assuming you're arguing against modern implementations)
In order to determine whether a block has "finality" in a POS system you need to either (A) have a computer running regularly on the network to determine finality on your own or (B) trust a third party to give you a valid finality designator.
So it is true that you have to trust a third party with these systems if (1) you haven't connected to the network for a year or so or (2) you are launching a brand new node.
Of course, with bitcoin #2 is also an issue since there's no way you can install bitcoin software on a new node without getting it from a trusted party.
The Ethereum PoS system, which is still a prototype and may change before the final version, uses checkpoints to guard against chain re-orgs. It is not trustless in the same sense as the Ethash system is. It's not exactly a secret but a calculated tradeoff.
The question here however was about how "currencies like NXT" work, which can hardly be described as modern seeing it was one of the first together with PPC. I believe they never fixed the fact that the optimum mining strategy is not the altruistic one the reference client uses. As long as all participants use the reference client they're safe, but it's not something you would want to base a trillion dollar economy on.
In general the challenges with proof-of-stake systems are how to avoid collusion, how to avoid exploratory mining on every possible chain, and variants thereof. (There's also the related problem how to bootstrap a node from scratch in face of equally probable views of history.) Different blockchains have tried different ways to mitigate this, including hard coded re-org limits and coin weights, but the only ones that have proven at scale are the ones that regularly checkpoint the chain. But please correct me if you know of any exceptions.
In Ethereum POS, an arbitrary PC can use a deterministic algorithm to exactly calculate the checkpointed/finalized block- There is no magical signature used by the ethereum foundation that "blesses" blocks as being checkpoints.
> how to avoid exploratory mining on every possible chainges with proof-of-stake systems are how to avoid collusion
In both Ethereum POS and tendermint this is a solved problem, anyone can earn a reward by providing proof that a user is mining multiple histories.
> There's also the related problem how to bootstrap a node from scratch in face of equally probable views of history
Yes, this is still an existing theoretical limitation of POS that is not shared by POW and is a valid criticism of POS- But even on a POW chain you still have to trust software from a third party to some degree in order bootstrap your node.
If a such a blockchain is under the control of a mining cartel, it would be rational to join that cartel instead of fighting it. When every participant knows this it should be possible to bootstrap such cartels from scratch.
And Ethereum absolutely plans to implement some sort of checkpoints. As you say, it's required to bootstrap new nodes anyway. The straightforward way to do this would be to sign them, but I'm not sure what they're planning to do.
There are two scenarios: If they release a new chain after they have released a previous signature, their entire deposit gets slashed in both chains. If instead they withhold all chains then this would only work if they are able to mine multiple blocks in quick succession on different chains (since they would lose the opportunity to validate a block within the timeout window) and this is exactly equivalent to a POW selfish mining attack.
The difference from a PoW model is that when mining is essentially free the incentives are different. If it doesn't cost you anything to try it makes game theoretical sense to do it speculatively.
You really don't have to trust the software with POW. The POW is encoded in the blockchain itself and can be independently verified by performing a series of hash operations.
With only the blockchain data, and a description of the blockchain layout, one can independently confirm the total amount of "work" done.
This is true decentalization & a huge benefit of POW over POS.
[0]: https://people.csail.mit.edu/nickolai/papers/gilad-algorand-...
[1]: http://stevengoldfeder.com/papers/BGB17-IEEESB-proof_of_dela...
Example: You come back online after your node had been off.
You receive updates to the blockchain in a PoS world. This is literally no cost to someone trying to commit fraud against you by staking their coins and creating fraudulent blocks.
You receive updates to the blockchain in a PoW world. You start receiving blocks with roughly the same amount of PoW included in previous blocks. You know that an attacker would have had to completely duplicate the entire PoW hashrate to create this clone of the blockchain. Since this would be extraordinarily costly, you can assume that after 6 blocks (or whatever is the expedience to transaction value trade of you're willing to make) it would be economically infeasible to commit.
Creating the implementation of PoS doesn't take an inordinate amount of time. The reason it hasn't been released is because it's a vaporware of a consensus system. The Ethereum foundation won't publicize this because they can continue to convince new ethereum buyers that Ethereum will solve that pesky Byzantine General's problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance
Ethereum proposes to prevent this by including "slashing conditions" that inflict large penalties on the type of fraudster you're talking about [0].
[0] - https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ#tha...
I do like the math behind Bitcoin but I wish it had just remained as a proof of concept.
I understand that more storage is a centralization pressure, but how does blocktime relate assuming the same number of transactions?
[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Accelerating-Bitcoin-s...
Again, not easy, but it’s the bread and butter of your first year in grad school: reading and understanding existing work. Ambitious undergrads are often doing this work quite professionally.
I'm still on the fence about the viability of PoS from the perspective that PoW at least means you have a chance of reward from using mining hardware that you probably already own, whereas PoS increases that barrier of adoption.
With BTC you can't participate unless you invest in expensive ASICs specifically for mining.
I wasn't saying that it's intentionally inefficient, just that it's purposefully designed to be ASIC unfriendly.
That's not an inefficiency, it's if anything more efficient with GPU.
The transaction problem applies to both, regardless of the mining algorithm.
Ethereum has been a promising platform for innovation. It is doomed to become a shill infested cesspool the day POS replaces POW.
Proof of Stake requires that you buy the currency in order to create blocks.
EDIT> and thank you for linking that, fascinating
The entity behind Kitties has some other high profile projects and media contacts. If they have something interesting to talk about, they can get people talking about. And even with a large staff of their own + friends - their incidental social network alone is enough to start some yammering.
I don't think a bad project can go viral, but many viral worthy projects simply don't go viral.
i think its something to do with the breeding
I think https://www.cryptokitties.co/kitty/102 this one should probably just be put out of its misery
Ebook's could increase in price when sold second hand (owned by such and such), an open source gaming asset exchange allowing people to buy and sell no matter the game.
Basically it crypto creates physical like scarcity in an otherwise abundant digital space.
That's the biggest deal about crypto IMO.
Combine that with AR and VR tech among other wearables and sensors and we won't just be digital nomads anymore, our entire world will have become completely digitized.
Humans are weird.
It's not the content of the book it's the affectional value of the book that's interesting.
For example, a problem for many low-income people in the U.S. is that consumer loans get sold and resold, often with poor record-keeping, and its hard for the consumer and the courts to know whether a creditor claiming nonpayment actually has a right to be paid. This is described in detail by Matt Taibbi in his recent book The Divide.
Well, a loan isn't a physical object so that example doesn't really apply to my comment, however, I still don't think it solves the underlying issue since the cause of the problem isn't a lack of reliable record keeping technology, it's "poor record keeping" which is a deliberate choice made by some businesses regardless of what technology is available.
Another example which is physical is real estate records in some third-world countries, where the central government wants to enforce property rights but bribes to the local register of deeds are effective at getting the records changed. (I read about this in an article in The Economist several years ago, so don't have a reference handy.)
Nothing really changes. You still have to trust that those private businesses will correctly use the record keeping technology. In a world with practical blockchain record keeping they would simply fail to use it or use it incorrectly.
And sure, you could spend a bunch of money setting up a government database and employees to run it, but at some point it's easier to write a few lines of code and be done with it.
Moreover, ETH in this case isn't really solving a problem for anyone.
That said - there are certain instruments (like cats!) wherein contracts could be designed around the limitations, for which it might work well.
But for the things you listed, I don't think so.
(disclosure: advisor, board member)
What is the benefit game-wise to trade the cats on a public blockchain? To an outside observer it seems like the users have to pay transfer fees at the order of a dollar for no particular reason. As long as someone controls issuance (which is completely reasonable for this type of game) they could just track ownership as well which would be trivial to scale.
Bitcoin enthusiasts in 2017: Bitcoin is for storing value
Ethereum enthusiasts in 2015: Ethereum is for making trustless currency transactions
Ethereum enthusiasts in 2020: Ethereum is for storing cats
The same could be said of Bitcoin. At least with Kitties you get, well, a Kitty :)
That’s the point. The open platform of the blockchain is usable by whoever is willing to pay what it costs in fees; not by how significant-seeming their activity is.
> The kitties' unique DNA can lead to four billion possible genetic variations.
Erm 2^256 is juuuuust a bit more than 4 billion. This seems like an error.
You're off by about 68 orders of magnitude; it's 2^32 that's approximately 4 billion.
Everything I knew about targeting audience, sorting market, or leads databases in general just fell apart.
Most of them are shallow changes or "busy work" to show activity. I have been watching FileCoin and Tezos Github, and I wouldn't expect much from either one of them.
What's wrong with going to the shelter and getting an actual cat.
This duration would have an upper bound equal the minimum between your own lifespan and the ownership period of the cat(s).
For a better explanation, see Koza's[1] work.
Items in-game of course can "nudge" the formula.
Doing this on the block-chain is an interesting idea a few people have suggested to me, but ultimately it didn't mesh with my idea of what the game should be.