Heyzap (YC W09) adds option to pay game developers with Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

Heyzap (YC W09) adds option to pay game developers with Bitcoin

venturebeat.com

62 pointsdanielrhodes19 comments

Could someone explain why anyone would be foolish enough to pay in bitcoins right now given its meteoric rise over the past few weeks?

If you are sure it will keep going up at this pace, why not take everything you own, sell it, and invest in (or: speculate on) Bitcoin? That's not a rhetorical question.

Personally, given its volatility, it doesn't make much sense to me to hold much in Bitcoin outside of what you plan to spend relatively immediately. It could go up or down by 50% overnight - not a great store of value, either way.

Some don't mind volatility as long as (a) the long-term expected gain is positive; and (b) the return is uncorrelated with more traditional investments.

Paying out in Bitcoins is very low risk since there is only a small holding time between acquiring the Bitcoins and making the pay out.

isn't that equivalent to asking why anyone would be foolish enough to not have 100% of their money in bitcoins given its meteoric rise over the past few weeks?

There are reasons to not have all your money in bitcoins, therefore there are reasons to sell bitcoins (even if you just bought them specifically for that transaction (for the anonymity for example))

edit: I realised this sounds a bit snarky, but I'm honestly curious. Is buying with bitcoins really that different from not investing in bitcoins?

When a currency is experiencing deflation it makes sense not to spend it. In that world, keeping my money under my mattress is the soundest investment strategy.

Why would I buy anything with my bitcoins if a week from now they're going to be work X% more? I'd just wait until then.

> Why would I buy anything with my bitcoins if a week from now they're going to be work X% more? I'd just wait until then.

If you believe this, then surely you also believe you should invest 100% of your money in bitcoins?

If not, then you believe only X% of your money should be invested in bitcoins (to avoid the risk of losing everything in a collapse)

Therefore if you have >X% of your money in bitcoins, you should spend some.

> When a currency is experiencing deflation it makes sense not to spend it. In that world, keeping my money under my mattress is the soundest investment strategy.

A does not imply B.

If the currency deflates at 1% but you could invest at 2%, your mattress isn't the most sound investment strategy.

Bitcoin is deflating at a far greater rate than you could make investing without some kind of extremely leveraged scheme.

Correct, but how certain are you that it will continue to deflate? It has already once lost 90% of its value in a short period after a parabolic rise. Could it not do that again?

Ah, so that's an indicator of where verbalist's comment[1] was coming from about "developers wanting to be paid in Bitcoin"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5508031

Definitely interesting, and more options are (in most cases) a good thing... the best application of this that's immediately obvious to me, though, is for financially successful devs/shops to mark one of their games for bitcoin income and use it as a test case.

I do hope, though, that it's not presented to small shops as being the same as [insert traditional currency here]; while it's certainly our own responsibility to be careful how we're paid, glossing over the realities of Bitcoin could end up with busy or otherwise inattentive devs accepting something that's just not the sure (or at least predictable) thing they need in terms of payment.

Unfortunately most users are annoyed by services like Heyzap and Openfeint. Ironically, Game Center seems to get out of the way the best, but is still pretty superfluous for a default app on a mobile operating system.

Exactly. It bugs me how much these types of services are making the front page of HN, considering that they only undermine video game quality for the sake of profit.

Game Center is infuriating if you don't want to use it. If you do decide to, it asks you to log into your iCloud account again.

I wonder if you set a price amount in bitcoin or it just does a conversion between BTC and USD (or some other currency).

If you set a price in BTC then if there is a drop in value, you might find wake up the next day and find that lots of people took advantage of that as a way to dump their BTC and managed to buy your $10 game for $1.

usually you can pick but most people pin their btc prices to their own local currency for convenience.

This is interesting because I think this is the biggest vulnerability for bitcoin. So far as people continue to peg bitcoin to their own currency, it will continue to be thought of as a speculative opportunity and will face insurmountable deflationary pressure.

Bitcoin needs to hit a tipping point in the density of merchants offering bitcoin transactions, such that the general population can free themselves of thinking of bitcoin as it relates to USD or EUR, and instead how the price of a good or service in bitcoin relates to other goods and services they can consume with bitcoin.

I'm surprised so many people in the tech community have fallen for this Ponzi Scheme.

For example, many heard about "some guy bought a $25 pizza with 10,000 bitcoins", but no one has thought about what this means. It means someone now has that 10,000 "coins" (which is close to 2'000,000). This also means someone had this amount (and possibly much more).

And, finally, no one questions who posseses the first "coins".

That's why the creator is anonymous.

Just my 2 cents.

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