Zynga Links Up With Bitpay For a Bitcoin Payment Test in Web Games | Hacker News Reader

Zynga Links Up With Bitpay For a Bitcoin Payment Test in Web Games

techcrunch.com

49 pointsa_olt10 comments

Here is a video demonstration of the in-game purchase using the Kryptokit extension [1] in Google Chrome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmN7UtXFRIU

Really shows the simplicity and speed which is great for these type of microtransactions.

1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kryptokit/lhhiping...

The article seems to conclude this is mostly a PR move, which I find plausible. I can't really imagine that an average Zynga customer would want to use bitcoin.

This is good news though, hopefully people will stop going bananas about the value of a bitcoin so using it as a payment platform becomes a viable option for everyone.

The Bitcoin network split and tanked when it exceeded, what, 500k transactions an hour?

There is a limit of transactions per hour based on the blocks

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Blocks

There is roughly 1 block every 10 minutes and it can only include 1 megabyte of transactions (transactions are around 500 bytes)

I don't think this limit has ever been hit but it doesn't allow for a ton of transactions per hour

The network split had nothing to do with transactions per hour. It was due to a very subtle difference between two versions of BerkeleyDB used in different versions of the Bitcoin client. Basically, a perfect storm:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1a51xx/now_that_its...

Not really. The issue with BerkeleyDB was actually triggered by a new version of the Bitcoin client that didn't use BDB to store the blockchain and that simultaneously raised the number of transactions allowed in a block so that more could be processed. Older BDB-based versions of the Bitcoin client hit a previously unknown limit when attempting to process that many transactions, causing them to fork onto their own version of the network. The issue hadn't been noticed before because the number of transactions was previously restricted to a low enough level that it couldn't trigger the bug.

> and that simultaneously raised the number of transactions allowed in a block so that more could be processed

Source? I don't believe the hard limit in blocks has ever been changed; bitcoin's devs are currently struggling to convince people to let them do it. The soft limit will NOT cause hard forks.

The only reason that fork happened was an unknown limit that existed with one database in one version and which didn't exist with an improved database in another version. It was a bug.

Here's an evaluation of the chainfork: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawi...

I can't really imagine that an average Zynga customer would want to use bitcoin.

How about once Zynga ramps up the slot machine stuff? Now there's a way to cash in and out.

I wonder why Zynga chose Bitpay over Coinbase. Anyone know?

Probably because Bitpay does one thing and does it better than anyone else.

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