How playing “The Way Home” earns us revenue by mining Bitcoin | Hacker News Reader

How playing “The Way Home” earns us revenue by mining Bitcoin

blog.mowowstudios.com

15 pointsmercury_aleph14 comments

I think this is pretty unethical, mostly because there is no mention in the app description or the app itself that you are doing this. Something about it feels very greasy and shady. I'd almost, almost, call it a trojan.

Now if you put a disclaimer up front, or if it was an opt-in thing, then sure. But right now you don't have any of that in the app, so I'm not sure how it differentiates itself from something like this: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/8/bitcoin-trojan

I'm sure apple approved it because they didn't catch it.

Gross.

Also seems similar to this. A gaming company was fined $1 million for embedding a BTC miner. http://www.wired.com/2013/11/e-sports/

The post is dated April 1st.

I understand, but people should stop and consider the virality and potential impact of their april fool's day joke. What if Apple didn't find this funny and yanked their app? Boom goes the dynamite and for no purpose but posting a dumb joke that isn't even funny.

Whether real or not, it does raise a question I've been wondering about for a while now - what about a f2p game that did state upfront that while playing, you are mining; so the more you play, the more it costs you. No IAP, no upfront costs, etc.

Obviously it would not be suitable for some game types (anything 3d heavy, basically), and has obvious battery/temperature implications on mobile, but it does seem to provide a plausible additional option for monetization.

Hi everyone, Bleau here from moWOW. We made a follow-up post to clarify both the nature of the post and our thoughts on having players mine Bitcoin - http://blog.mowowstudios.com/2014/04/bitcoin-mining-way-home...

Yes, it was just April Fools. It would take 30k days to mine one block with an iPad 2, not to mention how sleazy it would be to do it behind our players' backs.

Y'all know what day it is, right?

I hope it is a joke. Though, if it was, it's a pretty bad one that going to reap them nothing but negative attention for no good reason at all.

It's astounding when smart people do dumb shit.

Today is nothing but smart people doing dumb shit, unfortunately.

Wonder how this affects battery usage and temperature on the devices, I'd love to see reports based on app usage with/without mining enabled.

Did you check to see if the phone/ipad heats up while playing?

As first I thought this was another botnet operation mining Bitcoins.

There's actually an altcoin experiment at the moment, http://huntercoin.org. Basically an MMOG that runs on Blockchain technology. Users play and "mine" coins.

A pretty poor April Fools stunt (I'm hoping that's what it is) IMHO, given that some people probably have/would do this...

Wow, I hope it's a joke. If not, then this is terrible. No mention upfront, and it'll kill your battery.

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