BitQuest – Minecraft server with Bitcoin-denominated economy

Presumably, given the modifications they've made, they can mod it so that villagers won't trade emeralds.

Mind you I've found a few previous attempts at integrating minecraft and bitcoin but they all appear to have closed down, eg https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BitVegas where a bug was exploited to take all the server owners bitcoin and leave them unable to run the server.

I'd imagine the bitcoin mod would trigger on 'break emerald ore' in the world, and that a flag would be set upon 'place emerald ore' to prevent silktouch from causing it to be fired more than once.

If they didn't think of this their idea is broken and the server will either go broke or they'll patch it when they notice. There are several possible patches for this, the first that comes to mind is that they've modded natural emeralds to spawn with a different damage value than emeralds that villagers trade. After that it's pretty easy for their ATM mod to reject if they see villager sourced emeralds. As items with different damage values don't stack they won't mix either.

That's just the first patch that comes to mind for fixing this system. Another would be to just remove villagers/npc trading with a mod.

Hi, we heavily modified the way villagers work, and there is a really cool update coming in the next days:

You will be able to buy or sell to villagers. Villagers will have a "wallet" of money to spend and once they buy you stuff thats the very same stuff they will sell to other players.

If they really are emerald ores, you could pretty easily restrict the biome generation algorithm to only create extreme hills when there is money in the bank. I expect the "mobs are stronger the further away from spawn" is also meant to put a bit of a dampener on the rate you can grab them.

You could build an exchange into the game -- a simple bid/ask order book. And add the ability to use more than one currency in the game. Bitcoins could work alongside "Emeralds", and simply be traded voluntarily via an exchange mechanism. Although if people are able to mine Emeralds without some kind of limit, it wouldn't take that long for people with bitcoins to stop bidding on Emeralds, and bitcoins would taker over as the currency (I assume). Would be a very interesting experience regardless of what happens.

Of course, this concept of using real money in a game is fundamentally incompatible with the ability to create something out of nothing inside the game. If you can create something without effort, why would you ever pay for it with real money? If, however, items take time to create, people would be willing to trade the item for money. Presumably the item would become increasingly expensive the more labor (or, simply, "waiting") that is put into it -- just like the real world: an entire apartment complex is expensive because it requires a lot of work to build, and 30 year old Whiskey is more expensive than the same Whiskey at 5 years of age, simply because it takes longer to make.

Finding emerald within the game is actually pretty difficult. We actually had to make it easier to find. But yeah, there would be a problem if no one donates to the server and the game wallet runs out of bitcoin. We are measuring this with high presicion to makepredictions for our second fundraising stage

I didn't see anything about paying for stuff. It seems to be run entirely by donation as far as I can tell. I think that means it kosher: https://mojang.com/2014/06/lets-talk-server-monetisation/

No server should hold any bitcoins, that's not necessary (and a huge systemic risk). The server just needs to be able to interact with the Bitcoin blockchain, and create transactions that a player can pay using a standard Bitcoin wallet (or one that's built into the game, but where the private keys are stored locally).

1. Player 1 wants to trade a shovel with Player 2 in exchange for 10 mBTC, and tells this to the server by generating a bitcoin address that he wishes to receive the funds at, and sending this to the server.

2. The server generates a bitcoin transaction with an output that points to Player 1's address, and asks Player 2 to add an input to the transaction, and pay 10 mBTC from that input to the output added by the server (Player 1's address). The signed transaction is then broadcast.

3. The server keeps an eye on the blockchain, and when the signed transaction makes it into the blockchain (waiting on the number of confirmations that Player 1 and Player 2 agree on), the item is transferred from Player 1 to Player 2 inside the game.

We use xapo developer services to separate the server code from the bitcoin wallet stuff. They are a legitimate wallet service with a very cool API but you'll be able to transfer emeralds to any other wallet

That depends. If Emeralds take time to mine, then it's likely that people will be willing to pay money for them (like people usually are with all other items that take time to make).

But setting a peg between Emeralds and bitcoins won't work, it will have to depend on people voluntarily trading in the game. For every bitcoin you get out, someone else must have put one in.

Yes, you can. We also made emeralds easier to find in this first stage so we have lots of them flowing inside the world.

Emeralds are also good for buying stuff other people craft, tipping other players and entering tournaments, and we are working on more ways to use them. We have found most players don't cash out and use it to have fun

Who said Bitcoin wasn't real-world money...

I'm not sure that's even remotely accurate. Just because a game is popular at all ages does not mean its primary demo are kids.

It looks like it's been generated by http://overviewer.org/, I guess they've got a cronjob or something that runs that as a script and generates the html and then it looks like they use an <iframe> to load the map on the page. Really cool, makes me want to start running a minecraft server again.

Dynmap?

Example: http://minecraft.xandorus.com:8123