Minecraft Server with a Bitcoin-denominated monetary system

by martindale • 10 years ago

119 48 10 years ago

I call my server currency "Gil" and "Gilcoin" would have been the crypto currency. Server is named Gilcraft, and it uses iConomy for its economy plugin. I had the idea at least a year ago, but never got around to implementing the crypto part.

odonnellryan2• 10 years ago

I was thinking about this recently: it'd be really cool to play even a text-based game that had crypto-currency backed econ.

wingerlang• 10 years ago

Why?

I mean it seems like everyone just wants to slap 'crypto currencies' and 'blockchains' onto everything nowadays.

bowmessage2• 10 years ago

This is really cool. Sounds like you can earn bitcoin just by playing, without an initial investment? How are these monster drops funded?

I'm also curious to see if the latency of the blockchain has any affect on gameplay.

phaser8• 10 years ago

Hi, BitQuest developer here.

In a nutshell, every item bought from villagers goes to a "loot" wallet where sort of randomly faucets out back to players who kill monsters.

This post explains it a little bit more:

http://bitquest.co/2016/05/19/bitquest-2.html

bowmessage2• 10 years ago

Nice! How do you feel about gambling? Plans to do anything similar to BitVegas[1]?

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BitVegas

ben_jones• 10 years ago

You didn't by chance write the Phaser JS game engine did you?

flashman2• 10 years ago

How do you handle cheating?

If you're hosting all the wallets, what's to stop you (or someone who gains control of the server) taking off with all the money?

Don't get me wrong, this is very cool and using real money might solve a whole lot of Minecraft's social/"tragedy of the commons" problems, but I'm interested what other issues it brings up.

bduerst4• 10 years ago

Or prevent skimming?

The owner could programmatically create and distribute the pooled bitcoins to fake player account wallets, and it would look like business as usual.

zimbatm2• 10 years ago

Over a population of 32 with transaction consisting of 1/1000000 of bitcoins ? It wouldn't even pay off the servers.

phaser8• 10 years ago

This concept should be considered experimental (and we should emphasize more this) ànd you're right, there's nothing stopping me to take off with all the money.

Or a hacker.

We suggest to players to keep the minimum stored in their game wallets and cash out frequently as a precaution.

We are experimenting with Wallets that need to be signed by both the Client and the Server to make operations and when the time comes I'll be happy to share my findings.

zimbatm2• 10 years ago

The only way to make it secure is for users to bring their own wallet. On first connection they would input their wallet ID so monster look can be paid out.

When a user wants to buy something he needs to make it outside of minecraft, or use a custom minecraft extension that handles the wallet client-side.

brudgers• 10 years ago

Perhaps it might be appropriate to state this in the hero image of the landing page.

awt• 10 years ago

Are you in the WoT? Also are you aware of Eulora?

Shorel2• 10 years ago

A theft-proof way can be to avoid the anonymizing features of Bitcoin, that's it, by having the return address (for change in a transaction) being the same as the origin address.

That way you can simply monitor the blockchain for every player's single Bitcoin address, without having any private key.

Any transaction from those accounts should be explicitly initiated by the player, and for that you show QR codes in the game.

Kiro• 10 years ago

Minecraft's social/"tragedy of the commons" problems

I've only player single-player. What are these problems?

flashman2• 10 years ago

It's along the lines of how do you manage scarce resources and space in the centre of the map. Who do you allow to build there? It can be free-for-all (and certain servers like 2b2t.net have an anarchist charm) or it can be restricted to donors, or some other system.

kordless3• 10 years ago

Disclaimer, I know the Bitquest guys.

Don't get me wrong

I've found people occasionally say things like that right before they make a comment full of dissonance, such as "this is cool, but I'm concerned about X". When we try to simulate a new thing so completely we find all the flaws in it, we paralyze ourselves by creating dissonance that is unresolvable. With Bitcoin this happens frequently because money, or stored trust, is a common source of dissonance (i.e. who wants to lose money? Answer, nobody.)

Even thought it has historically had some rough beta testing periods, Bitquest has shown itself to be an extremely interesting concept to explore. It is a game and it's Open Source, so I would expect discussions to focus on the positive aspects of Bitcoin, not the negative ones. Recognizing dissonance in the conversations being had around a given technology and keeping the discussion going is where the cool stuff happens.

P.S. I take credit for the land ownership idea. :) I still think it needs a timer on it though.

mhluongo• 10 years ago

Congrats guys! Stoked to see BitQuest evolving.

zeta0134• 10 years ago

Isn't this against the EULA for Minecraft? I thought selling in-game items for real world money was prohibited.

phaser8• 10 years ago

I can't answer your question but i want to clarify that All Bitcoin spent in items go back to the players in form of 'loot money' and not used for monetisation. I hope that makes the difference,

I will try to get legal help for intepreting the EULA and hopefully if we break it we can modify the server so it meets requirements. (Charging for access? Sell only cosmetic items?)

zamalek2• 10 years ago

As I recall Notch specifically used the word "monetization" in his announcement blog post. This is the intent of the EULA, so if there's a problem I assume it would be adjusted.

tomc1985• 10 years ago

A while back I launched Bitcoin Armory for the first time only to discover it had to download the entire blockchain(!) before it could seemingly do anything. Does a game like this bloat the blockchain, and if it does, do people care?

phaser8• 10 years ago

I am very looking forward to SegWit and the Lightning Network and if it makes sense (probably will) to make a sidechain for BitQuest servers we'll try to implement that. In the meantime, we only process a limited amount of transactions per user per second so we don't spam the Blockchain

martindale2• 10 years ago

Eric Martindale here with Blockstream! Let us know if you need any help setting up a sidechain for this. It makes a lot of sense for your use-case.

eterm• 10 years ago

Why not just have the server handle all it's transactions in a database which can be handled without involving bitcoin or blockchains at all?

Then only deposit or withdrawl of coins will "spam" the blockchain.

homero• 10 years ago

You can use electrum, a light wallet

Joof• 10 years ago

As a game player and hobbyist game designer: please don't do this. It's pretty much guaranteed to become exploitive by design.

DennisP• 10 years ago

Ethereum could work even better for this. You can implement some of the logic in smart contracts, store arbitrary data on the blockchain, and the block time is 15 seconds. It's also easy to use multisig schemes to keep the money more secure.

Shorel2• 10 years ago

I concur.

This is fantastic use case for a smart contract.

Minecraft Server with a Bitcoin-denominated monetary system

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