Minecraft and Bitcoin Cash Adoption

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Avatar for Polydot
4 years ago

Minecraft is a sandbox adventure game that was released in 2009 and shortly after it began to take the world by storm. Eventually Minecraft reached the status of best-selling video game, a title which it has held since. 2009 also marks the release year of Bitcoin, similarly starting it's journey into mainstream attention. Eventually these two future successes collided making what could have been, and still could be, a great medium for driving crypto adoption.

BitVegas

BitVegas was a Minecraft gambling server that took place in a 6 story casino. Players could gamble Bitcoins (BTC) across multiple different games, such as Bacon Racing (horse racing but with pigs), Roulette, a Drinking Game, and many more. BitVegas also happened to be one of the most generous faucets of it's time, with 0.002 BTC per hour being given to visitors -- gambler or not.

While a Bitcoin based casino at the time was not a new idea, building one that was vastly more social and utilized the already thriving Minecraft community was not only a new idea, but a genius one.

I can say first hand having played on BitVegas shortly before it was defunct that the social experience of an 3d interactive casino still sticks vividly in my mind. It was a great time for both me and friends, even when we were doing nothing more than watching other people gamble with mixed results. BitVegas met an early demise due to an exploit in a widely used Minecraft server software called CraftBukkit. This exploit allowed for anyone to login to BitVegas as anyone else, leading the majority of user wallets being drained, with a resulting loss of 7 BTC about $1000 USD (US Dollar) at the time, and around $56,350 in USD today.

BitQuest

BitQuest took a very different approach to what Bitcoin was being used for in a Minecraft server. For the most part BitQuest functioned similarly to your average server providing the users with the ability to buy and sell items, kill monsters to earn rewards, and claim land. The main difference being it had an BTC driven economy. Slaying monsters could earn you some BTC, then that BTC could be used to purchase in game items, land, etc. To buy a 16x16 plot of land you needed to spend some BTC, but only about 1 cents worth. Buying items could be done through the in game market, or through other BitQuest players.

I only played BitQuest for a short time, this had nothing to do with BitQuest rather my own dwindling interesting in playing Minecraft. Still for that short time I got to play I felt much the same enjoyment as I had found myself getting from BitVegas. Being able to earn a digital currency in one economy that could be used to further that economy or spent elsewhere is quite the thrill. Not only that, it was a social environment shared by similarly interested peoples, and many newbies who just happened to stumble upon BitQuest -- or BitVegas.

Note: BitQuest seems to be defunct at the time of writing this, but the plugin used to make the server function is open-source.

Summary

If BitVegas and BitQuest were to exist today they would no doubt still garner attention, especially if kept fresh with new content. A key difference would be the Block-Chain technology in use, likely it would be Bitcoin Cash (BCH) or something with similar speed, and low fees. Maybe Enjin Coin would be used to tokenize in game items allowing them to be sold and shared across Minecraft servers, or even other platforms.

Games are a great way to help adoption by showing the power and purpose of programmable money. What better video game to help do it than Minecraft, since after all, it is one of the most popular games in the world.

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Avatar for Polydot
4 years ago

Comments

I have a lot of time to think about things like this. It would be interesting to see the integration of BCH or an SLP token into Minecraft servers.

Personally I think it would work better than BTC integration.

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4 years ago

BCH and cryptos in general needs to have more fame and linking them to games like minecraft will only make them better and famous

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3 years ago

looks good

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4 years ago

I now have a community for the topic of blockchains in gaming, check it out! https://read.cash/c/blockchaingaming-00ee

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4 years ago

If they have a new one, I'd love to use it.

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3 years ago

I'm looking to write more on BCH, and other block-chain technology being integrated into already existing games, maybe more on Minecraft. Let me know if this sounds interesting to you.

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4 years ago

It's very interesting. I'm not familiar with such games. What do you have to do to integrate BCH there?

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4 years ago

I haven't done much with Minecraft servers in a bit, but it should be simply following the server setup process, then integrate that server with a plugin that supports BCH.

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4 years ago

Isn't the holy grail of video gaming having characters and items and maps and levels etc. which are truly owned by the player? That's the missing piece into making the game "real". In the real world when you have try a level 20 times to succeed it doesn't count as passing on the first attempt. Also resources aren't limitless. Some players will want to be able to truly own their characters and move them across games, carry your reputation, etc. There are so many possibilities once video is more analogues to the physical world.

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4 years ago

Absolutely!

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User's avatar btcfork
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4 years ago

Have you seen realmx.com?

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4 years ago

RealmX is still running, but, appears to have no more developer work going on. There is a bug rumor and a pretty dead player use-level at the moment.

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4 years ago

There is already a non custodial BCH-plugin you can use. I pushed for such a thing since years. People discover this now, after stuff like enjin already started being first movers. I am really frustrated by the lack of awareness of devs. They just do "their thing" and while putting a lot of effort it in, they forget that they can do "a huge benefit for the entire BCH chain" with even less effort. But for that, they have to get out of their tunnel-vision, which they never seem to manage. Especially if someone like me tries to explain to them the benefits. They are closed-minded. That is why something like BITVEGAS, even though it was one of the coolest faucets back in the day, is still not reborn on BCH. which just shows the lack of situational awareness of most of the people, especially those, that already craete games for BCH.

People only recently started working on it again and even though there is a minecraft slp group, they don't seem to understand, what potential lies within it. Anyway, they, as always, have "better things to do". Making that plugin non-custodial would make this even more epic, but even with the custodial plugin, you could come up with a lot of cool stuff.

I have plans for a fantasy-rpg like minecraft, that involves SLP tokens. If you are interested, we can talk about it and maybe, if I finally find that website, I can link you to that plugin.

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3 years ago