Why Would a Currency Need a Non-Cash Application to Go Viral?

While Bitcoin (Cash) might be the best money the world has ever seen, that doesn't mean that anyone cares. Most people don't care about the soundness of their money because most people don't go through the collapse of a currency. Most people don't care about the borderless-ness of their currency because they don't transact with many people across borders. And most people don't care about the security of the currency itself because they've been able to trust other people to deal with security for them, without ever seeing the risk or cost that that trust actually incurs.

The average Joe DOES care about cool, fun, social things. And as I covered in a previous article (" Non-Cash Apps and the Myth of Blockchain Bloat "), a blockchain is, most generally, a decentralized timestamp server secured by proof of work, whose incentive structure just so happens to require an underlying digital currency. Such a server can be used to build cool, fun, social things, with which one can only interact by spending tiny amounts of the currency that's built in to the blockchain itself (as the mining fee). If we can make applications that are cool, fun, and social enough that people are willing to figure out how to get and use BCH in order to use those applications, I think that that could be the "beginning of the end" of the battle for market dominance, and the "beginning of the beginning" of mass-adoption.

Why Mobile Style Games?

Many of the things that make mobile apps addicting translate exceptionally well to Blockchain based games/apps. For example, mobile games often give you a certain number of actions, and then force you to wait to come back later when they've refreshed. Bitcoin already has a great built-in mechanism for this style of play via the arrival of blocks at an average of 10 minutes apart. (The random element to their arrival times could add a new element to mobile games, where users never know exactly how much progress they will have made, or what they will have missed out on, since last logging in.) Also, any "move" or "action" in a blockchain based game would occur via a transaction, which itself would require a small mining fee, an idea which would not be alien to mobile gamers who are bombarded with micro-transactions everywhere they go. The sub-cent fees per action would probably seem extremely reasonable compared to other mobile style games that implement relatively high-cost "micro"-transactions in egregiously exploitative, "pay-to-win" ways.

Additionally, the blocks' hashes are good potential sources for verifiable randomness, which could determine both the results of the previous block’s actions, and also the “situations” a player encounters for the current block. (The block hashes can be combined with, say, a user’s public key, and then hashed to provide a user-specific “seed” for that block, so that the randomness is user specific, but verifiable.)

Are There Any Actual Advantages to Blockchain-Based Games? (Or is this just a gimmick to get people to use BCH??)

Yes, there are benefits to blockchain-based games... though a gimmick to get people to use BCH would be fine with me, for the record. For one, the storage of the game data would be paid for with the mining fee for each transaction. Any amount that a user puts "load" on the network is immediately and by default paid for by that user. There would be no growing pains or server outages as long as the game operates within the technical bounds of the blockchain itself, and those bounds are quite high. Front end services for the game could, of course, go down, but…

Given the permission-less nature of building an implementation of a blockchain based game, it would allow many different front end implementations of the game to be built and compete with one another for users. Server outages from certain service providers would simply push users to other implementations, where they could pick up right where they left off. A multi-implementation scenario would also force those services to come up with their own profit model, independent of the game itself, which could lead to extremely efficient and low cost front-end services. While potentially chaotic in some ways, such a system would not affect users much since, as long as they are in control of their own private keys, they can always seamlessly switch to a different implementation and retain their "account" within the game.

The permission-less nature of building an implementation would also give those different implementations opportunities to create their own niche within the game's community, where items and events could have completely different names and visual representations depending on which site or service you use to interact with the exact "same" game. (All that the implementations would have to agree on are whether or not certain users have satisfied the conditions to be in possession of, say, game-item-67, regardless of whether they represent it as a rare pepe, a pocket sized monster, or a deep fried meme. Users could be interacting with other users, never knowing exactly what their in game items look like to each other!)

Finally, a game built on a blockchain can not be shut down. Even if every front end service for the game disappears overnight, anyone, at any time, could revive the game by creating their own implementation of the protocol. With data storage for the application itself on the blockchain and an open source protocol, the game could never truly die. And while games tend not to be the target of overt censorship, they do sometimes disappear forever because the company in charge shuts their own servers down, with no intention of releasing the game data to the public. This could never happen with a blockchain based game.

These basic advantages of a blockchain based game, in combination with a mobile style experience, could be combined to create a game that goes in one of an infinite number of possible directions. One idea for a game, tentatively called "Block Beasts", is described (very generally) behind the paywall. If I earn $5 for this article, I'll move it up to the free section. Thanks for reading!

$5 Goal Reached, thank you! Here's the rest moved up from the paid section:

BLOCK BEASTS

While other features could certainly be added on top of the features I describe here, I think that the following four features would be the bare minimum required to create an addicting social experience.

For each block that comes in:

1. The user encounters a "Block Beast". The beast they encounter will be determined by their personal seed (derived from the hashed combination of their public key and the previous block's hash). The user can try to "tame" that beast and, when doing so, can use some combination of their current items on that Beast which will affect how likely they are to “tame” it. (Whether they succeed in taming the beast will be determined by their seed from the next block, combined in some way with the items they’ve used.)

2. The user is given the option to claim a mystery item which will be determined randomly by their personal seed from the next block.

3. The user will be given the option to make their own beasts or items available for purchase in BCH.

4. The user will have the option to purchase other players' items or beasts.

There are, of course, many more decisions to be made when designing the game described above. Exactly how many Beasts there are, their relative rarities, and how to determine their chance to appear from the users’ personal seeds are just a few pieces of the puzzle that would need to be sorted out when designing the underlying protocol. The designs of the beasts themselves would also need to be decided upon by the first implementation. They could be funny puns with animal names plus computer concepts, they could just be silly/creative creatures a la Neopets, or they could ALL be badgers, named by their scientific latin names, with the rarest being the Honey Badger. (I'm partial the the Badger idea, in which case maybe the game should be called "Block Badgers", or just "Badgers".) And while other later implementations of the game would have the option of totally redesigning the front end, the decisions made by the first implementation would likely have a large effect on the long term success of the game overall.

Someone more knowledgeable than me will know whether purchases of in game items from other players could be handled consistently via some sort of smart contract, or whether a more involved escrow service would be required to complete those transactions without requiring trust between players. I do think, though, that the ability to market your in game items would be a potentially large part of the game, and so would be worth implementing.