The idea of online game with currency being pegged to Bitcoin has been tossed around by the community a few times in the past. I have decided to put some thought into it and I ended up with two possible business models.

Model 1

The game’s currency is pegged to Bitcoin, and the total in-game currency is limited by how much bitcoin has been put into the system.

Example

1 BTC = 10 million gold

The company starts the game by putting 10000 BTC worth of gold into the system.

By killing monsters, you are rewarded with a tiny amount of gold. e.g. 1 gold per monster kill. This number scales down as monster killing power increases. (more players, higher level, better gears)

(This is representative of the difficulty increase in hashing for real bitcoin mining)

As players purchase in game gold (by giving money to the company) the gold limit increases accordingly, and vice versa when players cash out. The company will be gaining money from difference in exchange rates. (1BTC = 10 million gold IN, and 15 million gold = 1BTC out)

Model 2

The amount of in-game gold is limited (say, 10 Billion gold). The BTC/gold exchange rate is based on:

1. How much BTC is put into the system. (Via the purchase of cosmetics)

2. The total gold of all players.

This means that if you put BTC into the system, the exchange rate increases. This means that the exchange rate will scale with player base!

Another interesting thing about this model is that you will be able to witness a deflationary economy. I think this will benefit bitcoin economy as a whole because we’ll be able to learn many things from what happens in the game.

Final Thoughts

The game needs to be incredibly complicated to prevent any botting. The real financial gain/losses would result in greater involvement from players. The player base will also snowball if the game has high replay value.

What do you think? Any other awesome ideas?

TL;DR

Online game with its gold pegged to amount of Bitcoin that has been put into the system. The in-game gold can either be hard-limited (like bitcoin), or scales with the amount of Bitcoins put into the system.

Game developer gets money from exchange rates and other services they provide. The deflationary in-game economy could be a good indicator of what a Bitcoin economy could be like.