
Hammercoin – A Bitcoin-fueled game - phaser
http://mego.cl/2016/11/24/hammercoin.html
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imtringued
It's economy is going to fail like almost every MMORPG economy because they
only cover the supply side but not the demand side. Since every item is a
commodity which is mostly obtained incidentially there are a lot of sellers
that sell low quantities of that item. They don't care a lot about losing a
bit of money they want liquidity. there is usually a limit on simultaneous
sell orders which means you cant sell anything at all if you don't prioritise
liquidity or have high quantities. The easiest way to quickly sell your items
is to just price your item lower than everyone else. When everyone is doing
this the value of the commodity is quickly plummeting far below the price most
buyers are willing to pay. Heck I've seen items that cost less than the money
NPCs would give to you (premium users can access the market place anywhere
outside a city and they dont want to go to the NPC) This gives rise to traders
that buy these cheap commodities and then sell them for the market clearing
price. The simple solution would be to just reflect the demand side as well.
Allow players to issue buy orders like "I want x of item y. I pay z for each."
on the central marketplace. Those who need liquidity get it and those who want
fair prices to sell their items at get them too.

~~~
keypusher
It sounds like you are speaking about the deficiencies of some particular
game, this certainly isn't true of all MMOs. GW2 and Eve both support buy
orders, for instance. Items that drive the economy are also not always
obtained incidentally, often they must be crafted by someone with high enough
skill using rare components.

~~~
micfar
Given that the In-Game currency is purchasable with fiat currency, wouldn't it
be reasonable to surmise that hyperinflation doesn't occur in the same way due
to the fiat anchor for IG currency values?

~~~
keypusher
Only if it goes both ways. The ability to purchase in-game currency with fiat
currency actually makes inflation worse by introducing even more money to the
in-game economy. Most games currently do not allow in-game currency to be
"legally" converted back to real world money directly. Their solution is the
ability to convert large amount of in-game currency to meaningful metagame
items. In Eve, you can use in-game currency to pay for your subscription. In
GW2, you can use in-game currency to pay for "gems", which are used for
microtransactions such as server transfers, rare skins, additional bank
storage, etc. These gold sinks serve as an important valve to control
inflation of the economy by permanently removing that currency from the game.

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sdrinf
Extra creditz just published an excellent video on why auto-generated vendor-
sellable items lead to hyperinflation under most circumstances, and a few ways
to avoid it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sumZLwFXJqE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sumZLwFXJqE)

| When buying from a player, the player bot will try to resell the same item
for double the price.

Given this, and assuming auto-buy from vendorbots, I'd predict the second they
open the game for auto-grinders (or puppeteered bots) to appear, kill anything
in sight, sell stuff, pump any bitcoin any vendorbot might hold, until the
game economy holds no more bitcoin. It's probably more CPU-efficient, than
mining bitcoin; and there's a manual workforce readily mobilizable for it.

The game looks really promising, and I'd love to grind a few hours in it as it
stands, but I'm not sure if dropping a bitcoin dependency into it won't sink
it prematurely.

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ogig
> on why using credit cards for videogames is a bad idea: You trust the game
> owner with your payment credentials, and while this is fine when using
> Google, Facebook and Apple “wallets”, indie developers like us don’t have
> access to the same level of trust.

> For every new player in the game we create a game wallet. This is a standard
> Bitcoin wallet you can deposit funds via QR codes and transfer to any wallet
> service.

This does not check. They refuse to hold cc data on a security promise but are
willing to host bitcoin wallets. Bitcoin laying around on game servers sounds
like a good target to me.

They would be much better using a third party for cc payments, regarding
security at least.

~~~
yuubi
Think of it from the player's point of view. If you send someone not-quite-
trusted or of fallible security $10 worth of btc, then the worst that can
happen is you never see it again. If you give them your cc (or worse, debit
card) number, then there's a chance of unauthorized charges to deal with
later.

~~~
foota
True, but a trusted third party payment processor is the best of both worlds.

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kriro
I would like to see a game that tests the gold standard approach. Basically a
novel economic simulator. The hard part would be building a fun enough game
around it, I'm currently thinking some sort of sandbox game/MMORPG.

Upon the creation of the game world a fund of X money would be set aside and
correspond to all available in game items etc. For each paying player, new
items would be added that correspond to a percentage of their fees. You could
sell the items directly to the game bank for real money. No inflation so
there's a limited number of items available and only if a new player signs up
will new items be added.

You could probably even test player characters retiring at a certain level.
Say you grind up to level MAX and essentially solved the game...click retire
and you get refunded all the money that your items etc. are worth (and start
the grind again if you want)

~~~
runeks
> I would like to see a game that tests the gold standard approach.

Bitcoin is that experiment, but in the real world. After ~2021, the inflation
rate will be less than 1.8% p.a. [1]. I believe the stock-to-flow ratio of
gold is around 1% (its stock/supply increases around 1% per year). So they
will be pretty similar in that regard in ~5 years, and in addition, we won't
need to worry about whether our experiment actually reflects real-world
conditions, as opposed to with a game.

[1]
[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply)

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VermillionAzure
My most favorite video game economy was Habbo Hotel, actually. Because few
people actually bought coins, people were caught in a deflated economy almost
constantly. And since special events or buying furniture from the store was
the only source of supply for the demand, a whole economy formulated around
furniture for coins, etc. I just thought the dynamic was neat.

Additionally, Spiral Knights also had an interesting model -- access to levels
was gated by something called "Energy," and you were given a cap and a given
regeneration rate for energy up to that cat. "Crystal Energy" could be bought
for real money and exchanged for in-game money, so it was an interesting deal
-- the game created an automatic sink for money in energy.

~~~
NTripleOne
Also, falling furni was fun as fuck and nothing anyone can say will change
that.

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petejodo
So semi-related to this, I've contemplated about the feasibility of a
cryptocurrency/blockchain built specifically for a pseudo-MMO game where
instead of a central server, it's actually a network of servers where anyone
can host a server. Each server would be a "game world" that falls into a few
categories, such as PvE, PvP, and Town, where Town would be a sort of server
browser to find PvE/PvP servers.

The blockchain would store users' character data i.e. level, currency,
inventory, etc.

It would use a hypothetical form of proof of work where either the previous
hash or the nonce would determine what monster and items are available on that
server for some given amount of time. Clients would then be required to sign
with their private keys a "chain of events" that would have to line up with
the server's chain of events somehow.

I wouldn't know how to determine if a client and a server are cheating or not
though.

The game developer would imaginably host some of the larger servers and could
then sell the cryptocurrency they gain from hosting said servers for some
actual fiat as a means to make money.

Clearly this is an incredibly rough idea that I have not actually spent too
much time thinking about.

EDIT

an inspiration for this idea was "The World", a fictional game from the
dotHack series

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zitterbewegung
Someone is going to figure out how to automate / bot / scam the game . Also,
isnt the game basically pay to win ?

~~~
unixhero
I don't think winning is the point. It would be fun if it was more - explore
to find, trade and gain.

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Lazare
This doesn't sound like a horrible idea, but...

It's got nothing to do with bitcoins. It's just an RPG with easy conversion to
and from real world currency and a fond hope they can make a dynamic player-
run economy work. Unfortunately...

Other games have tried the real world currency conversion, most famously
Diablo 3. The consensus is that it worked horribly. And as for the dynamic
economy, man, this one has been tried a lot. With mixed success, but okay,
maybe they can make it work. In which case it'll be another RPG/MUD/MMO kinda
thing with strong crafting/econ elements? Yay?

But again, nothing they're doing is about bitcoins. They could easily use
Stripe or whatever to accept credit cards in exchange for in-game
"hammercoins". And given the (sorry) very small scale they're likely to be
operating at, withdrawls are not a huge problem. They could even buy bitcoins
and send them to people, if all else fails. Or Amazon gift cards. Or just
paypal them funds. The bitcoins is just a sprinkle of magic marketing words
that doesn't impact the game. Which brings us to:

> This is a safe measure given the insane amount of stolen cards and other
> frauds, but this might give you a hint on why using credit cards for
> videogames is a bad idea

Please stop. Yes, your use of bitcoins will get you some attention and free
advertising, good job. But if you're going to pretend it's actually a better
solution for accepting online payments than a credit card, you're insulting us
both.

~~~
Pamar
I think that Second Life (still running, and where you can still trade in-game
money for real money see: [https://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-
Knowledge-Base/B...](https://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-
Base/Buying-and-selling-Linden-dollars/ta-p/700107)) is a better example than
Diablo 3

~~~
Lazare
Quite possibly; I'm more familiar with Diablo 3 than Second Life, and had
actually forgotten (if I'd ever known) that Second Life allowed RMT.

I think that supports my overall point though: This isn't new, and you don't
need bitcoins to make it work.

~~~
r2pleasent
Diablo III's downfall was that there were price floors and price ceilings.
They set a minimum price for gold, which would be higher than its true value.
This led to people selling their gold outside of the RMAH, and killed the
liquidity of the in-game currency.

Items also had a maximum price limit. This meant that items worth more than
$250 USD at the time had to be sold for lesser value items, or for gold (which
had the downfalls listed above).

The problems with Diablo III were the restrictions on the marketplace.
Blizzard never allowed prices to hit their true equilibrium, and it created an
off-site black market along with other inefficiencies.

There is no reason that a game economy should be ruined in one way or another
by a real-money exchange rate. There are many games where players buy & sell
in-game currency for real money, where the in-game currency holds a very
steady real money value.

Take Runescape for example. One million Old School Runescape Gold has been
worth roughly $1 USD for the past 6 months. The volume of in-game currency
which has been bought and sold in that time period is in the tens of millions
of USD.

Source: I run [http://r2pleasent.com](http://r2pleasent.com) \- a site that
buys and sells in-game items.

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jayajay
Don't be fooled by a few utterances of the word "Blockchain". This could still
be exploited by the game owners, who have control of the drop rates and enemy
interactions (i.e. there are still centralized aspects of this environment).
There are several elementary typos in that article -- so it makes me trust the
game creators even less. This reeks of typical MMORPG developer greed.

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turowicz
I wish GTA Online had their dollars based on this idea.

