
BitQuest – Minecraft server with Bitcoin-denominated economy - phaser
http://bitquest.co
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NSCFType
The villager trading mechanic can be exploited to provide unlimited emeralds:

The game has NPC villagers, each of whom are dressed according to their
profession. Professions indicate to the player which items are available for
trade. There are a number of possible items per profession, and each villager
will make available around a dozen of them. Villagers who are librarians may
trade an emerald for a 20-something sheets of paper. Paper is crafted from
sugar cane. Players can build massive sugar cane towers.

Normally, villagers stop trading items after a while and lock the item from
the trade screen. All can be locked except the last trade. So if you get a
librarian villager that has paper as its final item, that means unlimited
emeralds for you!

Obtaining villagers isn't a problem even if villages are hard to find since
zombie villagers can be cured into normal villagers. Villagers obtained can
then be 'farmed' in simple villager breeders, you just need two to start with.
Professions are randomly assigned at, um, birth.

Setup for all this is several hours of gameplay, less with some help. The
primary thing is finding a zombie spawner underground (plentiful) or an
occupied village above ground (not so plentiful). After that, it's just a
matter going to the sugar cane tower and grabbing hundreds of sugar cane,
crafting it to paper and visiting a librarian for a while. It takes like 10
minutes to trade a full inventory of paper. Repeat ad nauseam. You don't even
have to bring a pickaxe.

~~~
phaser
Hi, we heavily modified the way villagers work, and there is a really cool
update coming in the next days:

You will be able to buy or sell to villagers. Villagers will have a "wallet"
of money to spend and once they buy you stuff thats the very same stuff they
will sell to other players.

~~~
ultimape
Queue final fantasy style bazaars where people stand around all day yelling
"SELLING X FOR Y".

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_wdh
This might be a stupid question, but does this mean that the number of
Emeralds can that exist in the server is limited by the number of bitcoins
that the owner has in the bank? I don't see how they can have a Minecraft
world that has an infinite amount of space (and therefore infinite Emeralds)
and support cashing out the Emeralds into bitcoins?

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runeks
You could build an exchange into the game -- a simple bid/ask order book. And
add the ability to use more than one currency in the game. Bitcoins could work
alongside "Emeralds", and simply be traded voluntarily via an exchange
mechanism. Although if people are able to mine Emeralds without some kind of
limit, it wouldn't take that long for people with bitcoins to stop bidding on
Emeralds, and bitcoins would taker over as the currency (I assume). Would be a
very interesting experience regardless of what happens.

Of course, this concept of using real money in a game is fundamentally
incompatible with the ability to create something out of nothing inside the
game. If you can create something without effort, why would you ever pay for
it with real money? If, however, items take _time_ to create, people would be
willing to trade the item for money. Presumably the item would become
increasingly expensive the more labor (or, simply, "waiting") that is put into
it -- just like the real world: an entire apartment complex is expensive
because it requires a lot of work to build, and 30 year old Whiskey is more
expensive than the same Whiskey at 5 years of age, simply because it takes
longer to make.

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Sarien
Doesn't this violate the minecraft ToS?

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ultimape
I didn't see anything about paying for stuff. It seems to be run entirely by
donation as far as I can tell. I think that means it kosher:
[https://mojang.com/2014/06/lets-talk-server-
monetisation/](https://mojang.com/2014/06/lets-talk-server-monetisation/)

~~~
ubernostrum
They (BitQuest) advertise the "Stores" which apparently have "some incredible
weapons and armor". And they are explicitly denominating in BTC and hooked up
to a system for accepting BTC payments.

Both of which seem to fall afoul of the Mojang post.

~~~
ultimape
I didn't realize you could buy in-game currency with money. I thought it was a
one-way process (mining in game -> bits) used to create a real world value for
items in game.

~~~
phaser
You can't

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kordless
I've built a way to deploy a Minecraft server using Bitcoin and spent a bit of
time last weekend trying to get qrcode.js to run inside scriptcraft.js. My
intent is to show a Bitcoin QR code for paying for the instance inside the
instance's world. Marketing.

[https://www.stackmonkey.com/demo/minecraft/](https://www.stackmonkey.com/demo/minecraft/)
and
[https://gist.github.com/kordless/beba0a6fa8edcda3b15a](https://gist.github.com/kordless/beba0a6fa8edcda3b15a)

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ultimape
This sounds a whole lot better than the bitcoin ran minecraft server where you
were meant to put in your coins into the server's wallet... Then again, that
XAPO thing sounds a little weird.

Like most things bitcoin, I'm weary of a scam.

~~~
runeks
No server should hold any bitcoins, that's not necessary (and a huge systemic
risk). The server just needs to be able to interact with the Bitcoin
blockchain, and create transactions that a player can pay using a standard
Bitcoin wallet (or one that's built into the game, but where the private keys
are stored locally).

1\. Player 1 wants to trade a shovel with Player 2 in exchange for 10 mBTC,
and tells this to the server by generating a bitcoin address that he wishes to
receive the funds at, and sending this to the server.

2\. The server generates a bitcoin transaction with an output that points to
Player 1's address, and asks Player 2 to add an input to the transaction, and
pay 10 mBTC from that input to the output added by the server (Player 1's
address). The signed transaction is then broadcast.

3\. The server keeps an eye on the blockchain, and when the signed transaction
makes it into the blockchain (waiting on the number of confirmations that
Player 1 and Player 2 agree on), the item is transferred from Player 1 to
Player 2 inside the game.

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grouchysmurf
Somehow this reminds me of REAMDE by Neal Stephenson
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde)).

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everyone
I'm confused. Can you mine emeralds in the game, then export them out as
bitcoins, then turn the bitcoins into dolars, thereby earning real world money
in the game?

~~~
runeks
That depends. If Emeralds take time to mine, then it's likely that people will
be willing to pay money for them (like people usually are with all other items
that take time to make).

But setting a peg between Emeralds and bitcoins won't work, it will have to
depend on people voluntarily trading in the game. For every bitcoin you get
out, someone else must have put one in.

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tshadwell
This would be great if the primary demographic for Minecraft didn't become
almost entirely children.

~~~
Karunamon
I'm not sure that's even remotely accurate. Just because a game is popular at
all ages does not mean its primary demo are kids.

~~~
duskwuff
Minecraft is hugely popular with kids:

[http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-
discussion/di...](http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-
discussion/discussion/115432-whats-the-minecraft-players-average-age)

~~~
Karunamon
Minecraft is hugely popular, _period_.

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Already__Taken
How do they do that map?

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_wdh
It looks like it's been generated by
[http://overviewer.org/](http://overviewer.org/), I guess they've got a
cronjob or something that runs that as a script and generates the html and
then it looks like they use an <iframe> to load the map on the page. Really
cool, makes me want to start running a minecraft server again.

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Yadi
best of two worlds? :). pretty cool.

