

How playing “The Way Home” earns us revenue by mining Bitcoin - mercury_aleph
http://blog.mowowstudios.com/2014/04/playing-way-home-earns-us-revenue-mining-bitcoin/

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jawngee
I think this is pretty unethical, mostly because there is no mention in the
app description or the app itself that you are doing this. Something about it
feels very greasy and shady. I'd almost, _almost_ , call it a trojan.

Now if you put a disclaimer up front, or if it was an opt-in thing, then sure.
But right now you don't have any of that in the app, so I'm not sure how it
differentiates itself from something like this:
[http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/8/bitcoin-
trojan](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/8/bitcoin-trojan)

I'm sure apple approved it because they didn't catch it.

Gross.

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Tepix
The post is dated April 1st.

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jawngee
I understand, but people should stop and consider the virality and potential
impact of their april fool's day joke. What if Apple didn't find this funny
and yanked their app? Boom goes the dynamite and for no purpose but posting a
dumb joke that isn't even funny.

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cwoac
Whether real or not, it does raise a question I've been wondering about for a
while now - what about a f2p game that _did_ state upfront that while playing,
you are mining; so the more you play, the more it costs you. No IAP, no
upfront costs, etc.

Obviously it would not be suitable for some game types (anything 3d heavy,
basically), and has obvious battery/temperature implications on mobile, but it
does seem to provide a plausible additional option for monetization.

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Bleau
Hi everyone, Bleau here from moWOW. We made a follow-up post to clarify both
the nature of the post and our thoughts on having players mine Bitcoin -
[http://blog.mowowstudios.com/2014/04/bitcoin-mining-way-
home...](http://blog.mowowstudios.com/2014/04/bitcoin-mining-way-home-just-
april-fools/)

Yes, it was just April Fools. It would take 30k days to mine one block with an
iPad 2, not to mention how sleazy it would be to do it behind our players'
backs.

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zimpenfish
Y'all know what day it is, right?

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jawngee
I hope it is a joke. Though, if it was, it's a pretty bad one that going to
reap them nothing but negative attention for no good reason at all.

It's astounding when smart people do dumb shit.

~~~
zimpenfish
Today is nothing but smart people doing dumb shit, unfortunately.

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feelstupid
Wonder how this affects battery usage and temperature on the devices, I'd love
to see reports based on app usage with/without mining enabled.

~~~
ScottBa
Did you check to see if the phone/ipad heats up while playing?

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julezy1
As first I thought this was another botnet operation mining Bitcoins.

There's actually an altcoin experiment at the moment,
[http://huntercoin.org](http://huntercoin.org). Basically an MMOG that runs on
Blockchain technology. Users play and "mine" coins.

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KhalPanda
A pretty poor April Fools stunt (I'm hoping that's what it is) IMHO, given
that some people probably have/would do this...

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nemasu
Wow, I hope it's a joke. If not, then this is terrible. No mention upfront,
and it'll kill your battery.

