Every developer interested in making (a lot) of Easy money by riding the crypto bubble. Maybe the question should be what gamer would be interested in paying for such a game (i.e. paying significant sums for pictures of cats and paying more at every turn...you can’t even give a picture of a cat away free without paying gas), but the answer is the same...any gamer wanting to make money off the cryptobubble.
Blockchain can be marketed with terms like immutable, decentralized, and smart contract all anyone wants. However the reality is it’s all a race to the bottom based on greed and speculation.
In my eyes, it's dangerous to crypto that advocates spout absolutisisms about crypto. With a fledgling technology and market, anything is possible, and we should be honest about the fact. Otherwise, you risk blowing up expectations to where a potential crash back to reality gives everyone an irreparable distrust and dislike of crypto anarchists akin to that of Wall Street bankers.
And then the powers that be will mock anarchism for it's corruption and greed, paint the technologist as a devil, and write history books warning of the folly of decentralization. Anarchy is dead, long live anarchy!
So maybe the last part was overblown, but in seriousness, when people lose a lot of money, they get very angry. I'd hate to be the ideology at the receiving end of that anger.
It’s all fun and games until the IRS comes knocking at your door for failing to pay taxes on each and every cryptokitty transaction.
People thought blockchain and Bitcoin was a way to escape fiat...turns out mining is taxed as ordinary income, investing transactions as capital gains, and the IRS only accepts fiat.
People thought Ethereum smart contracts were a way to escape the legal system (the code being Law and all)...turns out people could’nt trust these smart contracts to do what they thought and were marketed to do (DAO); turns out the code isn’t the Law because the parties to the smart contracts could just fork and break the contract; and it turns out the SEC can actually regulate and prosecute ICOs that violate securities laws.
Who wants to file a tax return and pay ordinary income on every cryptokitty they birth or capital gains on every cryptokitty they sell?
Maybe I can get ahead of the ball and start offering “stripe atlas for self directed IRA LLCs for tax free cryptocoin/kitty trading”.
However, nothing currently exists that seamlessly handles scenarios like cryptokitties, or when tokens are automatically bought/sold behind-the-scenes of a dapp via 0x, etc.
Ethereum is still in it's infancy today and it does indeed have a very slow processing power and speed. But you can bet on the fact that it will improve exponentially.
Do you remember the first hard drives? 56K Internet speeds? IE6 browser? So many challenges have been overcome during the last decades in tech, why would it stop here?
There is a lot of brillant and very-well funded people working on the subject and they will find solutions to improve the platform. No doubt about it.
I always find it odd that such a tech-craving population as HN readers always seem to miss the bigger picture.
That’s not a fair comparison, in my opinion. A billion NES consoles can operate in parallel, without affecting the performance of other consoles. It scales perfectly. For a shared blockchain, however, performance deteriorates for you when someone else plays. And it doesn’t even have to be the same game. I mean, if a single game like CryptoKitties can reduce performance and increase fees, how will it look when there’s 10 games out there, or 100?
> I always find it odd that such a tech-craving population as HN readers always seem to miss the bigger picture.
I’m not saying this can’t be solved in the future. I’m talking about the present motivation for building blockchain-based games. Why can’t we critique technology just because it has the potential to improve in the future?
There's an inherent tradeoff between performance and decentralization. The major blockchains like Ethereum focus on decentralization above all else, because it's extremely important for a cryptocurrency where there's a real financial incentive for someone to attack the network. Performance is important, but shouldn't come at the cost of decentralization. There's a ton of smart people working on scaling Ethereum, and they will scale, but not to the level required to run WoW and Twitter simultaneously on the mainnet.
Which is why we think scalability will be achieved through sidechains. A sidechain can play by its own set of rules. Something like an online game or community on the scale of Hacker News needs to optimize for realtime performance, but can make reasonable tradeoffs for security — on a blockchain data integrity is already ensured by cryptographic signing, and you can't "double-spend" a comment or post, so there's little financial incentive to attack the sidechain to delete a historic comment.
I'd say the motivation for learning to build blockchain-based games now is because the infrastructure for this tech is coming very soon. We're in the process of building out one game as a demo to showcase Loom Network, and are talking to a couple other game studios who want to build games on our platform.
Things like CryptoKitties may just be a novelty right now, but they're paving the way for new types of game economies that that we've never seen before.
What makes more sense right now, for many games, is to put most of the state changes off-chain. If players are taking turns, they can sign the state changes as they go, and submit the final couple moves to the blockchain. Add in another trick and you can even make fair random numbers: http://www.blunderingcode.com/gamble-channels-fast-verifiabl...
This is how FunFair works; there's an on-chain transaction to deposit, another to close out and withdraw, and in between you can gamble all day without waiting for blocks or issuing transactions to the blockchain.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, of course, just that a lot of really smart people have been working on this problem for almost a decade, without having a production-ready solution yet.
A good discussion of the challenges is at their sharding FAQ: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ
Isn't that the approach taken by the Lightning Network for Bitcoin?
I think it's totally fair to say that Lightning technically isn't production ready, but it does seem to be in the late stages of testing / early release candidate stage of development.
This is the same way that the lightning / plasma network works, right?
In the case of a game, this might be simpler since you can have each player sign their own moves and the other player's last move, so that you can always broadcast your opponent's last move if they quit.
http://www.blunderingcode.com/a-lightning-network-in-two-pag...
So perhaps you have a game where you play for several hours or even days and only then eventually you want to save your progress on the blockchain for the world to see. Just an example.
As seen with CryptoKitties the high transaction cost is a crippling factor right now, on the other hand the game wouldn't even be possible in its current trustless design without the blockchain.
Is it really a “trustless” game? If the company folds and the website with it, sure you still have your “CK Tokens” in your wallet, but without the centralized platform you can’t exactly access the picture of your kitty, you can’t breed, you can’t sire, you can’t gift...in other words you can’t even transfer the “CK token(s)” from one wallet to another without the platform. Therefore it seems there is a whole lot of trust the platform will continue to exist, not to mention the value of the kitties is constantly subject to change, not just on a free market basis, but based on the rules and prices which are unilaterally set by the centralized company.
Yeah the game would lose 99.9% of its potential userbase without the front end, but if the remaining 0.1% wanted to build a new web interface we could and the game could go on. This may seem similar to spinning up a legacy WoW server, but the difference here is that we’d still have our own actual kitties and no be able to cheat the system so the game integrity remains in the blockchain version.
There's many, but none of them include blockchains. Being "distributed" isn't a valuable enough attribute for games to make it worthwhile. What you get is stuff like CryptoKitties, which isn't a game but is just trying to be more speculation.
I think this could give Hearthstone et al. a run for their money.
On the other hand, once the contract is deployed and the code open sourced, you can pretty much prove that you cannot manipulate your own creation anymore. It will probably be even better once there are other languages than Solidity to develop for the EVM.
I wrote a blog entry about my experiences and the second iteration on another platform at medium: https://medium.com/@jraedisch/the-path-to-sudokoin-6aee92cfa...
Right, and there are people working on the blockchain level with very compelling bandwidth improvement solutions.
You might find one interesting, take a look.
There are people making silly games right now on the understanding that the infrastructure they are building on will improve. These people are doing this because it helps them understand the toolkits, language and infrastrcture, which has a massive upside in their opportunities by merely exposing themselves to it now. When the infrastructure is already there, and the books exist, and the college kids are learning it at state schools, the opportunities won't be nearly as great for them. And yes, they can be wrong!
But it isn't as simple as you (and everyone other competent full stack engineer) questioning their life choices and being the only people to notice that the underlying platform has an uncompetitive limitation right now.
Time will tell which one is safe. If the rewards are high enough, someone powerful/knowledgeable will inevitably try and break or cheat the system.
† Some people like to make a distinction between "distributed" and "decentralized". For me the former is part of the latter.
You can totally build something Cryptokitties with NEO -- the only difference is that because there isn't a standard, there isn't a third-party marketplace for these assets. (i.e., there's nothing inherent about NEO that prevents something like Cryptokitties from being built.)
I get the interesting aspect of creating a game with a limited supply of some virtual good, but how much energy does it make sense to put into a game of this nature when the underlying platform prevents your game from becoming successful (because it can’t handle that kind of load)?
I suspect there’s a genuine use case for limiting the supply of virtual goods in games, but I doubt the solution involves all games performing state updates using on-chain transactions in a single, shared blockchain.