Posted by joshburt on Nov 27, 2012 in News |

What if you could really keep what you mined? What if you could take the rewards of all that hard labour with you? I set out to create a way to assign real worth, and external data to in-game objects. The first release is The Bit Mines.

My vision isn’t just around a single server but as a way for players to move their “progress” from SMP server to server, or to entirely different games or markets. You play for a while and accumulate some “progress” and then turn around and buy ranks, items, or memberships on other servers or games when you want to move on. The benefit being keeping “progress” in the form of Bitcoin and being able to purchase or donate to other servers without needed a credit card, etc.

A Bitcoin backed/based economy would be fantastic but there’s some specific reasons the first round of The Bit Mines wasn’t implement this way. It’s such a popularly requested implementation we’ll probably be working on it in the future.

The reasons I didn’t go this route, and thoughts on the subject

1. I don’t trust plugin code, and we’re talking about money here. This is why I pulled all the calculations and payouts out of the game engine ENTIRELY (and ever off the same physical servers). Minecraft in-general is too easy to exploit.
   
2. You CAN use /give and it won’t break, but you need to account for this a head of time. Not only would players have their own bitcoin wallets, but the server would too. You handle insufficient fund errors, etc at the layer that interacts with the bitcoin deamon. I’ve already had to address this in my current deployment. Additionally you have to ensure that in-game currency totals ALWAYS match actual back-end ledgers and this seems error proned (unless your in-game money is the only ledger – see item 1).
   
3. Player’s have money sitting in your system. My implementation only risks my own money and ‘theoretical’ claims to the money. Since Bitcoin vendors are a prime target for hacks it seemed unwise to risk player money like this for Minecraft.
   
4. Having the ability for players to give each other money in-game, (usable outside the game) also opens up the question of gambling. Since online gambling is illegal for large portions of the population care needs to be taken on how Bitcoin integration is implemented.

Other routes I investigated to fit Bitcoin into Minecraft

1. Assign each block it’s own bitcoin address. Money could be sent to specific blocks in the game world and users would get the funds transferred

Source: thebitmines.com