> First off, it’s important to understand that since it’s played on the Ethereum blockchain there’s no central entity managing the game. This means users literally own their kittens. Unlike playing Neopets where everything was stored on a central database and your pet was deleted when the company shut down, CryptoKitties is decentralized and will live forever on the Ethereum blockchain.
If people just stop playing, and the community dies, isn't that the same thing (in effect)?
I think they mean that anyone with value invested in Ethereum blockchain (anyone holding ether) is incentivised to stay a peer. They don't need to care about the game, just about ether in general.
Nobody thinks it magically does anything. There's an incentive built into the system for people who have nothing to do with the game to keep the blockchain and so the game data alive.
It’s a good story anyway. On the upside, the tiny sliver of my $20 investment that I printed out is worth low 4 figures. The downside is that I probably could have paid off my mortgage with the rest.
The devs have made the rendering algorithm secret. So even if you have the cat token, you can't know what it looks like unless you go through their front-end.
the auctions are handled by a smartcontract[1], breeding and storage too[2]. Smartcontract are used for a lot of other things, tokens are basically mappings in a smartcontract between accounts and balances. Multisig wallet are also based on Smartcontracts. Ethereum has spend a lot of effort on integrating the blockchain into web applications. You can use metamask to log into websites with your ethereum address and websites like etherdelta, that exchange tokens, can lock your tokens in a smartcontract.
I would say the price should go up, but the price of ETH is anything but predictable. As we've seen with the rise of BTC, there's no rationality in the market. It's all based on hype.
If price was based on tech, ETH would be $10k+ and BTC would be a dying relic.
Is there anything like Bitpay for Ethereum? I haven't seen any major retailers that directly accept ETH, which is a pretty significant use case for any currency.
While directly accepting ETH is certainly beneficial, it would make more sense for retailers to accept an erc20 based alternative to BTC (see BTH [1]). Ethereum is a platform. Digital currency is but a single application.
I participated in the alpha for this, and it was pretty cool. I'm glad to see that it's been successful, but I'm not sure why anyone would pay to play the game beyond transaction fees.
Just because the current Ethereum value is $1M, doesn't mean people actually spent that much money. They could have a bunch of Ethereum from when it was dirt-cheap.
People have been spending billions on in app purchases in app stores for ages. I say it’s all scam, However, that’s the internet economy for you - the value is not in tangible stuff anymore.
On the contrary, I think virtual worlds will (eventually) be one of the killer applications of blockchains.
People will be more likely to invest real time and money into virtual goods/currency/reputation if they can’t be confiscated by a corporation for arbitrary reasons. The idea will really take off once virtual goods are “portable” between games. At that point you don’t really have disparate “games” but rather a... Metaverse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse)
(I don’t imagine all virtual goods will be universally portable. You might be able to bring your CryptoKitties into Second Life but not World of Warcraft, for example...)
This reminds me of the Oasis from the Ready Player One book, where digital currency used in a game gains value enough to replace the USD and other currencies as the standard.
Whenever I hear about people spending outrageous amounts of money for something that should be really cheap, the first explanation that springs to mind is money laundering.
Yes, absolutely. This is a cornerstone to a lot of p2p markets. You take a % of the cut and let money launderers buy and sell between themselves via your market.
For example, let’s say I want to sell x$ illegal goods. I just tell the buyer to bid up my 1 million virtual cat and I’ll transfer the goods to you. The transaction goes unnoticed. What’s even better, the buyer can sell the cat at a lost and recover some
Cash.
What’s more the money launderers buy and sell the virtual pets so as so mix up their money in the market.
There was a huge art deal recently. You have to wonder how much of the money laundering factored into the purchase of Salvator mundi.
It goes even further. Participants in the market know that money laundering is taking place and rely on it for profit. They bid up the virtual goods.
Of course, there is also a pyramid scheme / hot potato at play as well. Last one holding the bag loses.
And yeah, there are the naive folks whose out there with their money in not a understanding what’s really going on.
Valve profits from this quite nicely, and second life. Lots of these games with virtual goods.
This sounds plausible, but it seems like speculation. Given two hypotheses: "the Valve hat economy is used for money laundering" and "many Valve gamers are willing to spend money on hats", I'm more inclined to believe the latter without more solid evidence.
It's been years since I was involved in the hat economy (TF2, way back when keys were 2.33 ref, to be specific), but the two hypotheses aren't exclusive. Valve gamers are willing to spend money on hats, but someone using the economy to launder money is willing to take a percentage loss, so it was cheaper to buy keys (the default currency) with Paypal from people who had bought them Valve using stolen CCs than from Valve directly. If I remember correctly, the official price was $2.50 per key, but they could be bought on forums or subreddits for around $2/each.
Again, it's been a while and not a topic I actively tried to remember, so please don't take this as necessarily authoritative.
I understand this position, but when the money involved is crypto -- which is inherently highly "launderable" -- I'm not so sure. Why run your money through a cat when you could run it through a mixer?
If you use the proceeds of your online drug business to buy virtual cats from yourself, you can tell anybody who asks how you made your money that you made it selling virtual cats on the internet. And back it up with documentary evidence. That's better than simple avoidance of direct ties between your money and illegal activity.
Because your money is guilty till proven innocent. If you can’t show the legit origin for the money, they will take it.
I disagree with the policy, but that’s how it works. Using a mixer makes it more difficult to explain the source of the money, it makes things worse not better.
There's plenty of people out there with stockpiles of ethereum that they mined early on, or bought during the pre-sale in 2014. For them, it's just virtual tokens. It's not like they're using any hard-earned cash from the real world to buy virtual kitties.
I would be extremely surprised if this was the case. If I found a hoard of gold coins in the basement I would still appreciate their very real monetary value despite not having invested any real time, effort or money into obtaining them.
Here's your proof [1] - 250 ETH, or almost $100K. I must say that the kitty in question is pretty cool [2].
You're free to believe in what you want to believe, but to me it's pretty obvious: the $3M that circulated in the CryptoKitties over the last 5 days is real, and certainly not from people laundering money.
You can also hang out with the devs and other hard core users (investors?) on CryptoKitties' Discord channel [3]. Some surreal but fascinating conversations.
ps: to offer a different perspective: I bought a Gen0 cat on Sat for fun; today the cheapest price is 3x. Not sure the future liquidity of the kitty marketplace (particularly if it crashes and burn, like Pokemon Go, which is very likely), but some folks are rushing to it like an ICO boom.
Thanks for the links. Its not that I necessarily believe its money laundering I just have such a hard time wrapping my head around someone essentially throwing money out the window since ETH can be so easily turned into USD.
I would have the same reaction if I learned someone was trading Apple Stock or other non-cash asset for these kitties.
On the flip side people regularly spend tends of thousands of dollars on mobile games. Terrible ones at that. People spend lots of money on stupid stuff.
Maybe in some cases, but it seems like whenever anything tickles people's fancy hard enough, they naturally piss money away. And much more if it's a word-of-mouth fad.
There's the greater fools theory. People are happy to spend $100k on something that they believe they can turn around and resell for $150k in a month.
There's also an anchor effect from loss aversion. If I bought a crypto-cat for 1 Ether, and then Ether price increase by 300%, I might refuse to sell the crypto-cat for less than 1 Ether, even though there's no intrinsic reason for my cat to appreciate at the same rate as the base currency.
This is so obviously the creators of that game making fake transactions to establish fake value in their product. It's not hard to send 100k to yourself for something that has no value to make people believe that it does.
There's no way to prove it, but all the members of our team have pledged not to trade in cats in any way. We are definitely not manipulating the price.
I can assure you that we're as surprised as anyone at the speed that this thing has grown!
Only a small number actually have to be faked to build momentum and FOMO. Greed is very powerful and seems to bear a lot of influence on those participating in crypto.
Rumor is a lot of ICO's do something similar in that they buy their own coin's with another coin like bitcoin which then goes right back into your wallet so you can buy more with it creating the illusion of tons of demand when you are really just cycling the same money through.
I met a couple guys from their team a couple months ago at the ETHWaterloo hackathon (post from then [1]). They presented a contract analytics tool to graph the number and type of function calls, like an etherscan.io but for custom queries/reports. The queries they showed had function names like SireKitten(), it was all quite funny and I assumed the analytics tool was the main product and that the kitty contracts were a joke example. Never would've guessed that it would take off, but I didn't see all the cute avatars then either.
When we started the project, we expected to use a standard, eBay-style, rising auction with successive bids, but that resulted in way too many on-chain transactions. So, we had to find a kind of auction that required just two committed transactions: Starting the auction, and claiming the winning bid. The answer was a descending clock auction, where you set some start price and gradually drop the price over time until someone chooses to pay. (It's formally equivalent to a first-price, sealed bid auction, if you're an auction theory aficionado!)
The common name for a descending clock auctions? "Dutch Auction" or "Tulip Auction". The irony is not lost on us...
We take a cut of all auctions facilitated by our smart contract, but we put no restrictions on owners' ability to transfer or sell their Kitties outside our site. In fact, CryptoKitties is the first smart contract to implement the draft ERC-721 standard, which attempts to make NFTs (non-fungible tokens) as interoperable as ERC-20-compliant fungible tokens. https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/721
Hey, they're the ones that designed the smart contracts. I think the fact that you can design a marketplace that allows someone to take a cut assures the success of smart contracts since people now have an economic incentive to design marketplaces.
Are the founders hoping for additional kitten games? It seems that the game art is protected by copyright and trademark. And the breeding game itself is possibly covered by a patent. But what about representing this kitten data as cats elsewhere? I can't tell from the Terms of Use if this is encouraged or discouraged.
"A. You acknowledge and agree that we (or, as applicable, our licensors) own all legal right, title and interest in and to all elements of the App, and all intellectual property rights therein. The visual interfaces, graphics, design, systems, methods, information, computer code, software, services, “look and feel”, organization, compilation of the content, code, data, and all other elements of the App (collectively, the “Axiom Materials”) are owned by Axiom Zen, and are protected by copyright, trade dress, patent, and trademark laws, international conventions, other relevant intellectual property and proprietary rights, and applicable laws."
I was recently struck by the thought that the blockchain might be ideally suited for the creation of some kind of "digital stamp". As with real stamps, different artists could publish and sell stamp designs of varying quantities. For uniqueness, perhaps aberrations could be algorithmically introduced based on each stamp's unique blockchain hash. The stamps could then be used to creatively sign communications and transactions, with inbound stamps showing up in the recipient's digital stamp collection. (Or maybe they could somehow be tied in to miner fees, to make them function more like the real thing.)
With the blockchain, it seems we finally have a way of assigning scarcity to digital assets. The only problem would be the social value of such goods, but things like CryptoKitties make it clear that this would hardly be a problem. People seem to love collecting rare things, even if the rareness is strictly algorithmic.
I think it would feel great to receive a communication signed by a particularly rare or interesting e-stamp!
Dunno, it's a super wishy-washy idea! This is mostly me thinking out loud. I was recently looking through my dad's massive collection of old Soviet stamps, and it really made me wish for some sort of digital equivalent. Intuitively, it seems to me that there probably exists some alignment of cryptocurrency concepts to make it work.
If by “perfect copy” you mean a physical copy that cannot be distinguished in a blind testfrom the original in any way, then of course we don’t yet have that capability. Perhaps with advanced scanning and 3D printing that would be possible, but I suspect the true original would still maintain higher value as long as a trustworthy chain of custody was maintained. As soon as a thief removes the original long enough to potentially swap it with a perfect copy, the market value of any alleged original would likely vanish.
Nothing, if you’re permitted to make copies of the source of the reproduction (e.g. you went to The Louvre and took a photograph). I would have said that you likely can’t legally print or sell an image of the Mona Lisa you find on Google Images, but Wikipedia says:
> The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain".
Anyway, reproductions of public domain paintings are commonly produced and sold for far less than the market value of the original.
That would be effectively impossible, because the authenticity of a unique stamp can be verified on the blockchain. Of course, this only matters if people are valuing specific stamps based on their verifiable uniqueness in a specific blockchain, and not just their consumable content (e.g. it’s trivial to share a screenshot of one of these kitties.)
several companies have been doing this for half a decade, its nice that people are independently coming up with obvious use cases even if its years later, that means education is happening.
98 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadIf people just stop playing, and the community dies, isn't that the same thing (in effect)?
Could anyone explain?
What is a peer-to-peer system without peers?
Nobody thinks it magically does anything. There's an incentive built into the system for people who have nothing to do with the game to keep the blockchain and so the game data alive.
When I was toying with Bitcoin when it was $0.05, a hard disk crash lost me some. How would you recover it?
This is probably what the kid that lost his Babe Ruth baseball card feels like.
And the prices (AFAIK) are also totally handled with smart contracts, so even if it's just you, you can still claim the price.
No one else is allowed to generate the supply.
If so, this might be the first time I've seen something actually kind-of-useful implemented via smart contracts.
(Well, to the extent that virtual cats are useful...)
[1]https://etherscan.io/address/0xb1690c08e213a35ed9bab7b318de1...
[2]https://etherscan.io/address/0x06012c8cf97bead5deae237070f95...
Brilliant :D Thanks for sharing this.
If price was based on tech, ETH would be $10k+ and BTC would be a dying relic.
1. https://medium.com/@bitether/introducing-bitether-bth-the-ne...
If I still had ether, this would be a pretty strong sell signal.
People will be more likely to invest real time and money into virtual goods/currency/reputation if they can’t be confiscated by a corporation for arbitrary reasons. The idea will really take off once virtual goods are “portable” between games. At that point you don’t really have disparate “games” but rather a... Metaverse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse)
(I don’t imagine all virtual goods will be universally portable. You might be able to bring your CryptoKitties into Second Life but not World of Warcraft, for example...)
For example, let’s say I want to sell x$ illegal goods. I just tell the buyer to bid up my 1 million virtual cat and I’ll transfer the goods to you. The transaction goes unnoticed. What’s even better, the buyer can sell the cat at a lost and recover some Cash.
What’s more the money launderers buy and sell the virtual pets so as so mix up their money in the market.
There was a huge art deal recently. You have to wonder how much of the money laundering factored into the purchase of Salvator mundi.
It goes even further. Participants in the market know that money laundering is taking place and rely on it for profit. They bid up the virtual goods.
Of course, there is also a pyramid scheme / hot potato at play as well. Last one holding the bag loses.
And yeah, there are the naive folks whose out there with their money in not a understanding what’s really going on.
Valve profits from this quite nicely, and second life. Lots of these games with virtual goods.
Again, it's been a while and not a topic I actively tried to remember, so please don't take this as necessarily authoritative.
I disagree with the policy, but that’s how it works. Using a mixer makes it more difficult to explain the source of the money, it makes things worse not better.
There's plenty of people out there with stockpiles of ethereum that they mined early on, or bought during the pre-sale in 2014. For them, it's just virtual tokens. It's not like they're using any hard-earned cash from the real world to buy virtual kitties.
You're free to believe in what you want to believe, but to me it's pretty obvious: the $3M that circulated in the CryptoKitties over the last 5 days is real, and certainly not from people laundering money.
You can also hang out with the devs and other hard core users (investors?) on CryptoKitties' Discord channel [3]. Some surreal but fascinating conversations.
ps: to offer a different perspective: I bought a Gen0 cat on Sat for fun; today the cheapest price is 3x. Not sure the future liquidity of the kitty marketplace (particularly if it crashes and burn, like Pokemon Go, which is very likely), but some folks are rushing to it like an ICO boom.
[1] https://twitter.com/nicksdjohnson/status/937596285917548544
[2] https://www.cryptokitties.co/kitty/101
[3] https://discordapp.com/channels/387021283503636500/387024670...
I would have the same reaction if I learned someone was trading Apple Stock or other non-cash asset for these kitties.
any marginally successful one of those is going to rake in tens of millions of dollars via those transactions
the only difference here is the technology used is perfectly fungible
when that perfectly fungible technology powers the entire ecosystem, it isn't improbable that one third party application will catch on.
There's also an anchor effect from loss aversion. If I bought a crypto-cat for 1 Ether, and then Ether price increase by 300%, I might refuse to sell the crypto-cat for less than 1 Ether, even though there's no intrinsic reason for my cat to appreciate at the same rate as the base currency.
https://medium.com/@bitfinexed/latest
I can assure you that we're as surprised as anyone at the speed that this thing has grown!
Okay...
Rumor is a lot of ICO's do something similar in that they buy their own coin's with another coin like bitcoin which then goes right back into your wallet so you can buy more with it creating the illusion of tons of demand when you are really just cycling the same money through.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15479945
The common name for a descending clock auctions? "Dutch Auction" or "Tulip Auction". The irony is not lost on us...
The developers levy a 3.75% fee on every cat purchase. Doesn't really seem like a decentralized app in that regard.
https://imgur.com/a/XdQ5B
Looks like this caused the pending transaction queue to increase from around 700 yesterday to over 9,000 now.
https://imgur.com/a/il6UD
https://www.cryptokitties.co/terms-of-use
"A. You acknowledge and agree that we (or, as applicable, our licensors) own all legal right, title and interest in and to all elements of the App, and all intellectual property rights therein. The visual interfaces, graphics, design, systems, methods, information, computer code, software, services, “look and feel”, organization, compilation of the content, code, data, and all other elements of the App (collectively, the “Axiom Materials”) are owned by Axiom Zen, and are protected by copyright, trade dress, patent, and trademark laws, international conventions, other relevant intellectual property and proprietary rights, and applicable laws."
With the blockchain, it seems we finally have a way of assigning scarcity to digital assets. The only problem would be the social value of such goods, but things like CryptoKitties make it clear that this would hardly be a problem. People seem to love collecting rare things, even if the rareness is strictly algorithmic.
I think it would feel great to receive a communication signed by a particularly rare or interesting e-stamp!
> The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain".
Anyway, reproductions of public domain paintings are commonly produced and sold for far less than the market value of the original.
Total Value of Punks Sold 518.47 ETH ($241,413.99 USD) Average Sale Price 0.46 ETH ($213.83 USD) Estimated Market Cap 2,899.15 ETH ($1,349,933.50 USD)
https://www.larvalabs.com/cryptopunks