Group Of Minecraft Players Trade A Million Blocks in Bitcoin
Readers may remember BitQuest, as covered here on CCN.com. The Minecraft server uses Bitcoin for its economic component, and the results are fantastic efforts from those wishing to earn Bitcoin. They even had an architecture contest recently.
A group of players recently decided to take the market component of the Minecraft server to a new level by creating a market that would be supply and demand responsive. Players were able to purchase in-game currency using bitcoins and then buy blocks. Each in-game emerald is worth a bit, or a millionth of a Bitcoin.
Some blocks are more valuable than others, but at present the average price of a block is about 23 bits. The most valuable in-game block is quartz because it is the hardest to find. Players can trade their blocks in for emeralds, which are worth bits, and then they can take these emeralds and cash out of the game if they like. Or they can use them to buy other blocks and continue playing.
Using a market model where each time an item sold, the price of the item increased, the group sold 1.54BTC worth of product in the course of six months. Developer Cristián González believes that the group’s experiment in Minecraft economics is illustrative, and that Bitcoin can play a serious role in virtual worlds. He writes :
But the best part is that for the first time a game currency is not a product to sell or a “pay to win” scheme, but the veins of a proper economy. Game money sucks because it’s all on walled gardens, and we believe multiplayer games of the future will use only one open, transparent currency that will work as your virtual world passport.
Whether Bitcoin is properly integrated into other online worlds, time will tell. Meantime, those with a taste for Bitcoin and Minecraft can check out the BitQuest Minecraft mod .
Images from Pixabay and Bitquest.
