The biggest Easter egg in Ready Player One is blockchain
Maybe you are just like me, who spent over 2 hours in the cinema and managed to discover over 100 Easter eggs. Do you guys know that, the real biggest Easter egg in Ready Player One is actually blockchain!
Ready Player One is a novel published by Ernest Cline in 2011, and he also participated in the production of this movie.
As its setting, in the year 2040, the world has been gripped by wards, pollution and energy crises. Seeing the disorder of the world and to escape the horrendous reality, people became immersed in a virtual reality game “OASIS”.
When he was to die, Halliday, the creator of OASIS, declared that, the winner of the egg hunt contest in the OASIS can inherit $500 billion along with a controlling stake in the OASIS.
The rules of the game are: complete challenges, collect 3 keys and open three gates, and the first one to discover Halliday’s Easter egg will be the winner. Hearing such resounding news, all players wanted to win the game. A great many guys gave up after one year’s try. Till 5 years later, an average boy, Wade, as average as any one on the road, discovered the first key and instantaneously became “hot” in the OASIS. However, he didn’t realize that, this game had put him under crises and traps, as a matter of life and death.
This movie integrates a lot of popular elements in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s from Japan, Europe to America, such as cartoons, movies and computer games. It has raised sympathy among many netizens, who have discovered over 100 Easter eggs in the movie. Some big boys even burst into tears when Daito was turned into Gundam at last.
Apart from them, it also features tons of recent high techs: light-weighted, close-fitting and never-tiring VR goggles, face-recognition drone planes much smarter than cleaning robots, holographic projection display, transparent screen …
What’s cooler than all the above is that, smart foreigners discovered such a paragraph from the original novel and published it in the section of blockchain in a forum:
Isn’t this the blockchain?
OASIS-supported virtual technologies sound similar to the blockchain. The blockchain is with “fault tolerance” and is decentralized through different nodes connected in a distributed network, immutable. The more participants there are, the more stable the operation of OASIS will be.
Some other signs also show that, blockchain technology is indispensable in this movie:
⚪ Smart Contract⚪
At first, it is most likely that, the founder of game — Halliday relies on smart contracts to guarantee the execution of “his will”. Smart contracts guarantee that his will can be executed, without any intervention from any centralized organization or other factors; only the man getting the egg can inherit his fortune and operate the OASIS.
All stage properties are developed according to the setting up in the game — when the villain took out his box-bottom treasure to bomb all the roles, the “life-saving gold coin” in Wade’s pocket has helped him survive alone. It’s not that this is the glory of leading male role, but that the setting of smart contract in the game can not be changed. It’s due to this setting that he survives, completes his mission and gets the keys and egg.
⚪ Non-real name system⚪
Blockchain is a technology, and virtual currency is the first successful application of blockchain. Everyone can register a “wallet”, and the major difference between the wallet and Alipay is: an Alipay account must be bound with an ID card or, at least, with a cellphone. And the boss of Alipay can know, if he likes, who transfers money to who and how much a person has. Nonetheless, a wallet does not correspond to a legal natural person. It only takes one minute to register a wallet, and one person can possess numerous wallets. Although the current amount in each wallet is open and transparent, you do not how many wallets a person has.It is for this reason that the government is unable to track the fund flow and cross-border remittance, and that’s also why some governments are unwilling to support citizens to use electronic currencies.
And, it’s also difficult to relate the figures in Ready Player One to the roles in the OASIS one by one; the villain can not relate Wade in the real world to the leading male role in the virtual world, till the leading male role’s head was turned by love, telling the leading female role in the OASIS “I’m Wade”. Later, when Wade meets game pals in the real world, they can recognize each other only through secret signs.
⚪ Consensus Mechanism ⚪
How can one get wealth in a virtual world? Roughly, there are mechanisms such as POW and POS.
POW (Proof of Work) means “the more you work, the more you earn”, while POS (Proof of Stake) means “the more you own, the more you earn, just like interest generated from bank deposits”.
Ordinary people arrested by IOI to work for it
The villain’s organization IOI arrests others under the name of “owing money”, who are made to continuously bury landmines and move bricks in the game, helping the villain to get the Easter egg. Isn’t this the consensus mechanism POW! Each node and everyone serving IOI pays off the debt with their own work; the more they do, the longer it takes, the more debt he pays off.
⚪ Decentralization ⚪
When Wade made a live broadcast and calls for all to help him find the egg, the villain once attempted to stop this broadcast and failed. Just like the “broadcast” in blockchain, everyone is enabled to listen to the same thing; each node records the same transaction in its own “ledger”. The logic is the same.
⚪ Private keys should be written down on paper⚪
I’m sure you remember such a scene: the villain’s hamster-ball is pasted with a sticky note, on which he writes down his password and allows the leading male and female roles to log into his account.
Those of you who have digital currencies must have an important booklet, on which there are mnemonics or passwords for wallets. Never record them in a computer, and, in particular, never transmit any of them via a chatting tool!! Otherwise, it’s likely that your digital assets may be stolen away, never to come back.
For more important knowledge on [Blockchain & IoT], you can read the following articles or visit the Ruff Chain community, and you’ll surely get what you want …
🔴BTA Summit | Roy Li: Application Practice of Blockchain Technology at the Enterprise Level
Abstract: What is an Ethereum test network? Which consensus mechanism should be for public blockchain? Why is the iteration of blockchain technology more difficult than traditional technologies?
🔴Only Those Data with Value Flow and Value Circulation are Worth Going onto the Chain
Abstract: Should data go onto the cloud or chain? How are IoT and blockchain combined?
Well, it’s possible that a game like the OASIS may come into being very soon, and, blockchain, for its features such as transparency, decentralization, and immutability, is bound to subvert our world in many fields such as science & technology, finance, law, life and medicine.
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