mintgox #001
During March, Real Life started to shut down. In its place emerged a society almost totally founded on online, digital interactions.
As we woke up in this new world where there is no “Real” life we decided to create a new type of event that could only exist in this world. A virtual space where online enthusiasts can swarm together and interact in ways that can only happen here. We called it the Magic Internet Gathering…or mintgox for short.
Bitcoin + Lightning Gaming
The activities we are taking part in are online games integrated with Bitcoin on the Lightning Network.
The Lightning Network is perfect for powering massively multiplayer online gaming interactions. Magical Internet Gatherings are really nothing more complex than many people online at the same time, playing the same games, making and receiving Bitcoin transactions via the Lightning Network.
The Lightning Network makes it possible for value to flow in a game like data, or an energy.
This opens up many possibilities for new ways to interact with a game and other players. For game developers, it is another building block in their toolkit to get creative.
The mission of Magic Internet Gatherings is to showcase these new types of games and provide an online audience of willing testers to experiment with them. Each month we will review these games and give the developers behind them a platform to discuss and show off their work.
We can only do this with help from you Magic Internetizens taking part. Want to help experiment? Sign up!
mintgox #002: Sunday May 3rd
mintgox #003: Sunday June 7th
The First Gathering — mintgox #001
With just two weeks of planning we held the first event on Sunday March 29th and we are pleased with how well it went.
100 online players
1,000 lightning transactions
This was an event in four parts over multiple platforms:
VR Panel
Bitcoin VR meetup host Udi Wertheimer kicked things off with a panel discussion between the organisers:
Moderator, Desiree Dickerson, Lightning Labs
Rod Roudi, BTCMedia
Jack Everitt, THNDR Games
Mandelduck, ZEBEDEE
Simon Cowell, ZEBEDEE
The panel was held in AltspaceVR. It was cool for audience members to attend in avatar form and we could hang out and chat with them afterwards. VR wasn’t necessary though and the whole thing was livestream. But…VR is very, very cool.
Virtual Fighting Competition — esports
The main attractions was an esports fighting competition developed by ZEBEDEE. The format was two semi-finals and a final between fighters from the organisers:
The cool thing about this game is that it used Bitcoin to break down the fourth wall and enabled the audience to interact with the game.
Audience members paid a lightning invoice to send a message into the game, which was displayed across the screen during the livestream. Each message sent also powered up a bomb which would then drop on the fighters, forcing them to break up and try and run for cover!
At the beginning of the match, each audience member was freely able to declare their allegiance to their preferred fighter. At the end of the match all satoshis collected by the game were distributed to the supporters of the winning fighter.
We suffered a bit of lag during the fight and in the future we will need to ensure all participants have the right gear and internet connection. In traditional esports you get kicked off if you have too much lag!
Overall, though this was a successful experiment at scale and we plan to add more interactive features in the future.
Bitcoin Bounce — mobile
THNDR games ran a competition of their hugely popular Bitcoin Bounce game. This is a one player mobile game on Android and iOS.
The competition ran all day with a live leaderboard dynamically updated. There was a healthy level of competitive banter on Twitter as players vied with each other to climb the leaderboard. @Doktor_What happened to be present in avatar form in the VR event so got his moment on stage as the winner was announced.
One of the advantages THNDR Games have found with integrating Bitcoin+Lighting, is that it is possible to run games with financial incentives without needing to collect personal information or payment details. This just wouldn’t be practical with fiat as the $ amounts involved are so low.
Sats Stacker — web app
ZEBEDEE also integrated Bitcoin+Lighting into an old school style coin-dropper game. The was a web app that ran throughout the event. The purpose of this game was to offer a fun Lighting faucet so that participants with no satoshis could acquire some for free through the gameplay.
The game issued players with ten free tokens. Each coin dropped was worth 10 sats which could then be withdrawn to a players own wallet.
