8 things I learned from breeding 30,000 digital cats on the blockchain

Cute cat for your attention. Photo by Tran Mau Tri Tam

Hello. My name is Derek and I’ve bred 30,000 digital cats. On the blockchain.

Yes. 30,000.

I have been playing CryptoKitties for over a year. For the uninitiated, this is a game where you own and breed cats on the blockchain. There are 4 trillion possible cats you can breed, based on the genetic make-up of each parent.

You can’t do anything with the cats. It’s just for fun. Yet over US$15m (81,600 ETH) of CryptoKitties have been sold. And over 1.7 million cats have been bred.

I ‘played’ the game with the goal to make money. And I did. I arbitraged the marketplace, calculated breeding probabilities, made back alley deals and have single-handedly crashed the market.

This was my beginning. I bought this cat for $30 and sold for $1,000. Source: Cryptokitties

I won’t get into the details of how it works and what I did. That’s a LONG article saved for another day (post).

However, what I will share, is eight interesting things I’ve learned about crypto-economics, incentives and marketplaces.

1. People with Crypto will buy anything (including useless things)