321–330 of 700 posts
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Bitcoin has a use case for money laundering, tax evasion, evading China's exchange controls, and drugs. That market turned out to be larger than expected.
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I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of…
I believe this is what happens with any open world MMO. There's no storyline to finish, there's no ending, and game devs have incentives to keep players playing forever (the more hours a player plays, the more likely he will spend more money). There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content and/or grinding mechanics. Grinding mechanics are way, way easier to create. You can even reuse sprites and just chan…
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Bitcoin has a use case for money laundering, tax evasion, evading China's exchange controls, and drugs. That market turned out to be larger than expected.
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In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in…
I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of…
In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in…
Here's a story about The Sims Online I posted a few years ago, in which I described making a maze solving bot to quickly and automatically generate millions of Simoleons, and an ad-hoc solution to the delivery problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730181 I wrote a bot for The Sims Online that manufactured Simoleons, then repurposed it to catalog and describe objects in the game for you with a speech synthes…
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> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? The difference between now and then is that people had to go to third parties; nowadays the game developer themselves will sell you the skip. Or a chance to gamble at a boost. Some of these mechanics are "compelling", in a very visceral sense - they compel people to spend time or money, in a way that isn't quit…
> And yet creating an obsession and a goal and providing a way to grind or spend to that goal is popular. Now that the veneer of such "games" is dropping away to reveal that they've just been casinos all along, the bright side is that society might finally find the gumption to start taking gaming addiction as seriously as gambling addiction.
Sports gambling via apps is getting huge and deregulated and advertised on major TV broadcast networks.
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Isn't the same true of gold? The gold supply is inflating at about the same rate as bitcoin right now, but has enough incoming cash flows to keep the priced propped up enough to maintain a $10 trillion market cap. Obviously some of that incoming cash flow is for actually generative industrial use cases, but it's a minority, https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in... . The lion's share of incoming…
You need to pay the miners just to be able to transact with Bitcoin. Gold on the contrary, you can just hand it over to someone else.
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That's a political publicity stunt, and does not counter any of the points made by the parent
Axie Infinity spokesperson: "It is a little bit dependent on capital inflows." Er, yes. All those players are paying about $1000 to get into the game and then grinding away to get Smooth Love Potion tokens. This is the SLP price graph.[1] Down 92% since the peak. A lot of suckers lost big. Many of them poor people in the Philippines, where Axie is big. Axie is frantically trying to obfuscate this with a second token,…
In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in…
how did you find btc via rs?
I stopped using PayPal for... a number of reasons, and BTC was a functional alternative.