Category: Bitcoin

Cryptocurrencies and the blockchain have started to change many aspects of our lives and entertainment in recent years. However, one area that appears to have been slower than others in adopting this approach is that of gaming.

At first glance, there are a lot of areas of crossover between cryptos and gaming. Some people have even suggested that gaming paved the way for these coins to appear as per https://medium.com/singulardtv/how-video-games-helped-pave-the-way-for-cryptocurrency-f930521eef55. Yet, the expected surge in this area hasn’t appeared so far. In what ways could these industries come together in the future to change the gaming landscape?

Gaming ICOs Being Launched

There is work being done on numerous new decentralised gaming solutions. These are projects that use the blockchain and introduce their own cryptocurrencies that users can typically earn, buy or exchange.

Among the biggest and most talked about ICOs of this type is Bountie, with full details on it to be found at https://www.bountie.io/tokensale/. This is a platform that promises to use AI and IoT in order to modernise the world of gaming.

Another project of this type is called ALAX. In this case, the idea is that players in developing countries can play on their mobile devices even if they don’t have access to traditional banking facilities. The platform uses their own ALX token to monetise gaming, as described on their site, https://alax.io/tokens/.

Unless an ICO offers something new and useful, the fact that it is decentralised isn’t going to be enough. Let’s not forget that over half of all ICOS fail in the first few months too, according to the Boston College research at https://www.coindesk.com/over-half-of-icos-fail-within-4-months-suggests-us-study. So, there is no guarantee that these new platforms will succeed. Many gamers are happy to play in the ways that are currently available to them.

Indeed, among the most popular gaming options gaining ground right now are online casinos. These are websites where numerous casino games are brought together. For example, at https://casino.betfair.com/c/slots we can see dozens of slots ranging from Hot Gems to Grease and from Big Bear to Captain’s Treasure.

Playing with Digital Currencies

Another possibility is that players start to use cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin to fund their games online. This may seem like a natural progression, since many gamers are now used to using in-game tokens and currencies.

However, perhaps the volatility of virtual currencies will play a big part in how widespread this becomes. Since these coins can gain or lose value very rapidly, anyone who pays using them is essentially making an investment rather than simply exchanging tokens.

It seems fair to say more stable cryptocurrency prices are likely to encourage more gamers to use these coins. There are certainly some good reasons for thinking this is a good idea. For example, it allows for virtually anonymous spending and means that no link to a bank account or credit card is needed.

It wouldn’t be a big surprise if the future were to bring a closer relationship between gaming and cryptocurrencies. Having said that, it would appear that we are still waiting for the perfect combination of these technologies that allows gamers to use cryptos to their full potential.

The growth of cryptocurrencies has been a source of many headlines in the last few years. Yet, research by Finder shows that only 8% of Americans have invested in these digital currencies. What is needed to help them to truly break into the mainstream?

One suggestion is that online gaming could be the key. Could gamers around the world give Bitcoin, Ethereum and other coins the boost they need to move to the next level of popularity?

Gamers Are Comfortable with Virtual Money

Perhaps the most important factor here is that gamers were comfortable dealing with virtual money long before most other people had even considered the idea. This has been an important part of many games for some time, but it is the Mesos used in MapleStory from Nexon that are widely credited as being the first gaming currency to really take off.

The most popular games now have giant economies spring up around them. Gamers are happy to spend their fiat money on virtual tokens that can only be used in a certain game. This concept has seen the gold mining industry in World of Warcraft pass the “$2 billion mark”, while in-game revenue in FarmVille is now over $1 billion.

Non-gamers tend to need to make a mental shift to value digital money as much as the paper currency they can hold in their hand, whereas gamers already understand that digital tokens can be just as valuable to them.

The global gaming industry is continuing to grow at an impressive rate. According to a forecast from analysts Newzoo, the $134.9 billion market value in 2018 was a 10.9% increase on the figure achieved in 2017. As more new gamers appear, the concept of cryptocurrencies is likely to be more widely accepted.

Players Spend These Currencies to Buy Games or to Play

It is still a fairly common assumption that Bitcoin can only really be used by gamers. Indeed, it is easy to imagine that some people have failed to invest in cryptocurrencies so far because they believe it is of no use unless they play games.

While there are now many other ways of spending Bitcoin, it is true that gamers can spend or earn these coins more easily than other people. On many sites, it is possible to buy games and there are games where you use virtual coins as you play. Steam has stopped accepting this currency but others, such as MMOGA and Microsoft, let you shop with virtual coins.

A case where future progress is expected is in internet casinos, where Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals make sense. At the moment, there is a limited number of Bitcoin casinos. The big-name casinos, the ones with dozens of slots, table games and live dealer lobbies, such as Paddy Power, have so far tended to stick to traditional payment methods.

If acceptance of cryptocurrencies goes mainstream, with gaming sites like this beginning to adopt them, the demand for them will greatly increase. People will also become more trusting of cryptocurrencies if they begin to use them on a regular basis for something that gives them a lot of pleasure.

Indeed, the world of gaming is still closely linked to cryptocurrencies. There is a good chance that any major growth in the future will be linked to gamers and how they spend their money online.

There are plenty of reasons not to like the internet today.

It starts with how we access it. Depending on where you are, internet connections can be unreliable, slow, and even pricey. There’s much disparity in the speed and pricing of the packages offered by internet service providers (ISPs) all over the world. ISPs can be quite restricting too. Monthly bandwidth caps are forcing us to prioritize what to access online.

This then leads us to the issue of net neutrality. ISPs are lobbying against an open internet claiming that they should have the right to set prices depending on the type of content or data that we access. This is at odds with our right to freely use (within lawful bounds) a utility we’re paying for.

Governments are also exerting their influence over the internet placing laws and regulations that allow them to censor and surveil our online activities. Private corporations also figure into this discussion as well. It seems that we’ve virtually forfeited our data to these companies when we agreed to their terms and conditions to use their services.

Then there’s the general profusion of bad products, bad content, and bad behavior. The list can go on.

The big question is, how can we fix it?

Centralization ruined it

Centralization has got a lot to do with these issues. The internet used to be highly decentralized operating essentially as a large peer-to-peer network. This changed when large telco companies took over the infrastructure in the effort to commercialize internet access.

Today’s tech giants eventually rose to prominence by providing most of the popularly used services and applications. They now happen to figure into almost every aspect of internet use. Google knows what questions we need answered. Facebook knows who and what we like.  Amazon, being our go-to store, knows our home addresses, payment information, and purchases.

Unless you’ve been living completely off the grid, these companies are bound to have your in-depth profile. What’s even scary is that such data can be used to manipulate us as revealed in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Having only a small group of entities dictate what we can and can’t do on the internet isn’t a good thing. These companies can impose policies that are designed for them to profit from our participation in a not-so-equitable manner. They can also stifle competition due to their size and influence.

A centralized service also serves as a single point of failure, that when exploited, could lead to disastrous outcomes. For example, DNS service provider Dyn plays a major role in the today’s infrastructure. An outage caused by a cyberattack to its services back in 2016 took down popular applications like Twitter and Netflix. This disrupted the online activities of millions of users.

How about decentralization?

There is now growing interest in transitioning away from centralized approaches as more users become aware of these downsides. The vision of decentralization is lessen the hold of these few entities over the internet and give back power and control to users.

It’s even quite fortunate that blockchain and crypto activities have gained much acceptance over the past year. These technologies offer the means to make a decentralized internet viable. Through blockchain and smart contracts, it is now possible to build and deploy decentralized applications (dapps) and platforms founded on transparent and immutable rules designed to be fair to its users.

These platforms are making headway in their development.

Projects like Skycoin even seek to disrupt the internet infrastructure segment by coming up with Skyminer – a custom-built hardware that is designed to support a crypto-driven internet ecosystem. The device essentially functions as a cost-effective but high-performing server with secure routing and networking capabilities. The device is also planned to be able to broadcast using a wireless antenna which will allow owners to function as ISPs and share their bandwidth to others creating a real peer-to-peer infrastructure.

Moreover, these efforts are making use of crypto currencies to power their respective economies. This way, they become self-sustaining. Peers fairly pay each other directly using crypto currencies without the involvement of intermediaries. Prices are market-driven and not dictated by big corporations.

The community that these platforms create also become a self-policing body that could democratically decide on matters. They are also responsible for encouraging positive behavior and punishing poor products and services and malicious actions.

Fixing the internet

We’ve been letting the internet be under the control of just a few entities for far too long. What we need to fix is for ordinary users like us to regain control and create an internet that’s truly neutral. It does call for us to step away from centralized approaches. Fortunately, decentralization offers the means for us to do so.

Decentralized platforms allow us to participate in fair and equitable markets. The crypto currency economies ensure that platforms are self-sustaining. These platforms also provide the opportunity for us to get back ownership of our personal data.

These technologies may still be in relative infancy but with exciting and ambitious projects that even seek to disrupt not only services and applications but the underlying infrastructure, a decentralized internet might be in our future. This way, we get to enjoy an internet that’s truly for the people and by the people.