After I first heard about Bitcoin in 2012 amongst my cypherpunk-type co-workers, the concept was a “foreign money for the web” or “e-cash”.
Round this time loads of discussions had been taking place across the Diablo III public sale home & how actual cash was pouring into sport economies. CS:GO skins had been additionally turning into tremendous useful.
So inside this context, the use-cases we thought up had been all the time one thing like: I’ve a bunch of gold in WoW, however I wish to purchase some Eve On-line foreign money.
So the concept was you possibly can promote your WoW gold for Bitcoin then purchase Eve On-line credit with it.
Type of the common foreign money for digital items.
So far as I can inform, Bitcoin (and different crypto) completely solves this downside and I believed could be its #1 use-case.
So, does anybody know why it is not getting used like this? Should not there be websites that enable individuals to purchase and promote sport objects & currencies with BTC?
Hadn’t thought about that but honestly a cross game/platform exchange priced in bitcoin would be super smart.
It’s definitely not its most powerful use case but would make someone a lot of money.
I think apple holds this whole industry back. Otherwise games could simply add an in game bitcoin wallet and allow for so much more.
You thought gaming currency was it’s number one use case?
Its technically against the TOS for most online games to sell the currency for real money.
> Shouldn’t there be sites that allow people to buy and sell game items & currencies with BTC?
There are. But most games don’t like you buying/selling their in-game currencies for real world money (it’s generally called ‘Real World Trading’ and is against the rules), so it’s a grey market. For most games though you can just google ‘[Game] [currency] [BTC]’, eg: ‘OSRS GP BTC’.
Some games have a closed economy. In Ubisoft for example, you can only buy R6 Siege skins from Ubisoft and they steal 30% commission
Even if the game maker wants to use a different payment channel, Apple bans the app until the money goes through the app store – Fortnite
But people have been selling skins for Bitcoin for a few years
Buying in-game currency with Bitcoin doesn’t make much sense. It would be better if Bitcoin was the in-game currency
Also, G2A has accepted Bitcoin since forever
I think (and hope) we will get that, but we will have to see whether there will be something added to Bitcoin (like a layer 2) to handle different token swaps or whether the industry will use another platform. In any case, the invention of Bitcoin has made this idea possible.
However, thanks to other events, large parts of the gaming industry and also the customer base are sceptical at the moment. We might have to wait for really good products to convince them.
Zebedee
As a means for drug dealers to sell illicit items on silk road based websites?
Yes..
Funny how btc hype started after multiple governments seized billions in btc.
Couldn’t be the government controlling the narrative to increase profits on their seized assets.
They totally wouldn’t do a thing like that
It would, but it all got stopped by fee spikes up to 10-30$ and lack of privacy. Same with adoption in South America, you can’t buy groceries which such spikes and vendor doesn’t want his account balance to be public. As you said, this was many years ago, before most people were even here, or BTC maximalism was even a thing.