Ability to allow players to safely make Bitcoin transactions within the game.

Not sure if this already exists or not. But the ability for people to make Bitcoin transactions while trading items in the game is an idea I have been interested in for awhile. I feel like this kind of thing will be all the rage in the coming years.

How do you expect this to integrate with all of the different wallets and wallet services that are out there?
They each have a different protocol to get at the wallet and generate transactions.
And the Unreal game itself could only do that itself if it implemented its own “Unreal Game Wallet” – who would use such a thing?
Or you would have to force the user to go out-of-game to generate the appropriate addresses for the transaction.
I really don’t see any kind of user interface flow that would make sense and actually be implementable.

Your install of the game would likely need its own wallet setup automatically.

There are a few different Cryptos right now like 1Credit and Monero that may be better suited for gaming. I think 1Credit is specifically designed for gaming actually.

“Who would use such a thing” <— Anyone who realizes how lucrative it would be to make a game with a flourishing economy where players are literally mining the game for items that they can sell for real money and the developer gets a 5-10% cut for every single transaction.

Imagine if every single time players sell or buy items it translates to a micro transaction.

I don’t think anyone is doing it right now because nobody is thinking about it yet. But after this happens it would probably become a completely new profit model over free to play.

Until you realize that only one of 1000 people actually owns crypto currency :slight_smile:
Also the same concept is valid for paypal via microtransactions.

Just make the games core currency based around it. Its no different than Gold in WoW or Plat in Warframe. You can even pool coin into a wallet where it goes to players for rewards for simply playing the game.

edit: Going to call it now, In 5 years this thread will look like a total joke. "Who would even use something like this?

HAHA

Hear me now quote me later, you wont be able to get away from crypto currency once people integrate it into gaming. There will be a day when people playing games are confused that grinding money in MMOs wasn’t for real money ect.

edit 2: This reminds me a little bit of when people down talked the internet like it was a fad. Or when IBM didnt think anyone would ever want to use a “Mouse”

But yeah having some kind of integration for crypto in UE4 is probably a good idea.

I’m not really into bitcoin, but aren’t there already C++ lib for all the bitcoin stuff?

or you want a wrapper to access it with BP ?

Honestly at this point I will take what I can get. I would definitely pay for something like this. A way for UMG widgets to allow transactions involving crypto currency between multiple players would be pretty interesting. Either through blueprints or C++.

I cant shake the feeling that this is one of those ideas that might sound kind of dumb but in practice is just revolutionary. I am actually pretty sure that someone with a better understanding of the tech could have a far more slick way to create such a system.

Using something like Dogecoin has worked in the past for some games.

not dumb, but like frantech bitcoin sound for me too like a huge bet, or let’s say a very small customer ∩ player market (Honestly I have no idea of the real numbers).
But your request is legit. I was surprised that there seem to be no widget, prototype or anything of that kind for any transaction system (paypal & co, and why not bitcoin) in the UE marketplace.

It would be fantastic if someone would develop such plugin. Which crypto doesnt really matter, any would do as a starting point.

There are a ton of different kinds of coins. But with that said Bitcoin itself is not really that much of a bet at this point. Short of some major catastrophy Bitcoin is here to stay and will likely continue to climb in value.

Now one thing I do have to say is that if a game were to use a crypto as its base currency properly and that game became very popular then the value of that coin could potentially spike significantly. Some food for thought.

So, the game would print a wallet string, and it’s up to the user to send bitcoin to that wallet?
And the game would have to verify the entire blockchain every time the user starts it up and wants to display your balance?
Or would you use a web service that caches the balance? Which service? Does the user need to create a login?
Or would you run the wallet manager in the background on the system so it’s “always available” but also “adding system bloat?”
And once someone wants to trade, they have to wait for three generations of acknowledge before they actually get what they paid for?

I just don’t see how this could in any way be a useful addition to a game, such as I understand current games and current blockchain technology.

Gives a whole new meaning to “please insert coin” :smiley:

Yeah I imagine this would be the best way to do it. But in a perfect world the wallet would be tied to the players account and stored on a server.

Yeah I think this would be necessary and the easiest way to solve the problem. It would be important for the game to not allow transactions until it is verified. With that said, in some cases it may be a good idea to allow the game to do things more quickly while it waits for things in the background.

Right now Bitcoin is slloooooooooow too say the least. Not sure if there are other cryptos that will work better. But for what it’s worth its not really that outrageous for items you purchased to sit in a pending state before showing up in your mailbox.

It would be a completely new profit model that rewards players with real money seamlessly while hiding micro transactions under the hood by taking a percentage of each player transaction. You can also be clever about how you set things up and make it so people who play the game are able to earn enough currency to get by without having to actually manually put money in their wallet.

“Force of Will Battle Simulator” is scheduled to be released this coming September. More than 100,000 players will be able to trade their game items securely on the bitcoin blockchain."

They seem to be solving a lot of problems with crypto by using tokens. Ill have to pay attention to this as info comes out.

edit: Once again I must stress. People NEED to be think about this and taking it dead serious because its a matter of time before it becomes a standard in the game industry.

You mean, like the There.com, SecondLife, and IMVU business models all relying on users creating content and the platform taking a cut of each transaction?
Except buyers get their items right away, rather than having to wait for verification?

What problem does Bitcoin solve for game microtransactions and player/player trade, that credit cards, prepaid cards, Paypal, SMS payments, and all the rest, don’t?

Accept the content would be a set list of items already in the game. But then that is just what I have in mind, there are all kinds of situations

Its not very easy to go those routes for a profit model based on dynamic interactions such as player transactions. Digital money has a lot of advantages in terms of how you can use it quickly. Some cryptos like Monero are nearly instant transactions of wealth and can happen without any need for infrastructure that dealing with banks would need.

One solid system written and updated on an engine like UE4 to support various coins would be far easier to setup for indie developers. In addition to that most coins are valued very low right now outside of bitcoin and will likely increase in value within the next 5 years on a dramatic scale. SO even if the percentages are low today those profits could sky rocket in the coming years.

There are at least 10 start-ups that already try to apply that same thinking, except “to all websites/apps” rather than just games.
None of them is locking in the market, because the market is by its nature decentralized.
And, because it’s decentralized, it’s fragmented, which means that it’s a hassle to use for most normal users – it’s harder for me to log into coinbase (or whatever,) generate some wallet, and then wait for some transaction to post and verify, than it is to just punch in a credit card number.

Having built such systems at two different businesses, I respectfully disagree. The main challenge is making sure that you avoid fraudulent actors (once there’s money, the sharks come swimming!) and making sure your system doesn’t suddenly somehow count as “gambling” for some reason. Bitcoin actually makes for less control of those problems than regular payment channels.

The PayPal or Square or Braintree or Paymentwall integrations are super simple to set up and gets you a large set of all payments that customers actually use. I see a lot of hard work and approximately zero upside in supporting this right now.

If you want to live on wishful thinking, that’s fine for you. Having dreams keeps you from being depressed about how hard it is to actually create real value in reality.
Another way of looking at it is that the “coins” (outside perhaps bitcoin) are me-too experiments that failed in the market.
Bitcoin has appeal to a variety of people, exactly because it sits outside the regular controls of the banking and governmental systems.
This is not necessarily a bad thing – there’s value in freedom! But, unfortunately, those who realize the most value in that freedom are those who are the least free in regular society, which generally are evildoers of various kinds (as per definition in society.)
What happens in real life is that the governments will want their control anyway, because of said evildoers, and then a real business that wants to play in real society has to choose between either accepting and using bitcoin under the regulatory framework that exists, or not use it at all. Given that bitcoin is such a small fraction of the legitimate economy, there’s just no real incentive to actually do that, other than as an interesting experiment.

Anyway, good luck on your project, and I wish you the best! And maybe in 5 years, you will show me how wrong I am when you sit on a pile of bitcoins worth thousands of dollars each, and I am stuck in the old, regulated, governed, society.

Fiat currency has never been used for evil things am I right? :smiley:

Anyway the focus is on digital currency not the moral dilemma of decentralization and how we victimize our so obviously benevolent government. Excuse me while use a voice changer while donning my handy dandy GuyFawks mask.

Anyway, jokes aside, the advantage is that that transactions of coins is more seamless. Its roughly as seamless as using the auction house in any MMO. This combined with the fact that items in video games do hold real world value anyway, yes even the games you currently play right now, its only natural to begin thinking this way.

This is absolutely something to be watching closely.

PS: In 5 years a bitcoin will likely be worth 10-50k at its current rate.

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The most amazing thing is how much worse the other forms are – feudalism, monarchy, dictatorship, monotheism, 

Democracy is really ******. It’s the worst possible form of government, except for all the others we’ve tried. But that’s a different discussion :slight_smile:

I don’t understand your math.

If we use a two-year look-back, bitcoin has actually lost value against the dollar. If we look back one year, BTC/USD has moved in the last year from 300 to 550 or so. If we assume 80% increase year over year for five more years (which the currency has not sustained historically) we end up just below 10,000, so even with the best possible baseline, we don’t get anywhere near $50k.
(Before then, there wasn’t really enough liquidity to establish a reasonably-grounded value – a two to two and a half year baseline is the best we can do AFAICT.)

Anyway, as I said: good luck! Knock us out!