Bitcoin Forum

Hello,

Would anyone be so kind to explain what would happen if a popular online game adopted bitcoin as a main in-game currency please?
I wonder if bitcoin network can really transfer large amounts of transactions.
Is it technically possible to for example - have bitcoin in World of Warcraft instead of virtual gold?

If it's not suitable now, can it be suitable in the future?
What needs to be changed? What are the limitations?

Thanks,

Using the accounts feature, all the in-game transactions wouldn't touch the blockchain: they would be handled locally.
This discounting the fact that apparently bitcoind is too slow to handle high amounts of traffic.

Thanks, is it likely to be faster in the future? Or that's just the way it is, and nothing can be done?

Many things can be done, especially locally.
Since the accounts feature is basically a local database, you could just re-implement a local database and use bitcoind (or any other service supporting bitcoin) only for receiving and sending bitcoins.
This is what many sites have done, I guess: they at start use accounts because they are handy, and when transaction volume rises too high they reimplement that feature (AFAIK btct.co is just doing or has just done something like that, but I might be mistaken).

Please notice that using bitcoins as an in-game currency would also require modifying the game itself, i.e. it cannot "just replace" the current gold, since the current gold is just a traditional centralised currency fully controlled by them: they can create and destroy it at will. They quite obviously couldn't do it with bitcoins.
So they would either add bitcoin as a parallel currency, or completely redesign the whole game economy.
Hint: redesigning the whole game economy will likely never happen anywhere, at least not in any large project: the best you can expect in existing games is for the first option (i.e. bitcoins added as a parallel currency), more likely bitcoins just used "externally" to purchase game items (and item auctions if you're lucky) or exchanges allowing you to trade game gold with bitcoins (I'm writing one).
I wouldn't hold my breath, though: what you can reasonably hope for is for new games to support bitcoins.

Due to the design, each confirmation takes 10 minutes. The six confirmations is general, and thus requires 6 x 10 minutes in total.

Not exactly.

First we are talking about in-game transactions, which won't be handled directly by the blockchain, so they would be instant.

Second, the "slowness" we were talking about is that of bitcoind itself (not the protocol), which can be fixed coding.

No.

Unhelpful.

Not unhelpful ! It can be used in the future

Please can you explain why? Just "No" is not really helpful to us, the newbies :(

Just ignore the troll and read my posts ;)

Because blocksize limit was lowered from 32 MB to 1 MB by Satoshi in early days of Bitcoin. He figured out that without such a limit the blockchain would be bloated and Bitcoin would be abandoned. Also, if u read the forum u would see a lot of threads discussing that without the limit Bitcoin will die. It's because transactions must compete each with other (by paying larger fees), otherwise mining will become unprofitable. There are some other "why"s, but I can't write in a few words so many threads, use [Search] button, plz.

It'll be ready when that kind of load start's to present itself.

Ah I see. Never knew that it was possible to also have in-game transactions in parallel to blockchain. Thanks for the clarification!

Np!

It's quite simple actually, if you think about it.

You give 10 coins to your game address.
The game knows it has 10 coins and that are yours.
In-game you give 2 coins to someone.
It's not necessary for that transaction to hit the blockchain: the game knows you have 8 coins and he has 2.
You withdraw 3, the transaction is regularly sent to the blockchain from the game treasury
Now the game knows you have 5, and the whole game treasury holds 7

That's basically every site handling bitcoins already works, except personal wallets of course.

According to the blockchain.info, the maxim number of transactions per block is about 500: http://blockchain.info/en/charts/n-transactions-per-block (http://blockchain.info/en/charts/n-transactions-per-block)
But you can use off-chain micropayments: http://thegenesisblock.com/off-chain-micropayments-implemented-in-bitcoinj/ (http://thegenesisblock.com/off-chain-micropayments-implemented-in-bitcoinj/)

500 transactions every 600 seconds = less than 1 tx/s. That sux, doesn't it?

500 are transaction per second processed actually, is not a limit.

If a game used bitcoins, people would send bitcoins to fund an account and withdraw bitcoins sometimes, but any internal game transactions would be kept by the game, so there would not be a need for a huge number of transactions on the blockchain. Bitcoin takes an hour to confirm, for small in game purchases there is just no need for such security measures as bitcoin provides.

Disagree. There are 600 seconds between blocks, not 1.

There already are large amounts of bitcoin transcated per second.

I believe we are already ready.

The bitcoin network cannot handle more than 7 transactions per second.

Inputs.io has been stress tested to handle hundreds of transactions per second, and of course no waiting for confirms, or no fees.

I stumbled upon this post right now, and I think it might be useful to bump it, hoping people won't forget.

Is there any statistics about the current average TPS?

From what I saw on blockchain.info (the live feed of latest transaction), it seems we are more or less at 1-2 tps...
It would be great if someone can share some stat. :)

Core devs are always looking for ways to improve the system and make it more reliable and faster.