I'm finishing work for a company now, and should have time for this project in a week.

My biggest concerns are coming up with a sound economy model for the game and finding artists I really like. A friend of mine (http://march0514s.wordpress.com/) can draw and paint a little and would be willing to participate, but he's a complete rookie

Another friend of mine (http://seiga.nicovideo.jp/user/illust/13453809) can draw and model and paint like a monster, but is fighting artist block for over 4 years now. I gave up on him for now, unfortunately

@Gabi, yes, something "high-tech" can be directly linked to BTC, but that doesn't mean Bitcoins can be worked in-game to be magical, steampunk, or just a normal currency.

My initial idea is to have something Ragnarok-style: http://mmohuts.com/wp-content/gallery/ragnarok-online/ragnarok-online-outside-combat.jpg

Or maybe Wild Arms 5-style (artwise):

http://www.dignews.com/legacy/screenshots/wild_arms_5_rev_06.jpg
http://cache.kotaku.com/assets/resources/2007/03/wildarms5.jpg

@mattiemus, thanks for that post, man; it really gives me a lot of energy!

One way of "securing" the working capital would be to simply make sure that there's limited money in there to keep the drops happening (e.g. having a "cap" amount adjusted to how many players are online), and move the remaining money to the possession of one (or many) game masters with password-protected wallets. They should then put the money back in as needed.

Gotcha.

Well, one thing is for sure: writing a server for an online game with all features that Ragnarok has definitely isn't impossible for a single person, as long as it doesn't have to support 10k+ simultaneous players. I'm sure that beyond/near that threshold, it would take more than just brainlessly writing the game logic like I did in the past, but I'm not sure it would be *that* hard either (never did that, so I can't say; only suppose).

With that many players online, I could certainly afford more coders, right?

Please bear in mind that I'm not aiming for a massively multiplayer online game upfront, just an online game with the gameplay of an MMO (Ragnarok), because I think that's fun.

I'm not saying this is easy. I'm saying this is not impossible, and that I did similar things before, when I was absurdly less capable than now.

Now, let's forget how hard it would be to *implement* this, and think how hard it would be to actually put a real currency in an MMORPG? I think this is much harder than actually implementing an online game.

The game would be open-source software, and we won't do like big companies that put too much power on the hands of the clients because they can afford crap like nProtect, HackShield, etc. That would be silly.

Of course, those companies do this for a reason, and that is reduced processing on the servers and less network usage. This means we would need better servers and the players would need better internet connections, unless we can develop really clever network protocols.

-- If a moderator sees this, could this be moved to a more appropriate board? --

Guys, I just had the most insane, but also most exciting idea of my life. I figure other people have also thought about that, and discussed it in some other threads, but I'm really considering to put this into practice.

My key ideas for the game:

• Monsters should have a chance of dropping BTC.
• When you acquire BTC in-game, it is automatically transferred to your wallet.
• The BTC that monsters drop can come from different sources, such as monthly payments, items sold by NPC's, in-game fees over maintaining guilds, entering special areas, etc.
• Money for keeping the server up can come from BTC in the game itself, unless the market is suffering a crash and BTC aren't worth much; in this case, the server would have to be kept up only by monthly payments and donations.
• People should get mad at bots, since they're effectively stealing their money (not their wallets, but the money they put into the game, which makes up for monster drops, etc.). The community could elect and pay game masters to keep the servers free from bots.

The catch is that I'm sharing this idea with you, but this is still a personal project. I'm going to make this in a programming language called Chii I'm developing myself, and the game style is going to be your usual Korean cute shit like Ragnarok.

If you can draw, paint, model in 3D, or is a developer insane enough to trust somebody who says is making a new programming language and would like to help, or simply keep in touch, let me know. I generally can't move things forward if I don't have somebody to discuss. Also, I can't do art yet, so I would need somebody to do that for me.

Otherwise you may think the idea is good but I'm overengineering with this Chii thing, or you simply hate anime and would like to make something like World of Warcraft, we can still help each other in defining the limits, pitfalls, and difficulties of developing an online game economy based on BTC. I think there's room for more than one game

By the way, before you get started with the usual "but you have no idea how hard it is to make an online game", yes, I do have. I have developed my first online game when I was 10, and I did not use any synchronization framework like RakNet to do that. I really did it all by hand using a standard TCP/IP library It obviously wouldn't scale (I didn't even know what this meant back then), but it did work, and I'm sure I can do better today (although I would *probably* use a synchronization framework today).

This guy has an effin' good point; what happens if rich BTC users die and their Bitcoins are lost forever? I never thought about that, but surely somebody else did?

@speeder, se entendi direito, a ideia do VAT (empregado da maneira correta) é se tornar o (quase?) único imposto e evitar sonegação ao mesmo tempo. Claro que poderiam colocar um VAT tal que daria na mesma que a soma de todos os impostos atuais, mas acho que depois é mais fácil baixar um imposto do que 30...

Haha, why's C# the language of the heroes anyway? For me it's just effing Microsoft Java, really!

@CAFxX, that's interesting, but are Bitcoin signatures ECDSA? I heard they're some specific elliptic algorithm + two SHA-256. Atmega328 is also 8-bits, right? I'm still shocked that's enough for crypto math, but it seems it's true.

Anyway, would you join the IRC channel and lend us a hand from time to time?

Okay, I think we really need an IRC channel for this development. It's funny that I found this after posting a proposal to do almost exactly that (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=18717.0).

I just recently bought some hardware to try this out. It's certainly very overkill for this project (a 400 MHz ARM920T; I'd be very surprised if it couldn't timely handle the crypto functions, even without a floating-point unit, and yeah, I'm a noob and I don't even know if floating point can or is used for cryptography; please forgive me there), but proof-of-concepts are something lacking here, right? I also bought a very good starters FPGA (Altera EP2C5 family).

FPGA's have the advantage that they generally solve stuff much, much, much more efficiently than a CPU, at a lower cost, and are just as flexible.

If a CPU is just good enough to run an algorithm timely and you have to change the algorithm, you're very likely to discover your CPU is not good enough anymore, and have to change it. FPGA's can also become useless if the change is too drastic, but I'm pretty inclined to believe it's harder to happen.

I think we should've got things straight by now already. I'll try to write down what I think.

I think all the options currently available to protect your wallet are just plain bad. Let's go through each one by one:

1 - Solution: Encrypt your wallet.dat.

Problem: When you decrypt it to use it there's always a breach. You have to trust that your computer was properly configured, and trust that it's not compromised at system level (something I think is pretty common on Windows).

In short, this solution has the problems of being hard to achieve (there's no handy program that does all that for you yet, afaik), being Linux-only (personal opinion of mine; one could argue), and, sum it all yourself, it's just terrible for non-geeks.

2 - Solution: Encrypt your wallet.dat under Linux.

Problem: You have to use Linux. If you're a Linux user that's fine, but if you're not, that solves nothing. Not to mention, if you don't use a pendrive of sorts, your wallet.dat is tied to a particular computer. If you travel, you either take it along or connect through SSH to make transactions. Not very practical.

3 - Solution: Encrypt your wallet.dat, put it on a data traveller and decrypt it using Linux when you need it.

Problem: ... none, if you're a Linux user. But you can't use it when you're away from your Linux laptop.

4 - Solution: Encrypt your wallet.dat and put it inside a bootable medium such as a pendrive, CD, or DVD.

Problem: None again, unless you're stuck with some public computer that's configured not to boot from media it's not originally meant to. This is very common in workplaces, schools, etc. Plus, you have to reboot your computer just to make transactions. You can use this just for your big-money account, but it's still a bit unpractical, especially for non-geek users.

5 - Solution: Place your (hopefully encrypted) wallet.dat on the cloud.

Problem: It sounds like going back to bank days where you have to trust someone to send and receive money. I, for one, think this is totally not Bitcoin-style.

6 - Solution: Encrypt your wallet.dat and put it inside a small, cheap device that stands for itself, requires zero-configuration and can be used from any computer that can at least open up a USB mass storage device and run an executable, and, most importantly, do this in total safety, because the password (which might as well be your fingerprint) is entered on a dedicated device you fully trust. Frankly, I feel safer doing this than doing internet banking! It's perfect!!

I think I've gotta be a die-hard advocate of this hardware wallet project.

There's a catch to this USB Wallet thing, though. If these USB Wallets become popular like I strongly believe they should become, it would be a shame if they couldn't be upgraded. If something real bad happens to the Bitcoin network, like someone entirely or partially craking the transaction signature system (I know it's VERY unlikely, but hey, it can happen, and we're not dealing with private e-mails anymore, we're dealing with damn money from lots of people, so I'm assuming the Bitcoin was designed in some way that can be upgraded... right? Please tell me I'm right..!), people would be so scared about it that making them buy new hardware would just push them more away from the market, which is really bad for the people who stay in.

So the USB Wallets should be easily expansible to support changes in the Bitcoin cryptosystem. FPGA's, I think, are generally better suited for that than a microprocessor like Arduino/Atmel's AVR (wish I'm not sure can even handle signing a transaction in, like, less than a minute; I mean, many of them are effing 8-bits and extremely underclocked, is that really enough?), or even some powerful ARM processor.

I think an FPGA is something really worth having in a USB Wallet, but that's something we can all discuss, try out, etc.

All in all, an IRC channel would be very welcome, wouldn't it? Any suggestions where we can set our HQ?

Where the hell is #anonops hosted now, after the RyKiddie incident? Can't find the server anywhere. irc.anonops.ru / irc.anonops.net are compromised, aren't they?

Hello, fellow coin owners.

I'm very new into this Bitcoins thingy (in fact, I heard about it yesterday; shameful!) and have been reading some discussions regarding wallet security, especially on Windows, and an idea occurred me. I'd like to know what you think.

Encrypting your wallets is the default way to protect them, but as some people pointed out, once you enter the password so that the Bitcoin client can get it, malware can also always get in unless you use Linux and have some other mechanism to ensure that only the real Bitcoin client can access the encrypted file. I'm pretty sure this is even harder on Windows (if not impossible, considering how usual it is for privilege escalation exploits to appear on this OS; correct me if I'm outdated).

So I thought people serious about their wallets' security wouldn't bother buying some (pretty cheap) specialized hardware.

The beasty would be a small, very cheap processor running a special Bitcoin client aided by an FPGA to do the public key mathematics (doing this using a processor would probably be less cheap; not sure). It would have an USB port used to connect it to a computer.

Two devices would flow through this USB port: an API for controlling the Bitcoin client and a read-only USB mass storage containing an app used as a front-end to this API. So you would put your USB Wallet inside your actual wallet because you dawg that's so amazing, and when you wanted to make transactions you would just plug the USB Wallet on a computer, run the front-end app, tell who you wanted to send money and enter the password on the USB Wallet itself (avoids any kind of logging).

This would allow you to use your wallet even on shared Windows computers infested with viruses.

The USB Wallet would be fully "open hardware" (you could build it home), obviously. There are a bunch of open crypto cores for FPGA's at http://opencores.org/projects. Dunno if they're enough to implement the Bitcoin client.

I would estimate the USB Wallet would cost less than $50, but sure we'd have to research more. I just want to hear your opinion first. What do you think?