The Bitles: new BTC videogame

[maokoto]

It is always good to have some alternative to traditional faucets, to renew the scene a bit. Thanks !

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[Lionel]

Well this 17 level is killer for me. I dont know what else to try did anyone finish that one? Little help hm hm tnx in advance

We'll only help you when you are totally tired and desperate

For now.. keep up the good mind work
That is exactly what puzzles are meant to be

[Lionel]

Important updates. Versions 1.3 and 1.4 are out

1.3 What’s new
- Fixed withdrawal process issue

1.4 What's new
- Added menu button in the credits scene

Please if you have an old version, update to the latest one or at least the 1.3 otherwise you won’t be able to withdraw your earnings!
After you uninstall and reinstall the game, all your earnings will still be there, so don’t you worry

[Lionel]

Game attacked by Russian thieves

These days you have been experiencing withdrawal issues because we've had to deal with an attack successfully performed by some Russian hacker(s) who stole money from us.

Due to this, we have temporarily blocked the withdrawals but we will be sending them manually in the next days. So you will have your coins!

The good guy in question has been sending automated queries to the game server faking real player behavior, and he easily got 0.3 BTC in 2 days.
Congratulations, dear hacker, you deserve our gift because we appreciate skilled coders like you.

We had only 0.3 BTC in the account because we expected something like this.
Soon we will load the wallet again and we'll reactivate the automatic withdrawals, in the hope nothing malicious happens again.

Bad news: the reward per puzzle became 1000 satoshi for the time being as a safety measure.
Sorry but this is necessary when jokers like that are hanging around to tease us.

We have only spent a lot of time and money on this game so far, no revenue. And now we also have to deal with hackers.
Awesome!

P.S.
If some white-hat hacker is willing to give us hints to improve this situation, we will appreciate and we will give all the info we have gathered about this episode.

[Qvery]

Game attacked by Russian thieves

These days you have been experiencing withdrawal issues because we've had to deal with an attack successfully performed by some Russian hacker(s) who stole money from us.

Due to this, we have temporarily blocked the withdrawals but we will be sending them manually in the next days. So you will have your coins!

The good guy in question has been sending automated queries to the game server faking real player behavior, and he easily got 0.3 BTC in 2 days.
Congratulations, dear hacker, you deserve our gift because we appreciate skilled coders like you.

We had only 0.3 BTC in the account because we expected something like this.
Soon we will load the wallet again and we'll reactivate the automatic withdrawals, in the hope nothing malicious happens again.

Bad news: the reward per puzzle became 1000 satoshi for the time being as a safety measure.
Sorry but this is necessary when jokers like that are hanging around to tease us.

We have only spent a lot of time and money on this game so far, no revenue. And now we also have to deal with hackers.
Awesome!

P.S.
If some white-hat hacker is willing to give us hints to improve this situation, we will appreciate and we will give all the info we have gathered about this episode.

Oh, those hackers

[Lionel]

@Qvery
Yes, and they are still trying , we see it from our logs.

Update: Minimum BTC withdrawal now is 0.0002000 BTC

But:
- for now you will receive the coins within 24 hours after you have requested the withdrawals. Once we are safe and we have finished our tests, the time you have to wait to actually receive your coins will be less!
- Reward per puzzle now is set to 200 satoshi, BUT the daily reward is the same as before

Roughly, you will reach the minimum balance to withdraw in 15 to 25 days, depends on how much we earn from ads, on how much the players click and/or install advertised apps, etc. , in short words it depends on ads performance.

That's all for now dear gamers, we'll keep you updated.

[Lionel]

Today's BTC rewards were a little higher
Ads are performing slightly better than before

Tip: to get higher earnings on mobile, sometimes install the games advertised in the video ads if you like them.
To get higher earnings on the desktop version, just click on the ads banner if you are interested in the advertised games

[Lionel]

Update: Windows 32-bit version is out


Windows (64-bit) http://thebitles.com/download-and-play/The.Bitles.Windows.64bit.v1.4.zip

Windows (32-bit) http://thebitles.com/download-and-play/The.Bitles.Windows.32bit.v1.4.zip

[mihi]

P.S.
If some white-hat hacker is willing to give us hints to improve this situation, we will appreciate and we will give all the info we have gathered about this episode.

This comment attracted my curiosity and I had a quick look at your game (my Game GUID is 1A2C710F-B024-4E07-A98C-75269F3C786D and I'm not interested in your Bitcoins, so feel free to block that user if you want to ).

Games like these are hard (or even impossible) to make hacker-proof (if you have solved all levels once, you can probably quickly solve them again; so can a computer), but you can at least make it a lot harder than currently (if you wireshark the traffic of completing 2 levels you basically know how to complete all 40 without requiring any reversing of the game code at all...).

A few hints, sorted by effectiveness (top ones are easy to implement and mildly effective, bottom ones harder to implement but more effective):

• Use HTTPS, if your ISP provides it. This one is quite easy to get (certificates are damn cheap or even free in case of LetsEncrypt) and an attacker will at least have to mess with a proxy to be able to still sniff the traffic. I don't know if Unity supports certificate pinning, but if it does, it gets even harder to bypass.
• Validate your HTTP headers (like User-Agent). This won't stop any determined skilled attacker, but may provide enough hassles to let a typical script kiddie give up, as request cannot be easily replayed in a browser.
  
• Add some dynamic authentication into your game. For example, take the game GUID together with the game data, add some long constant string (hard coded in the game) and build a SHA hash of them and add to the saveGameData request. Don't forget to verify it on server side. This is not infallible, but it will at least prevent replaying (if you have solved all levels once, you cannot replay the requests from another computer and/or with another game ID to instantly solve all levels too). Note that the effectiveness of this method depends on how easy it is to reverse the code of your program (no experience with Unity here, but I guess there are obfuscators for Unity too that make it harder).
  
• Add some proof of work. Currently the game data just contains 1: true, 2: true, etc. Replace the true by a string depending on gameplay (e. g. a matrix where you code where the player placed an arrow or a bomb or anything) and verify the strings server side (just hard-code the correct solution(s) on the server). That prevents an attacker who has reversed the code (see point above) to instantly solve all levels, but won't help against an attacker who has already solved all levels at least once.
  
• As I did not get to the payout process, I cannot say if you already do it, but consider including a captcha in the payout process (I'd also include one when initially setting up an account, but it depends on acceptance by the users). That way, even if a skilled attacker is able to complete hundreds of games automatically, he will still have to enter many Captchas to be able to pay out (assuming he can get 0.001 BTC per game easily, it would still require 300 Capchas to get 0.3 BTC paid out).
  
• Probably most effective: Add some rate limiting. Each IP will host probably less than 100 unique players on any given day (if your geoip provider provides information whether an IP is shared by multiple parties like on some mobile networks, use that to adjust these measures). Each level takes some time to play through (for watching the intro, watching the animation of the level, and watching the ad), so measure this time, subtract a few seconds for safety and validate the achievements against the elapsed time (i. e. if a user jumps from 2 solved levels to 40 solved levels in less than a minute, he must be cheating and probably should be blocked). Also, limit the number of possible payouts per IP per day (lower than the number of unique players per IP).
  

Hope this helps and good luck,


mihi

[Lionel]

@mihi Very kind of you, Thanks so much for your help. we have already implemented some of them

Guys if you want serious revenue as daily prizes, you should:

1 - Sometimes click on the ads
2 - Sometimes install the apps advertised in the videos

[Lionel]

Daily earnings are good these days, as i promised

This can continue or be even better, if you watch the video advertisements inside the game and sometimes
install and execute the apps/games advertised in the video ads

We get much more earnings if you do this and we will pay you much better the day after.
So, when you see a video ad, at some point a button will appear saying "Play this game" or "Play for free" etc..
Like this example:



Push that button to install the app then open it.
That's all

P.s. i know it's not 100% correct, do it only if you really like the game you see in the advertisement, so that it's more "honest"

[sabotag3x]

looks really funny started the download and will post feedback soon

got this error:

You need 64-bit version of the operating system, i think you were running it on 32-bit Windows, right?

It just crashes when trying to click on "Puzzle" Win 7 64-bit

What graphics card  do you have?

Running now on integrated intel graphics

Sorry, the game requires a gaming computer with a dedicated and reasonably recent DirectX/OpenGL GPU , with at least 1GB video RAM.
You better try the Android version or wait for iPhone/iPad app to be ready.

Well, I have the same graphic card will pass..

OP.. if you need translation to portuguese(portugal-brazil) pm me

[Bitcoinsummoner]

Never heard this game but i would like to try this game and i hope i will never made any problem in installation .i will feed back after playing it..

[svirby]

Hey what are the rewards in the game now?

[correosdelbosque]

Very nice game. Congratulations. I no have any issue at all I have a pc cpu windows ultimatum 32bits Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3330 CPU @ 3.00GHz 4  core Core Speed 1596.2 MHz. Graphics card integrated. The game works very good