For example, let’s say I want to sell x$ illegal goods. I just tell the buyer to bid up my 1 million virtual cat and I’ll transfer the goods to you. The transaction goes unnoticed. What’s even better, the buyer can sell the cat at a lost and recover some Cash.
What’s more the money launderers buy and sell the virtual pets so as so mix up their money in the market.
There was a huge art deal recently. You have to wonder how much of the money laundering factored into the purchase of Salvator mundi.
It goes even further. Participants in the market know that money laundering is taking place and rely on it for profit. They bid up the virtual goods.
Of course, there is also a pyramid scheme / hot potato at play as well. Last one holding the bag loses.
And yeah, there are the naive folks whose out there with their money in not a understanding what’s really going on.
Valve profits from this quite nicely, and second life. Lots of these games with virtual goods.
There's plenty of people out there with stockpiles of ethereum that they mined early on, or bought during the pre-sale in 2014. For them, it's just virtual tokens. It's not like they're using any hard-earned cash from the real world to buy virtual kitties.
I disagree with the policy, but that’s how it works. Using a mixer makes it more difficult to explain the source of the money, it makes things worse not better.
There's also an anchor effect from loss aversion. If I bought a crypto-cat for 1 Ether, and then Ether price increase by 300%, I might refuse to sell the crypto-cat for less than 1 Ether, even though there's no intrinsic reason for my cat to appreciate at the same rate as the base currency.
any marginally successful one of those is going to rake in tens of millions of dollars via those transactions
the only difference here is the technology used is perfectly fungible
when that perfectly fungible technology powers the entire ecosystem, it isn't improbable that one third party application will catch on.
If people just stop playing, and the community dies, isn't that the same thing (in effect)?
And the prices (AFAIK) are also totally handled with smart contracts, so even if it's just you, you can still claim the price.
No one else is allowed to generate the supply.
When I was toying with Bitcoin when it was $0.05, a hard disk crash lost me some. How would you recover it?
If I still had ether, this would be a pretty strong sell signal.
People will be more likely to invest real time and money into virtual goods/currency/reputation if they can’t be confiscated by a corporation for arbitrary reasons. The idea will really take off once virtual goods are “portable” between games. At that point you don’t really have disparate “games” but rather a... Metaverse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaverse)
(I don’t imagine all virtual goods will be universally portable. You might be able to bring your CryptoKitties into Second Life but not World of Warcraft, for example...)
With the blockchain, it seems we finally have a way of assigning scarcity to digital assets. The only problem would be the social value of such goods, but things like CryptoKitties make it clear that this would hardly be a problem. People seem to love collecting rare things, even if the rareness is strictly algorithmic.
I think it would feel great to receive a communication signed by a particularly rare or interesting e-stamp!
The common name for a descending clock auctions? "Dutch Auction" or "Tulip Auction". The irony is not lost on us...
I can assure you that we're as surprised as anyone at the speed that this thing has grown!
Rumor is a lot of ICO's do something similar in that they buy their own coin's with another coin like bitcoin which then goes right back into your wallet so you can buy more with it creating the illusion of tons of demand when you are really just cycling the same money through.
If price was based on tech, ETH would be $10k+ and BTC would be a dying relic.
The developers levy a 3.75% fee on every cat purchase. Doesn't really seem like a decentralized app in that regard.
If so, this might be the first time I've seen something actually kind-of-useful implemented via smart contracts.
(Well, to the extent that virtual cats are useful...)
[1]https://etherscan.io/address/0xb1690c08e213a35ed9bab7b318de1...
[2]https://etherscan.io/address/0x06012c8cf97bead5deae237070f95...
Brilliant :D Thanks for sharing this.
https://www.cryptokitties.co/terms-of-use
"A. You acknowledge and agree that we (or, as applicable, our licensors) own all legal right, title and interest in and to all elements of the App, and all intellectual property rights therein. The visual interfaces, graphics, design, systems, methods, information, computer code, software, services, “look and feel”, organization, compilation of the content, code, data, and all other elements of the App (collectively, the “Axiom Materials”) are owned by Axiom Zen, and are protected by copyright, trade dress, patent, and trademark laws, international conventions, other relevant intellectual property and proprietary rights, and applicable laws."
Looks like this caused the pending transaction queue to increase from around 700 yesterday to over 9,000 now.
Total Value of Punks Sold 518.47 ETH ($241,413.99 USD) Average Sale Price 0.46 ETH ($213.83 USD) Estimated Market Cap 2,899.15 ETH ($1,349,933.50 USD)
