Maybe Bitcoin Miners Can Help Pay For Pirated Games!

This past few weeks a lot of reports suggests that a pirate release of game Watch Dogs contained a Bitcoin Miner. While no one wants their machine infected with unwanted software, could and authorized installation of a bitcoin miner on users' machines generate enough revenue for a developer to give his game away for free?

While it's no secret that some pirate games releases contain malware, during the past few days a more unusual story has been doing the rounds. According to a GameCrastinate report, this week thousands of BitTorrent users inadvertently became infected with Bitcoin-mining malware.

The problem apparently stemmed back to a leaked PC version of the much-anticipated game Watch Dogs from Ubisoft Montreal. While there was never any suggestion that the company had anything to do with it, the assumption has been that whoever leaked the game thought they could make a few dollars by installing the trojan on pirates' machines.

While there appears to be very little hard proof that the trojan ever existed or indeed spread on the suggested scale, the idea that tens or even hundreds of thousands of computers could be hijacked to generate mountains of dollars for a third-party gained a lot of traction in the press.

The idea of a sneaky trojan install is likely to annoy just about everyone, but what if a similar process could be put to a more creative and authorize use? What if a developer allowed his game to be shared online for free but in return installed a Bitcoin miner on downloaders' machines to generate revenue to pay for the software? That question was emailed to TorentFreak this week and while we had our doubts over the idea's viability, it could be pretty cool if it somehow came to pass. We promised to find out whether this was a crazy idea or a flash of genius.

Last year, Ars Technica bought a dedicated miner for $274 capable of magically churning out around 20$ in bitcoin every day. Sure it gobbled up %11 a year in electricity, but as a financial prospect it was a pretty safe bet. Gamers tend not to own dedicated mining hardware, but people playing game like Watch Dogs more often than not will have rather juicy graphics cards on board which could be coaxed into a bit of mining. Question is, would they be up to the task?

Roger Ver, an angel investor in several Bitcoin startups including Blockchain.info, BitcoinStore and BitPay, has been referred to in the press as the Bitcoin Jesus. In his opininon, could the "Watch Dog hackers" who sparked this story make much money with their illegal trojan?

"It depends a lot on the machines hardware, but to the hacker it is all profit since he doesn't have to pay for any of the hardware or electricity costs" Said Ver.

So with free money for the hackers established, we come back to the key question: could a Bitcoin miner installed with the permission of the downloader generate enough fractions of a single bitcoin on a single machine to keep the developer happy, in Watch Dogs' case, to the tune of around $60? Ver was quick to disappoint.

"This isn't viable any longer," said Ver. "There are so many people mining bitcoins using specialized ASIC hardware that  home computer isn't very effective any more." So the idea of mining bitcoin in order to generate revenue from people who can't or won't pay for their games is a no-go.

Source: torrentfreak.com

Can Bitcoin Stop Game Piracy?

Could Bitcoin Make Free2Play Games Obsolete?

The much anticipated game Watch Dogs was released yesterday and according to some report the pirated version that showed up on various illegal torrent websites contained a little extra added by the person who pirated it in the first place: a Bitcoin miner.

Piracy has long been the bane of the games industry - but one enterprising pirate may just have figured out how developers could make money from piracy, by using Bitcoin. And could this have implications for how legitimate game developers make money?

The way Bitcoin (and other so-called crypto-currencies) work is clever: essentially, your computer will over time slowly generate Bitcoins for you by 'mining' them - in other words, putting your processor to work by solving complex maths problems. The more computing power you have, to faster you can mine - and the richer you can get.

So what the pirate (allegedly) did was package in a secret bitcoin miner that had been programmed to send the virtual coins to his or her Bitcoin wallet - so when you play Watch Dogs, your computer is secretly making money for the pirate.

Whilst this obviously isn't good for Ubisoft, who put in the hard work making the game, you have to admit that it is very clever. And it is also funny to see people who have downloaded the dodgy torrent getting indignant at how the game that they pirated, giving no money to the developers, isn't quite as it seems.

This ruse though raises a bigger question: has it shown a new way for developers to monetise their games? With all of the talk in gaming communities about how much they hate "free to play" games (where micro-transactions are used for in-game items instead of paying upfront), could Bitcoin mining provide a unique solution?

What if instead of paying £50 for Watch Dogs up front, or £2 for Angry Birds (or whatever), you were able to download the games for free on to your device, with the understanding that it would use your computer (or console) to mine Bitcoins for the developers? This perhaps isn't as crazy as it sounds. When the PS3 first launched, Sony made a big deal about how the console could be used for Folding@Home - a medical research app that used connected consoles to process shedloads of raw research data whilst the PS3 was in standby mode. Essentially exactly what I'm proposing - but for altruistic reasons. There is only one minor flaw in the plan though. People will have to start taking Bitcoin seriously.

Source: techdigest.tv