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People Have Spent Over $1M Buying Virtual Cats on the Ethereum Blockchain (techcrunch.com)
Launched a few days ago, CryptoKitties is essentially like an digital version of Pokemon cards but based on the Ethereum blockchain. And like most viral sensations that catch on in the tech world, it's blowing up fast. From a report, shared by an anonymous reader: Built by Vancouver and San Francisco-based design studio AxiomZen, the game is the latest fad in the world of cryptocurrency and probably soon tech in general. People are spending a crazy amount of real money on the game. So far about $1.3M has been transacted, with multiple kittens selling for ~50 ETH (around $23,000) and the "genesis" kitten being sold for a record ~246 ETH (around $113,000). This third party site tracks the largest purchases made to date on the game. And like any good viral sensation prices are rising and fluctuating fast. Right now it will cost you about .03 ETH, or $12 to buy the least expensive kitten in the game. So now we have people using Ether, an asset with arguably little tangible utility -- to purchase an asset with unarguably zero tangible utility. Welcome to the internet in 2017.
"A fool and their money" "One born every minute"
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
Puppies
how has nobody else thought of this
Quick! Someone go out and register etherpets.com and we can have a poster child for the cryptocurrency bubble!
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
If you are rich off hoarding rather than providing a product or service then you are making the world worse. You are a parasite.
Hoarding oil, hoarding gold, hoarding real estate, how does artificial scarcity improve the world?
"Wire 10 bitcoin to this Russian account or we delete Fluffy forever!"
They could have called them tulips instead of kittens, that would have been the story of the year.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The context seems to be trying to use "utility" in the economic sense but that concept is entirely intangible by definition. As in, on a scale of 1 to 10 how much utility did you get from eating a candy bar vs eating an apple. It was a fad measurement in economics for a while but is largely relegated to the curiosity bin since for all practical purposes its impossible to properly quantify.
Nobody in their right mind spends $23,000 on a picture of a cat. The average joe who sells cat jpegs might get the price up to $20 if they're really lucky. The sellers and developers are being paid for something else.
... held natural selection at bay for far too long.
Right now it will cost you about .03 ETH, or $12 to buy the least expensive kitten in the game
Whenever you read a story about cryptocurrency, no matter how timely, know that the prices you read are always going to be out of date by the time you read. The cheapest cats right now are going for 0.06-0.07 ETH.
My son and I watched this last night and it was possible to get cats for 0.03 and below, but they were snatched up immediately. Now you don't even see them for that price.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Sounds like drug dealers laundering their proceeds.
Wealthy people are buying digital blockchain cat pictures. A sitting US senator, Chuck Grassley (R-Bumfuck, Iowa) said this yesterday on television:
Get that? He thinks people who aren't millionaires just spend all their money on booze or women or movies.
I'm pretty sure we have ample evidence to start setting up the guillotines. We don't have to kill all the rich people and the government officials who service them, I'm thinking the rest might get the message.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It might be interesting as a social phenomena, but it isn't much different than getting all excited about dropping a bunch of in-game currency on a set of ebony armor in Skyrim. Weren't people selling their shorts on the housing market right before the bubble? Speculation built on speculation...
Surely some kind disinterest Mod could tell me where to "invest" all my monies in this river of wealth?
WHORES
...to the term "LOLCats".
I can haz bubble?
Clearly crypto coins, and now crypto cats are the wave of the future and will displace real money/cats in the future. Animal control is run by the government and can be used to STEAL your hard earned real cat. A crypto cat is clearly better in every way*.
*The ability to pet your crypto cat will come some day in the future.
Frankly, I don't see the difference between buying virtual cats on the blockchain and buying money on the blockchain. Either way, you're buying a unique artifact recorded on the blockchain whose value is entirely determined by demand and the coherence and continuence of this particular blockchain.
Once you lock it to a blockchain, what's the difference between a dollar and a cat, anyway? They're both bits of crypto-secured information.
Someone just spent 23K for a virtual cat! Clearly people are willing to pay big money for virtual cats! I gotta get in on this craze! My retirement account depends on it!
My prediction was that the Second Dotcom Bubble was fueled by phone-based apps, cheap cloud computing, the occasional successful IPO and social media hyping everything instead of CNBC. Nope, it's going to be this. I was wrong...we're going to see a lot of individual "investors" hurt by this, or at least greatly underwhelmed.
The time to get into mining or trading cryptocurrency was years ago. Now it's just a gold rush and even established exchanges are looking into offering futures. I'm a little pissed that I didn't have the foresight to fire up my own machines and do this back when Bitcoin was $1, but trying to get into it now is just trying to time the market and get out before the other suckers realize what's going on.
What's interesting is how fast things took off...I'm assuming that's because of social media being there to fan the flames. Cryptocurrency pushes all the right buttons with people...it's a little bit of a forbidden art because of what it's associated with, the libertarian don't-trust-the-government people love it, and everyone loves a get rich quick scheme. But when it's a matter of going to your broker and clicking a button, it's just another casino-style investment and not really backed by anything more than traditional currency is.
Why Kevin O'Leary doesn't spend $2.50 on a cup of coffee.
Yet here are, reading a story about people spending their real money on a fake currency to buy fake cats. To quote O'Leary:
"The truth is, there is a lot of crap you don't need."
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Excellent! We are in a bubble! Hopefully with this and Trump's tax plan, property values will correct in California to a more reasonable point!
They fritter it away on fripperies like avocado toast and virtual cats.
In my day we had dry toast, possibly topped with stray cat meat. And we saved up our pennies in piggy bank until we had the $499 we needed to buy a house!
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
At least with tulips you can get a half-dozen good blooms over 6 years...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
With other games' microtransactions you have a 0% chance of getting the value back. Is it really that stupid comparatively? (btw the answer is yes for the Genesis kitty)
My cryptocurrency is all in digital tulips. It is going to be THE next big thing. I'll be richer than those twins any day now.
I get it. I'm old. I'm still listening to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I occasionally text with my fancy phone and use the GPS and that's about it. I'd sooner put a coral snake in my bathtub than an Amazon Echo in my kitchen. I fully accept that the glory and wonder of the brave new internet connected world is passing me by, but at least I can usually claim that I understand what is going on, even as I see no use for it. But in this case, having read TFS and the TFA, I have no idea what anyone is talking about. $113k for a virtual playing card? WTF?
Creimer affiliate spam. Because mining without an asic is a smart move. Lol.
It is if you're mining an asic-resistant currency, e.g. vertcoin which changes dynamically to foil new asic designs.
Clearly these prices are seriously over-inflated, and likely caused by bots buying all of the virtual kittens as soon as they are available. Call your Senator, get them working on it before it's too late.
So, this is just like the Second Life real estate bubble? People are planning on making a fortune investing in something with a marginal cost of close to zero for an infinite number of copies? Or to people really get six figures worth of satisfaction from virtual felines?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Do they have any rare Pepes?
I think they only say "an digital" in the UK.
I'm adding this to my list of happenings with society and technology that prove the unibomber was correct in his assessment of humans + technology.
“The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.”
The unibomber was f'ing murderous, but he was also pretty darn smart on seeing this coming.
Good pussy is expensive.
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Am I the only one a bit creeped out by the term "crypto kitty"?
And stay there.
...I drive 5+ times a week and do not intend to sell it. According to your definition I am a hoarder.