A quirky bitcoin (BTC)-themed Space Invaders clone is promising a bounty of 10,000 Satoshis (SATs), worth $7, to whoever can score 10,000 points. The only catch is that it might take you over an hour — unless you’re willing to move $726 million in BTC.
The game, called Mempool Space Invaders, was released by Stacker News user @jasonb this week. Like Space Invaders, you play as a ship moving left to right shooting “invaders” before they reach the bottom of the screen.
In this version, each surviving invader chips off a percentage of your shield until you’re dead. As for the crypto element, each invader represents a transaction on the blockchain’s mempoool that tallies towards your points.
The larger the invader, the more BTC you’ll score. To get the game’s bounty, you need to score 10,000 BTC. The game also tracks the number of SATs each transaction costs.
After recording one session where Protos scored 273 BTC in 94 seconds, we worked out that, at the same rate, it would take just under an hour of gameplay to reach 10,000 BTC.
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That said, scores are based on the real-time BTC mempool, so if lots of wealthy transactions take place while you’re playing, it will likely decrease the time needed to rack up 10,000 BTC.
Lend me $726M so I can make $7 playing BTC Space Invaders
The game’s author recognized that this can be gamed to the player’s advantage, and notes that you can score 10,000 BTC easily if you just send 10,000 BTC, worth a whopping $726 million, to yourself and wait for it to appear in the mempool space.
“Then blast it out of the water — er — space. Just make sure not to spend too much in fees or you’ll eat up all your winnings,” its creator noted. A lot of work for $7.
Bitcoin’s mempool is the collection of pending and unconfirmed BTC transactions that are stored within nodes.
The game also gives players an option to pay 1,000 SATs per death to keep going. If Protos died every 94 seconds, we’d have to pay roughly $27 to reach the bounty score.
As the creator says, this is “not a wise strategy as the continue button is more expensive than a normal lightning game.”
He added that he would like verifiable screenshots of the score to award points, and that if anyone is willing to go through the effort to doctor their screenshot for $7 worth of SATs, “you definitely deserve them.”
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