Christian: Before I start, it's probably a good idea to make sure you have a Lightning wallet downloaded because, at the end, I have some games we can play and actually get some Bitcoin through the games. So if you don't have a Lightning wallet installed, please do so. I recommend my company's wallet, Zebedee. So if you just type in Zebedee on my t-shirt into the Google Play or App Store, you should be able to download it. Today I'm going to talk about the history of Bitcoin in gaming. So I've been told that people here are somewhat familiar with Bitcoin. Is anybody here who's completely new to Bitcoin? Don't be shy. But everybody knows what it is, so I don't have to explain the basics. I thought I'd just give an interesting presentation on the history of Bitcoin in gaming, or the history of gaming with Bitcoin. Because, at the moment, blockchain in gaming is actually quite a buzzword. I went to a gaming conference just last week, and there's a blockchain track, but there's really no mention of Bitcoin. But it actually all started on Bitcoin with gaming, and I was there in 2013. I started to make Bitcoin games. I just want to give context. I think it's interesting so people know how it started, what went wrong, and what's getting better now with Zebedee and Lightning.

Christian: So before I start, I just want to go back way before even Bitcoin and games had money. Does anybody know what these cards are? Has anybody seen them before? No? Nobody seen them before?

Audience: Are these tarot cards?

Christian: No, no. These are called Hana Fuda, which is Japanese for flower cards. Originally in Japan, the first Western people to come to Japan were, I think, the Portuguese, and they basically brought card games to Japan, and people would basically play games for money. Games had money. Obviously, kids would play games without money, but for most people, they would make a game more interesting with some money. That's just what made sense. However, eventually, I think the Shogun, they actually banned it because obviously putting games in money is a bit too much. You have these issues with gambling, stuff like this, and the Japanese Shogun didn't ban it. So they actually banned it. And a company, a very old company, made these cards. And the point of these cards was that they didn't look like normal playing cards. They were a secret way to play games with money because people just looked them up. They're just flower cards. They're just interesting images. So that's an interesting little bit of a tidbit, because this actually has relevance to one of the biggest gaming companies nowadays, which is this game. Everybody knows this game. So this game is made by what company? Nintendo. So Nintendo made Super Mario, but when Nintendo started, the first game they made were flower cards. So Nintendo was originally a company to make these cards so people could play games for money without being, I suppose, beheaded.

Audience: Inaudible

Christian: Yes. The game itself is boring. I've played it with my wife a few times, so money definitely makes it more interesting, but the point is that games had money, and then we had digital games, right? So we had money in games, but we didn't. So obviously, Nintendo wanted to continue the concept of, well, you have a game and you get coins. But obviously, when they released Super Mario, you couldn't actually get money. How can you have money in a game? But yet, they could still just get fake coins. But this connection between money and games just seemed obvious. And then we also had Space Invaders, or insert 25 cents to play, so you could put money in a game, but the money wasn't in the game. So when games became digital, the link between games and money broke, just for a technological reason, right? We had cash, and then we had digital things, but we didn't have digital money yet. Skip forward a few decades, and we had money in games; some companies cropped up PayPal or in-app purchases, and Apple. We can put money in games, but it wasn't really done well; it wasn't like if we play cards or poker, we can just throw some coins at each other and pass it around. They couldn't really do that. Instead, you would buy some in-game coins for 2.99 or 4.99, and you couldn't do a tiny amount. You could only do whatever a credit card would allow you to do. If you wanted to get money out of the game... There are companies where you would have to basically play a game, earn some money, and then you would have to go through PayPal, but you'd have to wait until you earned a certain amount, and it would take ages to go through, and you'd need a bank account; it wasn't allowed in some countries, et cetera. And then we also had downloadable content. This is how money in games became a... I put it to you that this is not how money in games should work. Money in games should work like money, cash works, be peer-to-peer, and be easily tradable. So money wasn't programmable. Maybe they would have liked to do that, but the technology wasn't there. So this is from, is it Zoolander? There's a famous scene where they're told the files are on the computer. So they look inside the computer. The money's on the computer, but it's not really there. It's not really programmable. But then along comes Bitcoin.

Christian: I just say Bitcoin there because I have a friend who keeps calling it Bitcorn. So we've all got a friend like that. For the first time, money became programmable in games, so this is or was the first Bitcoin client. Was it 2010? Or the client came out where you can actually start to use it in applications.

Audience: So why did you do the RBTC? (referring to the on-screen image of 'r/btc' instead of 'r/bitcoin', different sub-reddits)

Christian: Oh, I didn't, r/bitcoin, sorry. Should I? I agree. This is what happens when you make a presentation on the train to Google while the Wi-Fi is going in and out. Magic internet money. This is the one that is loaded. Anyway, we finally had programmable money, and we had the initial Bitcoin games that came out. So I'm not sure people might remember this one, but I think Adam might know it. This is Satoshi's dice. This is a very simple dice game where you would send Bitcoin to an address to place a bet, and then it would roll a die, and if you won, you would get Bitcoin sent back. So this was the first prototype game. It also had a game; this was a Bitcoin faucet. I see this as a little bit of a game. It's just a way to programmatically, in an application, use Bitcoin as money. Was this Gavin Andresen's? I can't remember, but you get five bitcoins per visitor. I think it used to be more than that at some point. So this is not really a game, I suppose, but people were starting to figure out, Hey, we have programmable money now, so we can actually bring it into the digital world. Any others? I just wondered if anybody knows of any other original Bitcoin games.

Audience: I think there was a Pokégame in the initial client.

Christian: You might be right, actually.

Audience: It wasn't completed, but it did actually work. There is some HTML. It looks like something made by Easter. But there is a game.

Christian: I'm sure. Obviously, I think there were probably people who made some poker games and stuff like this, but these are probably the first ones that were, I guess, well played. And then we had some other Bitcoin games. So I'm going to plug myself. A lot of these games are my games, because I'm somewhat known for... I started to make Bitcoin games in 2013. And one of the first people to make games on mobile, and actual games that you could download and play. So here are a few. We had SaruTobi and Takara; I'll get into them in a bit. There was another game I made. There's also a Minecraft server called BitQuest. This is 2013, 14, and 15. People started to actually make real games. There were a lot of restrictions at the time, especially since gaming was really on mobile then and also on certain Steam games and stuff like that. So it wasn't really allowed, but we had ways to do it, and I think that's why Minecraft was somewhat open so people could do it. So we started to have games that were coming out.

Christian: I'll talk about the game that really started my whole career. This was a game I made in 2013. I just heard about Bitcoin, went down the rabbit hole, and at the time I was just making an indie game, and I thought, Okay, I've got Bitcoin; it'll be great in my game. I can let people buy things for Bitcoin, so they can buy power-ups for Bitcoin. I submitted it to Apple, and they basically said, 'No, you have to use in-app purchases'. You can't just use Bitcoin, so they had that clear rule. I think I was listening to an Andreas podcast, and he was saying, Do your hobby with Bitcoin; how can you contribute to Bitcoin? So I just really wanted to shoehorn Bitcoin into this game. So I did something stupid, which was that instead of the game getting Bitcoin from the player, the game would give the player Bitcoin. I had no idea how I would fund it. So I just made the mechanism that if you download this game, the game will give you Bitcoin, and I went on Reddit. I posted a QR code and said, Send Bitcoin to this address. All the bitcoin you send to this address will be sent to players. And at the time, this had actually blown up because, at the time, people were trying to get everybody to know about Bitcoin, but there were no applications. So finally, people could say to their friends and family, Download this game; you can just get Bitcoin; it's easy; and it really showcased how to use it. So people actually sent a lot of bitcoin to that address, and a shrewd me would have run away with the money a long time ago. But I didn't; I stuck with it. So here are some images you would play. And in the first version, it would just randomly throw a hundred bits at you, which was very crude. This is when bits was the cool term to use before we say SATs. And here's a screen of how it worked. There was a pot. I formed a partnership with Zappo. I'm not sure they're around anymore. But they were an early exchange, and they had this cool way: you could enter your Bitcoin address if you wanted to, but if you didn't have a Bitcoin wallet, a user could download the game, enter their email address, and whenever they got Bitcoin, they got an email from Zappos saying, Sign up to get your Bitcoin. So it's an easy way to onboard it. A funny story about this around the time, there was a hack by Bitstamp. An exchange got hacked. And the hacker actually sent some of the bitcoin he hacked to the game to be distributed to players. So there's a Coindesk article about how the game involved Robin Hood money laundering. I got in touch with them, and I offered to give; it wasn't that much, just a few thousand dollars. But I wanted to say, Hey, I'll give you the money back, don't worry about it. But I thought it's a nice little story about how I was a money launderer for a short time—a few thousand dollars. Luckily, maybe the hacker knew not to put too much so that I wouldn't get in trouble. This was a popular game at the time.

Christian: I then went on to make this game. The reason I talk about my games is that there weren't actually that many games around at the time. I was quite lucky. I often say that if you can't be talented, be early. So I was early. So I made a bunch of semi-OK games and got a lot of market share. This was a game I made for Takara. Takara is Japanese for treasure. I was in Japan at the time. I was at a Bitcoin meetup at the Austrian embassy. And what do you do when you get a little bit drunk and you think you see coins on the floor, but they're actually bottle caps? I got that, and I thought, OK, well, it's a bottle cap. But wouldn't it be cool if I could just drop Bitcoin on the floor for people to pick up? So I actually came up with this idea: OK, I'll make a geocaching app. I think it's 2015, maybe, where people can drop Bitcoin anywhere around the world. And that's what people did. So we can see that this is an image of Tokyo, and some amount of Bitcoin people dropped. So I think we can probably see here how much they dropped. Yes, 2,000 bits, 0.1 point. So people were dropping Bitcoin all around the world, and people would collect it. Quite a few businesses picked this up; they realized we could drop Bitcoin in our restaurant or cafe, and this was secured because, if anybody knows anything about geocaching games, it's quite easy to fake your location. So this is actually secured. When you drop Bitcoin, you would have to enter a location-based question. So if I drop Bitcoin here, it would be, What's the Wi-Fi password of this place? So someone would have to come here and type in the Wi-Fi password. So restaurants were doing this. They would drop Bitcoin, and then they'd say to ask the staff for the code. But people would go there and get the code. So it was really, really quite fun. And also, some people might notice there's something other than Bitcoin there, which I'll get into a little bit. But that was another game I did, and it became the next thing in Bitcoin gaming.

Christian: We had these mobile games that came out. We had Minecraft servers. And it was starting to take off. There were quite a few companies that were starting to be funded and actually build their games on Bitcoin. And also, this is quite interesting: game tokens on Bitcoin. So I put the word NFTs. They weren't called NFTs at the time, but everybody knows what an NFT is nowadays, right? NFTs is a recent term, I think, coined by CryptoKitties. But before, people were the precursors to NFTs; people were actually minting or issuing tokens as game items and as collectibles on Bitcoin using a protocol called Counterparty. Has anybody heard of Counterparty?

Audience: Rare Pepe.

Christian: Okay. So, rare pepe. So, Counterparty originally was, I think, the original founders; they wanted to do, I guess, DeFi on Bitcoin. So it was really marketed more at issuing company stocks and all those shares. But the community said we're not interested in that. We're interested in doing rare Pepe's on it. But, for the time being, we actually started to play around with issuing game items. So this is a game called Spells of Genesis. And it's the first game ever to really use NFTs. And it's a Hearthstone-style game. So you'd have these cards, but the cards were provably rare because they were on the blockchain. And then, in my game, I let people bring the cards in. So this was the idea that you would have a game item from one game, but because it's on the blockchain, you could use it in another game. So this cross-game item is now known as the metaverse. This is where gaming on Bitcoin started to take off. I think there was an episode of Shark Tank America where a company got funded by Vinnie Lingham to make a counterparty game called Augment Earth. It was really starting to take off, and this was the future.

Audience: I just want to ask about this game and these cards. I don't know anything about RSO; I know it's based on cards. Mechanically, how are the cards used in the Spells of Genesis games, within an application itself, or in the game itself?

Christian: So interestingly, what Spells of Genesis did, what the company did—they actually made the game first. So they made the cards first, so the game was still being developed. So originally, the first use case of the tokens was in my game. So actually, because I saw they have a bunch of users who have bought these tokens and wanted to use them. So I just quickly put them into my game. But in their game, how it would work is that you would basically have a wallet, a counterparty wallet, which is basically a Bitcoin wallet. It even has the same address format. It would hold your bitcoin. It would also hold your tokens. And then you would link the wallet to the game. You would do something called message signing, where you would basically sign a message to prove you had an address. So the game would have an address, you would prove you own the address, and then the game could see what tokens were on that address. So if you had a Satoshi card, it would grant you access to a Satoshi card in that game. And if you didn't, obviously you couldn't do it. So that's how it works. So in a way, it was nice because you didn't actually have to send the token to the game; you kept it in your wallet, so it's scalable in that way, but it had issues, which I'll get into.

Audience Response: Can you put that back in because I've been trying to use my Sarutobi card?

Christian: Well, I'll probably get into what happened and why it stopped. So, I did have this at one point, and I plan to bring it back soon. We have something cool we're working on at Zebedee, which I can't talk about because it's all Hush Hush secret, but we do have an idea that there's a lot of things wrong with NFTs and there's a lot of ways you should and shouldn't do it, but... maybe I'll come back once that's public and give a talk on that, but at some point it will come back. But this is really early stuff. It reminds me of; I don't know if it's true, but I heard Blockbuster tried to make Netflix in 1999 or something, or very early on. It was; it just didn't work. The tech wasn't there, and there's so many things wrong. But now Netflix really works, right? And Blockbuster's gone. So I see this stuff; it's so early. It was cool, but it wasn't really the best way to do it. The tech wasn't there. It was a bit early. But hold on to that Sarutobi card, I suppose. Maybe it'll be useful.

Christian: So everything was great. We had Bitcoin games. People were tipping and dropping Bitcoin everywhere they were playing Minecraft. We had tokens and game items, and what could go wrong, right? Everything's great, and this happened with fee scaling. So probably a lot of people got into Bitcoin after the scaling debate. But Bitcoin had a civil war where people were building applications on it. But it didn't really scale. I don't want to get into the whole scaling debate, but loosely, to keep a blockchain decentralized, you have to have a limit on the amount of traffic you can handle. The whole thing about Bitcoin is that it should be reasonable for people to run their own node and reasonable for miners to mine. But if there's too much traffic on the Bitcoin blockchain, it centralizes that because it becomes too expensive to do so. Anyway, there was a big debate, and we had this term: small blockers and big blockers. And I've got a few images here. So this is when I guess I started to make my game, and fees were pretty much zero. And then once my game started to become popular, in order to send somebody a 10 cent tip, I had to pay $5 or £5, right? So my game mechanics broke, and people who were trading the counterparty assets would trade them on a DEX where you could basically sell the image really well. But then, once it became a few dollars to post a bid on the deck, it killed it because you would try to sell a rare Pepe that was worth $5, and it would cost $1 to list it, and then it might not get picked up. So it died in a way. I'm going to mention this guy.

Audience: You can use the remote to show

Christian: Oh, yes, I can. This guy—so who's this guy?

Audience: Luke Dash Jr.

Christian: Luke Dash Jr. So he was actually against people who were using the Bitcoin blockchain by, I guess, what is known as spam. So I did these small transactions, which weren't really Bitcoin. So Luke is a small blocker; I think he wants 300 kilobyte blocks at the time. But people like me were filling the blocks with basically data just for my game. But I also found it a bit hypocritical because, actually, no, sorry, I got this wrong. He wasn't putting it in the block, but he was putting Catholic verses in the Bitcoin, so maybe he was filling it up himself. And this is the OP_RETURN war. So OP_RETURN is a way you can add metadata to a Bitcoin transaction. Probably not what, not sure if that was the original use case, but it let you; it basically lets you build these protocols counterparty to issue NFTs; it's called OP_RETURN, and I think the Bitcoin developers made it smaller, the amount of data you could put in, but ultimately it was an attack on Bitcoin, right? In Bitcoin, the base layer shouldn't be for applications; it should be for Bitcoin, and then we can use layer 2s that didn't exist at the time to build your applications. So I actually started as a big blocker, so once my game started to suffer, I thought we needed to make the blocks bigger, and I was a big fan of Bitcoin Classic. But then I had a moment when I realized if my game, which wasn't, was popular in the Bitcoin world, but it wasn't popular compared to a real game. And so if my game can fill up some of the blocks, it's just stupid. Imagine if, at the time I think Flappy Bird was popular, something had millions of transactions. Imagine if that we just wouldn't work. So I quickly actually became, I guess, a small blocker or a pro layer 2 person. But this basically killed all my games. I didn't mind so much because I built all the games myself. I didn't have any staff to pay. So I just said, Oh well, it's what it is. It was a fun ride. But I did have colleagues who had started a company and were paying staff who were quite upset by it.

Christian: Luckily, my contemporaries at the time actually saw a solution, which was this guy. Yes. Well, maybe not. But this is what happened. So I was making games on Bitcoin, and a bunch of other people were making games for other companies, and then Bitcoin fees were too expensive. Run away; this new chain has zero fees. And I remember this being discussed; I can't remember who it was, but some famous Bitcoin person who he actually had played golf with Vitalik or something, and, oh, we're moving to Ethereum; the fees are low, and the fees will always be low.

Audience: Are you playing golf?

Christian: Oh, no, it may be with somebody from Consensys. All these conversations were happening. They were basically saying that it has zero fees, and Bitcoin has a few dollars. But if anybody knows now, that's not the case. And I think they tried to justify it that the culture in Ethereum was such that if the blocks ever got big, they would make the blocks bigger, which is not that simple, the way Ethereum works, because they actually have a scaling bottleneck before the block size. But also, because the blocks happen every 10 seconds, it would just be great. So, everybody but me, I think, ran away to Ethereum. And I said at the time that they were kicking the can down the road, right? You haven't solved anything. This restaurant's too busy, so let's go to a less popular restaurant. It's what they did. So this was me on lonely Bitcoin Island. And everybody was in Ethereum City. So we saw CryptoKitties, which broke Ethereum. It's one game. And we had some other ones, like Axie Infinity, which I think was fiddling on Ethereum, but now they've made their own chain. And it's a bit of a castle made of sand, I thought. but I was there, just, all by my lonesome. And I'm going to play Devil's Advocate a bit here. I said that people went over to Ethereum because the fees were lower. It's probably not entirely true. I think there were two other reasons. One is that if you wanted to make applications on Bitcoin, the community wasn't really behind you because they didn't want people making random applications on layer one. So there's a lot of, if you go on Reddit and say, Hey, I'm making this on Bitcoin, you get attacked. So I guess there was more of a nicer culture on Ethereum, where you could do whatever you wanted and there'd be no consequences. Another reason people think Ethereum is perhaps a smart contracting language is that you could actually do more. So Bitcoin NFTs were limited. You couldn't just write random smart contracts. But I think on Ethereum, people could write a smart contract to do an ICO and make lots of money. So that was also appealing as well. But I think the catalyst for it was probably the fees, because people were actually building stuff on Bitcoin to try and do these types of things. The counterparty was actually making an EVM to do smart contracts as well. But just the fees meant there's no point in doing it. So, just to play a little bit of devil's advocate, it wasn't entirely the thesis.

Audience: Fees were more the inbuilt tokenization; you mentioned ICO as well, and I feel maybe it was more that.

Christian: I know people who went to Ethereum, and it was the fees that were the catalyst. But definitely, the ERC20 took off on Ethereum because, on Counterparty, it was very to sell your token. There was no way to do it, right? If you issue a token, how do you sell it? You basically send money to an address, and the smart contract sends you the token. It runs itself as it were; the Ethereum blockchain is your server for you. With Counterparty, you could list it on a DEX, and people could buy it. There was a company called Tokenly that made a swap bot, which was a centralized server where, basically, you'd send them your tokens and people would send them Bitcoin, and then they would distribute it for you. But it wasn't as easy as just deploying a smart contract. We're going to make this thing, we promise. Send all your money here, and we'll give you this token. So I think that's another reason why it took off as well. That's why I'm being a good researcher here and playing the devil's advocate.

Christian: But I wasn't alone on the island. I saw in the far distance a little ship coming very far away with lightning on it. So around this time, gaming and Bitcoin died. But I thought on Ethereum, it's not really scalable either. So what's the solution here? I actually did a lot of work on research on some side chain stuff in the early days, trying to see what's the best way to do that. I even made Ethereum dApps just to try Ethereum out. I didn't want to criticize it before I tried it out. So I tried it out and made some dApps. I did the original Web3. I made a Web3 wallet when Web3 actually meant something. It had a specific protocol. Now it's more of a nebulous term. I won't get into it, but I saw some of the bottlenecks in Ethereum, which made me a little bit skeptical of it at the time, but then I heard about lightning network. This seemed like a good idea, so I just had to wait around for that. Anyway, now Bitcoin in gaming is possible. So Lightning Network came. I remember when it was first released, I tried it out, and it took me about an hour to actually buy a t-shirt because my channel and my payments wouldn't route, and so, to be honest, as a game developer, when it first came, it's okay; it's not really the silver bullet. It's not the silver bullet. I hoped for that's potential, but it was quite hard to use in a game because I don't get into how lightning works. But there's a lot of things you have to worry about, which I think I have a slide for. I have a slide about it in a little bit. But, anyway, now I'm alone on the island, but with lightning. So instead of Bitcoin, it's just me doing lightning, pretty much. And then Ethereum City turned into Blockchain City. So we had all these other chains cropping up in Engine and EOS and stuff like this. So pretty much the gaming community had left Bitcoin. And they weren't coming back because everybody was busy building on blockchain. So it was just me, which is good because it means that I could start a company and have very little competition. But then, we actually just started to see early lightning gaming. So people might know this one is probably the first lightning game, maybe called Satoshi's Place, which was, as you would, basically a public toilet wall; somebody described it as a public toilet wall. But you would basically pay to paint pixels, right? And so you could draw whatever you wanted to, but you'd have to pay a sat per pixel. And I think I remember at the Lightning Conference, they actually had it behind them on a panel, and somebody was drawing a giant penis as they were doing it. but it was cool. It just showed...

Audience: Sorry. When we were showing this in our first meet-up, which was about the history of lightning, and actually, it's an interesting fact, it's actually still on and still works. Inaudible

Christian: It runs from London, doesn't it? Lightning, well, when I spoke to Lightning Koala, I kept saying, Why is it so slow? And he said, It's running off a Raspberry Pi-type thing in his cupboard. Literally, that was how it was. It wasn't on a server. When it went down, I'd message him, and he said, Oh, and let me just open the cupboard, and I go, it's got overheated or something. But it was just showing how it's scalable now. We don't have to worry about spamming the blockchain; we don't have to worry about fees; we do have to worry about channels, but we can solve that, right? We'll make that a scalable one. And then also Lightning Koala teamed up with Andre Neves to make Koala Studios, and they brought out Lightning Chess, which was another Bitcoin game, which is quite cool. We have Satoshi's Games, who are a little bit controversial at the moment because they've moved to Solana. But, we can talk about that a bit later. But they actually started to make games as well. And Donner Labs was another one. I think they made a Minecraft server with Lightning, then they also made a first-person shooter-style game, Bitcoin Bounty Hunt, and also Thunder Games. So, Thunder Games, I think Jack comes to the meetups here now and then from Thunder Games. They're really cool. They actually accidentally got started at the Lightning Conference. We actually formed our company just before the Lightning Conference. So we had a table, and Jack, who I'd spoken to, just turned up and noticed the table next to our booth was empty, so he just set up shop and said I'm working on this game, and people found it quite popular, so after that, he said, Okay, I'm going to make this a proper company. so they're a good company to watch out for. But as early as gaming has started, people are starting to realize it's okay to do it on Lightning or on Bitcoin. And it's actually quite important that the community also encourage it. So before on Bitcoin, if you'd want to make a game, people would criticize you. You shouldn't be building on Bitcoin. It's not what Bitcoin is for. But Lightning, that culture of building what you want It's OK; it started to come back. So it was a lot more encouraging. But lightning is hard, right? So from a technical point of view, it's still quite hard to use, right? I don't know, show of hands, how many people run a lightning node here? Okay, probably the wrong meetup to ask out. But, anyway, what I mean is that if you want to just focus on making a game, a game developer doesn't want to have to learn how to maintain a Lightning node. So it's not a lot with building on-chain; the chain does everything for you a lot of the time. You don't; the chain, in a way, is your server. But with Lightning, you have to run it and manage it yourself. So with this concept of channels, if you want to accept Lightning payments, you have to make sure you have these channels set up, which basically just means the payments route correctly. And you have to; it's something that you have to do manually if you want it to work well. There's ways to do it automated.

Audience: To be fair, it's not as easy as it used to be, right? Everyone's got these apps. It's all built in. But I still totally agree with you. It's more manual.

Christian: This is when it first came out as well, right? It's the wallet you download; you'd have to open the channel in the wallet, where now the wallets will open a channel for you without to think about it, and there's various things. Also, another thing is actually regulation. This is more specific to game developers, so not the average user, but if you're a game developer—a proper game developer, let's just say Epic Games or something—and you want to use Bitcoin and Lightning, you have to worry about regulation. Can you just send your players money? What if somebody tries to use our game for money laundering? It adds friction for game developers to use Bitcoin and Lightning. So these things are why we still don't really see too many games coming on Lightning, I think.

Christian: Another important point is that crypto people can't make games. I've been in this space long enough, and I've made some terrible games. I've just seen block fighters, block wars, crypto, karate, all these games come out, and we have the technology now, but it's hard to use, and the people who use the technology don't know how to make games. That's why the first games that came out were made by Bitcoiners. And it showed. So we really needed game developers who know how to make games and don't know anything about Bitcoin to use Bitcoin. But because they don't know anything about Bitcoin, they wouldn't do it. So we had: the Bitcoin people couldn't make games, and the game developers couldn't use Bitcoin. So that was the friction that happened. But then along comes my company to solve it all. So this is Zebedee. This was co-founded by us three. That's Simon Cowell; he's our CEO. He was actually contacting me because he was working at Bitstamp at the time, and he just saw that Lightning Network was here. He said that working at an exchange, he saw how much liquidity of Bitcoin was out there, but there was nothing to really do with it, and he was into gaming. So he said, Well, who do I contact to make Bitcoin games? And again, I was the only person on the island. Not the only person, but you know. And he was actually an original player of Sarutobi in 2014-15. I actually have a support email from him where he's asking me, Hey, can we do this or something? So it's weird how stuff comes around. Andre Neves was from the Chaincode Residency. So Chaincode was this company that basically, I don't know what, funded Bitcoin development, and he also did a residency where if you were selected, you would just go to New York for a month and learn from the experts how to make Bitcoin. And he also comes from a big tech background. And he also made Koala Studios, which made the lightning chess. So, it was me who made games. So we're the three pillars of a chair or something. Simon knows business; he comes from the business world. Andre knows tech; he's built stuff for big companies like Facebook, etc. And I know games in a way. So we came together. And before, I think Andre tried to get funding for Koala Studios, but he wasn't really the business guy. I tried to get funding for my games, but I wasn't really a business guy either. And Simon didn't really know anything about gaming anyway. So we all came together to make Zebedee. And I'm going to go into a little bit of what Zebedee is; see what slide, yep. So, Zebedee, basically, our goal is to make it easier for game developers to add Bitcoin to their games. So, as I mentioned before, there's technical challenges and regulatory issues. So we are not a gaming studio. We do have games we have made, but we really are making the tools to get the big players Epic games or something that uses Bitcoin. So in our product suite, we have an open REST API that works on all platforms. I'm not going to go too much into the tech details here, but we have a developer dashboard. We have a game server, but we basically have all the tools for a game studio to be able to download an API key and add Bitcoin into the games, and they don't have to worry about channels; they don't have to worry about the wallet. Because we have a wallet the players can use, you don't have to worry if they're breaking any laws or regulations because we cover all that. So we make it really easy for gamers to add Bitcoin to their games. So this is our wallet as well, which is something we made because we noticed there's a spectrum of Lightning wallets. On one end, you have ones that are a bit harder to use, but they're non-custodial; you can use them yourself. But our wallet is really targeted, not at Bitcoiners; it's targeted at gamers. So we want to get gamers into Bitcoin with the least friction possible. So, it's a consumer wallet. It has a browser extension. So you can use it. You can link it with your Discord. So we have people who play games in our Discord. They can just write, send Chris 10 sats and it's sent, and it all reflects in the wallet. We have this gamertag concept. So one of the issues with Lightning at the moment is that it's too based around QR codes. QR codes are cool, but in gaming, you don't want to have to be scanning QR codes. Say you're playing a game and you're collecting a coin. You just want that coin, the bitcoin, to be sent to you. So we have this concept called a gamer tag, where if you download our wallet, it gives you a unique username in a way. And then you can just type, send 10 SATs to Dave or whatever, and it's just sent to them. And this is something that makes sense to gamers. We have some integrations as well. So I'm going to show a three-minute video that shows some of the stuff we do, and then after that, I've got a few more slides, and I'm going to get some people to actually play one of our sample games that we made, and you can actually get some bitcoin from it.

Christian: So some people might have noticed we actually have a Bitcoin integration into CSGO, which is a massively huge game. I think that peak is when they have 20 million monthly online players. And we added Bitcoin to that just because, as I mentioned before, we're not a gaming company, so we can build fun games. We can't really build AAA games. So we decided it makes sense to put Bitcoin into a game people already play, but now they'll want to play it more for Bitcoin. And then we can actually go to AAA game studios, which we're doing now, and say, look, we had CSGO, we put Bitcoin in it, and the players are now playing more. So you should put Bitcoin into your AAA games. So that's how we got this conversation started. But this is actually some nice stories of people tweeting out stuff they bought playing ZEBEDEE games, mainly CSGO for Bitcoin. So, these are mostly from, I think, Brazil or South America. But this guy has just bought food so he can eat; he's turned his CSGO playing into food. This person has paid their monthly bills and bought sneakers. So, it's really nice to see that there's a circular economy happening here. I should point out that for the Bitcoin that these people have made on our CSGO, we mainly have sponsored services, so we have people like Bitstamp who are funding it, but you can actually pay to play. So on the one side of pay-to-play, for every photo of somebody buying something, there's somebody frustrated that they probably lost Bitcoin. But it's nice, I think, that you get these young kids in South America taking money from richer people who aren't as good in America or something. So maybe it balances out a little bit. But we actually have servers that are sponsored, so you can play without having to lose anything. So we have a few mobile games that you can also try. So this is obviously my game. I forgot to mention my game that broke during the scaling debate. I brought it back with lightning. So, Sarutobi, you can play now and get Bitcoin. We also have these two from another developer called Vykr. They're hyper-casual mobile games. So the way these games are funded is that the game will show ads, but some of the ad revenue the developers are giving back to the players in the form of bitcoin. Sarutobi probably has the most Bitcoin that we give out. This is a great one we added, "Who wants to be a millionaire" which makes sense. So people were playing this game, and they were not getting money. It's a game where you get money. So now you can play this, and you can get SATs. So you can get a million SATs, I guess, in a way. You have to play a lot to get that much. These are some mobile games. But if you're more of a professional gamer, you might want to try Counter-Strike CSGO. and we have a lot of other games coming onto the platform this year, which I can't mention just yet, but some exciting additions are going to be added.

Christian: The last slide is an kind of like an open thing, So obviously, I went through how Bitcoin started, how Bitcoin gaming started with Bitcoin payments, how we were playing around with NFTs in the early days, and how Lightning has come and we can have Bitcoin payments on games, but we can't really have NFTs on Bitcoin yet. Really, Lightning does payments well. And that's why Lightning is scalable because it's a tool; it's focusing on one job, and that's why it can do this one job well. Whereas more general blockchains like Ethereum want to do smart contracts because they're trying to do so many things, it's an order of magnitude more difficult to scale. So we're not quite there yet with doing some of this other stuff on Bitcoin. But there are a few ways it's being solved or done at the moment. So we have sidechains, which could be a thing on Bitcoin. Maybe I know that at the next event you'll have Ruben, who's going to talk about the spacechain. So if they ever come, that could be something that we are keeping an eye on. RGB is the thing that lets you do tokens on lightning, but not really. I don't know. I think you had a guy, Igor was it, talk about RGB, but I still think that has some limitations because I think to transfer an asset would still take an on-chain transaction, but it's a better approach. Databases are a great way to do this, which is an important point about DINOs and databases. So, does anyone know what DINO means? It's a new term.

Audience: Decentralized in Name Only.

Christian: So again, being a little bit, I'd say, a little bit skeptical, I suppose. We actually—so I said that—a lot of people were building on Ethereum, and then as those fees became high, they've moved to other chains. So in my opinion, I don't think it's wrong, but people are solving the scalability issue of game items on a blockchain. By making blockchains that aren't really blockchains, they're making things that are really databases. But they call them blockchains. So people think of using a blockchain, but then these blockchains go offline, which doesn't really happen. The Lightning Network can't really go offline per se because it's decentralized. So people are solving it. It's a little bit frustrating at the moment because, again, to be cynical, they're not completely centralized. They seem to be decentralized; they're decentralized enough to avoid regulation, but not decentralized enough that you could actually have true ownership of your item. But I don't actually think NFTs or game items necessarily have to be super-decentralized. This is why I put databases there, right? If you're playing a game and the game is centralized anyway and the game gives you an asset that you can trade, I think most gamers are not particularly bothered about being able to store their NFT on a hardware wallet and validate that they have the NFT by their own node. They just have the idea that they can have something and trade it on a marketplace. So what we're starting to see in this space is that a lot of these other chains are more centralized, giving people low fees in the marketplace. They don't give them decentralization, but no one's really complaining about that. So that's probably where it's going. NFTs on Bitcoin: we could have decentralized NFTs in the future, but I think most gamers aren't too fussed about that. And at Zebedee, we have something interesting we're working on, but we believe that the good thing about Bitcoin is that, because Bitcoin itself is decentralized, if you get Bitcoin in a game, even if it's in a decentralized way, you have a decentralized asset that you can store in your wallet. But, so that's just some end thought; this is the horizon where Bitcoin gaming is now and the future questions and issues that might arise. But, probably in the next talk, you can ask Ruben about NFTs on space chains. He might give you some interesting ideas. And that's all, folks. Any questions for me? Yes.

Audience: Those little games, are they on the Zebedee app?

Christian: No, no, you just have to download it on the Play Store or iOS. I think most of them are on both, but definitely all on the Play Store, yes.

Christian: At the moment, all these games, I think, work through the gamer tags. So, Sarutobi, if you played it, you could actually withdraw the bitcoin to any Lightning wallet. But at the moment, I've limited it so it only pays out to the Zebedee gamertag. So you get SMS sent to your Zebedee wallet. You can then send those SATs to another Lightning wallet if you want, but you'll need the Zebedee wallet to play. And the reason I did that is for two reasons. One is that it's quite interesting; play-to-earn blockchain games are quite popular at the moment, and people might be aware that there are these; CAPTCHAs aren't safe anymore, right? If you want to put a CAPTCHA on your website, there are actually APIs you can download that send your CAPTCHA to a farm in Africa, where humans solve it, and then they send back the answer. You basically pay a penny each time that's done. And the same things are cropping up for Bitcoin and play-to-earn games. So what was happening in these games was that we had, I saw these farms would crop up in Indonesia and stuff, and they were farming the game and getting all the sats. So we had to make some changes to stop people from doing that. And one of the small changes was that they'd had to have a Zebedee wallet, but I'm going to add support for Lightning in general because we've solved this issue about...

Audience: Inaudible

Christian: They can, but it's an extra level of friction, and lightning still has fees. If I want to send one sat to a player, then if I send it and they have a wallet that goes through a weird route, I might have to pay ten sats to send that one sat, but with a gamer tag, it's a lot lower, but you're right, so once I added that, they started to get around Zebedee while they started to farm. So now we have...

Audience: It's good for your numbers; it's good for your stats and your company, right?

Christian: Yeah, but...

Audience: You've got 5 million users.

Christian: This is actually... So this is something we actually did as an experiment. So actually, Zebedee, we make games, not for our business model. We actually make games to explore and see what the issues are, so we can advise other people. So we've noticed this issue: if you put Bitcoin in a game, people are going to try and farm it and hack it, which they will. So through the Sarutobi we come up with a solution where it's a few ways to do it, but one way to stop it is that when they first play the game you can earn so little that it's not economical to farm it, but as you actually progress as a player and the game knows you're a real person because you've actually done stuff that real people do or a real person will put time and effort in, then you start to earn more and more Bitcoin and that's what what we're doing with Sarutobi and that stopped it because now if a farm starts up they basically they can't get to that level. It's not economical for them to get one SAT or something, because they still have to pay humans. So that's something we're doing with that game. I actually find it quite interesting some of the issues when you put Bitcoin into games is you get, it makes people play a lot more. So we see the users, we see companies that have added us, and they see a 2x increase in retention, which is massive in the games industry. And the cost per install, the CPI, is 40 cents, compared to four dollars or something. So that's really, really good. But obviously, the flip side is that you get people trying to make bots play your game. But it's a solvable problem. It's just that we need some creative thinking. Sorry, any more questions?

Audience: I watched this on CSGO.

Christian: Yes.

Audience: Did you do a plugin, or is it a CSGO thing? How does it work?

Christian: It's actually quite an interesting story. I actually wanted to, and originally I was working on it. I was going to do it for Quake, and I went on a Quake modding forum, and I wanted to mod Quake because Quake was open source, and the administrator said, You're not trying to mod it to add cryptocurrency to it. If you are, I'll ban you. So in a way, I thought, well, no. But then I thought, well, I don't really have to modify it. What you can actually do with these games is play CSGO and Quake; they let you run your own server. So when somebody's playing, you can actually see all the traffic that's going on on your server, so you know if somebody shoots somebody. They just download the legit game from Steam, they join your server, and you can see that Alice shot Dave, and then you can just send Alice a SAT. So the great thing is that you don't even have to modify it. We have added some mods just to make it a bit more fun, including putting actual coins in the game. But it's actually really quite interesting, and I recommend that if anybody's watching this and they want to try and mod another game, there are a bunch of games that let you run a dedicated server. With our API, it's really easy to put Bitcoin into these games. So feel free to ask me questions afterwards. Well, I actually did come with some games we can actually try. At Zebedee, we developed a Mario Kart-style game. And you basically play it Mario Kart, and at the end you get sats. So I'll probably end the presentation now, and then I'll get that set up, and then we can.

Audience: Can I just ask one more?

Christian: Go for it.

Audience: I didn't know you had a browser extension. What functionality is in that? I've only used the mobile wallet.

Christian: It's all the same. So the idea is that the wallet is everywhere you go, right? So if you have, if you download our wallet, you have a Zebedee account. So for that Zebedee account, it's in the browser, it's in Discord, and it's in Telegram as well, I think.

Audience: I've used it in Discord.

Christian: The idea is that there's everybody everywhere, because that's how gamers play, right?

Audience: I mean, does it somehow give the ability, if you're on some web page, I'm not quite sure what kind, to make a payment on the... I'm trying to figure out what the browser is.

Christian: Well, obviously, it'll support; for example, with some lightning games, if you press a link and it calls an LNURL, the extension would pick that up and pay it, for example.

Audience: Right, but again, it's in the browser, right?

Christian: That could be where it doesn't even have to be a game to say, say you played Zebedee, say you played Sarutobi, and you earned a lot of sats and they were sent to your wallet, then you go on to the browser, you're shopping on some Bitcoin website, which is Bitcoin payments to buy gift cards, and then you can actually just pay from your extension, because it's the same account, stuff like that.

Audience: And what would you say, because I suspect a lot of people here either haven't used Zebedee before, maybe? What would you say is the usefulness of it? Is it exclusively if you're a hardcore gamer and you're going to find it useful? Or are there other kinds of users you think might find it useful?

Christian: We're a gaming company, and we started with gamers. So obviously, there are lightning companies that are more general payment companies. But at Zebedee, ideally, we'd love to do payments everywhere, but we wanted to be focused, right? We thought it made more sense to focus on a demographic, gamers, and get that working first. But we will probably slowly expand to other types of applications. But, I suppose the wallet is a lightning wallet that works for other things, right? So not just gaming, but eventually we're probably going to bridge to, I think gaming itself is blurring. So things are becoming gamified, right? So we have one studio that is trying to make a duolingo-type thing. It's not really a game, but it's an application where you can learn a language and get Bitcoin rewards. So in a way, we probably would branch out to more gamified things, and then who knows in the future? It's sky's the limit, I guess.

Audience: But since we already discussed this in earlier meetups, the sort of profile of your wallet from a Lightning technical perspective is, to what extent is it custodial or not? Does it support LNURL? LNURL stuff, the address, and all that stuff.

Christian: So, again, we are a gaming company at the moment, so we wanted to make a wallet that is easy for gamers who don't know about Bitcoin. So it's a custodial gaming wallet. To sign up, you don't need to do any KYC to start using and get some SATs. If you start to get a lot of sats and stuff and you want to, then you'd have to KYC.

Audience: But you still have an email requirement.

Christian: Yes, or the discord. However, in the games that use the Zebedee platform, you don't have to use the Zebedee wallet to necessarily get the SATs. So a gaming company could use our SDK, and they could support LNURL. So, if the gaming company wants you to use any Lightning wallet you want, that would also be possible. But our wallet also supports LNURL, so if you get sats on our wallet and you don't know that we're custodial, you could send it off to your own wallet and keep it on your Lightning node. But you can use an LN address with it. Lightning address? Yes, Lightning Address was created by Andre Neves, our Chief Technology Officer. So obviously, we're big promoters of Lightning Address. So we're custodial, but we're an open wallet, if that makes sense.

Audience: I was going to say that for the use case, I actually used the wallet for my website. I wanted to have my donation there. I didn't want to mess with everything, so I just have the LN address and the QR code. It was great for that. It was the easiest solution to set up.

Christian: I think if you download our wallet, you get a profile page that gives you a QR code that lets you accept tips. Again, that's another use case. Outside of gaming, people can use our wallets for tipping. The Lightning address works with Twitter. So our main core function is that we do the APIs and SDK for game developers, but we made a wallet because we want a wallet; we don't want to scare people off. We don't want to scare gamers off with some of the early wallets that, when we first started, weren't quite there. But the wallet itself is taking off into a thing of its own, which is quite, quite nice to see.

Audience: Any other questions? No? All right. Then we play games, I guess.

Christian: So I'm just going to get set up. It'll take a second. Thank you for having me, and it's been great.

Christian: Because most people know how to play it, we can actually change the Mario coins to Bitcoin; it's a great way to explain it. And in Miami last year, we actually had a competition for this game where the winner got half a bitcoin as a prize. Wow. So we actually did that, and I think every month we were doing competitions where we gave away 10 million sats or something from this game. No, today it'll probably bug out and everything because it's being filmed. But I'll just explain how it'll work, and I'm going to host a game, and I'll get you guys to join it. I'm going to change this. So this is me: I'm Chris. This is my username in here. I'm entering my gamer tag. So in this game, you don't have to enter your gamer tag. If you don't enter your gamer tag, I'll show you a QR code at the end, which you can scan to get your score. If you enter your gamer tag, you actually get a bit more sats, and it just sends it to you. So my gamer tag is MandelBuck, and anybody wants to send me SATs? There is something weird; on our wallet there's this guy who keeps sending people sats for free. Now and then we just get this PTDS or something, his name. He's sending two SATs; I don't know why, and I don't know if it's right, but I'm not complaining. So what I'm doing now is, actually, putting 1,000 sats into the game, and then that will be distributed to the players based on how many coins they collect and on their positions. So I'm just going,

Audience: Oh, are you going to pay us? I thought you were going to pay us. I'm not.

Christian: So I'm sending Bitcoin into the game now. Oh, it doesn't have lights. You could've gotten one of us to play it. I know what you've done. What are you doing in the lot, Al? Okay, these are some of the cards we have. We have a Bitcoin card, and we have a Bitcoin rollercoaster guy. We actually did something where people might know the Magical Crypto Friends podcast. It's finished now, but we've only got those guys playing. I think it's finished now, but we still haven't got those guys playing. I'm just going to choose a... Fix my speed a bit. You can cut the piece of paper. Everybody can. I'm going to do the... I'll do this one because it's a little bit shorter. So guys, now you're on, guys. So, the gamer tag is the thing before the address. So before the Just that, ZBD. It'll be Roger 9000. Just that.

Audience: It's a name test, innit? It's a name test.

Christian: That'll be the one.

Audience: Oh, dude! I'm recording right now. Where have I been before? Ah! I remember this.

Christian: Just type a nickname in there as well. Okay, Europe, that's right.

Audience: So, both of the guys are ready with their screens. You're behind the... What's happening? There you go. You can cut that out.

Christian: Just choose the car you want. Just click here. This is a trap puzzle if we don't click right on the left. Right there. Choose any car.

Audience: So you have your car. You have your car. This is the trackpad, right on the left. Alright, so you have your car. What's happening on your screen there? Why does it look different? I'm waiting for this. He's actually the only one who's pretty ready.

Christian: Okay, so I'll just show you the controls. So the controls are... A is to accelerate. The joystick is to turn, basically. You want to try and get the coins? The left trigger is to use a power-up, and the right trigger is to throw a coin. So we do this thing: we have bitcoin on the track, and you can collect the coins, and the more coins you collect, the more bitcoin you get at the end. But you can also throw the coins at other players to hit them and overtake them. But then you have to spend your bitcoin. So do you hoard the coins and get more at the end, or do you try and use the coins to overtake and then get a bonus at the end? So, anyway, A is to go forward, turn, left trigger use power-up, right trigger throw a point. But if you're confused, just go forward and try to get many points. I'll tell you what to do.

MIXED AUDIO: This is good to be on the scene. Here we go. This is me. I'm going to lose on purpose. What? Where are you going? Oh, what's the question, then? This is the... Oh, I just... The screen is lagging, so... This is insane. Ah, excuse me. Oh, you're supposed to collect the coins, aren't you? Collect the coins! I've got French. Ah! What? What is that? This is the first place. Oh, man. Oh. The coin is coming too fast. How do you get faster, dude? What is the problem? How do you get faster? You're having trouble accelerating? You're the last one, aren't you? You're an old grey. I have no idea how to go fast. You're going fast now. You did something good. I don't know what I did there. I don't know. He's holding... I'm just trying to get coins, dude. Alright, okay, okay. I don't think I'm going to put this in the video, by the way. I'm not doing very well. This whole section, I don't know. Where the hell did you get all that? Right there. You can advertise clothes for different companies on the site. I'm just trying to get coins, dude. I'm back to get some more points. Oh, why? What's happening? Oh, why? You're doing the most interesting commentary so far. Self-commentary. So, you won? I'm not a volunteer anyway. Ah! I got most of the money first. I just got the second. So you won? I sent it to my Gamertag wallet. So I don't have anything. Show it to the camera. Show the people how much money and bucks everything else here? Because of what will happen when everybody finishes, it will send me some more coins. So there are some coins that won't be collected on the track, and if there are any coins, it sends them to people with a game attack. Okay, okay. so... So we just have to wait for the people here to finish, pretty much. So you can get your money; that's what's happening. We've only got this room until 8 o'clock. This game is actually available on Iitch at the moment, so you can actually download it. It's PC only at the moment; you can download it and basically play with friends. Everybody can pay some money to enter, and you can be friends. The Mac version is coming out soon, and we're actually trying to push it to the Epic Game Stores because, at the moment, Steam doesn't really allow any blockchain games temporarily. They're going to change their minds from what I've heard, but they just give a blanket bag to stop a lot of scams. So we're going to push for the Epic Game Stores because they seem a lot more friendly. And, ideally, we want Nintendo to add Bitcoin to Mario Kart rather than us having to make a poor man's Mario Kart clone. But it just shows the concept and how the wallet works. And I think everyone finished today? I was just going to quickly say, so I actually got a second transaction after everybody finished saying 14 cents. And this is a coin return. So some coins weren't collected. And any coins that weren't collected, I want to send back to the players. But without the gamer tag, I would have to make another QR code for somebody to scan. And maybe they've quit the game. But with the gamer tag, the server can just, after the game is finished, send it to you without worrying about it. So I know there are streaming SATS protocols coming to Lightning; there's keysend and stuff, so we might be able to do that in a more open way, but at the moment, one of the benefits the gamertag gives you is that we can stream payments. Also, I think, for games, it's okay if we centralize the sending of 14 SATs; it makes sense.