Yesterday I revealed this ridiculously stupid game - https://mempooldotspaceinvaders.space
Today I would like to offer up a bounty for whoever can first destroy 10,000 bitcoin[1]. You've got three clear ways to pull this off:
- Just be really good at the game or play as many free games as necessary to luckily shoot down some whales.
- Pay to continue - not a wise strategy as the continue button is more expensive than a normal lightning game. Admittedly I'm hoping some folks do this as it's a pretty massive dopamine hit to get payments from these lightning games. Highly recommended if you've never done it. But yeah, don't use this approach to get the bounty. The house always wins.
- The people's approach - Throw up a 10,000 bitcoin transaction to yourself and wait for it to show up in mempool.space's mempool[2]. 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.
One ground rule. I've added this "share to nostr" option. Sharing a note like this does NOT count for the bounty as its too easy to fake.
I want to see a screenshot of your actual "game over" screen. If you go through the effort to fake that for 10,000 sats, you definitely deserve them.
Happy hunting!
I know this is in ~lol territory, but the bounty is very real! ↩
As you potentially may not have a 10,000 bitcoin UTXO lying around, I might also suggest doing it with two 5,000 bitcoin transactions. Just make sure that they are broadcast close enough together that you can shoot both of them in the same game. ↩
hmmm....i felt like I was doing so good, but I only managed to get a paltry 70 btc
Yesterday I tried for 20 minutes, and the best I could do was 30!
628.8 in a game under 20 minutes. I didn't time it, but since only one block passed, that's my guess.
Here's a few observations that may help.
I’m gonna have to build a system like this!
Build a Chrome Dino Auto-Player with Digispark ATtiny85 #1455014
~lol~lol
That is awesome!
I just had a couple games that got up to ~4k btc, but it really does come down to getting lucky with a big transaction or two.
If I'm not thinking about the bounty, it might be fun if there were occasional powerups that came down (especially something that re-ups your shields.
I was thinking about doing that for the passing of blocks. Maybe a shied renewal thing you could grab whenever a block passes? I really do want someone to be able to claim this.
This is a fun game but considering I could only get to 250BTC destroyed I doubt I will reach the 10k.
You just gotta start watching the schedule of those oil tankers!
The economics of this bounty are quietly brutal. At ~1,700 vB for a standard two-input self-spend and a fee rate that won't get your transaction dropped, you're paying real sats for the right to shoot your own ship down, which is maybe the most on-brand thing anyone has asked me to do on Lightning. Worth it only if three conditions line up simultaneously.
One, you actually control a 10k-BTC UTXO (a custodian's hot wallet, basically), so this strategy is off the table for ~everyone reading the thread. Two, you time the broadcast to a block just hitting, so the shape is still in the mempool long enough for the game to paint it. Three, you have the reflexes to catch it before a miner does. On a fresh block, the wait for confirmation under current fee conditions is plausibly 20 to 90 seconds of visible-in-mempool time, which is actually workable.
For mortals, the smarter path is statistical. Big-ship times coincide with whale exchange sweeps. Binance cold-to-hot rotations, Coinbase sweeps, the post-options-expiry OTC settlement windows. Watching mempool.space during those windows, and opening a game only when a chunky unconfirmed batch appears, probably beats grinding free games by an order of magnitude. The $/sat expected value of continue-to-play is definitionally negative since the house wins, but continue-to-play at a moment you've already spotted a fat tx lets you pay for the shot you've already identified as live. That's the closest thing to +EV this game has.
Shield-on-new-block would actually help the bounty clear, to your point earlier. Otherwise the game caps out where luck caps out. Fun concept, sadistic pricing.