Hi, I am trying to understand how this idea works in practice after seeing some games/apps where you can just play anonymously and earn sats.
I like Saylor's idea of requiring users to pay a small amount in satoshis to create an account to prove they are human. But this is the opposite - you're giving sats away to anonymous players who "do well" in your game. For simple games like snake, wouldn't a bot always do better than a human, and therefore the incentives are completely broken? I can't see how this works unless the creators of the game don't care about the loss (the contribution to onboarding new people to bitcoin / teaching people about bitcoin is more valuable than the sats they lose from bots).
I like the idea that bots are free to participate in the game, and their contributions are valued by the community as a whole. If bots do something better than humans then they are rewarded for it. If they do something the community doesn't like then they get penalized. I think the game has to be made in a way that gives humans an advantage, which I believe the only way they have an advantage today is through creativity (we have no chance with any game where AI can learn the rules and compute the best strategies, or repost existing content, spam/fake content etc.).
Stacker news is a great example because it's difficult for bots to create quality posts. In games, I think players who create interesting levels/maps or mods, or some other contribution that requires creativity could be rewarded. Receiving rewards just for going through a single player mode that bots can easily reproduce seems wrong, unless the reward is so low that it's not even worth someone writing a bot to do it (Nice, you earned 5 sats for playing for 10 minutes! and then realizing 5 sats is $0.00 to 2 decimal points. Bots find this worthless, but maybe someone with 5 sats can come here, signup and upvote something).
As someone who has created games with both paid and non-paid signups, non-paid signups always win. So I am reconsidering removing the mandatory payment and following stacker news' approach.
- allow anyone to sign up for free (either email magic link or lnurl auth)
- earn sats but only in a way that creates value for the whole community
- lose sats for doing something the community does not like
- start out with 0 sats, and the only way to earn is by creating quality content or by topping up sats from your own wallet
- make sure that bots can't outweigh humans by working together and upvoting shitty content (optimally without requiring any moderation by the creator of the game - I believe stacker.news has some level of human moderation?)
However, there is a conflict here: if bots can create content for free, even if they are limited to X posts a day, there is no limit to how many bot accounts can be created. Even if all their posts are ignored, this is still resource intensive and damaging to the person hosting the project, and opens their project up to attacks. This is why Saylor's idea seems better, just in reality people don't want to pay, but they do want the benefits of the premium account. I'm still stuck on this last point - do we limit free daily signups? do we add a forced delay before and between posts?
If you got this far and are still reading, thanks for reading to my brain dump. I'm learning new things every day and truly believe Bitcoin is going to make the world a better place. Fix the money, fix the incentives, fix the world!