Bitcoin Turned into a Board Game
The Game of Life? Monopoly? Forget them. Meet a Bitcoin-themed board game that has been dubbed “Hodler of Last Resort”.
Being created by a Bitcoiner on Twitter named Pedro, this board game is intended to be a way for friends and family to learn about BTC, its value, and how it all works in a fun package.
A board game, what more could you ask for?
In a four-part thread, Pedro boiled down his mission with the game as follows:
It aims at creating a playful way for being presented with some novel concepts that Bitcoin proposes while forcing some technical understanding via the game’s mechanics.
For something as nebulous as a digital currency that isn’t related to any government or corporation, education is important.
And, while Hodler of Last Resort may not seem educational at first glance, it sure is. From a brief glance of the graphics that Pedro published, this writer found a number of concepts and technical terms detailed that all investors of Bitcoin should know about. These include nodes, Segregated Witness (SegWit), ICOs — ICOs scams to be particular, BitConnect, the Lightning Network, the infamous Mt.Gox hack, and economic concepts that accentuate the need for Bitcoin — Quantitative Easing and negative interest rates.
So how exactly does it work? (Image below courtesy of Pedro).
Well, to put it simply, it is pretty much a “Bitcoinified” version of Monopoly, the famous board game. If you were to disregard the crypto-themed ‘properties’ and ‘cards’, the seeming only visible difference between Pedro’s creation and the age-old board game would be the fact that the “money” is being accounted for on a spreadsheet that comes with the game, not physically.
Each play represents 52,500 blocks mined, meaning one year in Bitcoin time. Every four plays, the block reward reduction hits, meaning that as time goes on, players earn less BTC. To win, the player needs to collect all the Bitcoin available on the playing field.
Right now, the full details of the game aren’t available, as Pedro is presumably still bringing the game to market.
But, the idea and intention are there.
(Just an aside, this is not a paid product placement or anything of that sort)
Making BTC Digestible
Pedro’s to-be-launched game joins a number of other fun resources and products that could help Bitcoin investors and others involved in the industry teach their family, friends, or even co-workers about the importance of BTC. The idea is that this revolution in finance, in society even, should be as digestible as possible, to as many people as possible.
Another one of these educational resources is “Bitcoin Money: A Tale of Bitville Discovering Good Money” , a book penned by The Bitcoin Rabbi. The book, focused on a young audience, brings readers through the differences between “good money” and “bad money”, and explains the importance of BTC.
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
