I don’t really see the purpose of Bitcoins – the virtual currency. It was reading the national broadsheets this week that brought this new monetary phenomenon to mind, recalling my first experience of Bitcoins when I was sidetracked out of the ICE Totally Gaming show in February by a boffin-type character who gave me a pocket-handkerchief crash-course in the subject.
Now, according to the City pages, the “Bitcoin phenomenon” has become a force to be reckoned with in our financial world.
The question is, will it truly become a force to be reckoned with in the games and gaming community?
My boffin was Andy Tepper, from eGenesis, an American developer and something of a Bitcoin evangelist. In the version he showed me on his iPad in one of the ExCeL promenade cafés, he drew together virtual games with gaming. “The convergence of the Bitcoin business and e-gaming is now happening,” he trumpeted, quietly but no less forcefully.
You buy into a game alongside other players from all over the world, using Bitcoins. You buy them with a credit card and spend them to enter and play a game. The convergence comes when you bet with others against certain things happening in the game.
The value of the Bitcoin currency, says the media this week, has risen from $100 to $147. No-one’s sure who controls the circulation or whether there are any banking-type rules on its use – a virtual currency, after all, cannot be regulated. The obvious question, of course, is if it cannot be regulated, how do you keep the crooks out?
But the same City media is telling me that asset managers all over the place are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into the Bitcoin market. I’m glad I don’t have enough money to warrant an asset manager or I might just be asking him some awkward questions. “It’s a heady combination of casino investing and wisdom of the herd,” says one pundit.
I have yet to see Andy Tepper’s games/gaming reach a machine in an arcade or in a casino – or indeed on anyone’s iPad – but the chance (or threat) is undoubtedly there.
Incidentally, while on the subject of asset managers, the same City media also reports that an investigation had showed that a monkey investing at random would have produced better returns over the past 40 years than a typical tracker fund invested in a stock market index.
Confirms all my predictably pre-conceived ideas about folk with too much money entrusting it to asset managers…
