RuneScape Community Forums (since 2001)

Recently, crypto has been in the news a lot - with Bitcoin shooting up in value by a lot (today 1 BTC is $56,220).

There are skeptics who are saying that crypto is not a real currency, etc. but it's obvious that it's interchangeable for fiat currency (like USD), so it indeed is a real currency with real value.

This reminded me of how game currencies, years ago, became a sort of currency (including RuneScape's "gp" at the time). And the skeptics would often say, "you're wasting your money on pixels!" etc. but it was obvious those "pixels" had real value.

Even then, various games popped up, built on micro-transactions that basically turned their "pixels" into units with actual value, and made them tradeable too - essentially making these units into a currency.

It's funny how wasteful crypto mining is: loads of computers using up billions of dollars of electricity and releasing loads of carbon into the atmosphere as a result just to give these crypto coins (like Bitcoin) some value.

I think RuneScape's gp (coins) was a much better way to "mine" currency. There was a human element: you knew that x amount of gp took y amount of hours of "work" in the game.

The value of GP has decreased significantly though... I believe party hats are 30B RS3 GP now.

The idea of cryptocurrency has been around since the 80s but it only really took off when Bitcoin became the first cryptocurrency to solve the double spend problem.

Cryptocurrency does have its pros and cons. The electricity consumption is obviously an issue, which has largely been overcome by introducing new methods of verification (proof of stake), but this is reliant on people moving away from Proof of Work based systems. However I believe the pros greatly outnumber the cons, hence the popularity cryptocurrency has gained over the past decade.

(02-27-2021, 08:53 PM)The duck Wrote: [ -> ]The value of GP has decreased significantly though... I believe party hats are 30B RS3 GP now.

With all this talk of inflation i was actually thinking about phats as a decent hedge

I'm still in the profit with Doge as I purchased some a while back, crazy that a few tweets from Elon can pump and dump the market.

No, Runescape coin was likely not an inspiration for Bitcoin specifically.
There were predecessors, like BitGold by Nick Szabo. There were also ideological predecessors, like John Nash's ideal money. Milton Friedman talked about private, internet money in the 90s (Bitcoin isn't private by the way). Most of that was before Runescape.
There is a finite supply of party hats now, just like there is a finite supply 21M bitcoins. That might have primed people for limited supply coins such as cryptocurrencies, NFT's etc. The party hats are more like Bitcoin than Runescape gold, except Jagex can likely change the amount of party hats at any time. Or there might an inflation bug that increases the supply of phats. There might by an inflation bug with Bitcoin, but I assume it's very unlikely, since some of the best computer science minds are analyzing that code.
As for other cryptocurrencies, tokens, NFT's, I don't know what influence Runescape had. But there are some people active in the crypto space that have played Runescape, so that might have shaped their view partly.