🐪 Ancient Egypt and Bitcoin

Bitcoin Pizza Day is meant to celebrate the first ever payment for a physical good: Papa John’s pizza.

It’s a suspiciously specific cause for celebration. And after 15 years of hoopla (a tradition to be upheld by this very newsletter later this week), you’d be forgiven for feeling a little burned out by the whole thing.

Here’s a palate cleanser: Three days earlier, the founder of early MMORPG A Tale in the Desert adopted bitcoin for monthly subscriptions, apparently becoming the first commercial video game to do so.

We’re cheating a little bit: Bitcoin MMO Day was actually yesterday, on May 19.

At least, that was when Andrew “teppy” Tepper first announced he had opened his Ancient Egypt-themed online roleplaying game to bitcoin.

“I run the MMO A Tale in the Desert. We charge $13.95/month for the game, and pay about $0.74 in merchant and gateway fees,” teppy wrote on Bitcointalk.

“We’ll now accept Bitcoins as an alternate payment method. The price per month is 2000 BTC, which according to the exchange is a discount right now.” 

He was right: Bitcoins traded for less than half a cent at the time, pricing one month worth of game time at only $9.20 if paid in BTC — a 33% discount.

Tepper had initially hoped to match in-game usernames with messages attached to each bitcoin transaction. Laszlo Hayncez, the Bitcoin Pizza Guy, quickly pointed out that messages could only be included when sending coins to IP addresses, a feature that was eventually removed in 2012 due to security concerns.

“Hmm - is there any text field associated with an address based transaction? It does make accepting Bitcoins a bit more cumbersome. Would including such a text field as part of the protocol compromise anonymity somehow?” tepper replied.

Tepper’s quest spawned a discussion about encrypted messaging via transaction outputs that roped in Satoshi himself: “Bitcoin uses EC-DSA, which can only do digital signing, not encryption. RSA can do both, but I didn't use it because it's an order of magnitude bigger and would have been impractical.”

Laszlo continued to help Tepper in engineering a secure solution to accept bitcoins, one that would generate a new bitcoin address for receiving each separate payment.

It’s unclear whether such a system was ever implemented, but the address Tepper originally supplied for subscriptions received an eye-watering 42,100 BTC across 27 separate transactions in two months, worth around $3,600 back then but $4.4 billion today.

Tepper went on to launch another MMORPG, Dragon’s Tale, three years later, based entirely around online gambling. 

Of course, Dragon’s Tale accepted bitcoins (and credit cards), and even featured faucet-like mini-games that gave out free BTC as late as 2016, when coins were trading at nearly $600 apiece.

We’ve got a line out to Tepper to see if he’s up for a chat, but in the meantime…

Happy Bitcoin MMO Day!

— David

• Bitcoin developer Ben Allen will receive a $100,000 grant from Arthur Hayes’ family office Maelstrom to continue work on Payjoin, a privacy tool capable of disrupting financial surveillance over the ledger.

• BTC/USD is again flirting with all-time highs, currently about $4,000 short of its January peak of $108,786.

• PSA: Did you buy this tiny Procolored printer? Somehow, it shipped alongside drivers loaded with bitcoin-stealing malware. Stay safe!