blockchain

What happened to blockchain

Remember blockchain? Remember crypto? I remember.

I remember the first time I heard about crypto and blockchain. No it wasn’t bitcoin or Gary V with his NFTs. It was back around 2014 when an old college friend, Charles Toll, told me about this ethereum thing with eth and how eth was gas. I had no idea what he was talking about but earlier he told me about this junka show called Ricky and Morty. It was a good show so I trusted what he said.

I thought you could like, make an MMO on it or run an RTS match. No, it was way too slow for that. Fast forward to the NFT boom and I found myself working adjacent to crypto marketing. No inspiration, anywhere. Everyone was selling shovels made of belief. The blockchain would bring utopia or a utopia off the coast of Australia on crypto island; some place a guy at a convention told me about. I am sure it was a big success.

It wasn’t, but during that time I wrote a single smart contract which gave me an idea.

All the code and docs for smart contracts were about finance ownership bullshit. Not a single example was even remotely inspired. Everything was extending standard NFT or currency contracts which had varying degrees of degen scams built into them.

However, in some 8 lines of magical solidity code one can get a global minecraft server that works just like in my ethereum dream years earlier. Best of all, with those same 8 lines you can filter out griefers. I started this project but life made a dog out of me and then the AI nation attacked.

Today however, with the power of modern “google fu”, my dream has come true. Behold.

pragma solidity ^0.8.24;

contract WorldBlock {
    mapping(bytes32 => uint256) public cell;

    event Set(bytes32 indexed key, address indexed by, uint256 value);

    function set(bytes32[] calldata keys, uint256[] calldata values) external {
        require(keys.length == values.length);
        for (uint256 i; i < keys.length; ++i) {
            cell[keys[i]] = values[i];
            emit Set(keys[i], msg.sender, values[i]);
        }
    }
}

This smart contract with about 12 lines of code powers my global minecraft server.

Everyone calls the single function which upserts a block into the world. That’s it. A block is a byte so 255 possible values. You got gas? You shape the world.

What about assholes with money? Well because the chunk data is in the function call, the blockchain log contains a copy of all deltas. Look up all the transactions for a chunk in the world and splice out the ones you don’t like. Now the rich can buy the world as many times as they want and us poors can continue enjoying our little communities unmolestered. Win win win.

This strategy is called indirection where one system offloads complexity to another. In this case the game client has all the complexity. It is what decides how to read the blockchain and push to it, how to hold local edits before committing, what each of the 255 block ids look like, all of it. Heck, it could interpret the chunk bytes as anything really.

Don’t worry, my global minecraft server wouldn’t be interesting without a fancy multiplayer client to use. Lucky for you, I have just the thing.

This client will let you create a room for your friends to join in a lan-like realtime game. This allows for a more authentic minecraft experience where saves to the global store can happen as needed but player edits and movement are realtime. There are a few emotes and skins to choose from.

I have the client mapping chunk data to global geodesics down to about a 1:1 block to meter. I map real world locations into the global minecraft state. You can now visit China, Russia, and Canada without borders. I wonder if France will have an Eiffel Tower?

The client is a janky ass vibe coded mess with hacked up GI. If it doesn’t crash, that is a victory. So here is a recording just in case.

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I think this accomplishes, in theory, my original idea of an MMO if you squint right. The blockchain thing is hilarious. Block chain and crypto are still kick’in around but with a legal gambling slant more than anything AI. But who knows, maybe blockchain has other uses people don’t know about.

For me, I use it for a minecraft server that anyone can play.