I literally made an account to reply to this, because I like to play CoG games but this is ridiculous.
Jason, not only are all cryptocurrencies wasteful eventually, because of how their value is maintained (artificially, mind you, as it is not linked to any actual real life value) but also they’d put you and anyone using CoG into a very precarious position in legal terms.
Firstly, let’s start with how crypto is made valuable. The way any crypto coin is “mined” is by making a computer do a puzzle. At first they’re simple and don’t require much power to process. That way you flood the market with a large amount of coins in the initial stage. However, if you just kept doing that, there wouldn’t be sacristy and the value would be that of a Chuck-E-Cheese prize ticket. In order to inflate the value, the puzzles get more and more difficult. Once people jump onto the currency and more people mine it, the difficulty of the puzzle starts increasing faster and faster and that’s how you get the ridiculously bloated and wasteful crypto farms and people buying out consumer electronics to overclock and destroy them in pursuit of crypto.
As for the legal aspect, crypto is a ridiculously easy venue for money laundering and I say this as someone who worked in AML (sadly I can’t disclose most details of that employment as that is illegal, what I can say is I have worked in CitiBank’s AML division and while crypto wasn’t a thing then, art galleries were).
Many people are aware art galleries are a great way to launder money. You hot $2mil in human trafficking money. How do you make it legal? Well you grab an artist, get them to paint something, get your art gallery friend to value the something at $2mil, add the $2mil to your personal assets, then donate it to the gallery, write the $2mil off your taxes and bam, that’s where your $2mil is now legal.
NFTs make it even easier, because the value is so vague and you don’t need to employ any accomplices, you do the same thing with your own website you can put together from a wix template and you made your blood money legal.
And banks are waking up to this. Even if you don’t have any form of income that comes from horrible sources it can end up very bad for people who diversify into crypto. With how difficult for people like sex workers, who do no harm to anyone and who’s income is very often entirely legal where they live, it is often impossible to get money just because their income comes from a type of work banks consider “high risk.” You often can’t accept cards and have a hard time finding a bank that will accept your business if you run something as innocuous as a sex shop or even if you do NSFW art.
And crypto is hard linked with the deep web. People use crypto to buy things illegally and banks are aware of this. Many countries have started, and some already managed, to ban crypto altogether. I don’t think you realize that just by associating with someone doing crypto and NFTs, people using CoG may find themselves in a position where they can no longer get ANY form of income, because PayPal, their payment processor or their bank will drop them simply because they make games in your engine, which will be linked to NFTs if you decide to get them involved.
This will not happen suddenly, it will not happen all at once, but where crypto stands right now it is very likely to happen, because unlike sex work where you can point to parts of the industry that are actually harmful but many other are safe and should not be demonized, all of crypto is based on a very shaky, get rich quick, pyramid scheme-esque ground that destroys the environment by design.
Please rethink this.