A TALE IN THE DESERT

In early 2010, Bitcoin began turning up in some strange places as it began to break free of the forum and IRC channels that had effectively contained it for the first year of its life. And none of those places was stranger than the Egyptian desert. Yet that’s where Bitcoin effectively found itself in late May 2010 when it infiltrated a massively multiplayer online game (MMO).

In a thread dedicated to places that had begun accepting BTC – essentially forum users adding bitcoin to their regular businesses – user “teppy” wrote on May 19th, 2010: “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. 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.”

teppy urged players who liked the game to send 2,000 BTC to the wallet address he provided to cover a month’s membership. This may sound expensive for a month’s membership of just about anything, but it was a generous offer since teppy was effectively offering a 33% discount to anyone who paid in BTC.

Making Bitcoin Go Further

teppy was much more than just another guy hopefully adding a Bitcoin badge to their business as a means of flexing their cypherpunk credentials: he was actively interested in exploring the possibilities of what could be done with Bitcoin. He looked into ways of pairing player usernames with messages attached to Bitcoin transactions, before abandoning the idea due to privacy concerns.

These early conversations sparked debate about the sort of information that could be embedded into transaction data, with Satoshi weighing in to explain his rationale behind Bitcoin’s design and elaborating on what it could and couldn’t do.

But teppy also struck upon something profound when it came to bitcoin payments: there was no simple way of tracking onchain settlements, because if a merchant used a single payment address, it was impossible to tell who had paid and for what. teppy recognised that generating a new BTC address for each payment was the optimal way to proceed, and requested forum help in finding a solution.

Two regular users responded: Laszlo and dwdollar. The latter understood Bitcoin integration at a high level as the operator of the Bitcoinmarket.com exchange, while the former was an experienced software developer. Working together – for the culture rather than for profit, as typified so many of the early community collaborations – Laszlo and dwdollar helped teppy develop an elemental Bitcoin payment system.

When Bitcoin’s early adopters came to a stumbling block in the road, they didn’t give up and retrace their steps – they tried to find a way around it. This can-do spirit had already carried the community far beyond the initial promise of Satoshi’s code that had been released into the world 15 months earlier.

Three days after teppy offered to accept BTC as payment in his MMORPG, another real-world use case for Bitcoin emerged and it was to feature the same man who helped implement the payment solution for A Tale in the Desert – Laszlo Hanyecz.