What's It All About?

Buttcoin: The Game allows up to six people to play as (in)famous crypto-personalities, using a concept that will be familiar to anyone who ever spent Christmas morning arguing over "who would be the dog".

Roll the dice and buy up all the prime locations.

Build funbux businesses of increasing value.

Exchange your Dirty Fiat, Buttcoins, Litebutts and DogButts to gain a market advantage or balance your books.

Gain great wealth or lose it all with the "To The Moon" and "Crash & Burn" cards.

Amass random currencies with your Mining Farm and watch it all get eaten at the Crypto ATM.

Keep a sharp lookout for the SEC and the FBI who are always ready to punish you for pursuing your libertarian dreams a.k.a. dodging your taxes or not keeping your books balanced.

Aim to be the only surviving player with any money, patience or dignity left.

No visit into the realms of crypto-currencies would be complete without pointless infighting, stateless Internet "Personalities", petty one-upmanship, high-priests and faithful believers.

Stare in bemusement as Gabbing Anderson and Petra Clod argue the relative merits of increasing the block size.

Gasp in amazement as Mark Krapalees and a Dinkleboss Twin battle it out to formulate the most ridiculous ponzi disguised as an IPO.

 Utter "WTF" as Andreas Ontopofthis defends (or fails to defend) Ross Notsobricht in his lastest legal battle with the DEA.

And see Roger Bear clasp his hands in worship to the great god Notoshi Sakamoto.

The aim of this game is to highlight the deficiencies of todays crypto-currencies, from wasteful mining rigs, unsecure servers, blatants scams & ponzis, the pumps & the dumps, and delusional grandeur & posturing from its proponents - but with a tongue in cheek approach. It's unlikely any player can actually win the game, but they'll have fun and a few laughs and maybe learn something in the process.

See, it's fun AND educational! Two games for the price of one!

It'll be coded in HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery to work across most platforms and devices of a reasonable size. And what's more, the end products codebase will be released under a relatively open license. Anyone who contributed to the campaign will be able to use it, abuse it, fork it, do whatever you want with it.

Where The Heck Did This Idea Come From?

The idea dawned on me one night after too much brandy and late-night browsing on Reddit. I'd like to shoutout to both /r/bitcoin and /r/buttcoin for keeping me entertained, gob-smacked, facepalming and downright incredulous at the lengths people will go to earn money (usually at the expense of everyone else), the delusional beliefs almost akin to a religion, the infrequent highs and the daily lows, the bursting bubbles and log charts, everything that makes /r/bitcoin what it is, and keeps /r/buttcoin amused in comedy gold.

I've been hodling my $2.03 of accumulated ChangeTip "wealth" waiting for it to go to the moon, so I can retire to my own private island, but for some unknown reason, it just doesn't seem to be happening? Therefore, I'm hedging my bets by doing this project in return for dirty fiat.

Who's In The Team?

There's an old saying that "there is no I in team". Well I'm calling BS on this one, because the team is comprised of me, and me alone. I'm Dave, pleased to meet you! Here's a picture of me dreaming about code.

I spend my time divided between grey, rainy & windy Morecambe in the UK, and sunny (with the occasional tropical storm) Marikina in the Philippines.

I've been hobby programming for over 34 years, and professionally freelancing for the last 15 years - started with a ZX81 back in 1981 (surprisingly), and have gone through a VIC20, CBM64, Sinclair QL, Amiga 500, and PC desktops and servers ever since. I can do Assembler, BASIC, COBOL, C, C++, C#, Java, Perl, PHP, HTML, Javascript, and anything else you care to throw at me.

I've been working on mostly Perl and PHP systems since the time of the 1st dot-com bubble (those were the days earning $500 to change one line of code), spent over 8 years in the online hotel booking field where I wrote the backend and frontend systems to manage 7000 hotels, and for the past few years have done smaller freelance projects on file repair, crawlers, web apps, mobile apps and everything in between.

And in common with all crypto-currency related issues, if I can't deliver I'll simply explain "the server was hacked and all your money has gone poof, sorry for your loss" - I hasten to add I'm only joking, but you'd be surprised just how much this excuse is actually used in the real crypto-currency world!

What Can We Expect?

Upon Reaching Initial Funding Goal (£5,000)

You get 3 months of my (relatively) undivided attention to create this standalone game served from a website which will run on any modern browser and decent-sized tablets. You and your friends can play the game taking turns on one device.

If you're brave enough to venture out of your basement, why not have a crypto-party, invite your friend(s) and sit around a PC or pass an iPad back and forth? If not, there'll be an extremely stupid and not-at-all intelligent AI to play against.

In Case Of Double Funding Goal (£10,000)

If I reach double the funding goal, I'll spend a further 3 months to create a fuller online experience with chat servers and all that jazz, allowing strangers to play with each other (but only in a consensual way).

No longer will you be forever alone. Play, converse and even hurl random insults at anonymous people from around the globe i.e. all the best/worst aspects of every MMORPG ever, but with as more gentile dice-throwing, turn-taking vibe.

In Case Of Triple or More Funding Goal (£15,000 or more)

I'll definately say "the server was hacked and all your money has gone poof, sorry for your loss".

But seriously, I have no clue right now, I'll cross that bridge if I come to it.

Updates

Follow the project progress here on Kickstarter and at the following places :-

http://buttcointhegame.com

https://www.facebook.com/buttcointhegame

https://twitter.com/ButtcoinTheGame

Shibe TL;DR; Pl0x?

Browser Game, Many Devices, Much Fun, Tell Friends, Give Cash, To The Moon, KTHXBYE Dave!