PlayMC, a Minecraft server, has introduced an option to earn bitcoins while playing a game.

PlayMC offers players to earn Bits, a 100,000,000th of a Bitcoin, for every achievement, such as “kill” or “win” in an online game. To withdraw money from the website, users have to reach a certain threshold. So far 29,731,408 bits have been earned by 9,410 players.

Bitconomy as a feature allows PlayMC users to earn bitcoins on other activities besides playing games. These include bug reporting, content writing and other jobs for the server.

The server presents itself as child friendly, that is, its content is mainly targeted at young gamers. It has a special section “For Parents” to ensure that PlayMC do their best to protect children from bullying and swearing with the help of moderators. The server is currently free to use but it will switch to premium only mode in the future. 

The feature of rewarding players with bitcoin is not unique. Another Minecraft server with bitcoin economy, Bitquest allows players to buy and sell items using bitcoin micropayments. Users can earn bitcoins by building a SatoshiFarm and selling virtual produce for satoshis or by collecting coins on the screen using a flying monkey in SaruTobi app. The latter was suspended by Apple Store in March of 2015 citing the confusion between in-game bitcoin tokens and bitcoins that have real value.

Aliona Chapel