This ‘Space Invaders’ Clone Game Pays Real Bitcoin—If You’re Skilled, Lucky or Rich

A new free game Bitcoin game, someone will pay a BTC premium if he or she is adept at old-school arcade games, is lucky enough to play while a lot of Bitcoin is being traded on the blockchain, or is willing to move a lot of BTC to grease the wheels.

In the web game Mempool Space Invaders, first noticed by Protosplayers are challenged to shoot Bitcoin ‘whales’ that fall through the screen towards their ship. Each whale represents a real transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain, and after being destroyed by the player, the amount of BTC from each transaction is added to the player’s score.

If you don’t destroy the whale, your shields will slowly deteriorate until you lose the game. You can choose to start over for free, or pay 1,000 sats (approximately $0.73 worth of Bitcoin; each sat is 1/100,000,000 BTC) to continue your previous run.

Ultimately, the first player to destroy 10,000 BTC in the game – which amounts to approximately $730 million in real Bitcoin transactions – will earn a bounty of 10,000 sats, or approximately $7.30 in BTC from pseudonymous developer Jasonbper one Stacker News message from the creator.

However, taking home the bounty requires serious skill and luck. Players must shoot all the whales, many of which fall at the same time, making it difficult to stay alive for long. However, if you’re lucky, you can play while large Bitcoin transactions are taking place on the blockchain, allowing you to destroy bigger whales and stack larger amounts of BTC in a short time.

But there is another way to win, according to the pseudonymous developer, although it requires the ability to move a huge amount of crypto.

“The people’s approach,” the developer said in a post describing the game, is to “surrender a 10,000 Bitcoin transaction to yourself and wait for it to appear.”

“Then shoot it out of the water-er-room,” they explained. “Just make sure you don’t spend too much on fees or you’ll eat up all your profits.”

Of course, not everyone has $730 million in Bitcoin lying around to win the game. As an alternative, the developer cheekily suggested trying “two transactions of 5,000 Bitcoin.”

“Just make sure they air close enough so you can include them both in the same game,” they added in the footnotes.

If you don’t want to risk sending $730 million to the blockchain, you can try to play it out somehow in the Stacker News commentswhere one user said they were able to destroy a “paltry 70 BTC” after 20 minutes of trying, and another only 30 BTC. That is not enough.

Anyone who actually completes the initiative must share a screenshot of their ‘game over’ screen to unlock the bounty. If they “attempt to fake that,” the sats reward is “deserved,” the game’s author wrote.

Other free-to-play games have offered users a risk-free way to stack BTC, but often so have the rewards is not worth the time or effort. Most Bitcoin-backed games only offer a few cents worth of BTC for each hour of play, and even then you’ll have to endure a ton of video ads to earn that pittance.

Bitcoin is up 1.3% over the past 24 hours, slightly increasing the game’s premium as it sits around $73,198. The top crypto asset is up more than 9.5% in the past week, but is still 42% below its all-time high of $126,080.