I could not help myself today. I had to play the cat game. It was very very embarrassing to myself but I just had to do it. The urge was to much to understand how this latest rage is actually working.

In case you haven't heart of what I am talking about there is a new game running on ethereum that is all over the news and generating 10+% of all the ethereum transactions. This should amount to about 70k or so transactions alone.

The game is stupid and cool

The game is imho very silly. You can buy a cat and multiply it with a different cat. Apparently this all happens in a smart contract. I have not seen the details of how this works or seen it being explained anywhere. If you know someone or link that explains the architecture and smart contract design i'd be very interested.

It is a crappy game with crappy game experience.

BUT! It is using ethereum to guarantee ownership and to create a true market for the digital item that is a cat in this case with unique attributes. That is amazeballs and something other games cannot offer. As such I am sure someone will take care of the flaws of the game and this will lead to many copy cats and some succefull innovators that will take this concept and make something better out of it.

As such this ought to be embraced by the crypto community. And studied and improved.

First cool DApp?

This is also something that for the first time looks like a potential app ontop of ethererum, with a real company designing a game and making a profit off of it. Unlike other games that only cost money this game also generates value for its players, if they are smart that is.

Sweet.

Scalability is an issue

The game however has two scalability issues. First it does not work because transactions on ETH with metamask are just pure horror. It is worse than trading on Kraken!!!

Even though I constantly overpay in ridiculous amounts and act like money does not matter to me, I still can't get transactions to work. It is simply annoying when things don't work even though one is paying a few $ per transaction.

The 2nd scalability issue is the game itself. You can only have a somewhat decent user experience if you pay a few hundred dollars or more per cat, else your first experience is all about waiting hours or days. Even if you spend $50-100 on your first two cats.

As such the game is not designed to work with many or few players and needs a certain amount of players to work well.

Thank god for steem

This was a great experience to learn from today. But most of all it showed me again how amazing the functionality is that steem has brought to the market for such a long time already.

• We have 3sec tx, and tons of users that every day have no problem using this blockchain without paying anything.

• we have the only working pegged currency, SBD that i would have no problem holding in my wallet over long periods (yes steem is failing to capitalize on this)

• we have an absolute useful app, with a new monetization system that trumps existing business models. Unlike this cat game which is not going to compete long term with real games.

Steem has things to work out, but overall today showed me how valuable steem actually is and why I keep holding and earning it. Again.

Happy Steeming!