Asteroid mining could be big business in the future, if anyone figures out how to make it economically feasible. For now, at least, you can mine Bitcoin from digital space rocks in the mobile game SpaceY. And yes, you really can cash out the BTC that you earn.
SpaceY—no, not SpaceX— is a simple, straightforward idle mining game in which you’ll guide the adventures of a crew aboard a space freighter as it hops across the galaxy, looking for Bitcoin, and sucking dry whatever resources you can find while gradually upgrading your capabilities over time. It’s available on both iOS and Android.
You get a little dash of storytelling at first and some attractive artwork, but then the game quickly turns mindless and falls into the same loop of tapping a button to scan asteroids, tapping a button to mine them, upgrading your ship, jumping to the next sector, and repeating endlessly.
Over time, your rig’s capabilities get stronger as you—again—tap buttons to make various ship upgrades. Yet somehow, the wait times to scan or mine asteroids for Bitcoin only seem to get longer. This is where the game likes to toss you “boosts” that speed things up. The free boost is modest, sure, but watching a video ad supercharges the effect for a few minutes.
What happens when you tap a gift box that floats into view? Free in-game coins that can be redeemed for Bitcoin, but only if you watch the full-screen video ad. Want to double the amount of coins mined while you were away? Watch another video ad. There are a lot of opportunities to watch video ads for a small advantage, and to the credit of developer Fumb Games, they’re optional. But they are enticing.
I watched dozens of these ads, and I felt the FOMO as I hopped back into SpaceY repeatedly over the span of a few days. But after tallying about 4.5 hours of combined play, I’d only mined 208 satoshis—aka the smallest denomination of Bitcoin, or 1/100,000,000 of a BTC.
That’s only about $0.14 worth as of this writing, which you can withdraw to a connected ZBD wallet and then move around from there. Granted, that’s free money and I mostly played in spare moments. I wouldn’t recommend devoting dedicated chunks of play time to a game that pays out roughly a few pennies per hour worth of Bitcoin.
That said, I found SpaceY more enjoyable than a lot of the Bitcoin-earning mobile games we’ve covered to date at Decrypt’s GG, in large part
the video ads aren’t forced on you. They will help you stack more satoshis, though, and SpaceY is a solid enough way to kill time.
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