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

A new free-to-play Bitcoin game will pay someone a BTC bounty if they’re skilled at old-school arcade games, lucky enough to play while lots of Bitcoin is being transacted on the blockchain, or willing to move a ton of BTC to help grease the wheels.

In the web game Mempool Space Invaders, first spotted by Protos, players are challenged to shoot down Bitcoin “whales” that fall through the screen towards their ship. Each whale represents a real transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain, and upon being blasted by the player, it adds the quantity of BTC from each transaction to the player’s score.

Fail to destroy the whale and your shields will slowly deteriorate until you’ve lost the game. You can choose to start over for free—or pay 1,000 sats (about $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—representing some $730 million worth of real Bitcoin transactions—will earn a bounty of 10,000 sats, or about $7.30 in BTC from pseudonymous developer Jasonb, per a Stacker News post from the creator. 

Taking home the bounty though will require serious skill and luck. Players must shoot down all the whales, many of which fall simultaneously, making it difficult to stay alive for long. If you’re lucky enough, though, you might play while large Bitcoin transactions are taking place on the blockchain, allowing you to destroy larger whales and stack bigger quantities of BTC in a short period of time. 

But there is another way to win, according to the pseudonymous developer—though it’ll require the ability to move a massive amount of crypto.

“The people’s approach,” said the developer in a post outlining the game, is to “throw up a 10,000 Bitcoin transaction to yourself and wait for it to show up.” 

“Then blast it out of the water—er—space,” they explained. “Just make sure not to spend too much in fees, or you’ll eat up all your winnings.”

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

“Just make sure that they are broadcast close enough together that you can shoot both of them in the same game,” they added in the footnotes. 

If you don’t want to risk sending $730 million on the blockchain, you can try to play it out like some in the Stacker News comments, where one user said they were able to destroy a “paltry 70 BTC,” and another only 30 BTC after 20 minutes of trying. That won’t cut it.

Anyone that actually completes the initiative will need to share a screenshot of their “game over” screen to unlock the bounty. If they put in the “effort 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 the reward is not worth the time or effort. Most Bitcoin-backed games only offer pennies’ worth of BTC for each hour of play, and even then, you’ll have to endure loads of video ads to earn that pittance.

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