Playing Monopoly With Satoshis on the Lightning Network

The game follows the classic Monopoly structure, but with a few twists that make it great for teaching someone how to use Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Monopoly: Where The Bank Goes Broke

Monopoly is a dark board game. The rules are ruthless, as the point of the game is to destroy your rivals by bankrupting them. One of the official rules of traditional Monopoly is that “the Bank never goes broke.” In fact, if the Bank runs out of money, it can issue as much as needed. Kind of like the real-world central bankers of today.

In the Satoshi Monopoly version, the Bank has a fixed amount of Bitcoin. This is an accurate representation of Bitcoin’s scarcity. Players put this BTC into a custodial wallet like Wallet of Satoshi or Blue Wallet. This type of wallet guarantees that players won’t be paying high fees as they transfer money using the Lightning Network.

Playing is Learning

As any developer and engineer would say, the best way to learn about new technology is by playing with it. The Satoshi Monopoly version teaches players to interact with a crypto wallet. This is a great way to introduce children and elders to the concept of Bitcoin. Also, players use the Lightning Network, where each wallet is typically a node, another great opportunity to learn about how this novel payment system works. As Redditor joeknowswhoiam points out in the same thread,

Your wallet (typically an LN node) knows about many nodes on the LN and will find a path for your payment that is the most efficient/cheap/short and inform you of the fees for the best route(s).

He adds,

If you have direct channels between the Monopoly players it would be 0 fees, as you won’t need other nodes to route the payments for you.

Gaming Innovation

If this wasn’t enough, another Redditor promptly proposed a different Monopoly-style game.

The game has a different set of rules, currently in Portuguese, and it reveals the creativity of the gaming community. One of the clearest signs of mainstream adoption will come when people accept and use cryptocurrencies in their daily activities, like games. Cryptocurrency-based board games should help with this, bringing crypto awareness from screens into the living room.