Curate of Curiosities

I will first go through the website's first game, Advanced Bitcoin Simulator.

It starts on a stark white screen prompting you to pick up your laptop and start browsing a bitcoin forum.

Upon doing so, the player downloads a mining app onto their laptop. 

Unfortunately, all this app manages to accomplish is increasing your electric bill. 

You go back to the forum and are directed to a site where you can buy and sell Bitcoin. 

While it’s theoretically possible to profit from the Bitcoin exchange, there’s a delay between clicking the buy or sell button and when the purchase is made.

Not that it matters, since there’s apparently a 22 month delay for withdrawing fiat currency, so you can’t even use it to make up for your losses.

After messing around enough with the bitcoin exchange, Bitcoin investments become available. However, they’re all Ponzi schemes run by obvious pirates, and although they seem to steadily appreciate in value, when you try to withdraw your investments, they suddenly shut down. Every time this happens, the users on the Bitcoin forum try to spin it as a positive.

 This happens a total of four times, and each time it’s more and more obvious that you’re being scammed, and the forum users grow deeper and deeper into denial.

While this is happening, the Bitcoin exchange shuts down, taking all the coins you’ve purchased with it. At this point, every single one of your attempts at profiting from Bitcoin have been complete and utter failures. 

Just take a look at the “Accomplishments” tab. All of the grayed-out accomplishments are pie-in-the-sky goals like “create a financial empire”--like there’s any possibility that you could do so just by mining Bitcoin. Since doing so requires a massive amount of power to make the required calculations, your electricity bill would end up more than cancelling out any potential profit.
One of the other ones is “make a positive contribution to society.” Of all the crypto users I've encountered, I've yet to see even one that you can say is helping society in any way, and it seems that the creator of this game thinks so as well.

However, all is not lost.

There’s still one last option available—purchasing a Bitcoin miner. 

Once you do so, the text prompt states that as long as you get it in a week or two, it will be able to pay for itself somehow. 

Naturally it takes several months for you to finally receive the miner. The first couple of times you use it, there doesn’t seem to be a problem, aside from a weird smell. It looks like you might finally make something out of this. The third time you use the miner, something different happens…

You are directed to a new screen on a new page, explaining that your miner managed to catch fire and burn down your house. At this point, the game turns into a simple text adventure, where all you can really do is move around and examine things. 

Naturally, none of the businesses are willing to take Bitcoin as payment, and I find it weird that the game focuses on this rather than the fact the the receipt clearly isn’t yours to begin with.

Eventually, you reach the outskirts of town, where you find a homeless shelter. This place has only two things of note, a soup kitchen and something called a BitHut. When you try to enter the BitHut, you find the air unbearable and leave.

Go into the soup kitchen however, and you can wait in like to get—as the game calls it—some “unregulated, free market pork product.” After eating it, you start feeling a little strange, but it’s nothing you can’t walk off, right?

Apparently not, because you eventually black out and end up in a formless void, with a tax collector standing in front of you. Examining him gives you the following prompt…

With that in mind, there's only one thing to do...

The tax collector disintegrates, and a government regluator appears in his place. Examining him yields a similar prompt as that of the tax collector, and you deal with him in the same way as before.

When the regulator disappears, a Washington fatcat, looking straight out of a political cartoon. Just like before, there’s only one way to deal with him.

And that's the end of the game--you bite three guys in a crypto-induced haze, then act like you've won a victory against fiat.

But that’s not all that this game has to offer. If you load the text adventure page directly, without going through the main page first, things will be a little different. 

You’ll be playing the text adventure—which looks like it was coded with a 6502 processor—through the eyes of someone else. Specifically, a man who is on his way home from the town deli when he notices a fire near his house. He gets in closer to investigate, and finds that his neighbor’s home has burned to the ground. That’s right, you’re playing as the Bitcoin guy’s neighbor. 

The interesting thing about this is that it shows your Bitcoin shenanigans through a normal person’s point of view, rather than that of someone who spends all their time browsing crypto forums. You follow the neighbor into town, and pass by the same Bitcoin kiosk from earlier.

If you examine it, you find out that the neighbor doesn’t even know what Bitcoin is. You pass by the town stores—which you can’t even enter—and eventually catch up with your neighbor. Maybe you can try to help him in his time of need?

Apparently not, cause the moment you get close to him, he bites you in the neck and you bleed to death. The end.