I’ve seen a few people ‘playing’ crypto apps over lunch where they just tap on the screen in exchange for rewards.
What does the crypto company get out of it?
In: Technology
Crypto is super weird. One of the ways you “make money” with crypto is “mining”.
Basically think of crypto like an immensely complicated checkbook. In order for anyone to write a check, someone has to solve a very complicated math problem. It’s so complicated, computers can’t solve it quickly. This is good for security, but bad if you want to quickly process transactions. So to deal with the amount of time it takes to find a solution, people can volunteer their computers to try doing the math. It’s a funky kind of math where you can try a lot of different ways to “solve” the problem. So all of the volunteers’ computers try different approaches, and the hope is one of their attempts finds a solution fast. In return for their computer time, that person gets paid a small amount of crypto.
That’s why it’s called “mining”. You basically throw your computer at the problems all day and hope you “hit gold” and solve a few problems. That’s why there are “farms” with thousands of computers devoted to this mining: the more computers you volunteer the more likely some of them will “hit gold”.
That is mostly what your friends are doing while playing the games. Their phones are being used to mine crypto for the game company. The game company keeps all or most of that crypto. The user with the phone usually gets their payout from playing the game, which of course doles out its prizes much more slowly than its users “hit gold”.
Meanwhile they’re also seeing ads, which generates revenue. And they probably have the option to pay for things in the game, which is another revenue stream.
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