We’ve covered a lot of mobile games that pay players Bitcoin rewards, but Bitcoin Miner is the most literal interpretation we’ve seen to date: You’re mining fake cryptocurrency in this iOS and Android game, but can cash out real Bitcoin.
As Decrypt’s GG recently reported, Bitcoin Miner first launched several years ago without real BTC earnings baked in, and it went nowhere. But once Fumb Games tried implementing the ability to earn and cash out satoshis (the smallest unit of Bitcoin, or 1/100,000,000 BTC), downloads shot through the roof and players kept coming back.
And after playing Bitcoin Miner daily for more than a week now, I totally get it. Like all of these games, the amount of Bitcoin you’ll actually earn is incredibly small—and the full-screen video ads that you’ll need to endure along the way can be annoying, particularly when they promote the same couple of scammy looking games over and over again.
But unlike a lot of these games, Bitcoin Miner packs personality thanks to its pixel artwork and references to various coins, and it’s an entertaining treat for those of us who live in this oft-ridiculous industry.
You’re not going to make any serious money from this game, but it’s fun to hop into for a few minutes at a time—and you do get some Bitcoin for playing it.
Bitcoin Miner is a simple idle “clicker” game that rewards you for repeatedly tapping a button. You’ll begin with a single crypto miner—a little pixel guy sitting at a computer, occasionally generating little pixel coins that scroll over to your piggy bank. As you bank more coins, you can invest in additional levels for your mine and upgrade the speed at which they produce rewards.
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Idle tapping game Bitcoin Miner was developed in the wake of the 2017 bull run as a colorful and amusing riff on the wild world of crypto. And to hear Fumb Games co-founder Paul West tell it now, almost nobody cared when the game first launched on iOS and Android. “Nothing happened. Like, literally nothing happened at all,” West told Decrypt’s GG. West said they didn’t promote the game due to hurdles with the Bitcoin branding and that even getting the game live on the App Store and Play Store wa...
Before long, you’ll have a multi-tier mine yielding (fake!) bags of Ethereum, Dogecoin, Solana, Shiba Inu, and eventually Bitcoin. Reinvesting your coins into mine upgrades only boosts your earning capabilities, plus you can unlock and equip “managers” for more bonuses, open up additional mines in other regions, and more.
There’s not a lot of depth to the gameplay, admittedly, but there’s always another upgrade, boost, or expansion to pour your coins into—and plenty of opportunities to watch those grating video ads to supercharge your earnings or unlock other benefits.
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Along the way, you’ll also earn real bits of Bitcoin in the form of satoshis that can be cashed out to a ZBD wallet via the Lightning Network. Sometimes satoshis will appear on the screen to tap and claim, while other times they’re hidden around the in-game store or awarded as a daily login reward. Mostly, you’ll earn them through simple gameplay missions that pop up on the screen.
It just doesn't add up to a whole lot of Bitcoin to cash out, really. After five hours of play, I amassed 236 satoshis—that’s about $0.16 worth of Bitcoin as of this writing. That’s on par with most of these mobile Bitcoin games, which tend to average out to a few pennies per hour worth of earnings, including Fumb’s own asteroid-mining game, SpaceY.
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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...
Don’t play Bitcoin Miner because you think you’ll make bank. Play because it’s an amusing riff on the crypto market, and because the numbers always go up in this fake video game economy—unlike in the real crypto market. I’m still playing because I want to see just how wild the faux returns get, even if the real Bitcoin I’m earning is ultimately trivial.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa
