If the idea of a “forced exercise” doesn’t sound like fun to you, you’d be right. Serkan Toto, CEO and Founder of Tokyo-based Kantan Games Inc., an independent game industry consultancy, tells Inverse, “A lot of these games seem to be forced exercises in basically trying to use blockchain and digital ownership and monetization.” Over the last five years, blockchain games have become a genre of their own, but whether any of them are actually worth playing is as unknown as Satoshi Nakamoto’s true identity.ĭr. And, unless you’ve been stuck in a Sumerian stockyard, you know that mainstream in the 21st century means gaming. The growing ubiquity of multi-million dollar NFTs ( non-fungible tokens) and cryptocurrencies has pushed blockchain into the mainstream. It’s easier to clone a sheep than to counterfeit a cryptocurrency.

Nobody likes to get screwed, be it in sheep or Dogecoin.īlockchain is most famously associated with Bitcoin and Ethereum, which use the technology to create secure currencies with real-world value backed by the time and energy spent encrypting them. Cuneiform, like blockchain, was invented out of the desire to create a secure, transparent exchange. Replace the wedge-shaped codes on clay tablets with algorithmically encrypted data on a computer network, and baby, you’ve got a stew going. It was, as scholars have shown, a newfangled transaction recording system that applied innovative cryptography to existing technology. Well, the blockchain of 6,000 years ago - cuneiform.

About 6,000 years ago in a sweltering Sumerian stockyard that stunk like sheep shit, someone invented blockchain.

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