Fail to destroy the whale and your shields will slowly deteriorate until you’ve lost the game. You can choose to start over for free—or pay 1,000 sats (about $0.73 worth of Bitcoin; each sat is 1/100,000,000 BTC) to continue your previous run.
Space Invaders...but it's transactions in a mempool
Taking home the bounty though will require serious skill and luck. Players must shoot down all the whales, many of which fall simultaneously, making it difficult to stay alive for long. If you’re lucky enough, though, you might play while large Bitcoin transactions are taking place on the blockchain, allowing you to destroy larger whales and stack bigger quantities of BTC in a short period of time.
But there is another way to win, according to the pseudonymous developer—though it’ll require the ability to move a massive amount of crypto.
“The people's approach,” said the developer in a post outlining the game, is to “throw up a 10,000 Bitcoin transaction to yourself and wait for it to show up.”
“Then blast it out of the water—er—space,” they explained. “Just make sure not to spend too much in fees, or you'll eat up all your winnings.”
Of course, not everyone has $730 million in Bitcoin laying around to win the game. As an alternative, the developer cheekily suggested trying “two 5,000 Bitcoin transactions.”
“Just make sure that they are broadcast close enough together that you can shoot both of them in the same game,” they added in the footnotes.
Anyone that actually completes the initiative will need to share a screenshot of their “game over” screen to unlock the bounty. If they put in the “effort to fake that,” the sats reward is “deserved,” the game’s author wrote.
Bitcoin is up 1.3% in the last 24 hours, slightly increasing the game’s bounty in the process as it trades around $73,198. The top crypto asset has jumped more than 9.5% in the last week, but still sits 42% below its all-time high of $126,080.
