Topic: Censorship Resistant Vanilla WoW Character on Blockchain (Nostalrius Solution) (Read 281 times)

Many of you may be aware of the Nostalrius debacle. For those of you who aren't allow me to summarize.

The story:

Nostalrius was the largest, most popular and most respected vanilla wow private server of all time. It became so popular that Blizzard threatened them with legal action and forced the devs to shutter the project. So many people were enraged and heart broken that it turned into a PR shitstorm. Hundreds of thousands of people lost countless hours of time investment. The characters were never recovered.

The problem:

The community is afraid to commit to a new sever because they are afraid it will just happen over and over again. Now you think, why not just switch to a new server. The obvious answer is you would be lv 1 again. So why not just make a server where everyone is level cap right away? Well you could do that but it would rob the game of so much of its soul. The leveling and gearing process segregates the community in a way that is healthy and good.

The solution in a nut shell:

Private servers will periodically publish a database containing all of the character data (probably 10gb or less for a million users) for all of their users while simultaneously publishing a hash of that data on the blockchain. Servers that all play by the same rules and trust each other can federate and the same character could be accessed on any server that was a member of the federation. Your character would "live" on the blockchain, so to speak, making it censorship resistant. Blizzard could censor any server they wanted but they would only ever be hacking at the branches while the roots (our characters and their progress and achievements) are as timeless and immutable as the blockchain they live on.

The technical specifics:

Too be added tomorrow. It is getting late.