The villager trading mechanic can be exploited to provide unlimited emeralds:<p>The game has NPC villagers, each of whom are dressed according to their profession. Professions indicate to the player which items are available for trade. There are a number of possible items per profession, and each villager will make available around a dozen of them. Villagers who are librarians may trade an emerald for a 20-something sheets of paper. Paper is crafted from sugar cane. Players can build massive sugar cane towers.<p>Normally, villagers stop trading items after a while and lock the item from the trade screen. All can be locked except the last trade. So if you get a librarian villager that has paper as its final item, that means unlimited emeralds for you!<p>Obtaining villagers isn't a problem even if villages are hard to find since zombie villagers can be cured into normal villagers. Villagers obtained can then be 'farmed' in simple villager breeders, you just need two to start with. Professions are randomly assigned at, um, birth.<p>Setup for all this is several hours of gameplay, less with some help. The primary thing is finding a zombie spawner underground (plentiful) or an occupied village above ground (not so plentiful). After that, it's just a matter going to the sugar cane tower and grabbing hundreds of sugar cane, crafting it to paper and visiting a librarian for a while. It takes like 10 minutes to trade a full inventory of paper. Repeat ad nauseam. You don't even have to bring a pickaxe.
This might be a stupid question, but does this mean that the number of Emeralds can that exist in the server is limited by the number of bitcoins that the owner has in the bank? I don't see how they can have a Minecraft world that has an infinite amount of space (and therefore infinite Emeralds) and support cashing out the Emeralds into bitcoins?
I've built a way to deploy a Minecraft server using Bitcoin and spent a bit of time last weekend trying to get qrcode.js to run inside scriptcraft.js. My intent is to show a Bitcoin QR code for paying for the instance inside the instance's world. Marketing.<p><a href="https://www.stackmonkey.com/demo/minecraft/" rel="nofollow">https://www.stackmonkey.com/demo/minecraft/</a> and <a href="https://gist.github.com/kordless/beba0a6fa8edcda3b15a" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/kordless/beba0a6fa8edcda3b15a</a>
This sounds a whole lot better than the bitcoin ran minecraft server where you were meant to put in your coins into the server's wallet... Then again, that XAPO thing sounds a little weird.<p>Like most things bitcoin, I'm weary of a scam.
Somehow this reminds me of REAMDE by Neal Stephenson (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde</a>).
I'm confused. Can you mine emeralds in the game, then export them out as bitcoins, then turn the bitcoins into dolars, thereby earning real world money in the game?