TL;DR: Insert Coin is a new arcade on BSV blockchain where every point won is a real payment from your opponent, settled on-chain as it happens. Its builder, a former semi-professional Halo player who goes by @CollinCTO, says gaming should replace trading as the way people earn and use BSV. Every game has a free practice mode alongside the real-stakes tables, and a planned faucet will hand new players their first BSV for free.
Key Takeaways:
“I think gaming needs to replace trading, because trading is stressful, full of scams, and 98% of people lose money. It gives bitcoin and the broader crypto ecosystem a bad rep as a gambling platform and addiction.”
So says “CollinCTO,” developer of Insert Coin, a new arcade on BSV where the blockchain is part of the game itself, not just a bolted-on wallet. Win a point, and the sats are paid to you by your opponent, on-chain, right then.
“There’s way more gamers than there are crypto people and crypto traders combined, so I think gaming is a killer app,” he told CoinGeek.
A gamer first
Collin isn’t some finance guy who discovered Bitcoin and decided to apply it to games. He started playing Halo in 2001 and still plays today. He was a semi-professional player in Major League Gaming back when that was a big thing. The pro path was within reach: a friend he used to game with went on to become a professional Halo player sponsored by Dr Pepper, he said (older fans will know the name Snip3down).
“I always wished that I was playing for money, because of all the time that I spent doing something I love,” he said. “I just wanna give gamers the ability to do something they love, which is spend a lot of time gaming, and at the end of the day, be able to pay the bills. I want to give people the ability to escape the 9-to-5, and I think this platform can do that.”
That’s the ambition, anyway, and we’ll come back to how realistic the numbers are. The more immediate goal is onboarding: bringing people into the BSV ecosystem who “otherwise wouldn’t have given it a second thought.”
Why BSV is better at gaming
Collin said he’s been in Bitcoin since around 2013-14 and describes himself as a purist. He followed the forks to BCH and then to BSV, and the moment that settled it for him was not technical.
“What woke me up was when they censored big blockers on Reddit, and they only allowed the small block narrative to exist,” he said. “I knew that something was really wrong.”
“I believe in big blocks and micro transactions being the killer app features of Bitcoin,” he said. “So I couldn’t help but follow the logical conclusion that Bitcoin SV is actually Bitcoin.”
The machines
Insert Coin runs entirely in the browser. Press the Bitcoin logo button, and you have a wallet made in one click, with no sign-up, no email, and nothing to install. The wallet is non-custodial: keys are created in the browser and never sent to Insert Coin’s servers, the site says, which also means backing up your 12 words is your own job (if that’s too much, it’ll offer you a downloadable login file that works just as well).
Three games are live at the time of writing. Satoshi Pong is Pong for stakes: you and an opponent lock sats in escrow, and every point you win is paid from their balance to yours, with the escrow visible on-chain while you play. We tried the demo and the whole thing is, frankly, pretty. It’s definitely not your grandfather’s Pong either—the gameplay is similar but the UI is more… synthwave. Matches run first-to-five at a stake per point, and a free mode deals every new wallet 50,000 pretend sats so you can learn the table without spending anything.
The second game is the one Collin is betting on. FPSV is an arena shooter for up to eight players, free-for-all, in a similar TRON-style retro neon world of wireframe arenas and starfield skies. Every kill takes sats from the player you drop, and the scoreboard shows the loser going negative in real time. The weapons are named by someone having fun: the flagship rifle is the AYRE-15, named “in ode to Calvin” (CoinGeek owner Calvin Ayre), and the sidearm is the Block 21. It’s mildly graphic in the way FPS players expect, blood spatter and all, and the music and sound effects are addictive.
We played it one-on-one against a 15-year-old Fortnite veteran and lost 18 of 20 matches, plus most of our dignity. That’s about the strongest thing we can say for it: the shooting and movement feel like a proper arena shooter, good enough that a teenager who takes these games seriously did not get bored. It doesn’t feel like a blockchain demo with a game glued on.
FPSV games are configurable too—join one that’s already in progress or host your own, set the time limit, conditions to win, and the number of sats each player stakes (and forks over when they’re killed). Invite-only if you prefer to play with friends or open it up to anyone.
The third game is chess, for those who miss POWchess: both players’ stakes locked in escrow, and every capture paid out in sats. Slower than the other two but still neon-infused, and probably the one where skill pays most reliably.
“It only took us a few days to make the FPSV,” Collin said. “We’re going to be focusing a lot of time on the first person shooter because I think it’s going to have the biggest market base. We’re gonna release new maps for it, new weapons, new game styles, and then once we have that really cooking then we’re gonna release all kinds of new games based on market research. We’re going to identify the most popular game types and try to build at least one game for everyone.”
More titles are getting added, including a neon racer with lap times sealed on-chain, and a snake arena where a fallen rival’s sats spill across the board for anyone to grab. All games will have voice chat. It’s early days, so keep checking back for updates.
There’s a BSV faucet
The part that may matter most for BSV is the faucet. “Everything that the platform earns, we are going to redirect it back into a faucet and give away real BSV to anyone who wants to claim it,” Collin said. “So they can be brand new to the ecosystem, get onboarded instantly, and start playing games and using Bitcoin SV within seconds.”
He’s clear about the problem this addresses. “I think it solves a broader issue in the ecosystem, that Bitcoin SV is somewhat hard to acquire. Especially for an American, with very few exchanges supporting it. Now all you have to do is go to Insert Coin, hit the faucet, now you have BSV, and the ability to increase how much BSV you have just by playing games.”
CoinGeek readers will know we’ve covered that acquisition friction before. Earning rather than buying is one of the cleaner ways to get around it, and clever app developers are building it into their architecture.
Around the games sit all the usual arcade elements, done the on-chain way: usernames, a leaderboard that is already busy, a Trollbox where likes pay the author a few cents, and NFT player icons inscribed as 1Sat Ordinals that you can move to any BSV wallet. Collin also wants the platform to become a public demonstration of throughput, “a crazy amount of transactions per second just on one platform,” as he put it, to show miners and the scaling-curious what the network can carry.
And there is a softer goal underneath it all. “I also wanna create a sense of community among Bitcoin SV people, give them a place to hang out, meet others,” he said. “All of our games will have voice chat, so instead of just speaking on X Spaces they can actually go and play games versus each other and stitch relationships. And also want to give Bitcoiners something to do other than just think about the price.”
FAQs:
What is Insert Coin?
Insert Coin is an online arcade built on BSV where games are played for stakes between players. Win a point or a kill, and the sats are paid to you on-chain by your opponent, as it happens.
Is Insert Coin free to play?
Games include a free practice mode, but if you want to play for real stakes, you’ll have to put a few sats on the line. Winning enough games could even be profitable. Reserving your own unique gamertag costs $5, but it’s only necessary if you crave the recognition.
Do I need a wallet or an account to play?
No account is needed, but a wallet is. Pressing “Insert Coin” creates a wallet in your browser in one click. The wallet is non-custodial: your keys never leave your browser, and you are responsible for backing up your 12 recovery words.
What games are on Insert Coin?
Three games are live: Satoshi Pong, a head-to-head Pong match where every point is a payment; FPSV, an 8-player arena shooter where every kill takes sats from the player you drop; and chess, with both players’ stakes locked in escrow and every capture paid in sats. More titles, including racing and snake games, are in the works.
Can you really earn BSV playing games?
The amounts are small, and stakes come from other players, so for every winner, there is someone paying. Treat it as entertainment where the points happen to be money, not income.
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