One block you can walk around, with doors into zones. Clear the Scrap Yard, beat the Whale, and hunt for loot and Widgets.
A test only. Nothing is live. Loot is saved in this browser only.
Every enemy attack shows its full shape on the floor first, with red stripes. The stripes fill up, flash white, then it hits. Get out, or dodge through it. You'll hear a rising tone when one starts.
Bosses have 3 white squares. Each attack you avoid fills one (a CLEAN dodge fills two). Fill all 3 and the boss is TIRED: 1.5x damage for 3 seconds. Beat the Whale while taking 1 hit or less for a CLEAN KILL bonus drop.
Practice in the Gym: the practice bot does a harmless slam every few seconds.
A new block lands every minute or two in this test. Each one brings 3 Block Jobs, a Boss Key, an Edge chest by the NEXT BLOCK road, and sparks falling outside. Tap the BLOCK box at the top left to see your jobs.
Boss Keys: the Whale gives full loot with a key, Parts and Normal items without one. Keys save up to 6, or 18 if you rest on the bench outside.
Workshop: the Orange Forge and Nixi Swap. Market: the Wanted board. Your Collection Book is in the BLOCK box and the BAG.
Assist: warnings last 1.5x longer and enemies hit 30% softer. Rewards stay the same. High-contrast warnings are yellow and black. One-thumb mode: tap anywhere to walk, no stick.
Normal grey · Rare yellow · Set green · Unique orange (smokes on the floor) · Widgets, bosses only
Widgets and +skills only raise skills you already have points in. A skill at 0 stays at 0. Gear adds at most +6 to any one skill.
Follow the line from the power plant to the mines. Here's what happens along the way.
Coal, gas, water, sun, wind. Doesn't matter which. It's power, and power costs money.
Those boxes do one job: guess a number, trillions of times a second. Every guess costs a little electricity.
The first machine to find a winning guess adds the next block and gets paid in new Bitcoin plus the fees inside it. Everyone else checks that guess in a blink.
No shortcut, no friend at the bank. The only way to win is to spend real energy. Want to change an old block? Redo all the work since then, faster than every miner on Earth. Good luck with that.
Power goes in, a block comes out, and the coins are proof the power was spent. That's the whole trick: Bitcoin turns energy into money you can save and send.
They set up where power is wasted or stuck: gas burned off at oil wells, dams far from any city, extra sun at noon. They'll buy the power nobody else wants.
Watch the sky over the mines: when a new block is found, an orange beam goes up. In the full game the Mining Camp quest lets you run a rig yourself.
+100 Parts · Lucky Find +10% for 10 min · Ghost ring trim
Pick the trim in your Collection Book. More signals are hiding out there.
You found a ghost signal. Here's the part most people never hear: how Bitcoin miners have helped real power grids, and why.
A power grid has to match supply and demand every second. Most big users can't just stop: a hospital, a steel mill, your fridge. A mine can. It switches off in seconds, loses nothing but that hour's income, and switches back on when power is cheap again. Grid people call that a flexible load. It's the rarest thing a grid can buy.
How grid demand response works: ERCOT, Texas grid operator.
Heat wave. Air conditioners everywhere. ERCOT said about 1,000 megawatts of crypto mining shut down for two and a half hours so homes kept their power. That's roughly a big power plant's worth of demand gone in one move.
ERCOT, via Utility Dive and Fortune, July 2022.
Another heat wave. Riot Platforms cut its power use by more than 95% at the peaks and sold the power back. It got $31.7 million in power and demand response credits that month, more than the roughly 333 Bitcoin it mined. The grid paid the miner to step aside, and it did.
Riot Platforms August 2023 update; Texas Public Radio; Houston Chronicle.
Oil wells bring up gas with no pipe to send it anywhere, so it gets burned off in a flare, or worse, leaks as methane. Since 2021, ExxonMobil and Crusoe ran a pilot in North Dakota that fed that gas into generators running mining rigs instead: about 18 million cubic feet a month that would have been flared. Running it through an engine burns off nearly all the methane, a much stronger warming gas. It still makes CO2, so it's a patch, not a cure.
Houston Chronicle, March 2022; Crusoe.
New solar and wind farms often sit finished for months waiting to be hooked up to the grid, earning nothing. A Cornell study looked at 58 planned US wind and solar projects: every one could turn at least a small profit mining in that gap. The 32 Texas projects alone came to about $47 million. Money in year one helps more of them get built.
Lal and You, ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, Oct 2023 (Cornell).
A small river dam in rural Africa can make power all day, but villages only use most of it in the evening. The spare power goes to waste, so the dam can't pay its bills. Gridless puts a container of miners next to the dam to buy the leftovers. At Zengamina in Zambia, 120 machines brought in close to a third of the plant's income. In Malawi, reports say the Bondo mini-grid has connected about 1,800 homes. When the national grid finally arrives, the miners pack up and leave.
Gridless; Cointelegraph; UnHerd, Jan 2024. Company figures, not audited.
Not everyone cheers. Critics say Texas households end up paying those credits, that gas-powered mining still pollutes, and that miners add load to the grid in the first place. Senator Warren asked ERCOT about it in 2022. Blip's take: the switch only helps if it flips when the grid needs it. Watch what miners do on the worst day of the year.
Utility Dive (Warren letter, 2022); Greenpeace USA.
A mine is a buyer that never sleeps and needs no customers, no roads and no town. Just power and an internet signal. So it can show up anywhere power is stranded, wasted or too cheap to sell, pay for it, and leave when real people need it. That turns wasted energy into money, and that money can pay for the next dam, panel or wire.
Blip, after a long night at the Mining Camp.
You got to the Edge first, so this block is yours to name. Up to 16 letters and numbers.