The Future Is Now - The Power Revealed by CryptoKitties on Ethereum

Ethereum has had a few "holy shit" moments where we get a brief foresight into what the underlying technology might enable in the future.

The future is now, sort of, introducing: CryptoKitties!

CryptoKitties combines very basic functionality of the Ethereum network (transactions that interact with complex contracts) into a game that's surprisingly fun to play. To create the market dynamic we're seeing, the game incorporates a few clever features that work together: a marketplace, trait scarcity, randomness, a minimum cost for a new lineage, a lineage decay model, cool-down, and of course, cute AF kittens.

The exciting aspect of this game, though, is that all of the actual game mechanics are done without the use of a central server. You could extrapolate this idea a bit further and imagine:

CryptoKitties, instead of hosting assets on cloud storage, stores all assets on decentralized networks like Swarm or IPFS, which are peer to peer.

Next, imagine that CryptoKitties.co was instead CryptoKitties.eth, and that ENS domain pointed to a contract that could be rendered in a browser like Moon (announced at Devcon3). It's likely that even the future 2-7.5 second block time enabled by the Casper PoS consensus mechanism won't be fast enough for prime-time, so slap a Raiden channel on for low-latency transactions and BOOM kitties on the moon.

Are CryptoKitties transactions clogging the entire network with random adoption/cat-mating transactions? If you answered 'YES' you're correct, you've won some catnip. So what if it was put on a Plasma subchain contract (Raiden might be necessary for low-latency transactions on Plasma).

The implications of building dapps like this on platforms as capable as Ethereum are huge. The cost of data storage, infrastructure, and deployment is next to nothing, and this makes the only real barrier to launching a killer app putting it into code.

Yes, CryptoKitties is a very basic example of a decentralized game, and yes, it's clogging the entire network right now, but it's super cute and demonstrates the future potential of dapps.

The far away future looks great but it might be sensible to plan for some damage control in the near future, if a bunch of kitties can have the Ethereum network on its knees, who knows what copycat games are going to follow.

Do you know of anything similar that's in development?