Did you know you can earn Bitcoin by playing Minecraft? Satlantis, a Minecraft server, allows users to earn satoshis (sats) while gaming. Players can join a virtual mining pool that pays real sats to players every 10 minutes.
A satoshi is the smallest unit of Bitcoin, with each Bitcoin containing 100 million satoshis. According to the startup Zebedee, which created the technology to power the third-party server, over 1 million satoshis (about $300) are distributed every week.
How do you get involved? How does it work? And how much can you really earn? We've spent countless hours in the game to help you get started, both through text and video. Check out the step-by-step guide below.
How to Earn Bitcoin in Minecraft
Satlantis is a Minecraft server accessible via Minecraft: Java Edition on computers. The server's IP is play.satlantis.net.
Anyone can join Satlantis and play, but to earn Bitcoin, you must obtain a virtual ASIC miner — the same kind used for real Bitcoin mining — and then supply it with emeralds. This will increase your hashrate (seen on the right side of the screen), which enters you into a drawing every 10 minutes to win satoshis.
The lowest-tier ASIC miner adds 10 to your hashrate, but you can acquire an ASIC miner that produces up to 45 hashrate.
To calculate your chances of winning, divide your hashrate by the global hashrate displayed on the screen and then multiply by 100. During our short gaming period, we managed to achieve a maximum hashrate of 30 with a global hashrate of 52,630. This means we had a 0.057% chance of winning Bitcoin every 10 minutes.
While ASIC miners are the primary way to earn sats in the game, you can also trade to get Bitcoin. There is a market available where users sell everything from simple items like clay to rarer ones like insect wings — this is how we acquired our ASIC miners!
However, don't be fooled by market prices! What may seem like $2,000 actually means 2,000 sats — which is currently just over $0.50.
How to Get an ASIC Miner in Satlantis
There are two ways to obtain ASIC miners in Satlantis: through the battle pass, which involves rewards, or from the market. The battle pass, accessible by typing "/bp" in the game's chat, is available in both free and paid versions.
In the 3rd season, the current season at the time of writing, you need to reach level 51 in the free battle pass to obtain an "Elliptic Key," which allows you to get an ASIC miner through an "Elliptic Crate."
If 51 levels of a free battle pass seem a bit too intense for you, the premium battle pass offers an elliptic key at level 10. A premium battle pass costs $40 via Stripe or 120,000 satoshis — approximately $33 at current values.
To increase your battle pass level, you actually need to actively work on it — your missions are rarely completed as a byproduct of regular gameplay.
There are fun missions, like "Where's Waldo?" where you must find Waldo hidden somewhere in the world. But there are also more challenging missions, such as "Deal 10,000 points of damage to a player."
After playing for a while, we decided to take a shortcut and buy some ASIC miners directly from the market.
First, we had to deposit money into Satlantis. This is done by typing "/deposit" and sending Bitcoin via the Lightning Network to the address displayed on the screen through a QR code.
We loaded $9, which gave us 32,999 sats, and bought three virtual ASIC S10 miners for 29,000 sats each.
How to Fuel the ASICs
To make your ASIC miner produce hashrate, it must be fueled with an emerald. You don't need to be logged in to produce hashrate or collect rewards, so the game can run in the background while you do other things on your PC.
The maximum number of emeralds you can put in an ASIC is 64 per fuel slot. This merely extends the amount of time your virtual device will produce hashrate — it was 18 hours, three minutes, and 20 seconds for our S10.
It's essential to note that you don't obtain emeralds the same way you would in vanilla Minecraft. Instead, there are traders in the lobby who will exchange ores and sugar cane for emeralds.
With exchange rates of 32 diamonds for 16 emeralds, you'd be forgiven for thinking that securing stacks of 64 emeralds is unattainable. But you'd be wrong.
By typing "/mines" in the chat, you'll be teleported to a crazy mine system with an abundance of all the ores you need. In these mines, we managed to get two stacks of 64 diamonds in 20 minutes.
You can take things to the next level by entering the diamond mines. To get there, you must complete an incredibly challenging parkour course. If you want to make things easier, buy an "elytra" (a set of wings) and fly down — we finally did this.
Once down there, you'll find plenty of mushrooms (great for making soup), mobs (also known as enemy creatures, for completing missions), and Poseidon's tomb.
In this tomb, there is an incredible amount of ores to mine. It can be a bit overwhelming when you first enter, but not everything is straightforward as you'll have to fend off mobs.
How Much Can You Earn?
Over four days of sporadic play on the Satlantis server, we managed to keep our three ASIC S10 miners running for about 41 hours in total.
For most of that period, we didn't earn any Bitcoin. We were in our last hour of fuel with the game running in the background when we suddenly won the drawing.
We won 16,034 sats during our time on the server. At the time of writing this article, that was just over $4, which means we're almost halfway to recovering our initial investment.
How to Withdraw Bitcoin from Satlantis
When you're ready to withdraw, simply type "/withdraw" followed by the amount you want to withdraw. Then, you'll be prompted to enter your Lightning Network address. After doing that, you'll need to wait up to 48 hours for the transaction to be processed.
The Satlantis server is an intriguing way for gamers to earn Bitcoin while playing one of the most popular games of all time.
Getting started can be challenging, but the guide above should help you navigate — and don't hesitate to ask questions in the server's Discord or in the in-game chat, as the community seems to support newcomers quite well.
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