I'm Giving Away Olympiad Games on the Bitcoin Blockchain

Hello, Chess.com fans!

This is a public service announcement to say that the first round games of the 2024 Olympiad have been inscribed into the Bitcoin ledger. As long as Bitcoin survives, the games will live on in a distributed blockchain database that is running on thousands of computers around the world. The Olympiad only happens every other year, and many many games are played by the best players on the planet who have been given the honor of representing their countries. These are very special games, if not to the public at large then certainly to the players themselves who may only be celebrating this event once or twice in a lifetime. They serve not only as a historical marker on the blockchain, which marks out time in blocks, but also as a potential source of future value for chess players. I wanted to present this idea to a wide audience, and the Olympiad is the perfect momentous occasion to do that.

Every round one game (open and women's sections) is an individual inscription. Anyone can view these games here: ordinals.com/children/36b5ce7138cc49d297973326dc541e201b41ca19e96c14851f0ae3f35dc4baa9i0. Once you see these games come up, you can click on them and play through them or view the game score. Likewise if you have a mobile app that collects inscriptions, you can play through them there as well.

To be totally transparent about my intentions, let me explain. In my opinion, chess games can be collectable items. Chess players that add to the pile of historical games should be given the opportunity to be first owners of these digital artifacts and sell them to others, or just hang onto them until they become World Champions and can sell them, I assume, quite handsomely. Games that mark turning points in a tournament, contain a brilliancy, or oddity could be valuable. If you doubt that is possible, I'll just remind you of how much money crazy people spend on useless Bored Apes NFTs -- literally thousands of dollars for some pixels that are rather ugly and don't have any historical significance!

In the future, I'd like to see sponsors and organizers mint games officially and gift them to players for participating. Eventually a market for them could spring up. Anybody can do this, not just me. This is all open source technology. I can also picture enterprising individual players doing this for themselves in the future. It is important, I think, that these games be minted by reputable sources and/or subsequently owned by a player if they are to have any real value. This is why I come to you with an offer, to show you all how this works, test the waters for interest and potentially grow the idea.

Any players at the Olympiad that also have Lichess accounts and who are interested in having their round one game sent to them absolutely free may friend me @KGNiteKnight here on Chess.com. I will explain how I can get them to you. I will pay all fees. Any and all players that are more or less able to convince me that they are who they say they are, (I can probably tell by your Chess.com profile) are eligible. If for some reason, more than one player wants to make a claim on a game, I'll have to go with the first person that asks for it. If there is a lot of interest, I can mint individual games of interest or further rounds. Maybe you lost your first round game and won a later round game. I can inscribe whatever additional game you'd like. In the interest of conserving my Bitcoin, I need to limit this offer to one per player.

Many of you probably believe (and I don't blame you) that NFTs or inscriptions are foolish things to spend money on and nobody should ever want to collect them, especially since PGN files are free to anybody that seeks them out on the internet. That is entirely true, and yet the concept of ownership of a unique thing persists. Some people put value on odd things and seem to appreciate digital scarcity, which is what this project is based on. I am an NFT skeptic, but if I knew that a chess game was officially created at the time the game was played, was one of a kind (or maybe two of a kind), and was owned by the original player, I might want to own that game. I think time will tell if others feel the same way. This is all just an experiment and I would love to hear your comments and criticisms. Feel free to speak your mind in this post.

I'll finish with an apology and a couple "thank you's".

To anyone offended by this idea, that chess games can be collectable somehow, that they would be valued at all and sold like art, I apologize. Some people are purists and would probably rather not see chess games turn into commodities. We'll have to see how the community digests this idea. Personally I think a market of chess games that would reward players only adds a new dimension to the sport that makes it bigger and more celebrated.

Also big "thank you's" to Lichess and Mark Crowther. To Lichess for their awesome PGN viewer javascript code, which has been inscribed in Bitcoin as well and makes it possible to view games beautifully on Bitcoin, and to Mark for his dedication to providing PGN games like the Olympiad to everyone for free. I used them as the source for these games. If they are flawed in any way I do apologize.

Cheers, and
Long live Chess.com!

Ken "KGNiteKnight" Greiner