"If you could turn out a bitcoin per day per player"
Can't be done.
According to this BitCoin calculator[1] you need to generate 245 Mhashes/sec (mega-hashes per second) to generate 1 bitcoin per day today. (Remeber that number will go up as time goes on)
I assume that calculator is for 24/7 calculation (which you won't get with gamers), let's assume they are hardcore and play 6 hours per day, every day. You can't dedicate 100% of your customer's GPU power to bitcoin mining (since they'll need to actually play yoru game), let's say you dedicate 20% of their GPU.
To get 1 bitcoin per day you need hardware that's able to do 245 × 4 × 5 = 4,900 Mhashes/sec.
This thread[2] from the bitcoin forum today has some idea of what current hardware can do. They say "5870's are $250 apiece at the moment and each only get around 350 Mh/s", so in order to get 4,900 Mh/s, you'll need about 14 of them.
i.e. If the players of your MMO have 14 graphics cards (costing ~US$250 each) in their machine, then you can probably generate 1 bitcoin per day per hardcore player. i.e. It's not possible, forget about it.
But then let's reassess this 1 BT/Day thing. That's $8 a day right now, you'd be pretty pissed paying $8/day for most any game.
What if we said 1 BT/month instead? Then all your numbers kind of point to that being pretty feasible no? If I'm reading your calculations right, then a gamer with one GPU would generate 2 BTs per month.
Except when someone on your games forum points out how players can get a 25% increase in graphics quality (By going from 80% GPU power to 100% GPU power) by stopping a certain process (your BitCoin miner). Hardcore games are going to care about that kind of numbers.
I think miners also need to download a lot of data initially (i think 500GB). Mining might require network access which has a negative impact on network latency, and a negative impact on most real time MMOs.
i.e. there are also a whole pile reasons why running a miner would pissed off your paying customers.
Well, a Bitcoin-mining MMO game probably should be free. It would have a larger install-base, and people would be more tolerant of a miner running in the background.
Also, MMO games generally have pretty low graphics requirements (to appeal to the widest possible install-base), so a lot of gamers have excess GPU that could be used for mining.
Can't be done.
According to this BitCoin calculator[1] you need to generate 245 Mhashes/sec (mega-hashes per second) to generate 1 bitcoin per day today. (Remeber that number will go up as time goes on)
I assume that calculator is for 24/7 calculation (which you won't get with gamers), let's assume they are hardcore and play 6 hours per day, every day. You can't dedicate 100% of your customer's GPU power to bitcoin mining (since they'll need to actually play yoru game), let's say you dedicate 20% of their GPU.
To get 1 bitcoin per day you need hardware that's able to do 245 × 4 × 5 = 4,900 Mhashes/sec.
This thread[2] from the bitcoin forum today has some idea of what current hardware can do. They say "5870's are $250 apiece at the moment and each only get around 350 Mh/s", so in order to get 4,900 Mh/s, you'll need about 14 of them.
i.e. If the players of your MMO have 14 graphics cards (costing ~US$250 each) in their machine, then you can probably generate 1 bitcoin per day per hardcore player. i.e. It's not possible, forget about it.
[1] http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php [2] http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9052.0