Bitcoiner

Bitcoiner was a 2016 JavaScript incremental about mining bitcoin with rented CPUs, selling the coins for dollars, and buying better rigs, with a TRON minigame, a bonus shop, and a chat room where players discussed their rigs in real time. wernersbacher built it, the wiki listed it, and by May 2020 it was abandoned and broken.

What the loop felt like

You rented CPUs, the rigs hummed, and satoshis accumulated while you decided whether to cash them out for dollars or reinvest in the next rig tier. That's Bitcoiner.

Then the bonus shop opened, the TRON minigame offered a change of pace, and the chat room turned a solitary spreadsheet into a little trading floor of people comparing rigs. Also that's Bitcoiner.

The systems doing the work

The skeleton was the classic mine-sell-upgrade arc: CPU mining generated BTC, a dollar exchange converted it, and rigs and research spent the proceeds on faster generation, with a prestige layer for players who outgrew their setup. The extras gave it personality beyond the math: a TRON minigame as an arcade palate cleanser, a bonus shop for the completionist itch, and, unusually for a hobbyist incremental of 2016, a live chat room wired into the game itself, which made it as much a tiny community as a game.

An honesty note on research: our AI Mode passes mismatched this title with two different crypto idle games, so their output was discarded, and everything here rests on the wiki row, the archived pages and the community traces that remain.

Where it stumbles

The abandonment notice is dated May 2020, which puts the whole game's lifespan inside one halving cycle: born when bitcoin mining was still a plausible browser-game premise, dead before the coin's second act finished. Both original hosts are now gone, verified in this rewrite: the uberspace.de home page is gone and bitcoinergame.com is a parked for-sale domain. As a game it was a period piece even in its own time, a clicker about a speculative asset, balanced on the hope that the asset kept being interesting.

Playing it today

The original host and the later bitcoinergame.com are both dead, but the Wayback snapshot retains the game's HTML and assets, which puts it one tier above most of its lost peers. The caveat is real: the archive rendering can be unstable in a live browser, which the research records honestly rather than papering over. There was no Steam or mobile release.

The verdict

A historical entry: a bitcoin idle whose servers died before the coin's second act, with a chat room that almost mattered more than the game. The archive keeps it upright; this page keeps its story; and the halving-cycle lifespan remains the best joke the game never told.