[NSCFType]

The villager trading mechanic can be exploited to provide unlimited emeralds:

The game has NPC villagers, each of whom are dressed according to their profession. Professions indicate to the player which items are available for trade. There are a number of possible items per profession, and each villager will make available around a dozen of them. Villagers who are librarians may trade an emerald for a 20-something sheets of paper. Paper is crafted from sugar cane. Players can build massive sugar cane towers.

Normally, villagers stop trading items after a while and lock the item from the trade screen. All can be locked except the last trade. So if you get a librarian villager that has paper as its final item, that means unlimited emeralds for you!

Obtaining villagers isn't a problem even if villages are hard to find since zombie villagers can be cured into normal villagers. Villagers obtained can then be 'farmed' in simple villager breeders, you just need two to start with. Professions are randomly assigned at, um, birth.

Setup for all this is several hours of gameplay, less with some help. The primary thing is finding a zombie spawner underground (plentiful) or an occupied village above ground (not so plentiful). After that, it's just a matter going to the sugar cane tower and grabbing hundreds of sugar cane, crafting it to paper and visiting a librarian for a while. It takes like 10 minutes to trade a full inventory of paper. Repeat ad nauseam. You don't even have to bring a pickaxe.

[pbhjpbhj]

Presumably, given the modifications they've made, they can mod it so that villagers won't trade emeralds.

Mind you I've found a few previous attempts at integrating minecraft and bitcoin but they all appear to have closed down, eg https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BitVegas where a bug was exploited to take all the server owners bitcoin and leave them unable to run the server.

[phaser]

Hi, we heavily modified the way villagers work, and there is a really cool update coming in the next days:

You will be able to buy or sell to villagers. Villagers will have a "wallet" of money to spend and once they buy you stuff thats the very same stuff they will sell to other players.

[ultimape]

Queue final fantasy style bazaars where people stand around all day yelling "SELLING X FOR Y".

[rtkwe]

If they didn't think of this their idea is broken and the server will either go broke or they'll patch it when they notice. There are several possible patches for this, the first that comes to mind is that they've modded natural emeralds to spawn with a different damage value than emeralds that villagers trade. After that it's pretty easy for their ATM mod to reject if they see villager sourced emeralds. As items with different damage values don't stack they won't mix either.

That's just the first patch that comes to mind for fixing this system. Another would be to just remove villagers/npc trading with a mod.

[ultimape]

I'd imagine the bitcoin mod would trigger on 'break emerald ore' in the world, and that a flag would be set upon 'place emerald ore' to prevent silktouch from causing it to be fired more than once.

[DanBC]

Parent comment is not talking about using silk touch picks to retrieve the ores and then using fortune picks to mine those ores -- and there's no reason to stop that behaviour.

Villagers trade items for emeralds. It's possible to trade paper for emeralds. The game limits the amount of paper that can be traded, but the game misses a single option which means that it is very easy to get huge numbers of emeralds.