Jumping into the Cryptokitty craze

Over the last few weeks I've been exploring, understanding and researching the various Cryptocoins that are out there (Yes I know I'm late to the party). As part of that research it didn't take long to learn of the Etherium blockchain as it's no secret that Etherium is currently one of the big players in the Crypto market. 

Unsurprisingly Cryptokitties became popular as a side result of being a "game" based on the Etherium chain.

With my puny little PC I was way to late to mine it myself and my finances are such that I wasn't able to invest heavily with cold hard cash but I could afford a small investment. Having always enjoyed breeding games I figured even if I can't find a way to profit from breeding/selling at least I can enjoy it for it's core design.

First impressions and doing my research:

It's not exactly cheap is it! Not only do you have to factor in the cost of getting some kitties to start with but everytime you do anything it costs a little Ether. I hesitantly looked at my bank balance to decide how much I could put in and what it would get me. The short answer.....not a lot. I ended up settling on enough to buy two cheap mid gen kitties and enough to breed them a few times.

Now if this was going to be sustainable I needed to be very careful which two cats I started my journey with. SO, the next step was to find out what had already been learnt about the breeding process and which traits were rare and thus likely to help me get a return.

The result:

https://cryptokittydex.com/

https://medium.com/@kaigani/the-cryptokitties-genome-project-68582016f687

Perfect! Some very dedicated people, much clever than myself have looked into the binary code of each kitty and found a way to decipher it so you at least stand half a chance of breeding for specific traits. After a lot of reading I understood the kai gene concept enough to start thinking about what I needed for my first kitties. 

Now don't get me wrong the kitty dex is an insanely useful tool but I felt I needed I bit more of a quick reference sheet.I toddled off to google docs to make a sheet of all the currently known Kai gene codes and then highlighted some of the values based on how rare they were, again according the the dex listing.

Kitty Gene pool spreadsheet-Feel free to refer to it if it helps you too.

The result, I now have my first two kitties. Yay!!

Why did I choose this combo...ahh that would be telling. Nah I don't have any insider info it's just a combo that didn't have huge numbers in the market already and had low price tags with gens that weren't excessively high.

Trading:

Now it occurred to me that surely the best way to get ahead in this game must be to have trading partners, no? All other games of this type work better when you can create partnerships so you can trade babies to share genetics (and avoid cross breeding, but that doesn't appear to be an issue here).
There isn't a trade/swap mechanism built into the site so I'm guessing the main issue here would be trust as you would both have to list on the market and count on the other person buying at the same price you sell yours for (or whatever trade you agreed). Do you have a trading partner/s? Would you be interesting at looking into this option if we both had traits the other wanted? Let me know.

Happy breeding,
Sharky