Disclosure: I built the game and write the newsletter mentioned in this story. Both are free. Nothing here is legal or tax advice.
This month I shipped a free browser game where every obstacle is a real U.S. Bitcoin rule. A set of free Bitcoin GIFs I publish passed 4.3 million views. And my plain legal explainers reached the top 2 of HackerNoon’s Web3 writer ranking.
Three very different formats. One lesson: information about the law spreads when it fits inside something people already do.
Here is what I built, how I built it, and what I learned.
The slow part: legal explainers
For months I’ve been writing informative articles about Bitcoin law here on HackerNoon. No price talk, no predictions. Just how a specific rule works and who it affects.
This month, those articles put me in the top 2 of HackerNoon’s Web3 writers.
A small confession about that label. I’m a Bitcoin maxi, and “Web3” is not a word I would ever pick for myself. But it’s the category HackerNoon uses, and Bitcoin writers and Bitcoin stories are ranked inside it. So I’ll take the ranking and leave the label.
What I noticed is that the articles that travel are never the opinion pieces. They’re the precise ones. A form number, what it reports, who has to file it.
The fast part: a game where the walls are laws
Articles have one limit. They only reach people who already want to read about regulation. Most Bitcoin holders don’t.
They will, however, play something for two minutes.
So I built Cold Storage Run.
How it plays
You’re an orange Bitcoin coin trying to reach cold storage. Tap to fly. Walls slide toward you, and every wall is labeled with a real U.S. rule or enforcement tool.
A few of them:
- Form 1099-DA. Brokers now use it to report proceeds from digital asset sales to you and to the IRS.
- The Travel Rule. Financial institutions must collect identifying information and pass it along with funds transfers of $3,000 or more.
- A John Doe summons. The IRS used one to get a court to order an exchange to hand over records on 14,355 account holders.
The others are Form 8300, the coffee tax, the 1040 question and an IRS letter.
Each gap you clear counts as one block. Every 21 blocks there’s a “halving” and the game speeds up.
Hit a wall and the run ends. The screen shows the rule that stopped you, one fact about it, and a link to the source. Ranks go from Paper Hands to Satoshi Tier.
There’s one power-up: a stamp marked WITHDRAWN that lets you pass through a single wall. It’s based on a real event. On October 5, FinCEN withdrew its 2020 proposal to require reports on transfers to self-hosted wallets.
Below the game, every wall is explained in plain English, with its source.
The three constraints
It had to be a real game. An earlier idea was closer to a quiz. I dropped it. Quizzes feel like homework, and nobody shares homework. Poor design is the usual reason gamified products fail, a point this gamification playbook makes well.
It had to ask for nothing. No sign-up, no wallet connection, no email field, no cookies, no trackers. The page makes no third-party requests. The only thing it stores is your best score, in your own browser. For an audience that cares about privacy, a tool that collects data would contradict the whole point of the game.
Every wall had to be real. Each one is a rule or event that exists, with a source you can check.
Technical notes
The game is a single static page. HTML canvas for the rendering, plain JavaScript, no framework, no backend. It sits on a static host under a subdomain. No server means nothing to maintain and nothing that logs visitors.
Gap positions are randomized and the order of the rules is shuffled on every run, so you can’t memorize a path. A player on X asked for a fixed practice mode so learning the rules feels less frantic. Fair point. It’s on the list.
The share flow taught me something about platforms. When a run ends, the game draws a square result card as a PNG, right in the browser. I wanted the “Share on X” button to attach that image automatically. It can’t. A website can prefill the text of a post, but not attach an image to it.
So the flow became: save the card, open the prefilled post, attach the image yourself. On phones, the button opens the system share sheet, which makes it almost seamless.
The surprise: 4.3 million GIF views
The third thing was never planned as a product.
I publish free Bitcoin GIFs on GIPHY. This month they passed 4.3 million views.
What I like most is where they end up. On X, bitcoiners use them in replies to explain an idea or make a point. Nobody visits a website to see them. They simply show up inside conversations that were already happening.
What a month of building taught me
The articles, the game and the GIFs look unrelated. One is long-form text. One is a coin dodging tax forms. One is a few seconds of animation in a reply.
But they do the same job. Each one meets people where they already are, in an article feed, on a phone screen or in a thread on X, and hands them one accurate piece of information without asking for anything back.
If you write explainers of any kind, legal or technical, that’s the takeaway I’d offer. Stop waiting for people to come to the information. Put it inside the formats they already use.
And if you try the game, tell me in the comments which wall stopped you.
Disclosure: I built Cold Storage Run and write The Bitcoin Act, a free newsletter on Bitcoin law. Nothing in this story is legal or tax advice.