I spent 20 years of my life hacking online video games back when I started up was the Wild West. Today, the online game is basically totalitarian government. Right When you're inside the game, you have to play by the game companies roles, and I was able to come in and show that you can bypass those rules. My name is Adrian Online. I'm known as Man Fred and I spent 20 years of my life hacking video games and exploding their online virtual economies. We'll be talking about, I think, all of these games, except to uh huh Other people have come out publicly, but not at the level that you know, um, and transparency that I came up with my time up on the stage. You know, this is like closing the chapter on my 20 years of hacking online games. I was born in Poland, grew up under someone of a corrupt government. Workers rose up and they were like against the government that was trying to corruption. Basically, we emigrated in 1984. We saw the asylum here in the United States, and then I just grew up around computers. I'm a huge gamer and that was very curious about how my online games were. For example, my first game was Ultima Online and Ultima Online. You could have a house inside. The game was highly sought after item. So I put the castle up for sale in this game on the eBay, and I was expecting to get a couple 100 bucks for then it sold for $2800 and I was like, Wow, this is bonkers. I had probably 2 300 eBay listings going at once. You know those bank for my expenses of my college education and things like that. And what kind of revenue you generate probably shouldn't say mhm. Most people don't want to grind away in the game, you know, they don't want to spend eight hours a day like mining virtual rocks. They'd rather just pay somebody else to do that. Yeah, pretty quickly. You had hackers. Once they played some of the original games. You get to the end and their curiosity did not end. They wanted to do more than just play the games within the confines of what the game developers had intended, and they were able to change the code of the games. So this is where the front part starts. Because this is where you like, break out some custom tools to like understand how it's working. One of my favourite exploits was in Dar Wars to our republic. Let's say you had five eggs in your inventory. You could say, Hey, I want to delete three eggs and then the game says, All right, I'll delete three eggs and now you have two eggs in your inventory. You could tell the game. Hey, I want to delete negative three eggs. Then when you subtract, a negative becomes positive, right? So you end up with eight eggs so you can create infinite items. When online gaming really kicked off, it became new heights. Everyone was looking for glitches and games and bucks to take advantage of to make more and more money out of it. Okay, so this is a fun one. This game is called Wild Star Online. Basically, the Wild Star game allows you to place a bid on an item. So I'm going to create a buy order for some gadget, and I'm gonna pay five units of in game currency. But I'm going to modify this as it's going out to the game server, and I'm going to say I'll buy this for, um nine quintillion units of goal. So when the game subtracts the huge sum of money for me, it's gonna bother me out beyond zero, and it's gonna roll me back to the top. So think of a car back in the day. You have a car with the odometer, and they have these little tumbling. We also like, hits nine, and then you add one more mile the whole thing overall room and becomes your again. Similar concepts in computing applies where it's called like an integer overflow or an integer or underflow 32 bit computing. You can have a value up to 4.2 billion if you add one more to that, it will become zero and the same thing with going the other way. Like if you have zero and you subtract one where I'll have basically nine quintillion or 18 quintillion gold has shown here I had about $12 trillion worth of in game currency, which was bonkers. But the thing about this game is it wasn't very popular, so you couldn't sell more than $100 per day. So do you have to keep in mind that the vast majority of gamers are not interested in doing this? They lack the skills or the curiosity You have a very small subset would view this as a business, and they realised pretty early on there was a market for people. For gamers who wanted to increase their capabilities within the game, for a fairly significant amounts of money became a real business for some teenagers who were doing this because a lot of people in online games were trying to make a living wounds. Cape Online is one really good example. Could run it on really all the hardware. So it's a game that's popular in developing countries and low income countries, Um, for example, in Venezuela. So there's people going into a moonscape as their day job to farm items and sell them to other players. The in game currency is more stable than the Venezuelan Fiat currencies, and then they use the landscape currency to basically pay for their bills or buy a loaf of bread and do daily transactions. Some people, their entire livelihood, depends on their participation in the game and the game company can one day just completely shut her mouth. The online game is basically a totalitarian government, right? They can. They can ban your account for any reason. They can exile you from the game, basically, by banning your account. And as time went on, more and more of these games started selling currencies directly to players, which is the same thing I was doing. So that's when I backed out and I said, All right, it's time to close this hacking for fun and profit chapter and move on. It was interesting because you know, the solidarity movement that the government and Parliament trying to crush back in, You know, in the early eighties, it was workers' rights versus the government, and right now in online gaming, there's a similar theme going on right now. Games like ACSI, Infinity allows for players to earn the living Condoned by the game. It's a Blockchain based game, meaning that the players own your assets and it's cryptographically proven like Gilligan. This game you build up your character and then you can listen to an auction house. You get some money and you can cash out, and then you have your other section of your playerbase. They just want to buy a character from another player, and in the end, everybody wins. Actual. Infinity has a huge participation in the Philippines, and people are like going their day job to participate in this online economy, where the American a better living games are more than just what developers tell us how we should play them. And I was able to come in and show that no, that you can bypass those rules. A game is basically a virtual country now where you have citizens and you want to attract forces and you want to give them the tools to for them to produce goods and services. Keep your players happy, keep them as workers happy and as a game company unit will make more money.