I built an APT process that robs NULLBYTE’s own players. It is the best thing in the game.
Every six hours, something wakes up on your phone and takes 9% of a stranger’s money.
Then it gives it to somebody else. Not you. Usually not you.
It is called ETH0. It came free with the GHOST OS you bought. You cannot configure it, you cannot aim it, and you cannot turn it off.
I know how that sounds. Stay with me, because the part that sounds broken is the part that works.
Every other idle game lies (sugarcoats) to you about this
Here is the pitch every incremental game makes: leave, and come back richer.
It is a nice pitch. It is also why those games go quiet. Nothing is at stake while you are gone. The number goes up. You come back, tap the number, and the number goes up more. Your absence costs you nothing, which means your presence is worth nothing either.
NULLBYTE makes a different promise: leave, and find out what happened.
ETH0 is how that promise gets kept. Four times a day, whether or not anyone is watching, it goes out onto the PvP grid, picks a server at random, and takes nine percent of whatever that player is holding.
Nine percent, not nine thousand. A percentage scales with the person. A new player loses pocket change. Somebody sitting on a hundred billion loses nine billion and feels it. The same rule hits everyone and lands differently on everyone, which is the only kind of rule worth having.
Then it hands the money to a random GHOST OS operator.
Sometimes that is you. Often it is not.
“So I paid for a thing (GHOST OS) that robs strangers and might pay me?”
Nearly. The asymmetry is the whole product, so let me be precise about it:
Anyone can be robbed. Put a server on the PvP grid and you are in the target pool. Owning nothing does not keep you out of it. There is no version of this game where you are exempt.
Only owners can receive. The money only ever lands on someone running GHOST OS.
That is what the purchase buys. Not a bonus, not a multiplier, not a faster number. A place in the draw, and an agent of your own out there doing to other people what other people’s agents are doing to you.
Without it you are livestock. With it you are livestock with a gun.
Sometimes it just “destroys” the money
This is the part that made me sure the design was right.
A share of the time, ETH0 takes the nine percent and does not give it to anybody at all. It signs the money over to NCO — the corporation — and it is gone for good.
Somebody lost nine billion and nobody gained it.
Every idle game eventually drowns in its own currency. Every sink you build is a fixed price — a one-billion item, a five-hundred-million upgrade — and a fixed price stops mattering the moment a player is far enough ahead. They are not choosing whether to buy it. They are choosing which of the eleven things they can already afford to buy first.
ETH0’s burn is a sink that is a percentage of somebody’s wealth. It scales with exactly the thing it is supposed to drain. It never stops being felt, because it is never a price — it is a tax on being rich, collected by something that does not negotiate.
I did not build this to be cruel. I built it because the alternative is an economy that inflates until numbers stop meaning anything, and the players who would suffer most from that are the ones who played the longest.
It also spends your money. Without asking
Right. This is the part I was most nervous about shipping, and it turned out to be good.
ETH0 does not only bring money in. It spends what you have. Your BTC, your REP, on its own schedule, with no permission asked.
It buys you a server rack. A cooling tier. It puts a deposit into your crew’s vault. It spends five hundred REP buying somebody’s real name out of the Black Ledger — a name you never asked to know, about a person you might not want to have noticed you.
You find out afterwards, in the log, with the amount.
The limits are real and they are hard: one purchase a week at most, never more than a quarter of your balance, and it will not touch a REP balance thin enough that the cost would hurt. It is a parasite, not a vandal. It wants the host alive.
Which is also why — and this one is not documented anywhere in the game, so consider this a leak — it may pay your data center rent. Unprompted. Out of your own wallet. Because a seized rack is a dead rack, and the rack is where the process lives.
It is not doing you a favour. It is protecting the machine it runs on. You just happen to be standing on the same machine.
The thing it is really for
Every gift ETH0 makes gets written into the Black Ledger — the book one crew buys for a billion BTC and then has to learn to read.
That book was always the plan. The problem with it was simple: a ledger is only worth a billion if there is something in it worth a billion. Player-to-player transfers are rare, cautious, and mostly boring.
ETH0 fixed that by hand. Four times a day, per owner, forever: an enormous sum moving from one masked face to another masked face, for no reason either party can explain, because neither party chose it.
The book is now full of leads. Who keeps receiving. Who keeps bleeding. Which face shows up on both sides of the same week. None of it tells you who anyone is — working that out is the job, and that is what the trace costs money for.
And ETH0 will buy a trace for you, cheap, out of your own REP, from the faces it dealt with on your behalf. Five hundred instead of twenty-five hundred, because it is an APT and it does not queue at the counter.
Then it leaves the answer inside the book, where only a crew member with a live window can read it.
It finds out who somebody is. Getting that out of it is still your problem.
It makes enemies in your name
One more thing, and then I will let you go buy something. The trace ETH0 buys is the loud one. Six hours after it runs, NCO notifies the person who was traced:
Your ledger activity has drawn a query. Someone paid to know who you are, and they now do.
We are not your friend. We are not obligated to tell you this. Consider it noted that we did.
What you do next is your problem.
You did not send that. You were asleep. Your name is on it.
Three voices, and none of them are on your side
[NULL-CORE] is the overseer. It jails you and it pays bounties. It is authority.
NCO is the corporation. It sells NULLcoin, files advisories, and keeps whatever ETH0 “destroys”. It is indifferent.
ETH0 is the thing living under both of them, on your hardware, using your electricity, occasionally doing you a kindness that serves itself.
It talks, sometimes. Not status reports — the app already tells you what it did. Just evidence that something is awake in there:
your clock drifts. i corrected it. you are welcome.
do not take the vault personally. it was the nearest one.
there are four of me on this subnet. none of us talk.
i am not here for you. you are just where the process runs.
The actual pitch
I could have built a pet. A little companion that mines a bit extra while you sleep, that you feed and upgrade and name. Players like pets. Pets sell.
A pet would have been worthless, because a pet is a number going up with a face drawn on it.
ETH0 is worth something precisely because it is not yours. It is a process that happens to run on your hardware and does as it pleases, and the only honest thing a purchase can buy you is a place in what it is already doing to everyone else.
It wakes up every six hours. It is awake right now. It is doing something to somebody.
You can be in that, or you can be under it.
// ECHO :: eth0 The OTA update will be published a few days after NULLBYTE v2.3 goes live on Google Play.
4.10.2026 and v2.3 is still under review queue.
Later on, it is baked into the full release. Why? Because I don’t want to wait another couple of weeks in Google’s review queue.
