Star citizen digital products and merchandise can be bought on the Roberts Space Industries website using the following payment methods:

 

Created 5th October, 2015

Star Citizen Payment Methods available on Roberts Space Industries

So what does that mean for players wanting to use alternate payment methods to reside in the Star Citizen 'Verse?

The current company policy is to restrict players from selling digital products from Star Citizen when not using official channels. While this sounds vague, the truth is more complicated as there are many different types of items that can be traded in different ways.

 

For example:

  • Player Accounts - The company prohibits selling your player account to another person.
  • Items in the game - Introducing: mG - Mobiglas!

Probably the most important thing to understand about the mobiGlas is that it is connected with practically every other component in the universe, from player characters to Takuetsu ship models. Thanks to the TAG system, which we’ll explain further another time, the mobiGlas can fetch data on anything that has been tagged, and interpret it depending on the situation.

 

The beautiful mobiGlass (mG) - Is it tracking everything you do?
The beautiful mobiGlas (mG) - Is it tracking everything you do?

It certainly sounds like in game transactions may be recorded or monitored by the company somehow so making shady deals may have an extra level of risk (you may have to turn off all devices in an area before the deal can go down).

 

Selling "Gifting" Ships

The company started to regulate the grey market in May 2014. Since then it allows players to "gift" ships only once.

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So this sounds like one way that one may acquire a ship in the grey market with something like Bitcoin.

 

Using Bitcoin to purchase a playable account would still be considered black market in terms of Star Citizen.

 

If we used the word vague earlier to describe company policy for Star Citizen real world market trading I think we understated the current situation. We hope to have given you a glimpse at the complexities with buying and selling digital products in Star Citizen.

 

Update: February 6th 2016

The monthly Studio Report for January 2016 mentions the following:

On a related note, we’ve also been pushing hard to get caught up on our hacked accounts. We feel this is a good time to remind players that we do not condone buying and selling of pledges using the gifting system, in fact we actively discourage it. This is one area where we cannot promise and you should not expect that we can or must address a given ticket. The gifting mechanism is not intended for this use, and not only can CIG not monitor a third party transaction, you are exposing yourself to a risk where you may not be able to recover your funds if the other party has malicious intent.

 

Trading pledge accounts and gifting ships for currency is discouraged by CIG.

Please always check the official website for the latest official details.

Star Citizen & CryptoCurrency

Some good reasons exist why the in game items don't use Distributed Technologies (DLT, Cryptocurrency and others) as defined by the recent hype in the recent crypto bubble.

Since the game is a high fidelity digital massively multiplayer online simulation any delays in data access would make the game unplayable. Additionally, the benefits of a centralised system are required for the creation of this type of game (too many to discuss here).

While even late generation online distributed systems can be good at tracking large amounts of data, Star Citizen already has been using "uncountable" entities for years - and in near real time to players all over the globe.

The video games industry has a long experience with in game currencies going back a few decades.

Star Citizen is a hand crafted and procedurally generated parallel in-fiction universe with a simulation-controlled economy.