The hackers still have their assets as Ethereum Classic. The fact that ETC lives on is a testament to how nobody could 'take away' what is listed as theirs on the blockchain.

But I don't buy this argument for video games. Most of the game code ought to live outside of the blockchain and that non-blockchain code/art would be difficult to reproduce let alone subject to copyright claims or closed source.

Another random video game thought: Would item storage on blockchain mean that every player could see the inventory of every other player?

The "no secrets on the blockchain" aspect has already played out in subtly interesting ways in Cryptokitties. I have a tool that lets me see in a moment whether a given account has gained or lost money, and how much, and how much they were willing to spend. The marketplace is a completely open book, with real time sales data and a full history. You can't breed kitties in secret in pursuit of a particular breed. You can't (easily) buy out all of a given trait on the marketplace to create a false sense of high demand. And yes, you can see the entire kitty inventory of any other CK player.

That's based on one current implementation of a gaming DApp.

It's worth noting that you can achieve semi-privacy through either on-chain/off-chain hybrids, as well as some other emerging efforts.

One example I've been playing around with is to use the multi-address approach:

In your database each "player" consists of multiple addresses each which are OR-multi-sig wallets, for various inventory elements and stats.

When they log in via a system like metamask, their main wallet (PlayerID) is unlocking an account which in your games database (off-chain) ties together another set of "master wallets" together with you've given the player private keys for - for each item, or each set of X items, in the players inventory you are setting up a new smart contract that is a OR-multi-sig wallet.

For this wallet, which holds the item, there are two possible signatories the first being the game's main contract, so that the game can add/remove items from players based on game events, and then one of the players private keys.

While you'd likely need a custom fork of metamask to handle the multi-key environment, you've made a system where:

* Player's inventory cannot be know from one private address.

* Player's retain full control over the items.

* Player's have private key access to the items in case the service goes down.

* You store player data off-chain, but in a way that your service is not crucial to the game.

* Player assets can be traded off-game without updating the game service.

* Data about individual items is still public, and does not need to be obscured, oraclized or stored off chain.

The current blocker isn't any specific blockchain technology, but just having a good multi-key management UI for users.

Brilliant. Definitely interested to see how this space evolves! Metamask is a great first step to helping bring wallets to the masses in the web browser, and it continues to improve, but it certainly isn't what a mainstream web wallet extension will look like in a couple years.

The DAO fork happened in what was effectively Ethereum's early beta phase, when the community was very small, and there was next to no activity on the blockchain. A hard fork right now would be far more disruptive due to the amount of activity taking place on it, and would face from more opposition to a much large community.

Forking a cryptocurrency is part of the game.

Every participant has the choice to stick to the old protocol or use the new one. Or use both.

If I create a Bitcoin fork tonight and somebody buys 0.1 Bitcoin from me in the forked chain, what's wrong about that? The price of Bitcoin my forked chain would obviously be another matter.

I'm sorry to butt in but I have to point out something to you: The DAO hack was a bank theft and the hard-fork was decided by consensus.