Now here's a "blockchain" example which could have been useful, but it's just another "coin" and a lot of hype.[1] The idea is to have a DRM system for assets in virtual worlds, which might be useful if VR ever gets anywhere.

When I heard about this, I thought, "they're going to use this to make assets portable". A game/VR/virtual world asset is basically a file, which has to be decrypted to be useful. It has a creator, who owns the IP rights, and an owner, who owns the copy. Currently, such property is slaved to a single game/VR/virtual world, and the owner can't move it to another one.

Think of a user A wanting to move an encrypted graphical asset created by creator B from Facebook Places to Apple's VR world. Creator B has to approve of portability between the two worlds, and user A has to request the transfer, but Facebook Places has no say, because they don't own the asset.

Now that's what I thought High Fidelity was doing. Nah. It's just another token with a complex backstory that doesn't do much. They're talking about a way for creators to prove ownership. All you need for that is a cryptographic time-stamping service. Those already exist. When you create something, you take the hash of it and get that time-stamped. Now you can show priority. No blockchain needed.

[1] https://blog.highfidelity.com/tagged/blockchain