i agree, when it comes to things like cryptopunks consensus is what decides what is authentic and what isn't. i still think they are stupid, but i'm at least sympathetic to the argument of ownership and authenticity. you still own nothing more than what exists on the blockchain though, which is self evident based on the fact that people can make all of these clones.

when it comes to hearthstone blizzard decides. you can have every single nft on the planet, but if blizzard decides you dont get to use those cards in hearthstone you 100 percent absolutely don't get to use those cards in hearthstone.

> when it comes to hearthstone blizzard decides. you can have every single nft on the planet, but if blizzard decides you dont get to use those cards in hearthstone you 100 percent absolutely don't get to use those cards in hearthstone.

NFTs are just as useless. I can sell you the NFT for the original doge Shiba Inu, and I can sell Bill the actual legal rights to use that photograph.

Despite you owning the NFT, you can't actually use that photograph. Bill can. And he can sue you, and win, if you try to.

All that ownership of the NFT entitles you to is... Ownership of the NFT. It's like owning a photograph of the deed to my house. It doesn't mean that you actually own my house. You can keep reselling that photograph, but it's not going to get you any closer to owning the house.

But eh, we can burn a lot of electricity to certify that you do, in fact, own that particular photograph of the deed. Fantastic. Meanwhile, I can take, and sell more photographs...

I think this why there is an increasing trend towards valuing NFTs which assign rights to the NFT owners or simply license the whole project as CC0. That removes the dichotomy between on-chain ownership and legal ownership and leaves only a socially constructed notion of digital property and value.

The idea in blockchain gaming is that the NFT is the in-game item. An NFT would represent that powerful weapon, not the picture of the weapon, and the game would look at the blockchain to understand what items you own. The game can use any image it wants to represent that item, and other games may choose to display them differently. If I sell the NFT to someone, I no longer have access to that item in any game but the buyer does.

In this situation, the NFT does come with usage rights (like a license) and isn’t the same as selling a picture of your house.

There's no point to doing any of this when the game could just keep track of this in a traditional database.

The only benefit is having a 'public' API for ownership of an item that other, third-party games could use, but why, as a game developer, would you possibly give any rando third-party competitor full access to this information? It makes sense if you are curating a community of fan-made tooling that ends up promoting your game, but it makes zero sense to give competitors access to it.

Imagine a Hearthstone-clone that pitches it as: "Join our game! You have every card that you own in Hearthstone! And a <gimmick>."

Do you think it would be in Blizzard's interest for that clone to exist? Do you think it would be in Blizzard's interest to go out of its way to turn its player's cards into NFTs, so that some unlicensed Martian knock-off goes ahead and makes that pitch?

It is in Blizzard's interest to share this information with someone that they have a partnership with (or with another game that they've developed), but that problem can be solved by... An API. With revocable keys.

I think that you have very succinctly captured the difference between web2 and web3 ideologies.

Value is socially constructed.