I think the last episode of Last Week Tonight really shed light on why Blockchain can't really solve real-world problems like that. The problem isn't a technical problem. It'd be easy to solve the problem of ticked distribution/resale without blockchain if the concert vendors actually wanted. But now Ticketmaster owns most of those, so you can't solve it easily even if blockchains would help anyway. And you really can't solve the problem of scalping without tying tickets/accounts to a verified national ID, which is a political problem.
I think blockchain is potentially a huge detriment to solving real-world problems.. because it tricks smart people into thinking "you apply blockchain, and then all these problems are magically solved", rather than actually working with other people on the actual social, economic and political problems we need to solve to make real progress.
Also since Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation it's not just ticket sales but also concert promotion and artist management, so even if blockchains were useful for ticket sales it would be hard to get traction because any venue which tried to cut them out would also find that a large number of popular performers wouldn't play at their venue:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/arts/music/live-nation-ti...
> I think blockchain is potentially a huge detriment to solving real-world problems.. because it tricks smart people into thinking "you apply blockchain, and then all these problems are magically solved", rather than actually working with other people on the actual social, economic and political problems we need to solve to make real progress.
This is a very important point, amplified by the built-in conflicts of interest caused by turning the tech layer into a financial instrument. Many blockchain proponents are capable of reasoning through complex problems but doing so means that they are guaranteed to be leaving money on the table compared to their less ethical peers and since the only way their tokens have value is by talking them up there's even a strong disincentive to acknowledging when other people are selling something they can't deliver.
I'm not sure I understand that.
You could tie it to something within a smaller group (e.g. tickets can only be transferred to people who have bought the bands album, or only to verified accounts that the vendor approves). I would also be surprised if there wasn't a ZK way of doing some kind of KYC like check that you are able to prove you have ID and tie that to an account _without_ making the link between the two public.
“You can sell to people who aren’t a member of a union.”
“You can sell to people who never donated money to the ACLU.”
“You can sell to people who don’t own a gun.”
Is that the direction we really want?
You could try to have a trusted third party verify ID and only allow registered accounts to participate in the resale market (Ticketmaster sells this service) but at that point the blockchain is, as usual, not adding anything other than overhead because the trust depends on that third-party and the venue's staff checking ID at the door (otherwise you'd find people on Craigslist paying people to register, get their ID checked, and letting the scalpers use their account).
The what would hold some value would be a combination of self sovereign financial services & Tim's "Social Linked Data"/SOLID.
The current Web3 wave just seems like a legal marketing scam (scam as in legal but zero ethics). It's just about pumping price's and intellectual masterbation (talking about things they never do)
It is however true that you cannot separate economic incentives from a platform where we want to see economic activity.
I currently think of the role of crypto in "web3" as a bit like dark matter in the universe, something that causes the web (universe) as a whole to resist centralisation -- by means of financial incentives. It doesn't have to be everywhere, but it has to be in enough places to resist the pull towards building megaservices like Facebook.
I'm very skeptical as to whether it's actually going to play out that way though.
Instead of going through offshoots trying to find the killer app, I'd much prefer to see cryptocurrency tech evolve in order to bring costs down. Take the base use case of keeping "bank account" records and run with it until it works (as of now, it does not). Out of the viable -- for my definition of viable -- cryptocurrencies out there, the only one I see moving in the right direction is Ethereum. They are taking their sweet time, though.
If a killer use case is needed, think micropayments: The ability to pay 0.1¢ to listen to a song, paying directly to the artist.
Based on what we've learned over the past few years, I'm not sure I believe that any more.
Without a central authority, there's no way to be confident that anything is "true". Partly because it's impossible to correct mistakes.
So you get NFTs of stolen art, because there's no authority to verify it.
You get ideas to "put real estate deeds on the blockchain" with no answer to the question "what if someone loses their private key?"
The only information that can reliably be handheld by such a blockchain is information that entirely exists within that blockchain - so account balances, but effectively nothing else.
Even account balances are a bad idea to do on the block chain. Ever had to dispute a credit card charge when you dealt with a sketchy vendor? Well too bad, all sales are final now in this new immutable world.
Not in terms of money, but in terms of freedom of speech without censorship and a controlling authority.
With no authority that decides whether I can send money to/receive from someone.
Especially living in a corrupt authoratarian system, even only those two outweight all the bad sides (tx fees, scalability, PoW environmental effects) for me. It does more good than it harms in the big picture.
More accurately, it could if it actually worked but since it doesn't all you're doing is paying more for lower quality of service. A key concept to understand is that when blockchain sales people say “no authority” they mean “except the miners, software developers, exchange and oracle operators, and the governments which have jurisdiction over them”. Just as real-world censorship is far more often based on after the fact consequences rather than preventing someone from speaking first, consequences can be applied retroactively to anyone who participates in illegal transactions and blockchains very helpfully publish a full list of transactions so the authorities don't miss anyone.
We're seeing this right now: technically, someone in Russia can make a Bitcoin transfer since the Russian government hasn't chosen to block the protocol at the network layer but when they do so they are finding that many companies won't participate in those transfers and since the history is public that can extend to any downstream transactions based on the transferred funds.
Critics like to say "it doesn't work", then the next day complain about how it enables a ransomware plague. You can't have it both ways. The fact is it clearly works.
This isn't to say it's magic; it doesn't protect you from bullets any more than it makes you coffee. It is not a magical unicorn; just finding a reason why there might still be censorship somewhere is not a valid argument.
Free speech laws work even if Facebook deletes your post, or you a fired, or sometimes someone doesn't appeal their conviction. Your argument about "miners, developers or exchange operators" existing is not any more valid than this one is.
> Free speech laws work even if Facebook deletes your post, or you a fired, or sometimes someone doesn't appeal their conviction. Your argument about "miners, developers or exchange operators" existing is not any more valid than this one is.
Free speech laws generally don't apply to private companies like Facebook, who are generally given a high level discretion for how they choose to run their communities. The same is true of a blockchain network: the implementers and operators set the policies and since these systems are based on money that generally means that you're getting the rules which the major players either want or are required to implement by the governments with jurisdiction over them. That last part is key to understand: maybe a protocol allows you to make a transaction somewhere but the cost/risk shifts considerably if the recipient knows that they won't be able to use it in most places and every potential buyer can easily tell that it's on a list of tainted tokens.
I see no evidence of this. Authorities have been going after crypto-currencies users very effectively ever since the early days of Bitcoin; from the first darknet market takedowns, to arresting people on LocalBitcoins because they didn't register as money transmitters.
It sounds like we agree on the limitations of a ledger, but saying it "doesn't work" simply because the physical world exists and governments can arrest you, attempt to track you, make rules for exchanges and merchants etc is nonsense. Of course they can.
They can equally block encrypted chat apps, VPNs, prevent device makers from allowing them onto the hardware, force backdoors, effectively threaten people who use them, or spy on your communications locally.
None of these things mean that encryption doesn't work, or that it isn't useful.
If you live in a relatively open democracy, the knowledge that your encrypted chat app could be attacked by the police isn't a huge deal because there's a legal process protecting you but that trade off changes considerably if you are at risk from a hostile government. Systems which require you to leave a public paper-trail for the authorities, for example, are too risky to consider and something more privacy oriented is still a significant gamble — especially since in such an environment it's likely that you'd be at risk simply having it installed on your devices unless you were certain that it made no identifiable network activity. If I lived in China now, for example, I would not want to risk having something like a VPN client or Signal installed on my phone if the police stopped me or started linking DNS lookups to ISP customers.
Sure, gas fees aren't that low to cover with "a little mining" but I'm sure there will be a middle ground between with more gas available for anonymous posting and optimizing gas use for these actions, with some volunteers over the world incentivizing free speech contract interaction with lower gas fees just like people volunteering to participate in Tor network.
While we're not there yet, I see it very hard to trace any transactions that way.
That last part seems like the key challenge to me: what you described isn't cheap and it only works to the extent that you can do business with people who aren't following KYC. That makes it more likely that the entire service will be tainted because the non-trivial cost means that people aren't going to use it if they don't need to.
The other problem is that durable records are inherently risky. Your use of such a system isn't just a question of whether someone can see the transactions immediately but whether it'll retroactively become de-anonymized — the public blockchains are right out there but if you're trying to use a private L2 system you now have another party you're placing a lot of trust in — not unlike the questions about how you'd be able to trust a VPN provider or Tor nodes not logging your traffic.
If participating in anything on this new internet requires money, the Bezoses and Musks will be able to do whatever they want while the normies will beg for scraps in this vision of the web.
Instead of fixing a corrupt authoritarian system, we'll just end up implementing digital neofeudalism.
This is already starting to happen with NFT games, where westerners keep Filipinos as indentured servants. [0] It'll only get worse from here if we don't stop it.
[0] https://reason.com/2022/02/01/the-biggest-nft-video-games-ec...
That’s actually a good point and Bitcoin/crypto solves this. Why doesn’t it stop there though, what does web3 solve?
You can imagine outlawing processing some crypto transactions in some area. Miners have no choice but to comply, leading to at least a fork and massive confusion, at most to actual enforcement of the rule.
Blockchains may be censorship-resistant, but humans are not rubber hose resistant.
It is not a geo-location issue. The enforcement measures in question either manage to control 50% of the hashrate or they don't. If they don't, the protocol will ignore their censorship. Yes, they could continue mining a minority fork chain, but you would need to convince Bitcoin-users and services to use the fork instead of the uncensored version. You could imagine this being done by force: ISPs block the download of the software, exchanges no longer trade it etc.
The point is merely: <50%, the power is not with the miners at all; it is the users that need to be controlled.
Not so far off 50+eps
For now. Governments are catching on, and since the transactions are public, they can (and are putting the building blocks in place now) easily apply the same regulations to international bitcoin transactions as they do traditional money transfers.
Basically, folks today are taking advantage of a blind spot in government oversight. They're aware of it and are removing that blind spot.
I heard an analogy at one point - governments are elephants. It's usually pretty easy to avoid being stomped on when you're small. But if you do get stomped on, you'll be utterly destroyed. Many governments have no problems with making examples of people.
NFTs are already centralized and primarily used as scams. If your non-scam NFT is blocked by OpenSea, it might as well not exist for the purposes of selling and re-selling.
Where NFTs are not used for scams, they're being implemented in a proprietary blockchain and used as a method of extracting more money from customers with no new benefits (it's not like customers can re-sell their NFTs; see: proprietary blockchain).
The only thing I potentially see as valuable from web3 is cryptographic customer identification - but this is something we've had for years (client certs), but which never took off. I don't see how "web3" will change that.
None of them are scams. I know many people who work on other NFT projects which aren't scam as well.
They are all on public blockchains, perfectly functional with relatively healthy communities.
I think you are cherry picking the scam projects by using the word "primarily". We hate scam projects just as much as you do, they damage the reputation and trust of whole ecosystem.
People can collect and trade items of virtually any kind that virtually represent anything digitally. They can also be programmed to perform tasks to do anything on the chain.
Basically it's creating a whole new platform that isn't controlled by anyone and everyone can contribute to it as a user or a contributor (NFT creator, contract designer etc) to suit different use cases.
Just because some actors use it to scam obviously doesn't mean that the whole ecosystem is bad.
There's no technical reason fiat money doesn't have this property. But societies everywhere, democratic or authoritarian, have decided that's a bad idea and have money laundering laws.
And why wouldn't they?
Digital assets shouldn't be controlled by authority as long as you aren't converting it to fiat. Then, (while I still don't support it, I get it) I understand if IRS takes a portion when you convert it to USD. But that should be all about it.
Crypto "world" should have a separate line with fiat world and fiat-controlling authorities shouldn't have any power there as long as someone doesn't convert their crypto to fiat.
Yeah. Why not try donating to NGOs through a bank account if your friend or penpal happens to be stuck in a sanctioned country? [0]
I also don't think merchants and businesses would like to tolerate the knowingly abused chargeback system which friendly fraud hurts both the customer and the merchants.
Cryptocurrencies completely eliminate that abuse. The user can contact the merchant for a refund instead of filing a costly dispute which the final decision always sides with the banks, who doesn't even know if it is friendly fraud or not, but takes the money anyway.
I can see them using it for Stripe or Coinbase Commerce.
[0] https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanct...
So for a merchant, there are absolutely no problems in friendly fraud, failing cards in other countries, etc in Web 2 then? Especially sending money to people in sanctioned countries using bank accounts?
Of course one can use cryptocurrencies with Web 2. But try doing the above with the banks, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, etc.
It seems that this is proof that cryptocurrencies not only can work together with Web 2 websites but they are also here to stay.
So that is not even utility then?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System
> can't you use IFPS without cryptocurrencies?
You can. And you should.
Cryptocurrency is a solution in search of a problem. Problem it purports to solve isn't something you can solve via software.
That problem being sending money wherever you want, which is eminently solvable with software (mostly because it is almost all software everywhere).
And, I'd even say it's three waves, the first being TBL semantic web, which predates bitcoin.
That's because last i checked (admittedly a couple years ago) their software was slow and ressource intensive. Which is quite the opposite of what you want for real-life network transfer software. Meanwhile stuff like syncthing seem to get bittorrent-like transfer just fine.
Dat/hypercore seamed less bloaty (again a while ago), i wonder what the solid projects in this area are currently.. (torrent-based network filesystems)
Web3 uses IPFS, the dependency tree is the wrong way around in your question.
Both predate the recent hype-wave.
The real issue with responses like this is that you can do anything with computers anyway. The blockchain basically gives you a
* Globally writable database
* With stored procedures
* And row level security
Now, you can always swap out that with a centralised service. Turing machines can do stuff and machines can talk to each other. Whether it's possible to build a technically equivalent thing is not really the important question.
What tends to happen though is that the underlying infrastructure if supported by a profit-making company is that it has its own agenda and desire to control access. There's no real desire for the base layer to be open, it's not profitable in itself.
One of the more appealing things to me in the area is that there's a lot of work with shared interfaces. Working with the ERC721 spec I can easily make a non-fungible token that refers to a ticket at a conference, or right to claim a financial security, or game item, or has a link to a wiggly line or whatever I want. Someone else can build an auction contract, and my nft will automatically work in it, as will anyone elses. If you have control of the NFT you can pick which auction type/contract/service you want to use. I don't (and shouldn't) care, that's not the part I build or manage.
Finally, "but can't you do it with postgres and ..." is true but there's a huge shift that's happened. Before, sure, I'd have to have built all this stuff on chain and have all of the complete pain-in-the-arse stuff to deal with that comes with crypto. But now that all exists.
So to make, say, an in game item that people can re-sell, swap, etc, instead of
* Make a website
* Setup the DB
* Manage user accounts
* Manage payment information
* Code the sales, auctions, etc
* Build the integration with my game & my API
* Manage and maintain the server
to do it the traditional way. To do it on chain I
* Create a trivial NFT contract
* Build the integration with my game & a generic API
That's it. All the other work, auctions, etc. has been solved and built already. User accounts are already managed.
You can always solve it another way. The more interesting question is in which cases should you solve a problem in certain ways? Not everything makes sense on chain, the database is slow and public (and even for very cheap chains comparatively expensive), and the stored procedures are extremely limited.
However some things can fit well - do you need to create some kind of economic incentive & want to let market forces control things (for example, filecoin and paying people for storage)? Maybe just creating a token on existing infrastructure will fit your needs. If it does, does it make sense to build even more things yourself?
Disclaimers - I am currently doing contract engineering in this area but am not looking for work, have only small holdings and am not here to shill for anything.
> * Make a website
> * Setup the DB
> * Manage user accounts
> * Manage payment information
> * Code the sales, auctions, etc
> * Build the integration with my game & my API
> * Manage and maintain the server
> to do it the traditional way. To do it on chain I
> * Create a trivial NFT contract
> * Build the integration with my game & a generic API
I don't understand this argument.
You describe step-by-step in a detailed way what would be needed to implement the usual way and then simply glosses over "build the integration with my game & a generic API". That is exactly the tricky part, isn't it?
The integration to your game also depends on your game having some kind of linking between the NFT and your in-game item (hence a database). It depends on the communication with this generic API being reliable enough so you can completely offload your load to that, if it's not reliable for that you'll need to create intermediate API layers to deal with these issues, and so on and so forth. Generic APIs are never really generic.
And this is the most beaten example already, what else can this provide apart from giving me ownership of in-game items?
Trivialising the work of "build the integration with my game" as something that "just happens" is a naive way to shove the hard work unto a trivial step.
Handling and managing money transactions to run an auction sounds very much like a tricky part, there's a lot of regulation I'd be getting involved in going down that road.
Building the integration with the game doesn't sound hard, no, and it's the same either way. Authenticate, call API to check ownership - beyond that it's down to your game. (edit - to be clear here, the API already exists, I'm not saying "build a generic API" but "use an existing, highly interchangeable service")
The point here is that that side is identical in both cases.
> The integration to your game also depends on your game having some kind of linking between the NFT and your in-game item (hence a database).
I'm not sure what you mean, this can be as simple as a hard-coded list in the game, it doesn't have to be a shared database.
> It depends on the communication with this generic API being reliable enough so you can completely offload your load to that
Sure, but they really are quite generic - you can swap them out for one another easily, they implement the same interface for this kind of work. There's subtle differences when it comes to more complex cases but "read public information" isn't one of them.
> Trivialising the work of "build the integration with my game" as something that "just happens" is a naive way to shove the hard work unto a trivial step.
What about this do you think is going to be the tricky part? Authenticating the user? Checking if that account currently owns the NFT?
What makes you believe there won't be regulations on trading NFTs in the future? The moment NFTs become an instrument for money laundering you're going to end up with the same KYC regulations as any other financial instrument. There is nothing in NFTs that protect companies using it to be above regulations. They simply don't exist yet which doesn't mean they won't ever come. There is money in this, there will be regulations and major companies will have to abide by them.
> Building the integration with the game doesn't sound hard, no, and it's the same either way. Authenticate, call API to check ownership - beyond that it's down to your game. (edit - to be clear here, the API already exists, I'm not saying "build a generic API" but "use an existing, highly interchangeable service")
> What about this do you think is going to be the tricky part? Authenticating the user? Checking if that account currently owns the NFT?
I don't know, I don't work on the space. Leveraging from my 20 years of career I'd say that it's never trivial to integrate with a 3rd party for any kind of complex business logic.
Like never in never ever, I've never seen it be just a case of "call this API, save some data" and that's why I have this instant reaction that you're glossing over a part that isn't that trivial. Even if the APIs exist, are generic, etc., integration is the hard part.
Even more reason for me to not want to be involved in the actual trading part.
> There is nothing in NFTs that protect companies using it to be above regulations.
Sure! The crypto-bros are wrong that there aren't/can't be regulations on these things, as are those complaining it's an unregulated area.
> I don't know, I don't work on the space. Leveraging from my 20 years of career I'd say that it's never trivial to integrate with a 3rd party for any kind of complex business logic.
This isn't complex business logic, that's my point. There's _already_ a standardised API. As I've said, there are annoying differences, but they are for more complex use cases and "read public data" is about the simplest there is.
To break it down a bit more, you utilise two key things. One is the standard API that all nodes have (https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/apis/json-rpc/) which acts the same for the use case here. There are public ones, you can pay a company to run one and you can if you want run one yourself. The end user can be free to swap between any of these.
The interface there isn't so nice, as you can ask for data stored somewhere, but finding exactly what address to read isn't that nice. Helpfully it's extremely generic so you can use a library to help with that step. You would do something like this in python:
web3 = Web3(node_provider_url)
my_contract = w3.eth.contract(abi=my_abi, address=my_contract_address)
print(my_contract.functions.my_read_only_function().call())
That's it. You're pulling from a shared database.
I hope that helps explain it a bit more - the API/backend stuff is generic and doesn't have to be run by you. However the only real external piece here is the storage layer - you're still in control of the data structure & functions (you write the contract). You're not relying on a third party to manage a "game item" API and hoping they don't change it, if you use a third party here it's about paying someone to run an open source project for you on their hardware.
There is a fairly specific kind of game where anything like this would even be useful and arguably it is impossible for the practice to not be predatory anyway. It is difficult to imagine an entity that would do this without also wanting the kind of complete control that a blockchain supposedly exists to avoid.
From there, implementing "Player X has given item Y to Player Z" is pretty straightforward. It's even built into most RPG multiplayer games by default, unbound to any form of external payment.
Multiplayer games also add event logs - creating a immutable record of all inventory changes - just so customer service (CS) can do their job. For example, in Everquest, GMs (aka CS) were able to see that yes, indeed, a player did get the drop from the dragon, even though it later glitched out of their inventory, and re-gifted the item to the player.
So, for a single game, a blockchain only adds a second, delayed (and relatively expensive, since it requires extra compute resources to create) record of events that are already recorded.
But OK if you want to break it down more:
* Have the user prove they own a specific account (https://walletconnect.com/ I would guess would be a simple approach to this)
* Make a REST API call to check if they own the item (edit - to clarify, the API already exists, you just need to do a single get request)
* Set local flag in game to say "yes they own the item"?
What more detail would you need?
Implementing the weapon. Paying for that implementation.
Concrete example: I buy an NFT for a sword in World of Warcraft. I want to take it with me to FFXIV. Now FFXIV has to implement the sword. Its looks, its behaviors, its power, in a completely separate engine and world.
They - Square Enix - also probably have to pay Blizzard for the trademark and copyrights to the sword. Yet when I buy the sword that money goes to Blizzard, not Square. So... why would Square do it?
Plus, implementing a "yes, person with email address N owns sword X" rest API is pretty straightforward. You could even implement public/private key signatures for authentication of the receipt. It just would be stored in someone's email inbox instead of the chain.
Implementing an in game item? That's already part of your game, right?
> Paying for that implementation.
You can buy an NFT entirely on chain, that's surely not in doubt.
> Plus, implementing a "yes, person with email address N owns sword X" rest API is pretty straightforward. You could even implement public/private key signatures for authentication of the receipt. It just would be stored in someone's email inbox instead of the chain.
Yes, I totally could re-implement all of these things. I could handle payment info, get people to manage their own public/private keys using my own implementations and have them copy & paste it from an email (?). I'm not sure I follow the flow there where people copy keys from emails into my game and how duplication is stopped but it sounds like an awful flow.
My point, as I tried to emphasise, is that I can get those things without building them. They already exist if I manage that part with an NFT.
So the question has increasingly become (as the field matures) - why build it myself? Why not use existing, working infrastructure?
> Concrete example: I buy an NFT for a sword in World of Warcraft. I want to take it with me to FFXIV. Now FFXIV has to implement the sword. Its looks, its behaviors, its power, in a completely separate engine and world.
I've not said anything about sharing between games, and the complex part of that is identical whether it's with crypto or not. What the global shared database part solves is that either game can easily check, if this was something they wanted to do.
Nah, not for the usecase of moving items between games - one of the biggest features touted by NFT enthusiasts.
But that aside...
> get people to manage their own public/private keys
For a receipt, the individual users don't need keys. For proof of ownership, that ship has already sailed off into the sea of fraud and pyramid schemes, and we don't expect to see it again. When people are trying to sell NFTs of artwork to the original artist (aka blackmail), you know it's jumped all the sharks.
> They already exist if I manage that part with an NFT.
Most of this already exists in a system regardless. Adding a rest endpoint on the top of a database entry is usually pretty trivial - especially for something as basic as "retrieve and display this row in the DB" - and "already exists" in the form of libraries. And by using a blockchain as a database, I'm actually adding a lot of complexity to my system.
> Why not use existing, working infrastructure?
One, the existing and working infrastructure already exists. All the elements of a purchasing stream are implemented as libraries.
And it's not as if you can stop caring about how money flows, because there are laws that require you to do a lot of bookkeeping and pay taxes on that money (no matter the form the transaction initially took).
Why not use a blockchain as a distributed DB? Because it's slower and more expensive. Because it provides no functionality you don't already want or need to have locally, especially when we're discussing a game.
In other words, NFTs - from a company's point of view - provide the same benefits and detriments as a normal event-stream DB, but it's slower, more expensive, and it includes transactions from every other company using that blockchain.
> What the global shared database part solves is that either game can easily check, if this was something they wanted to do.
Why would the first party need to check an external database, when their game engines literally require them to implement it internally?
Why would a second party check the external database when there are licensing issues that require them to talk to the first party in the first place?
That's not what I've been talking about though.
> For a receipt, the individual users don't need keys. For proof of ownership, that ship has already sailed off into the sea of fraud and pyramid schemes, and we don't expect to see it again. When people are trying to sell NFTs of artwork to the original artist (aka blackmail), you know it's jumped all the sharks.
That wouldn't apply at all for an in game item. Do you understand that two NFTs pointing to the same url would still be entirely distinguishable?
> One, the existing and working infrastructure already exists. All the elements of a purchasing stream are implemented as libraries.
"There is a library" and "there is already running maintained infrastructure" is quite different.
> And it's not as if you can stop caring about how money flows, because there are laws that require you to do a lot of bookkeeping and pay taxes on that money (no matter the form the transaction initially took).
I would be involved in the initial sale, but no auctions/trades/secondary sales.
> And by using a blockchain as a database, I'm actually adding a lot of complexity to my system.
I've outlined the steps required and can't see what you think would add a lot of complexity.
> Why would the first party need to check an external database, when their game engines literally require them to implement it internally?
How are you managing trading items between users without some database external to either users machine - unless you're talking about an entire p2p db of ownership which sounds frankly even more complex.
You're jumping into a use case I've not posited and then bringing up things which don't seem to make sense (art NFTs created by random people).
I don't think this is very productive so I will just leave you with one thought:
Imagine you were already using the blockchain for this, and that was normal for games to do so. Now someone tells you that you could actually use these other libraries, and maintain your own database, and stop users from selling/trading however they wish but only through you, and you could build your own site for trading instead.
Would you say "Yes, that brings me the features I really need - I should change to this different architecture"?
So is a cryptographically signed receipt. So is an internal database log. These are all that are required for the sale of items in videogames.
> "There is a library" and "there is already running maintained infrastructure" is quite different.
You'd still need a library (or a dozen libraries) to implement a NFT DB in your game. And probably some custom coding to wire it into your local DBs required for the game.
Also, RDS. And databases built into the game engines (such as Unreal, Lumberyard, Unity, et.al.). Running and maintained infrastructure already exists for databases.
> I would be involved in the initial sale, but no auctions/trades/secondary sales.
NFTs can be set up in a way when funnels a portion of future sales/trades back to the generating party. So yes, you most likely will be legally involved in the future sales, unless you explicitly opt out when creating NFTs (which doesn't make much sense, from a "we're doing this as part of our revenue generation" point of view.
> How are you managing trading items between users without some database external to either users machine
This must be done regardless. See previous comments about the NFT DB being too slow to act as the source of truth for videogames.
> Would you say "Yes, that brings me the features I really need - I should change to this different architecture"?
From a purely capitalistic point of view, definitely. It gives me more control over how my product is being used. Why would I want to allow people to trade cash shop items (based on your earlier comments, without letting me take a portion of those trades/sales) when I can make two sales instead?
It'd also save me the CS costs associated with anything that goes wrong with a NFT auction/trade/sale for items in my game. Because I know they're not going to blame OpenSea, they're going to blame me. How do I know this? Because players already blame the game provider for things like DDOS attacks and internet outages.
Corporations love control. Even today, they'll spend more money on infrastructure and development to maintain that control. You can see proof of this in the NFT space with how game companies are implementing their own private blockchains to do NFTs. No need for "what if" games.
Web3 incorporates this ownership. While Web 2.0 was about writing something to the internet and the World Wide Web was about reading something on the internet. It's a further iteration which just makes sense.
I only really see a use when mapping to an actually digitally scare good, say an IPv4 block or a domain name. But that's it really. Maybe some gacha/collectible games, but that's iffy.
Have you read the list of restrictions Ubisoft has for their NFTs? Do people really own those?
Even today, there are 3rd party websites that let you play Magic online with other people, but you get to play with any cards you want which removes a certain aspect of the meta game.
As long as I owned the NFT on a decentralized blockchain, any 3rd party could verify my ownership and let me use those cards.
I really don't get this argument at all. I bought an in-game mount for World of Warcraft as a NFT, WoW shuts down, where the hell am I going to use the in-game mount again? A shitty game that tells me "your WoW mount works here as well!"?
It really feels it's all a preparation for the "metaverse" bullshit.
A token representing a Magic card doesn’t need any association with the art on that card, it just needs to exist so anyone can verify that I purchased that card (and therefore the ability to use its mechanics) from WoTC. A 3rd party game that allows me to play Magic can verify the NFT card ownership and can use it’s own art or no art at all, just like they do today.
The only difference is that today’s 3rd party Magic sites don’t have verified ownership of cards so everyone uses the most expensive cards.
Yeah, someone else can create a new game and say "we accept the NFT items from Defunct Game X", you are still completely under the control of whomever is providing you the platform for these in-game items to actually exist. If that platform is taken away you just have some bits of data pointing to other bits of data with no meaning and no value at all...
They can still have meaning (we know what item it was); whether there are people who would value the pure notion of owning such a digital item in the absence of concrete functionality is indeed the question that NFTs explore/raise.
We have of course been able to buy and own more or less exlusive licenses to digital goods for a long time now. The video game market is now larger than the music and film industries combined and quickly becoming entirely digital.
And if it's own work and the more literal form of ownership rather than just a license to it, these rights are well protected in law and don't really use to become a problem? Unless you live in a state with state-sponsored copyright infringement, but these would absolutely not respect NFT's and proofs of ownership either.
But if you for some reason need to support the specific case of proving original ownership, NFT is a technology that can help although I think this is becoming a too niche use for a widespread internet-wide revolution. It's still digital which can be made into perfect copies and I think this alone reduces the appeal even if it would come with a sticker that validates the product. At least it does so for me. Sure it's "useful" kind of like how an MD5 sum is, and now we get even further along the way than that but... it's still digital goods with everything that implies...
The responses to this story read rather like Facebook comments on controversial news articles - there's a bunch of comments claiming the website is a bunch of nonsense without actually articulating why that is the case, presumably by people who believe (or are invested in) crypto or "Web 3".
Can anyone give a reasoned argument to the actual benefits of Web 3, in contrast to what is currently not possible without the use of a Blockchain?