user 'NoahDiesSlowly' seems to know it well enough to be making some money. I'm glad he outlined it for us. This is a great addition to the more theoretical posts.
>but from my understanding they are a way to extend "ownership" for digital entities like you would do for phisical[sic] ones.
But it doesn't. Unless that NFT includes a legal sales agreement or contract transferring ownership, you don't 'own' anything. If I'm an artist and sell you a NFT for a digital copy of my art I still 'own' that art. I am still the copyright holder. You are not legally entitled to anything and the NFT legally confers nothing to the buyer. You're not 'buying' anything. You're just making a non-deductible donation.
Hmm, analogy I just came up. This would be same as buying piece of paper with name of the art work and then signature by artist(possibly fake). So some value, but on average not really. Unless artist was very popular and those signatures were exceedingly rare...
I'd argue it's more similar to buying a signed copy of a book by an author. It doesn't prevent them from printing more copies, but it is also worth more than an unsigned copy.
More like a torn out page with signature, without the book. The book itself is nearby, but another person holds it in his hands and can open it for you when requested.
the author's signature has value because the author has a very limited amount of time in his life to give out signatures. moreover not only it takes time to sign stuff but it also takes effort. these two combined, plus some subjective personal feelings about the author and their importance, give value to a physical signature.
digital signatures on the other hand are effortless and automatic, the author doesn't have to do anything beyond generating a public key pair once
correct me if I'm wrong, but a receipt dressed up in a brochure that in most cases is being marketed as "art".
The address to this brochure doesn't change but the "art" at the end of it can change without your notice?
Those are fair points, but my understanding is that it's not specific to NFTs iteself:
- buyers not knowing exactly what they buy is something that happens all the time in the real world. That doesn't make it right, of course, but that doesn't make all those sales "non-deductible donations".
- artists already use a lot the same kind of mechanism used for NFTs. For example, limited editions of a reproduction of a piece of art. You won't own the original piece, but you will have a copy, with a certificate that proves its authenticity. Part of the price is usually a high quality reproduction, but an often significant part is the certificate and the scarcity of the item.
I think my point is that "limited" NFTs as in "multiple NFTs for one piece of art" are something already natural and established in the art world. I agree with you that "unique" NFTs as in "one NFT for one piece of art" are more confusing and already somewhat existed before in the form of copyright holding. One difference that I can think of is that with NFTs artists can keep the copyright and thus control over how their art is used, while still allowing people to "own" and speculate on the art itself.
All of that is just about the NFT concept by itself. There is also the implementation part (crypto), how it's used, and arguments like "is it even a good idea to do artificial scarcity in the first place?". I don't know enough about those subjects to have an opinion on them.
The decentralization is interesting question. How much resources you need to run fully qualified node. That is one that has full history, mempool and so on. And how many of the users actually do this anymore? And how long it takes to bootstrap for new user...
And now multiply this for all the chains you want to use/support... And with BTC you aren't even paid for this service...
I can sell you (and a dozen other people) a photo of the deed to my house, and it's very nice that you own this photo, but I don't understand why you would pay me real dollars to buy it.
Unless your plan consists of selling it to a bigger fool.
Some tokens have license in their metadata allowing the token owner to monetise and redistribute the artwork. The original author still has author' rights.
Except most probably that license itself and rules regarding it's usage are stored in a centralized way somewhere. Simply because NFT can't store anything this big inside, not even a sufficiently long text only file. The tech doesn't allow this.
Because IPFS is decentralised permanent storage. Blockchain handles ownership, IPFS handles metadata, visual assets, etc. It's kinda how things work in real world with real estate, for example. There is a registry and there is physical property. Same here.
The license and rights do not have to be centralised. The owner just has to hold on to some documentation showing they have ownership. If the original artist challenges it, you pull out the email/letter/receipt that shows you originally paid for it.
Fraudulently inventing proof is a serious crime. None of this required any blockchains or decentralisation. In fact it was never centralised to begin with.
NFTs serve absolutely no purpose that wasn’t already solved in better ways.
> Some tokens have license in their metadata allowing the token owner to monetise and redistribute the artwork.
the problem is that these rights must be linked to a physical real person, and not just a public key pair. in the real world if I want to acquire the rights to a piece of media I have to contact the author or some kind of middleman and specify exactly who I am and sometimes even how I'm planning to use the asset. instead if ownership is linked to an anonymous private key then I could simply share the same key with some of my friends and they could all use the piece of media in their works and present some proof that they have the private key with them in case of questioning.
so even if in theory NFTs could in fact be used to automatically make a public record of whoever has bought the rights to something, then we would need a public record that links real people's identities with their private keys (so a good old public keyring) but that would destroy any semblance of privacy and we're back to square one.
I am flat out convinced that most people who buy into the NFT hype are gullibe at best, and a fraud at worst. If that offends anyone, I am sorry; it is probably going to take a while for the NFT madness to blow over and uncover the true nature. This is coming from someone who made thousands of (NF)T trades back in 2017-2018! (with some bias of not earning a single cent on NFT's in 2020/2021).
I don't disagree but can't you say the same thing about expensive art in general? I mean is any painting really worth $100m? At one point it's not about the painting, it's about being able to splash a lot of money at something expensive when you already own everything other expensive thing you could splash money at.
That's why I always thought comparing crypto to currency, financial investments or gold is the wrong analogy. To me it is more akin to the art market.
Which value is in the eye of the beholder. Some people think they hold something valuable with a Klein Monochrome that my handyman could paint in a minute. Others enjoy the ownership of a few randomly generated bytes on a hard drive.
Art can be really incredible to behold in person (modern & contemporary less so imo, but I digress). There is some value there over and above monkey jpegs.
One of the "examples" for NFT that I see most often repeated is the following:
The usage of NFTs in games. Using them to let the player "own" their character customizations and ingame items in order to resell them and carry them over to other games. This is presented under the banner of decentralization with the result that no one could take away these ingame items from the buyer ever again.
This example is a gross misreprentation of how game transactions and game assets work:
1. The only thing an NFT would enable is the ability to show that you own an item in a game. The only change is that the necessary bit sits on a blockchain instead of the server of the game company you bought it from.
2. Ingame assets need to be created by the developer of the game in order to be in the game...there is no inherent compatibility between two different games, especially if the games are from two different companies. And the NFT does not contain the asset itself, that is: The 3D model, its texture, its game logic attached to it (the things the asset is supposed to do).
3. Because of 1. and 2., the only authority over wether you get to use an ingame purchase is the game developer/publisher of the game in which you wish to use the asset. The fact that you can show your ownership does not change anything about that at all. If Company A decides to ignore your ownership bit (in the end you still play on their servers) they are free to do so at any point, the player does not have the slightest bit of additional "power".
4. If you show your ownership bit of an ingame asset that you bought from Company A to Company B, they have to build it into their game (model, textures, logic, basically copy these things from Company A) and give you the ability to use it. In order for this whole NFT dream to work as advertised Company B has to perform this work for free if you ever want to use it there.
> I am flat out convinced that most people who buy into the NFT hype are gullibe at best, and a fraud at worst.
The aspects I described above are immediately obvious if you remotely know how game development works. That is the reason I can only come the conclusion that the people pushing this NFT narrative are either really clueless about technology, very gullible, or intentionally trying to deceive others to inflate the prices of this scheme.
> with the result that no one could take away these ingame items from the buyer ever again
That is one result, the bigger picture is that the strategies centralized owners of those items use to make profits at the expense of each user would go away.
You are correct that an issue exists between completely hard-coded ownership on the blockchain and subjective creation of items in a game, but perhaps ruminate over some roadblocks. If a 'set' of items represented by NFTs is valued by a large group of users, then developers which do not integrate those items fairly enough will suffer users.
In this case it will not be the game developers controlling the items, it will be artists who sell the raw NFT which becomes integrated. This leads to all sorts of other little issues that aren't as fun to dunk on, but you should at least steel-man the concept.
Furthermore, your example of cosmetic items is the weakest example. Items which offer in-game functionality first and foremost, and are released according to semi-predictable mechanisms are the stronger case. Just like Bitcoin prevents unwanted malicious activity from allowing forks, so to must the game(s) which use these items. I'm not convinced it's so impossible to have an open source game built around the items rather than the other way around. An extremely simple RPG is a MVP.
Of course the visible community around NFT's today is completely ill-fitted for such a project, but like all things crypto on HackerNews, detractors often mistake the loudest sales-pitch for the best possible outcome. If you want to make a strong case against the merits of crypto, focus less on projects who spend their effort on marketing and more who spend their effort on development.
> That is one result, the bigger picture is that the strategies centralized owners of those items use to make profits at the expense of each user would go away.
It's the opposite. No real game developer would ever make assets tied to NFTs that have already been sold because they can't make any profit from that. The only thing the NFT provides is transferability, which most game developers also wouldn't want to support. The company makes more money if all consumers have to buy the same items separately. They build in scarcity by removing transferability.
Some companies might use NFTs to sell things no one would buy otherwise (like Disney selling pictures of R2D2), but that's pretty much the only use case for them.
No game developer would do it for free, correct, but they wouldn't be able to centralize those items around their control. The game itself would have to make money, and the items being operable with the game without too much cost (that's why I said "fairly enough") would attract users to the game which may be monetized in other ways.
As for your other points they were already addressed. Did you read my whole comment before finishing yours?
Sure, that works in theory. If you basically magically change the whole gaming market landscape in a fundamental way.
In your point you are basically leaving out many steps:
> If a 'set' of items represented by NFTs is valued by a large group of users
Good thing you mention this, we don't have to speak hypothetically to evaluate this. Highly valued assets on a gaming marketplace already exist with Steam Marketplace, where you can buy and sell virtual items from games that exist on Valves Steam Platform (Steam offers an API for this and developers can support the feature if they choose to do so). Items for e.g. Dota 2 have been sold between players for >2000$ on the Steam Marketplace, I believe this deserves being called highly valued by a large group of users.
The Steam API offers the ability to check a users inventory [1], so any game that is on steam could verify your ownership of a marketplace item and do something using that knowledge. Steam is a huge platform, so huge in fact that for many players Steam is PC Gaming, right now it sits at ~23 million active players (that is only players that are currently playing any game they own via steam).
Now let's go back to NFTs. What would they change? Basically connecting them to games somehow would be just the same thing, which is verifying ownership of items outside of Steam.
"Outside of steam" is not all that many players and it is very hard to get them away from there, just look at the struggle of Epic to pull users away from Steam: they have now been giving away >250 games (including many AAA titles) for free since 2018 [2]. And Valve has made its stance on NFT/Crypto pretty clear for now [3].
I believe that this puts into perspective how realistic the NFT gaming revolution is.
> Items which offer in-game functionality first and foremost, and are released according to semi-predictable mechanisms are the stronger case.
Those, in my opinion, would be even harder to carry across games because they are even further embedded inside the engine and programming and logic.
> In this case it will not be the game developers controlling the items, it will be artists who sell the raw NFT which becomes integrated.
So if I understand you correctly you believe in a market of NFT driven games that explicitly form around NFTs, rather than NFTs finding their way into the existing gaming market?
Right, I think you make a lot of good points which I (for some reason) had to remind some friends who have spent money gambling for skins in games that virtual items can indeed have sustained high value appraisals from large groups of users. From a user perspective (assuming the NFT's were on a chain with reasonable tx fees), liberating one's Steam inventory would likely be a net positive depending on the player (some are susceptible to scams and would do better to remain in Valve's safer, slower system). Being able to trade skins directly for money to anyone with no third party and no corporate tax rate would be great.
The issue of course is that Valve has no reason to do this, and this is important, because a huge part of the reason in game items have dollar value is that they have aesthetic value in popular, well crafted games. Anyone who makes a quality video game will seek to monetize their in game items, not liberate them through NFTs. For this reason I am indeed saying that NFTs and their properties have to be a selling point.
This means that game developers make their money up front on the initial minting or selling of the NFTs (hoping that the real promise of a forever more decentralized market adds a premium - this should also include a promise of no future releases or algorithmic/predictable future releases), or the NFTs existed before the game and were valued enough that integrating them into a game after the fact is somehow profitable. Its certainly an interesting space (will be a lot more interesting when volume flows across cheaper chains than PoW Ethereum).
They are pyramid schemes - if they are being pushed. Because few people push anything NFT related for any other reason (as it turns out, there are few other reasons). So when we see people even slightly defend NFTs, one can assume it’s because they are invested at the bottom of a pyramid.
It doesn’t help when people (still pyramid investors) sound like the worst software managers we ever had. We as technical people absolutely hate it when people misrepresent what’s technically possible.
I have an nft - an ens domain name. Just because people have associated NFTs with the art / collectibles world (which lots of people don't get the value of even in the real world) doesn't mean those are the only use cases.
And I would say that the idea of skins portable between games being controlled by an NFT is absolutely technically possible, it's actually the business side that isn't probable - why would a company spend a bunch of money to make those skins work in their game if they aren't getting paid for it? It's possible to imagine incentive structures that could make it happen, but the reason we don't have it at the moment isn't because NFTs haven't been around, it's because those incentive structures don't exist, or don't exist to the right extent.
> the idea of skins portable between games being controlled by an NFT is absolutely technically possible, it's actually the business side that isn't probable
If the business side was probable, why would you need NFTs to implement that?
You certainly wouldn't need them, but there are benefits to secondary liquidity, compared to running some custom trading server - way more people will have ethereum wallets than an account on your server, the ethereum network will allow them to trade even if the amazon availability zone your server is on goes down, your NFTs can be included in baskets and traded transactionally with all kinds of other assets or listed on distributed exchanges without you having to build any of that stuff.
These are all the same questions you'd have to answer if you'd built the marketplace yourself, except the answers are even harder, and there's nobody there to care when you solve them.
And if you're on ethereum, you probably can use a 'different' coin easily, because it'll be wrapped or more likely implemented as a token, and you didn't have to do anything to get the benefit of that aspect of the ethereum ecosystem.
Correcting/fixing wrong transactions is a fun one, but it's not impossible depending on how you set up your smart contract.
The whole idea of selling skins sucks. I wish we could go back to what minecraft did where you just uploaded whatever texture map you wanted for free.
NFT promoters push all of this stuff about what you could do in the future with NFTs and it always looks like some dystopian hell where we take something that was free and charge money for it.
> it's actually the business side that isn't probable
Oh absolutely. But once you have that, there is literally no one who knows why you'd need the NFT bits. There are people who think that NFTs will magically make NFTs of player hats portable between one game and another, because something something blockchains. The fact that IF someone made such an interop then NFTs wouldn't be necessary, or that the "ownership" of items would STILL be exactly as shaky and fungible as it would be without NFTs is handwaved. Because something blockchains.
> [...] the reason we don't have it at the moment isn't because NFTs haven't been around, it's because those incentive structures don't exist, or don't exist to the right extent.
Exactly right, or if I can paraphrase somewhat ironically "We haven't yet found the right problem for our solution".
The thing that is "portable" would be something like "weapon_hkp2000:dragon_lore#2331". Strings are trivially portable. But sharing this across applications does nothing
The amount of coordination, legal and technical agreements that would need to be established between game companies in order for the game example to work would already make NFTs basically 100% useless for that exact scenario.
The real absurd thing about NFTs to me is that you don't have certified ownership over the art piece itself (which would be way to expensive to be included in the data chain), but just the URL redirecting to it. Oh boy, the implications of this ...
Yeah, that also blew my mind when I read Moxie's blog that was on the HN frontpage some days back. [0] Apparently a real image on blockchain is too expensive... so suddenly I'm more on the right clickers side again.
While the current hype around NFTs seems like a giant scam, it's interesting to note that there is VCs investment in the area. That is, VCs investing in the infrastructure to mint/sell NFTs.
You know there is something wrong with currency when people loan it to spend it...
Same goes with NFTs that are bought to flip them... Ofc, in that market selling them initially by mass automatic generation makes sense. After all that non-fungible part is tad hard... But really doesn't matter once you automate generation.
NFTs remind me of those websites that let you "buy a piece of the moon."
Sure, you just spent $x on a certificate that says you "own" a grid reference on the moon, but don't for one second think you actually own that piece of the moon.
I think most people missed the point of the question on reddit. It isn't why NFTs are a bad idea. Let's be honest, a lot of collecting is a bad idea. Financially, ecologically. OP's point is that everyone, collectively, started having a deep hatred of them overnight. And I'd attribute it to a few articles and to Twitter groupthink now saying NFTs are the approved thing to hate on. Then all the cool kids must hate on NFTs, regardless if they use less energy than Magic the Gathering cards or trade for less money than any other collectible junk.
I don't think that people "started having a deep hatred of them overnight", but it has a lot to do with not getting the point of NFT. I certainly don't get why/how it is a good idea, same with lots of different blockchain projects (earth2 anyone?)
> OP's point is that everyone, collectively, started having a deep hatred of them overnight.
I think the hate carried over from crypto currencies and other blockchain projects. The top reply mentions:
> NFTs are driven by hype, making NFT investers/scammers super outspoken and obnoxious. This is why the tone of the conversation around NFTs is so resentful of them, people are sick of being forced to interact with NFT hypebeasts.
I think this is what makes blockchain projects so polarized. I've yet to see something interesting come out from blockchain technologies. If those projects exist, they're drowned in the middle of people and companies who have no clue what they're talking about and are trying to bank on the hype.
nft financial speculation is not the problem, it is a symptom.
you dont hate non fungible tokens, you hate the abusive financial system that we all live under.
the funny thing is that p2p programmable money databases and things like nfts could offer us something different. it does seem that a lot of attention (and vc money) goes to people rebuilding existing things 'but on blockchain'. but there is a lot of interesting anti-speculation crypto protocols/standards being built too -> things like circles ubi.
"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. That tension will not go away." - Stuart Brand
I'm not an "active" NFT hater (this is the first time I comment on this topic on internet), but my reasoning for disliking the NFT craze is following:
We already experience popular backlash on tech, which is arguably justified, although from my point of view it is over the top (you can just delete your FB account, you know?). Now, no matter your opinion regarding behavior of "big tech" companies, it is undeniable that they employ significant amount of engineers on exceptionally good terms and they contribute a lot to the wider ecosystem (via open source, conference support, etc.). In contrast, NFT ecosystem seems to be small group of opportunistic unethical people who intend reap all the benefits for themselves and at the end whole tech community will have to endure the backlash.
PS just yesterday I witnessed a discussion on the topic in chat of unrelated Twitch channel and someone characterized NFT as "bunch of smart techies scamming clueless rich people". I don't want to be held responsible for this when the bubble bursts, even indirectly.
And FB will continue to spy on you and create shadow accounts for you in case you should sign on again. Big tech has become a loose cannon and needs to be reined in. Hard.
Well, the most popular complain is that FB will "radicalize" you by their psy-ops algorithms based on your profile. If you don't read news on FB, then they can't show you antivax/trump-supporter/whatever posts, right?
Besides, I always get a feeling of hypocrisy when this is being discussed because the argument people make is that FB is scum of the earth that will destroy democracy and society but the same people wouldn't delete their account because then they will miss the posts of their knitting group or something. So for me it seems that either people who are making the argument actually don't consider FB as much of a threat, or they value democracy and civic society less then their knitting group.
Anyway, let's not derail NFT discussion into typical HN big-tech-hate flamewar. Sorry I brought up the subject.
I don't hate NFTs, but I appreciate the backlash because people who like NFTs seem to misunderstand them MASSIVELY.
Some NFT haters also seem to misunderstand them, however, so let me throw yet another explanation attempt into the ring.
Anyone can make an NFT for anything. I can make an NFT for the Mona Lisa or whatever the hell I want. What do you get when you buy it? Absolutely nothing. I can make infinitely many too.
NFTs get all of their value from where they come from, a bit like autograph cards.
One from some rando on the web? Worthless. One from Eminem? Hmmm, maybe more interesting.
I do think NFTs can have some value for artists and art collectors. But always remember that an NFT's value comes from its creator and what they do, say and commit to. One possible option would be that an NFT entitles you to listen to ("own") a piece of music (my favorite use case because I love buying things on Bandcamp, but would like to be able to resell stuff at some point).
That's an interesting use case, but nothing close to what NFT zealots dream of.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadBut it doesn't. Unless that NFT includes a legal sales agreement or contract transferring ownership, you don't 'own' anything. If I'm an artist and sell you a NFT for a digital copy of my art I still 'own' that art. I am still the copyright holder. You are not legally entitled to anything and the NFT legally confers nothing to the buyer. You're not 'buying' anything. You're just making a non-deductible donation.
You are buying something in that you will be able to sell it later, which I think is the main point.
- buyers not knowing exactly what they buy is something that happens all the time in the real world. That doesn't make it right, of course, but that doesn't make all those sales "non-deductible donations".
- artists already use a lot the same kind of mechanism used for NFTs. For example, limited editions of a reproduction of a piece of art. You won't own the original piece, but you will have a copy, with a certificate that proves its authenticity. Part of the price is usually a high quality reproduction, but an often significant part is the certificate and the scarcity of the item.
I think my point is that "limited" NFTs as in "multiple NFTs for one piece of art" are something already natural and established in the art world. I agree with you that "unique" NFTs as in "one NFT for one piece of art" are more confusing and already somewhat existed before in the form of copyright holding. One difference that I can think of is that with NFTs artists can keep the copyright and thus control over how their art is used, while still allowing people to "own" and speculate on the art itself.
All of that is just about the NFT concept by itself. There is also the implementation part (crypto), how it's used, and arguments like "is it even a good idea to do artificial scarcity in the first place?". I don't know enough about those subjects to have an opinion on them.
Edit: Missed to not. I assume it still was clear
And now multiply this for all the chains you want to use/support... And with BTC you aren't even paid for this service...
I can sell you (and a dozen other people) a photo of the deed to my house, and it's very nice that you own this photo, but I don't understand why you would pay me real dollars to buy it.
Unless your plan consists of selling it to a bigger fool.
Fraudulently inventing proof is a serious crime. None of this required any blockchains or decentralisation. In fact it was never centralised to begin with.
NFTs serve absolutely no purpose that wasn’t already solved in better ways.
the problem is that these rights must be linked to a physical real person, and not just a public key pair. in the real world if I want to acquire the rights to a piece of media I have to contact the author or some kind of middleman and specify exactly who I am and sometimes even how I'm planning to use the asset. instead if ownership is linked to an anonymous private key then I could simply share the same key with some of my friends and they could all use the piece of media in their works and present some proof that they have the private key with them in case of questioning.
so even if in theory NFTs could in fact be used to automatically make a public record of whoever has bought the rights to something, then we would need a public record that links real people's identities with their private keys (so a good old public keyring) but that would destroy any semblance of privacy and we're back to square one.
That's why I always thought comparing crypto to currency, financial investments or gold is the wrong analogy. To me it is more akin to the art market.
The usage of NFTs in games. Using them to let the player "own" their character customizations and ingame items in order to resell them and carry them over to other games. This is presented under the banner of decentralization with the result that no one could take away these ingame items from the buyer ever again.
This example is a gross misreprentation of how game transactions and game assets work:
1. The only thing an NFT would enable is the ability to show that you own an item in a game. The only change is that the necessary bit sits on a blockchain instead of the server of the game company you bought it from.
2. Ingame assets need to be created by the developer of the game in order to be in the game...there is no inherent compatibility between two different games, especially if the games are from two different companies. And the NFT does not contain the asset itself, that is: The 3D model, its texture, its game logic attached to it (the things the asset is supposed to do).
3. Because of 1. and 2., the only authority over wether you get to use an ingame purchase is the game developer/publisher of the game in which you wish to use the asset. The fact that you can show your ownership does not change anything about that at all. If Company A decides to ignore your ownership bit (in the end you still play on their servers) they are free to do so at any point, the player does not have the slightest bit of additional "power".
4. If you show your ownership bit of an ingame asset that you bought from Company A to Company B, they have to build it into their game (model, textures, logic, basically copy these things from Company A) and give you the ability to use it. In order for this whole NFT dream to work as advertised Company B has to perform this work for free if you ever want to use it there.
> I am flat out convinced that most people who buy into the NFT hype are gullibe at best, and a fraud at worst.
The aspects I described above are immediately obvious if you remotely know how game development works. That is the reason I can only come the conclusion that the people pushing this NFT narrative are either really clueless about technology, very gullible, or intentionally trying to deceive others to inflate the prices of this scheme.
In short: I agree.
That is one result, the bigger picture is that the strategies centralized owners of those items use to make profits at the expense of each user would go away.
You are correct that an issue exists between completely hard-coded ownership on the blockchain and subjective creation of items in a game, but perhaps ruminate over some roadblocks. If a 'set' of items represented by NFTs is valued by a large group of users, then developers which do not integrate those items fairly enough will suffer users.
In this case it will not be the game developers controlling the items, it will be artists who sell the raw NFT which becomes integrated. This leads to all sorts of other little issues that aren't as fun to dunk on, but you should at least steel-man the concept.
Furthermore, your example of cosmetic items is the weakest example. Items which offer in-game functionality first and foremost, and are released according to semi-predictable mechanisms are the stronger case. Just like Bitcoin prevents unwanted malicious activity from allowing forks, so to must the game(s) which use these items. I'm not convinced it's so impossible to have an open source game built around the items rather than the other way around. An extremely simple RPG is a MVP.
Of course the visible community around NFT's today is completely ill-fitted for such a project, but like all things crypto on HackerNews, detractors often mistake the loudest sales-pitch for the best possible outcome. If you want to make a strong case against the merits of crypto, focus less on projects who spend their effort on marketing and more who spend their effort on development.
It's the opposite. No real game developer would ever make assets tied to NFTs that have already been sold because they can't make any profit from that. The only thing the NFT provides is transferability, which most game developers also wouldn't want to support. The company makes more money if all consumers have to buy the same items separately. They build in scarcity by removing transferability.
Some companies might use NFTs to sell things no one would buy otherwise (like Disney selling pictures of R2D2), but that's pretty much the only use case for them.
As for your other points they were already addressed. Did you read my whole comment before finishing yours?
In your point you are basically leaving out many steps:
> If a 'set' of items represented by NFTs is valued by a large group of users
Good thing you mention this, we don't have to speak hypothetically to evaluate this. Highly valued assets on a gaming marketplace already exist with Steam Marketplace, where you can buy and sell virtual items from games that exist on Valves Steam Platform (Steam offers an API for this and developers can support the feature if they choose to do so). Items for e.g. Dota 2 have been sold between players for >2000$ on the Steam Marketplace, I believe this deserves being called highly valued by a large group of users.
The Steam API offers the ability to check a users inventory [1], so any game that is on steam could verify your ownership of a marketplace item and do something using that knowledge. Steam is a huge platform, so huge in fact that for many players Steam is PC Gaming, right now it sits at ~23 million active players (that is only players that are currently playing any game they own via steam).
Now let's go back to NFTs. What would they change? Basically connecting them to games somehow would be just the same thing, which is verifying ownership of items outside of Steam.
"Outside of steam" is not all that many players and it is very hard to get them away from there, just look at the struggle of Epic to pull users away from Steam: they have now been giving away >250 games (including many AAA titles) for free since 2018 [2]. And Valve has made its stance on NFT/Crypto pretty clear for now [3].
I believe that this puts into perspective how realistic the NFT gaming revolution is.
> Items which offer in-game functionality first and foremost, and are released according to semi-predictable mechanisms are the stronger case.
Those, in my opinion, would be even harder to carry across games because they are even further embedded inside the engine and programming and logic.
> In this case it will not be the game developers controlling the items, it will be artists who sell the raw NFT which becomes integrated.
So if I understand you correctly you believe in a market of NFT driven games that explicitly form around NFTs, rather than NFTs finding their way into the existing gaming market?
[1]: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/api/ISteamInventory#GetAl...
[2]: https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-games-store-free-games-list/
[3]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/15/22728425/valve-steam-blo...
The issue of course is that Valve has no reason to do this, and this is important, because a huge part of the reason in game items have dollar value is that they have aesthetic value in popular, well crafted games. Anyone who makes a quality video game will seek to monetize their in game items, not liberate them through NFTs. For this reason I am indeed saying that NFTs and their properties have to be a selling point.
This means that game developers make their money up front on the initial minting or selling of the NFTs (hoping that the real promise of a forever more decentralized market adds a premium - this should also include a promise of no future releases or algorithmic/predictable future releases), or the NFTs existed before the game and were valued enough that integrating them into a game after the fact is somehow profitable. Its certainly an interesting space (will be a lot more interesting when volume flows across cheaper chains than PoW Ethereum).
It doesn’t help when people (still pyramid investors) sound like the worst software managers we ever had. We as technical people absolutely hate it when people misrepresent what’s technically possible.
https://twitter.com/mikeshinoda/status/1479865779822551040
And I would say that the idea of skins portable between games being controlled by an NFT is absolutely technically possible, it's actually the business side that isn't probable - why would a company spend a bunch of money to make those skins work in their game if they aren't getting paid for it? It's possible to imagine incentive structures that could make it happen, but the reason we don't have it at the moment isn't because NFTs haven't been around, it's because those incentive structures don't exist, or don't exist to the right extent.
If the business side was probable, why would you need NFTs to implement that?
And if you're on ethereum, you probably can use a 'different' coin easily, because it'll be wrapped or more likely implemented as a token, and you didn't have to do anything to get the benefit of that aspect of the ethereum ecosystem.
Correcting/fixing wrong transactions is a fun one, but it's not impossible depending on how you set up your smart contract.
NFT promoters push all of this stuff about what you could do in the future with NFTs and it always looks like some dystopian hell where we take something that was free and charge money for it.
Totally not a pyramid scheme.
> it's actually the business side that isn't probable
Oh absolutely. But once you have that, there is literally no one who knows why you'd need the NFT bits. There are people who think that NFTs will magically make NFTs of player hats portable between one game and another, because something something blockchains. The fact that IF someone made such an interop then NFTs wouldn't be necessary, or that the "ownership" of items would STILL be exactly as shaky and fungible as it would be without NFTs is handwaved. Because something blockchains.
> [...] the reason we don't have it at the moment isn't because NFTs haven't been around, it's because those incentive structures don't exist, or don't exist to the right extent.
Exactly right, or if I can paraphrase somewhat ironically "We haven't yet found the right problem for our solution".
[0]: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
Same goes with NFTs that are bought to flip them... Ofc, in that market selling them initially by mass automatic generation makes sense. After all that non-fungible part is tad hard... But really doesn't matter once you automate generation.
The people in the pyramid are making a lot of money...
(sarcasm if it isn't clear).
Sure, you just spent $x on a certificate that says you "own" a grid reference on the moon, but don't for one second think you actually own that piece of the moon.
I think the hate carried over from crypto currencies and other blockchain projects. The top reply mentions:
> NFTs are driven by hype, making NFT investers/scammers super outspoken and obnoxious. This is why the tone of the conversation around NFTs is so resentful of them, people are sick of being forced to interact with NFT hypebeasts.
I think this is what makes blockchain projects so polarized. I've yet to see something interesting come out from blockchain technologies. If those projects exist, they're drowned in the middle of people and companies who have no clue what they're talking about and are trying to bank on the hype.
you dont hate non fungible tokens, you hate the abusive financial system that we all live under.
the funny thing is that p2p programmable money databases and things like nfts could offer us something different. it does seem that a lot of attention (and vc money) goes to people rebuilding existing things 'but on blockchain'. but there is a lot of interesting anti-speculation crypto protocols/standards being built too -> things like circles ubi.
"Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. That tension will not go away." - Stuart Brand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
PS just yesterday I witnessed a discussion on the topic in chat of unrelated Twitch channel and someone characterized NFT as "bunch of smart techies scamming clueless rich people". I don't want to be held responsible for this when the bubble bursts, even indirectly.
And FB will continue to spy on you and create shadow accounts for you in case you should sign on again. Big tech has become a loose cannon and needs to be reined in. Hard.
Besides, I always get a feeling of hypocrisy when this is being discussed because the argument people make is that FB is scum of the earth that will destroy democracy and society but the same people wouldn't delete their account because then they will miss the posts of their knitting group or something. So for me it seems that either people who are making the argument actually don't consider FB as much of a threat, or they value democracy and civic society less then their knitting group.
Anyway, let's not derail NFT discussion into typical HN big-tech-hate flamewar. Sorry I brought up the subject.
Some NFT haters also seem to misunderstand them, however, so let me throw yet another explanation attempt into the ring.
Anyone can make an NFT for anything. I can make an NFT for the Mona Lisa or whatever the hell I want. What do you get when you buy it? Absolutely nothing. I can make infinitely many too.
NFTs get all of their value from where they come from, a bit like autograph cards.
One from some rando on the web? Worthless. One from Eminem? Hmmm, maybe more interesting.
I do think NFTs can have some value for artists and art collectors. But always remember that an NFT's value comes from its creator and what they do, say and commit to. One possible option would be that an NFT entitles you to listen to ("own") a piece of music (my favorite use case because I love buying things on Bandcamp, but would like to be able to resell stuff at some point).
That's an interesting use case, but nothing close to what NFT zealots dream of.