In Defense of CryptoKitties

How are baseball cards useful? How about fine art? What about virtual goods in MMORPGs? I guess my point is that enjoyment and fun is a worthy utility in and of itself.

Indeed,

The "it's a proof concept" argument falls down when you realize that automatic contracts would be a serious bug, not a desirable feature, if applied to anything other a wholly arbitrary thingy.

And just as much, the examples are "toys" because crypto-contracts can only work on toys or rather only has it's guarantee properties for things encoded within the blockchain.

The ability to have land change hands automatically with no recourse if said land winds-up in ill-intentioned hands? If you want to trample the rights of tenants, ignore regulations on environmental protection, ignore worries about fraud, assuming all zoning ideas are ridiculous and so-forth, that would be great.

But even if you did want this stuff, it's unlikely crypto could get this because real world things already have their real world keepers because of their usefulness and few are willing to discard the actual protection such keepers have for the mis-features of crypto-contracts.

Edit: Not that I'm a fan of DRM, but it also doesn't seem like blockchains could enforce DRM, which is the primary feature that everyone trying to fence off cyberspace want.

> So how are cryptokitties useful?

For example, they showed that a real-world application instantly cripples the "global distributed decentralized infinitely scalable" blockchain (was it Etherium?).

And it had a fraction of traffic that a real real-world application generates.

Games are useful for ushering new users on to the platform since they rely on novelty instead of network effect. Then when more people are comfortable with using dapps and on the platform, the more serious apps can come about.

I’m not sure, but I think you just tried to compare the technological platforms of VR/AR with virtual cat trading for money on existing platforms? I’m not even getting into the huge amounts of time, money, and hard work that’s gone into VR/AR, because as far as I can tell you just compared apples and bricks.

Did he just say Meow?

I suspect their will be a decentralised 3.0 web allowing supporting the later layers of the semantic web model.

I do not think it will be Ethereum, not just because of the technology issues but also the philosophy, too much greed in the heart of it.

The scarce thing is being able to say "Cryptokitty #123 belongs to me". No one else can say that, and everyone will agree that you're the answer to the question "Who owns Cryptokitty #123?" or "Who owns the Cryptokitty with that specific appearance?". It's definitely a bit silly, but I still feel there's some neat allure to that. Maybe try thinking of it like owning the original piece of some fine art. Art can be photocopied, so what's the point? There's some kind of prestige in having the original, in knowing that you have a direct relationship with where it came from, and the fact that your direct relationship with it may affect others who are interested in the art.

And about the specific cat images themselves: sure, anyone can create a cat image like these, but there's a certain fun in knowing that the image was produced by a specific system and by people learning and using the rules of the system. Anyone can take a chess board and its pieces and arrange the pieces into a winning configuration, but that's missing the social significance that you get from playing a game against someone and getting the pieces into that winning position through artful play within the game's system of rules.