Comment by dmw_ng | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmw_ng | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't understand how the value of tokens drifts towards zero

This is the software industry after all.

Take for example a multi-player game with purchasable trinkets. Player "invests" in a copy of the game at $50 and 20 trinkets originally costing $1 each. Platform the game is designed for becomes obsolete (say, an app targetting Windows 3.1 or Android 2.1), or the company goes bust and turns off the infrastructure supporting multiplayer functionality. Perhaps having issued all the tokens it can, the company simply loses interest in continuing to pay for that infrastructure.

What happens to the value of the issued tokens? Well we know what happens, much as we know what happened to the millions of 3.5" and 5.25" floppy disks containing licensed software written for Windows 3.1 that were manufactured in the 90s.

The only way to preserve the value of the "investment" is if the token is supported in perpetuity by a functioning market that must by necessity not be dependent on a single piece of software (game), OS platform, vendor or centralized authority of any sort.

You really don't understand the value proposition here. If a MP game goes defunct, as they do constantly the game will lose it's value, regardless if you bought it on steam or as a token on an NFT exchange. It doesn't matter. Same with any in-app purchases of items costumes or whatever. NFTs for games aren't trying to provide you will value in perpetuity.

So then what is the point of doing it via NFT? If all value is tied to the behaviour of a single central counterparty, the use of NFT is utterly redundant.

I understand this may come as a shock, but the entire point of blockchains is to solve a specific detail in the original Bitcoin design - mutual agreement on the content of a distributed linearized log in the absence of any authority. For almost every application where centralization (indirect or otherwise) continues to exist, they are deeply inefficient from a technical perspective and suffer from deep usability issues from a user perspective. So you end up with the majority of the userbase thinking they're "doing blockchain" but their only experience of it is some centralized eBay for JPEG clone site who also happen to be managing their wallet, in order to trade tokens tied to an asset (in this case) dependent on the future viability of yet another central counterparty (the game producer). This is called snake oil.

Where is the value?

The value is in reselling the game when you are done with it. Instead of buying it on steam and then being stuck with it, you resell your token( which is the equivalent of having bought the game on steam) to the 2nd hand market. Same as you did with old games but digital.

Glad you understand!

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