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Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

What's the connection between NFTs and using real money to pay for Fortnite skins?

The notion that people paying for digital assets means that people will pay for NFTs.

It's meaningless, though, since the same (massive) caveats apply as when cryptocoins tried to claim they were a viable and better alternative to traditional financial services: buying and owning digital assets is entirely possible to handle with existing, more efficient technology.

Nobody that sells digital assets has any reason to buy into whatever purported benefits a distributed system provides other than hype: you don't need a distributed system if you already control all the servers and everyone is fine with that. The subset of customers that will be _REALLY MAD_ that they can't use their Fortnite skins should Epic disappear is vanishingly small.

NFTs don't even have the edge case that they're useful for transactions for illegal goods. It's grifters boosting bullshit trying to make a profit through and through.

The idea of paying for an unique digital asset, even if it is just unique by social convention, would not be foreign to my kids.

If you think about it, land ownership is also just a very well established social convention.

But land ownership gives you an actual, tangible benefit. You get exclusive use of the land. NFTs don't offer anything except bragging rights.

It gives you a benefit in the real world vs a benefit in a virtual world. It's not that different especially for people who spend more time in virtual worlds than the real one.

The part I don't understand is what benefit NFTs actually have in the either the real or virtual world, outside of bragging rights.

The connection is that both are instances of people paying real money for imaginary goods. I don't know how I feel about that, but intuitively it doesn't seem a smart thing to do.

But that's been a thing in videos for at least 30 years -- expansion packs shipped on disc for a long time -- and a common thing in almost the modern form since 2006 (Elder Scrolls Oblivion adds cosmetic-only horse armor to game for $2, online purchase only).

If you think NFTs add to that the ability to resell as a hedge against initial purchase price, then Valve added a player driven market to TF2 in 2012, the same year Blizzard added the real money auction house.

If you think NFTs add the ability to use content across games, Metal Gear Solid had features involving reading other game save files in 1998, Nintendo Amiibo launched in 2014, and Steam also allows for this via player inventories.

If you think NFTs add the ability to cash out for real money, that's been possible via external third party sites in TF2 since 2013, and analogously for real money gold sales in World of Warcraft since about 2004.

There are ways in which all of the examples above are not totally perfect and/or are more technically clunky than the vision of what this looks like in 5-10 years, but qualitatively more or less every feature of NFTs already exists in various forms over the last 20 years, in some cases all in the same product.

If the Segway was invented and the inventor cited Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov as influences, but had never heard of or wasn't willing to talk about scooters, vespas, skateboards, or cars, that'd be a huge red flag, even if you think that Segways add a bit of value.

So I think the parent's question is still pretty well taken -- what's the connection between the thing everyone's been willing to do for 20 years and the thing that's alleged to be new and different?

> analogously for real money gold sales in World of Warcraft since about 2004.

Even in the late 90’s folks were buying and selling virtual items in Ultima Online.

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