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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

It makes sense that you would cite Axie Infinity as a leading example of how the Web3 technologies are actually starting to work at scale.

Huh? Axie Infinity is a Ponzi scheme. They're the people behind the Smooth Love Potion token. See chart for that.[1] They prey on poor people in the Philippines and Vietnam with a pay to play game that costs about US$1000 to enter.

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/

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Yeah: and the only reason it works at all is because it is actually a centralized game (which then indirectly but still centrally mints the SLP any time they want under any rule set... this is absolutely a "security") that can attempt to prevent people automating play by doing stuff like bot detection. I'm a believer in crypto, and even in crypto for games, but trotting out Axie as an example is painful.

It’s not a surprise though as the interviewee works for a VC that invested in it.

The interviewee, Chris Dixon, never mentioned Axie though. It was the interviewer, Steven Johnson, that brought it up.

As I read it the first block is Steven replying to Chris. Might be wrong though it’s not formatted very well.

Ah yeak ok. I agree the formatting is a bit unusual. I guess the confusion is Chris did mention Axie but it was in the previous post which is paywalled.

I'm pretty sure Axie Infinity and other "NFT games" are centralized too, which skirts the entire purpose of using NFTs. They can completely change Axie stats, introduce new Axies, or shut-down. It's no different than selling rare pokemon or CS:GO knives or any game with in-app-purchases and trading. These aren't "distributed apps", they're centralized apps that use cryptocurrency.

A truly decentralized crypto game is a smart contract where the outcome of a transaction is unknown to both parties until they agree to it. For example, "crypto roulette": an Etherium smart contract where N parties enter M coins, and then a (pseudo-)random-number generator decides which party gets the spoils.

You could build off this concept with other games like "crypto blackjack", "crypto poker", etc. where you somehow enable user input and output once players enter their coins (this would need a timer, so if a player doesn't input in X time they are disqualified. I really doubt this is currently possible and I don't even know if it's possible at all). You could also use NFTs instead of coins, and replace the basic random-number generator with a more complex algorithm which simulates a kind of "battle" based on parts of the NFT hash. Kind of like a battle between Axies.

But the fundamental point is, the entire game is a smart contract. There is no centralized server handling the transactions, and the game-maker can't "shut down" the game or change the rules or create an overpowered NFT. And the rules are visible to anyone (you can still add "cheats" but you have to hide them, because other players can find and use them too).

Some people in the countries you mentioned are making more playing Axie than they could otherwise [1].

I'm not advocating for Axie Infinity, but I think there are multiple sides to this.

[1] https://restofworld.org/2021/axie-infinity/

Yes. About 1 in 700 players can make a living off of it. It's zero-sum, of course. Many of the losers don't know they lost yet, because they haven't cashed out. This is typical of a Ponzi scheme.

The bottom already fell out of Smooth Love Token.[2] The Axie Infinity governance Token is down a bit after a big runup.[3]

"Daily Earnings of Typical Axie Infinity Player Fall Below the Philippines’ Minimum Wage Line".[1]

[1] https://block2block.io/daily-earnings-of-typical-axie-infini...

[2] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/

[3] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/axie-infinity/

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