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Comment by miracle2k | Hacker News Reader

They can communicate, but if they want to agree on shared state between them, they have to solve the same problem that blockchains seek to solve, and the options available to you there are essentially on a spectrum of how many people are going to participate and to what extend you can vet them.

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I don’t think multiplayer games are running a blockchain and they agree on shared state. Humans being humans tend to reject cheaters who manipulate the state in their favor. But you don’t need a blockchain for any of this, and in fact, it’s too slow to have shared state /in real time/.

While I'm not really big on "Blockchain all the things!" this might be a poor analogy, considering just how many big multiplayer games use very intrusive, almost rootkit level anticheat software to, effectively, try and force all clients to behave and share state fairly...

Hmm. Might be a poor analogy then. I’ve never had any issues with anti-cheat software or ever noticed it’s existence — other than an icon on a splash page.

Not really; it is the server that tells all clients what the state is.

I know "there is nothing new that blockchain does" has become a meme among sceptics, but with respect, I am getting a bit tired of it.

It's just not accurate. You can argue that what the way blockchain allows for shared state is useless all they long, or that the financial use cases are undesirable, and that's all fine. But you simple cannot run the kind of apps that are running on Ethereum right now, enabling financial transactions, with the same guarantees of décentralisation and permissionless access, w/o a blockchain.

It may be useless and/or criminal, but it is certainly new and it works.

> Not really; it is the server that tells all clients what the state is.

Not with realtime action games, nope. The server hopefully verifies, but not even that is a given... Just look at New Worlds immortality bug from a few weeks back for a pretty large budget game that forgot to do that to a sufficient degree.

Thanks for the heads-up. Sounds like I don't know enough about how those games are made.

Looks like you are describing the value of the distributed non-permissioned consensus mechanism, without using those words.

I’m not arguing that the blockchain isn’t valuable. I think it does unlock new and interesting things. I think we are still learning what those things are, outside of crypto transactions. And like anything else, there’ll be times to apply it and times not.

Dude the internet is made of protocols that accomplish “shared state”

Ever heard of dns or IP addresses?

What about bittorrent, tor, i2p, ipfs?

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