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Comment by ViViDboarder | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. One could make an argument that the work some users put in, once sold, result in value to the buyer, but that value isn’t generated by the worker. The developers created the scheme and could deliver the value directly at no cost to all players, poor and wealthy, but instead chose to create meaningless work by making grinding opportunities.

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One could also argue that if the developers did that, the market value of the digital item in question would drop. The value that the buyer receives is grounded in the large time investment required to acquire the item in the game. Even though it is completely artificial, it makes the item more scarce and therefore more desirable to other players. I totally agree that the fact that this power is in the hands of the developers, though, makes these types of NFTs far from the decentralized digital goods they are claimed to be as pointed out by the author.

This implies that anything that is scarce or requires labour to obtain automatically becomes desirable and rises in value.

Faux scarcity is a key concept in the crypto ecosystem.

scarcity is a necessary, but insufficient condition for desirability.

I think it's not even necessary. Otherwise, rights holders wouldn't have to put in so much effort to hold up the other form of artificial scarcity, DRM. Free software wouldn't exist.

I have the feeling that buyers feel they are getting more value if the item was "generated" by grinding than if it was created ab nihilo by the developers. Why, I have no idea.

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