I agree: There is no killer-app from the perspective of a first-world citizen.
For low-wage workers in developing countries the killer app is play2earn gaming.
For low-wage workers in developing countries the killer app is play2earn gaming.
Article: https://paulbutler.org/2021/play-to-earn-and-bullshit-jobs/
It's a closed loop system so the only way for people to earn money is to get it from other gamers. And gamers aren't going to throw money at these games when they could play a better "centralized" alternative.
And the reason why non-pay2earn alternatives will always be better is because non-pay2earn games are much cheaper because they only need to pay the game devs while pay2earn games need to pay both the game devs and the freeloading "earners".
"Generation 1 of play2earn gaming popularized in 2021/2022 was based on an ongoing influx of capital and generated profits only in the form of its redistribution. This changed when ... "
Farming resources in MMORPGs was happening before cryptocurrency became popular:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming
The killer app is illegal markets, malware / ransomware payments, and money laundering.
Where does the real economic benefit come from in this? "Paying people to play games" cannot possibly scale beyond the existing gold-farming niche. It's also something that historically games have tended to ban.
If you have a way to keep them busy and earn esteem without hurting anybody, that's a huge economic benefit.
Why crypto is needed is because that is the tech that makes it possible for Player A to actually own Thing X, when Player A sends money to Player B who actually spent 8 hours playing or doing in order to earn Thing X.
There are a few of these examples starting to gain steam like Axie Infinity[1] for instance. Although I suspect FB & Roblox are going to really go all in on this soon, if they haven't already. And their user bases are enormous.
[1] https://axieinfinity.com/ (click on their marketplace link to see for yourself, the prices are crazy)
Asset <-> Token <-> Blockchain
where the <-> are links of some kind. I understand that the T-B link on the right is secure and uses all the fancy crypto stuff (smart contracts, whatever) . However, the A-T link is less clear to me.
Concretely, if you 'own' a Pokeman/Axie then that is the T-B link, but what links the Axie to the token? A URL/URI? So where is that stored - in a database somewhere?
It all seems very suspect, but maybe I'm missing something.
Don't hold Axie Infinity up as a success.
No, Roblox is not getting into NFTs. They're planning on having no-copy transferable items within their own ecosystem. Second Life has had those for years. They're a minor portion of the object market, especially since SL got rid of gachas ("loot boxes") for regulatory reasons.
The main use of NFTs that makes any kind of sense is monetizing popularity. It's a new form of celebrity merch. This is great if you're a celebrity, but not otherwise.
[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/
It's pumped millions of dollars into poor areas in developing countries. I think they would consider that a success. Remember, they're not investing in these NFT's, they're utilizing them to extract wealth from collectors/investors in the west. So for them, yes it's been a resounding success.
>No, Roblox is not getting into NFTs.
Not only will they get into NFT's, when they do they will have the largest marketplace. I don't own RBLX, or any NFT's, but the writing is on the wall. The Metaverse(s) are just getting going.
That money comes from the poor suckers who are grinding away, buying Axies and hoping to make money. This is zero-sum, remember.
If you're poor, you're not buying those shitty tokens. The poor are the ones selling the goods for the tokens, which are purchased by people with enough disposable income to spend on digital "things".
If you have $100 to spend on an outfit for your avatar in some game, I have no problem if some family in the Philippines gets o eat for a month as a result.
2 mostly makes sense to me--ownership can be managed independently of the game, and without a bespoke integration with that particular game. I do wonder a little how important being able to turn game assets into general-purpose instruments is (meaning, to the success of the game), but I can see how it expands the market and in particular how it makes it harder for the game company to manipulate that market, which makes the assets more reliable.
I'm not sure I understand 1 though. Don't the assets only have value in the context of the game's mechanics, which _are_ centralized? Like if the game decides your bag of holding no longer holds anything, or even to simply ignore its existence, does it matter that you have a token asserting your ownership of the bag? In theory, the token could have value as a token outside the context of the game, like a meme stock or, uh, the current price of Tesla, but that's true of anything tradable.
If however (some years down the line) the original game creator abandons the game, any group of people could jump in and revive the game (by re-creating or updating it or doing something completely novel) based on the state that is still available on the block chain.
Thanks for the discussion in any case.