More People Own Items in Second Life Than Own NFTs | Hacker News Reader

More People Own Items in Second Life Than Own NFTs

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54 pointsjbegley23 comments

Is this surprising? I would expect this to be the case based on two factors - one, SL’s much longer availability to end users and the much lower friction to acquiring items and two, the much smaller initial buy-in cost of SL items. Even a “free” ethereum NFT is going to cost a user over $100 for gas alone!

I would say there are 3 factors.

The SL items can actually be highly complex, scripted stuff, animations etc. Their purpose it to provide their buyers with entertainment like owning a movie in a digital library.

An NFT serves no purpose at all. Other than collecting it for whatever reason.

While I think buying ingame SL items and NFTs is dumb, there is no reason an NFT cannot be as much or more functional than a SL item. The idea is that the token represents a non-fungible item is the same. The argument is portability — which I don’t think is that strong to be honest, as game devs are not likely to make mutual compatible items, it’s a point. Most NFTs “contents” are based off the ERC721Metadata standard, which is but one of many possible future formats. They don’t have to be ugly jpegs.

The key difference is the interactivity SL provides.

In SL you could buy a virtual car and drive around in it with your friends.

Good look doing that with an NFT. There is no world, no car and no friends to connect with.

In truth most SL stuff is probably some sort of sex bed with a bunch of animations for two ;)

I think that parent's point is that an NFT can represent ownership of a virtual car in SL or a similar game. Of course, as they also point out, it doesn't really bring any value over the existing mechanism for owning SL items.

There are other blockchains which are much more NFT friendly which you can mint an NFT for next to nothing. Avalanche or Solana for exanple, have a fraction of the gas fees but the same capabilities as Ethereum

They support smart contracts, but trade off censorship resistance and decentralization in order to achieve those low fees. NFTs are useless without those features and there are other, more secure alternatives to using “cheaper chains”.

Tezos (along with hic et nunc) are popular for clean NFTs as well.

Quick question; NFTs don't store the image in the block chain, they just store a pointer to the image.

So are there any guarantees the pointer won't get changed? Or is it a hash of the image or something? Could you effectively remove someone's control of an image by changing the pointer?

Honestly NFTs seem utterly useless to me because there's no guarantee they'll keep in sync with the reality of the objects ownership.

There’s a fixation on this “pointer” problem with NFTs. Most projects use IPFS, making this a non-issue.

There are plenty of other critiques of NFTs - this is not one of them.

Unless people on IPFS decide to stop storing your item. IPFS does not address incentives to store objects. It’s a protocol like HTTP - but that doesn’t mean you have any incentive to store people’s NFTs yet, just like how having HTTP doesn’t mean you have an incentive to host a website yet.

Sure, but you can always maintain (and/or pay others to maintain) the things you care about on IPFS, and if the implementation points there directly (afaik not all do...) the pointer remains useful. Whereas if it points to a random HTTP url, you cant maintain that without the domain holder cooperating.

My main concern with this is that files hosted in IPFS aren't necessarily immutable, so what you own according to the NFT isn't immutable either.

The "default" way of using IPFS is content-based addressing == immutable.

IPFS uses file hashes. You're thinking of IPNS.

If you own the NFT, you do.

The way I understand IPFS, the address is based on the sha-256 hash of the content. If no one wants to host your object, or even if the object disappears from the network, you can put it back. Because it is based on a cryptographic hash of the content, no one can reuse the address for anything else, and putting it back won't change the address. This is unlike HTTP where you can lose your domain name, provider or change the referenced content.

So as long as a single person has your object it will not disappear, and as long as a single person is willing to host it, it will stay available, that person can be the owner of the NFT.

Thanks, I'll look into IPFS.

Crypto punks, for example, does store the image on-chain, and not all NFTs require images.

I recently went back to Second Life because it was the platform of a social group that was going virtual due to covid.

I was able to buy a custom penis; the avatars do not come with fully functional sexual organs.

However, when I put my pants back on, my member was clearly visible, protruding out of my pants. I had to manually set the penis to invisible, or else stop "wearing" it in public situations where nudity was not encouraged.

Sort of amazing it is still around, when did it come out -- 2004 perhaps?

The penis modding community is rising rapidly, bud sadly underserved by most platforms.

Wow,what a sentence

That’s actually support for a pretty strong bull case for NFTs…

It really isn't. The sort of money being thrown at NFTs would imply that people think they're going to become mainstream. Right now, seven years on from the first NFT and about three years since the hype started, and a year on from really enormous hype starting, they are clearly such a niche that another tiny niche (Second Life) makes them look small. That does not bode well for them.

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