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> I think that a lot of people are anti-NFT because they hate them and all these explanations for the exact reason why they suck shift once you start talking to these NFT haters and engaging them.

As one of the terrible nocoin haters, possibly I can explain what's going on here.

People dislike NFTs for _multiple reasons_:

- They're typically hideously wasteful of energy.

- They are typically scams

- Even if not explicitly scams, they represent a pointless and inefficient financialisation of bloody everything that no-one except crypto enthusiasts seems to be at all interested in

- The art is weirdly universally alarmingly bad

- As applied to games, they incentivise bad (pay to win) design dynamics

I could go on. It is not inconsistent to dislike something for multiple reasons.

> They're typically hideously wasteful of energy.

What do you think of Immutable X, which has pledged to make all transactions on its blockchain carbon neutral? https://www.immutable.com

> They are typically scams

There is definitely a lot of scams. First most of the ICOs a few years back were scams, and then a lot/most? of DeFi schemes are scams. But I am not scared off of an area just because there are scammers in the vicinity. I think there is a lot of opportunity for what I would term gentrification of what are otherwise lawless areas.

> Even if not explicitly scams, they represent a pointless and inefficient financialisation of bloody everything that no-one except crypto enthusiasts seems to be at all interested in

I think that it will become less "inefficient" over time. I think that what can be sold will be sold if there is a market. There will be a series of fads, just like in real-life. I think this sorts itself out. If you want to believe Beanie Babies are a good thing to sell and speculate on, go for it. I won't stop you. But I probably won't speculate on those.

> The art is weirdly universally alarmingly bad

A lot of NFT art is derivative. But there are tens of thousands of artists who have made NFTs, and many are talented. I think you are cherry picking the copycats and the grifters work.

> As applied to games, they incentivise bad (pay to win) design dynamics

Games for me already went deep into the "pay to win" territory once they landed on mobile. That made a lot of companies quite rich. Thus you may disagree with the dynamics, but they are the main way that mobile games make money.

The energy argument is a bad argument because it's an obvious ploy by the terrible nocoin haters to latch on to broader environmental politics by a superficial analogy equating PoW to Fossil Fuel Power Plants and CO2. The reality is that there is plenty of zero-carbon energy to power our global economy -- it's called the Sun, and it's been working pretty well for a long time now. If we accept the ploy, then everything that isn't strictly necessary needs to go: Netflix, Google, computers in general, cars, trains; and we all need to return to living in harmony with nature and subsistence farming.

Instead of being fooled by feels good thinking, let's work on the real problem: decarbonizing the electrical grid.

> If we accept the ploy, then everything that isn't strictly necessary needs to go: Netflix, Google, computers in general, cars, trains; and we all need to return to living in harmony with nature and subsistence farming.

All these things have a value returned to society in some shape or form, even if just as entertainment.

Being more mindful about our resources' usage is not a ploy, it's simply the mindset we need to have if we plan on having a comfortable future, it's pretty basic thinking: we need to be more efficient and mindful of where we spend our limited resources because the wake up call has come.

This complete reductionist take on the environmental effects of PoW is absurd... Much more absurd than the argument that energy is better spent somewhere else than mining coins. Yeah, we have plenty of energy, do something more useful with it then, not consume a whole medium-sized country of energy to support an immutable ledger.

This position is inconsistent.

> All these things have a value returned to society in some shape or form, even if just as entertainment.

If other people find crypto mining fun, valuable, or meaningful, then how are you able to claim they are wrong when you're relying on 'entertainment' to justify Netflix, etc?

> Being more mindful about our resources' usage is not a ploy, it's simply the mindset we need to have if we plan on having a comfortable future, it's pretty basic thinking: we need to be more efficient and mindful of where we spend our limited resources because the wake up call has come.

I agree with this sentiment in general. I think you could be more precise in your condemnation of cryptocurrency while justifying Netflix.

> If other people find crypto mining fun, valuable, or meaningful, then how are you able to claim they are wrong when you're relying on 'entertainment' to justify Netflix, etc?

They’re using orders of magnitude more power for one thing, but also they clearly do not consider this as entertaining as watching Netflix because if they did they’d be talking about that. Nobody says they love random hashes, it’s always about how much money you can make selling them to someone else. NFTs theoretically could get closer to that but most of the salespeople never mention the artists’ names, much less give a reason why the aesthetic merits justify a high valuation: it always comes down to “buy high, sell higher”. Twitter’s NFT integration is a great example: they’re not linking to them because anyone cares about the artwork, it’s not new that you commission art, but it’s highlighted on profile pictures because people want to say “I spent a lot of money on this receipt. You can buy it from me!”

Contrast this with the early days of the web or smartphones: yes, lots of people talked about money but that was because a much larger group of people were having fun doing things that they couldn’t have done before. The point was to actually build something, not just put up a sign saying you spent a lot of money on something you didn’t have to.

> They’re using orders of magnitude more power for one thing.

It's not clear whether this statement is true. Do you have sources? I'm serious, do you know how much infrastructure is required to deliver Netflix streams globally? How much investment went into building that infrastructure on top of all of the supporting infrastructure and its energy costs?

> Nobody says they love [NFTs]... [it's not] as entertaining as watching Netflix.

These people like making money and they derive pleasure from it. How's that any different from 'watches TV and derives pleasure from it'? It's not. This isn't a logically consistent position to take. Your claim here reduces to "Making money != entertainment Therefore Crypto is Bad". It's nonsensical.

> I'm serious, do you know how much infrastructure is required to deliver Netflix streams globally?

According to Netflix, an hour of streaming is 100g CO2e: https://about.netflix.com/en/news/net-zero-nature-our-climat...

Estimates vary about Bitcoin's exact cost but they generally come in on the order of kilograms per transaction, and because far, far more actual people use Netflix than use Bitcoin for real activity a fair fraction of those transactions are overhead rather than a single economic transaction.

> > Nobody says they love [NFTs]... [it's not] as entertaining as watching Netflix.

> These people like making money and they derive pleasure from it. How's that any different from 'watches TV and derives pleasure from it'? It's not.

This was explained in the parts you elided. If people were doing this out of some aesthetic appreciation for random hashes, we'd know because they would be talking about that. Instead the sales pitch is always about the things they can do after cashing out into hard currency. There are almost certainly some people who define themselves on making a number go up but they're not represented at all in the marketing material.

> I could go on. It is not inconsistent to dislike something for multiple reasons.

Of course it isn't. I don't like NFTs but it's dangerous to assume all NFTs fit in the above reasons. You can still have the following:

> - They're typically hideously wasteful of energy.

NFTs that are economically friendly: NFTs on Solana, Algorand, Avalanche, etc.

> - Even if not explicitly scams, they represent a pointless and inefficient financialisation of bloody everything that no-one except crypto enthusiasts seems to be at all interested in

NFTs that are useful: Blockchain Domain Names for identities. ENS [0], Solana Name Service, etc.

We still pay for blockchain domains in order to renew them, just like we do for domains on ICANN expect that for the latter, the registrar can seize your domain and hike the prices up [1], for any reason where as the former is owned by you on the blockchain and no one can take it away.

So which one is the true scam?

All the other reasons such as NFT jpegs, NFT games, etc are all valid criticisms and demonstrate limited or no usefulness. But not all NFTs are like that. ENS (which is a blockchain domains service) is a great example of utility in NFTs.

[0] https://ens.domains/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29403773

> I think that a lot of people are anti-NFT because they hate them and all these explanations for the exact reason why they suck shift once you start talking to these NFT haters and engaging them.

This seems like you’re arguing against the weakest form of the argument rather than engaging with the specific criticisms offered by people who understand the technology at least as well as most proponents. For example, most of the criticism I’ve seen of NFTs in gaming isn’t just about the high cost or environmental but rather more the fundamental business questions about what problems the companies who make games have which are best solved this way. If it’s something a company could trivially do now but has chosen not to, it’s unlikely to have a technological fix.

> This seems like you’re arguing against the weakest form of the argument rather than engaging with the specific criticisms offered by people who understand the technology at least as well as most proponents.

Does this meet your needs?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30243820

I also discuss interoperability and how I suspect it will be realized here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30243851

Interoperability isn't juat a technical problem. It's also an economic and game balance problem.

All three problems are insurmountable. It's just a monumentally stupid idea.

> Interoperability isn't juat a technical problem. It's also an economic and game balance problem. > > All three problems are insurmountable. It's just a monumentally stupid idea.

When I refer to people who seem to not really understand nuance but rather view it in stark contrast I am specifically speaking of comments such as the above.

What happens if I want to bring in visual only avatar configuration? Does doesn't affect game balance. What happens if I wanted to tie my officially licensed sports game to assets that are being sold by sports teams in the leagues I have licensed? Or Nike or Adidas ensure that NFT shoes you buy online work in Fortnite or Roblox by giving these games some money to enable that?

Maybe the game is part of a series and some of the top in-game purchase are transferable to the next game in the series, even if it is created by a different company using different tech?

Maybe I want to be able to bring my WoW sword and carry it around in Decentraland where you don't really die and thus its stats don't matter because I like it?

Maybe I am a game publisher who has a few different genres of games and I make some special items which can go between the various games and result in really weird effects/bonuses? Cross promoting my properties.

I think there will be a lot of cool things happening if people start to see the potential here.

> I see a lot of specious arguments and strong statements that are usually generationizations focused on the negative.

Doesn't this go both ways? People hear the loudest voices in the room, both for and against crypto. As a personal anecdote, I asked an acquaintance who is really into Internet Computer[1] how apps that implement the Matrix protocol[2] compare to something like OpenChat[3]. Their response was unconvincing, mainly because it was more like generalized marketing hype for Internet Computer and not actually addressing my question directly.

So I think while there are plenty of folks who blindly hate on the crypto/web3 ecosystem, there are also a lot of people trying to engage constructively and getting pro-crypto memes thrown back in their face. Where's the space for nuanced answers to these nuanced criticisms?

[1] https://smartcontracts.org/docs/introduction/welcome.html

[2] https://www.matrix.org

[3] https://oc.app

> [...] I expect it to completely explode within the gaming community when these low and no-fee blockchains take over [...]

What use do block chains have for gaming that can't already be done more efficiently?

Supporting efficient blockchains for in-game assets, those blockchains with near zero fees, enable (1) robust secondary markets as well as (1) interchangeable assets when desired (such as avatar customizations.) Right now the game industry tends to offer walled garden and fractured solutions here.

In other words, blockchains don’t help at all. The game industry has walled gardens now because that’s what they want and people keep giving them billions of dollars, not because nobody has heard of databases and APIs.

> In other words, blockchains don’t help at all. The game industry has walled gardens now because that’s what they want and people keep giving them billions of dollars, not because nobody has heard of databases and APIs.

I think that offering interoperability will be a benefit for new entrants. Existing players tend to not change their ways very easily.

But I think the potential for game microtransaction revenue can be even larger with robust NFT marketplaces, secondary markets and the potential for interoperability of metaverse assets. There is more money here down this path and thus I think it will happen.

The two big concerns I’d have are the companies’ desires to build up captive audiences (e.g. Ubisoft’s NFT restricted to their system) and the challenges of bootstrapping a marketplace on the idea of interoperability which doesn’t benefit the consumer until multiple companies actually implement it and their fees are known.

It’s a tough sell to pay more upfront in the hopes that it’ll yield results later, and that applies both to the consumers being asked to buy these NFTs and the companies being pitched on implementing them without clear demand.

> It’s a tough sell to pay more upfront in the hopes that it’ll yield results later, and that applies both to the consumers being asked to buy these NFTs and the companies being pitched on implementing them without clear demand.

Integrating third party blockchain microtransaction engines I think will be cheaper than implementing a custom solution for new games. I think it will in the future be viewed akin to adopting Auth0 for authentication rather than rolling your own - it seems cheaper to do it yourself until you want to get for ISO compliance or deal with JWT or SAML or OAuth or 2FA integration, and then you need your own people dealing with bugs, features, and UX designs distracting you from pushing your product's unique features forward.

If you're just treating it as a micropayment system, a hypothetical far more efficient blockchain service could potentially be cheaper than building a pure-custom system but it's unlikely to be easier than Steam/Apple/Google/Stripe/etc. and there's a limited margin for how much cheaper it could be (those players have plenty of room to lower their fees before becoming unprofitable). The problems with micro-transactions aren't really the overhead of processing charges.

The deeper question about this concept is about the idea of interoperability. Payments or authentication are comparatively simple problems which are well-understood. If I use Autho0, I'm cutting out the most expensive part of that problem and my app change are minimal — before I verified that you could receive email at you@example.org myself, now I get that as an attribute from the SSO service, but it's always been my unique identifier.

In contrast, integrating assets into games is a much harder problem without a turnkey solution. Putting an asset into a game requires the artwork, sound, etc. to be adjusted for the game engine (this is far more complicated than just resizing a JPEG since they need to adjust things like 3D meshes, lighting, etc.), custom behaviors implemented (does anything light up or respond to conditions?), if does anything which affects gameplay that has to be implemented and balanced against the rest of the game (you're going to regret paying extra if your favorite weapon is weak; nobody else will want to play if it's over-powered), and while those are substantial amounts of work they're not even the hardest part: the game developer needs to have a license to do any of that. You're not going to see Mario in Call of Duty because Nintendo doesn't want their billion-dollar franchise used that way. Gamers can't even resist advanced purchases for games of unknown quality, there's no chance that they're going to stop buying games until the publishers grant general access to assets or do so at less than usurious rates.

Now, look at it from the perspective of the implementer: if you want to take an asset from game A, you already spent the money buying it in that game. I can spend a lot of time and money licensing & developing support for that asset in my game in the hopes that it'll make you more likely to buy my game but that's a big upfront cost which limits my returns to the person or, hopefully, people who hold that particular NFT — or I can spend that time and money on things which I can sell to everyone, and don't require ongoing licensing fees to the developers of game A.

Ah yeah what a boon to new entrants to have to design games that can accept an infinite number of arbitrary game assets that they will receive no revenue from!

Isn't the main benefit (for the operator) of a walled garden specifically that it keeps new entrants out? Why would any of the big players let some startup NFT company offer interoperable NFTs when they could just as easily do it themselves within the same user database that already exists?

More generally, why would you use a blockchain for such an application at all? If some group of big gaming companies were interested in having in-game assets be transferable between their games, why not start a joint venture that manages the shared database instead of giving all the power away to some group of blockchain devs? That seems like it would have a lot of downsides (exposure to rugpulls, difficult onboarding for users that don't have a wallet yet, etc etc etc) for very little upside, and thus not a thing that company executives would be interested in.

Why is the game industry going to give up one of their major channels of revenue or allow it to be shared between properties or even other companies?

They wouldn't have to give up any major channels of revenue. This would just be an improved architecture for their existing micro transactions, that also enables a secondary market.

Remember that NFT contracts can be written such that the original issuer can get a piece of secondary sales. That is a new revenue stream for the content owners.

I think that interoperability will not be universal, but maybe you can buy NFL gear on an NFL website and then it happens to also work in the licensed NFL games -- stuff like that. Or Nike negotiates with Fortnite and Roblox and Minecraft so that Nike NFTs that you buy from Nike.com work as avatar customizations in these games. I think this is how it starts -- limited and negotiated interoperability between non-competitors. Maybe it gets to where competitor games have interoperability, but that is definitely not where it starts.

How would I use an item from world of war raft in another game?

You can't even use items from D&D 3.5e in D&D 5e.

I think that interoperability of functional items, rather than apparence items, needs to be careful considered on almost a per-item basis.

There will not be universal interoperability of functional items across disparate games, and only limited interoperability of functional items within game families/series.

Royalties are not supported by the existing nft interface. They are instead done by services like opensea.

Gaming walled gardens are generally a result of copyright / legal walls, not any lack or need of capability.

> interchangeable assets

Can someone point me to a proposal for how this is even supposed to work, by someone who is familiar with game development? There is no standard for 3D asset development between game studios. Even games made within the same studio don't have interchangeable assets.