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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

This is something blockchain would actually be very good at solving.

Download a legal copy of the game from anywhere. No DRM, but your license key gets checked against the blockchain.

The block chain may be able to validate a license to a copy of the game, but that doesn't encompass hosting/delivery of content. The actual content of NFTs, tiny PNGs, are still hosted behind a URL. Putting 60+GB AAA titles out there for all time isn't something a Blockchain itself can solve.

I also don't know how IPFS people would feel if they became the CDN for commercial software.

I think it's reasonable to believe that third party CDNs would pop up in the world.

The feature would be that it's structurally decentralized in a way that decouples content creators from delivery.

What would be the business model for the CDNs? If they're paid by the publisher, you're back to the game vanishing when it's no longer profitable for them to provide it. If they're paid by the user, this feels a worse user experience than the centralised status quo of steam.

It doesn't decouple them. The cdn still needs rights to share the content from the creator. Why would the creator give anyone else the right than say steam? So you would have a NFT of your game that only works in one platform since others cannot distribute it.

Torrents are a thing, but still I won't give my bandwidth for something I paid good money for. Just no.

I would if it meant paying 30% less

>CDN for commercial software

What does that have to do with IPFS? IPFS doesn't really care what's on top of it.

All of the prospective "stores" can host their own IPFS nodes and contribute to the bandwidth availability, just like how a CDN works.

> No DRM, but your license key gets checked against the blockchain

Isn't that DRM?

I just wonder how could duplicating the license key be prevented. First by small group and then maybe just stolen from someone. While also preventing loss of it with let's say device.

A game key could be considered a non-fungible token so this already works on a blockchain. Instead of recording a game key, you record the wallet public key. If you need more privacy, you can use Zero knowledge proofs[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof

How would you prevent group of friends from sharing a wallet? Which I see as one thing to do, pool your money and buy each new game to new wallet... Then share the wallet's private key between all.

... and then one of your friends gets hit with some wallet stealing and someone transfers all of your game-license-tokens out.

The benefit of putting a game key in a public place is to make porting the key easier. So yea, sharing a wallet would be possible. This is definitely not something corporations want.

Back in the day, you can borrow your friends game after they were done. DVDs can be shared. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sheesh being down voted on hacker news for a technical response. If my technical response is wrong, please let me know.

You would need a separate CDN such as BitTorrent.

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