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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

"Web3" isn't even able to solve problems it's supposed to solve.

The big pitch was that you could have non-copyable items which you could move between virtual worlds. The Second Life / Open Simulator ecosystem already has that problem. People looked into NFTs as a way to solve it, and concluded it would not help.

You can download content and upload it as new content, perhaps with a minor mod, creating a new object. This is called "copybotting" in Second Life and Open Simulator. As with any copyright violation, you can file DMCA takedown requests if you find a copy of your stuff.

Would NFTs stop copybotting? No. They just protect the object's ID, not its content. You can still copy the content. If you want to copy a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT image and make a poster of it, the NFT system does nothing to stop you. It's not even clear that's a copyright violation in the US, since BAYC images are computer-generated.

Many NFTs don't even have an on-chain cryptographic hash of the content, only a URL for some server. Nor do most NFTs have their NFT ID watermarked into the actual content. So the NFT doesn't even give you a verifiable proof of ownership independent of the creator's server. There isn't info that would allow a server to tell if a new image upload is a copy of an existing item. An image search might help, but that doesn't need NFTs. Decentraland's solution to this problem is to charge a $500 "curation fee" to get an object onto their platform, which cuts down content to the point that they can check for duplicates.

NFTs are thus useless for their claimed purpose.

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> The big pitch was that you could have non-copyable items which you could move between virtual worlds.

The whole "moving objects between virtual worlds" thing is one of the most ridiculous concepts I see pushed by the crypto/NFT/web3 community.

As you've outlined there is a potential for this functionality in non-game/metaverse environments - even if NFTs fail to do it properly.

However, when this gets applied to video games at large, I really start to roll my eyes. Even if you could magically hand-wave away all the technical issues that go along with trying to implement something like this - why would developers even bother? Game economies have to be tightly controlled to combat things like RMT, botting, and unsanctioned item trading. Letting people transfer in any item they want basically makes that impossible.

Exactly. Why is Epic going to design and support a Fortnite version of your hat NFT when they get nothing out of it?

Stupid. Ponzi. Crap.

> Why is Epic going to design and support a Fortnite version of your hat NFT when they get nothing out of it?

They do though. The argument is two-pronged: (a) developers earn secondary fees on open markets, and (b) players get to resell stuff they don't want. It's literally a win-win.

Epic can make more money by locking players into their walled garden. Nothing short of government regulation would convince them to spend more money implementing exponentially more items into their game while also taking a smaller cut of each item's purchase and resale.

Know what’s better than 5% of a resale? 100% of every sale!

Tim Sweeney knows.

You forgot what drives every good for consumer thing a company does: competition.

If every games company is allowing users to resell their items, and Epic is not, they just look evil. We're not there yet but when we are you don't want to get the reputation of being the evil company that seeks profits above all else.

Social media companies "look evil" when they don't allow users to freely use third-party apps and clients, but they still don't, because that doesn't make them money.

And competition doesn't/won't solve either problem, because third-party apps aren't why most people choose social media platforms, and reselling hats isn't why most people choose a game.

In other words, the proposed feature is something developers want, not users.

That still leaves you with the chicken-and-egg problem of how you get to the point where "every games company is allowing users to resell their items", when it's not beneficial to any of them to start with.

Disclosure: the above poster is the co-founder of an NFT-based gaming project.

Epic, or any studio could have done this without web3.

The perverse incentive of the "token" and making a boatful of money suddenly gets people concerned about developer's income.

Roblox already supports this on a centralized platform. You can buy items/cosmetics on the platform, and then use them in any game.

The amusing thing is the people who actually are drafting standards to move objects between virtual worlds have nothing to do with NFTs.[1] That group includes Epic, Unity, NVidia, W3C, Autodesk, Microsoft, Meta... The people who make stuff work.

[1] https://metaverse-standards.org/

"Game economies have to be tightly controlled to combat things like RMT, botting, and unsanctioned item trading. Letting people transfer in any item they want basically makes that impossible. "

Except in Diablo 3. Where all that killed the game.

> Letting people transfer in any item they want basically makes that impossible.

This is missing the forest for the trees. Of course it wouldn't be a carte blanche, but it would be trivial to let people transfer in cosmetic items (think stickers, color schemes, etc.) based on another ecosystem/game/achievement/etc.

Cosmetic digital items (e.g. non-gameplay-impacting) are like a hundred-million-dollar+ industry.

There are a lot of examples where it's trivial to do this now. For example, Diablo III and Immortal are owned by the same company and run through the same portal - can I transfer gems, skins, or titles between the games? If I'm a Master's SCII player could that show up in Overwatch somehow? Maybe I could play as a Zealot!

If this "transfer between games" thing is such a killer feature why isn't it happening now? Shouldn't we be seeing stuff like this in Steam games where Steam could easily expose your progress between other Steam games.

> Shouldn't we be seeing stuff like this in Steam games where Steam could easily expose your progress between other Steam games.

Amusingly, Valve has already experimented with this (and, as far as I can tell, given up on it). There were a handful of in-game items in Team Fortress 2 which were given to players as a reward for purchasing certain games, or for completing specific achievements in those games.

This made TF2 unplayable for me - I have a rare item (iPod earbuds) from the initial Mac launch, and the next few times I signed in I couldn’t get away from people spamming me to trade them.

This is one reason you wouldn’t be a crypto billionaire no matter how prices went up; you’d probably sell first.

This was an argument why email will never work too. Spam filtering will get better over time.

That’s actually why email is centralized now. Gmail’s good spam filtering works because it can see what’s going to every account.

Some email providers (Hey in the US) don’t accept emails from other senders without prior authorization from the user. IIRC Chinese providers won’t accept any of yours unless you have a contract with them.

> This was an argument why email will never work too

No, it wasn't. Email was popular and established before spam became a big concern.

Though spam, and the necessary control mechanisms, is one reason email had become less central.

Yea and then when spam came out there were hundreds of articles that Email is becoming useless because of it.

We encounter new problems, then we build solutions, that's how progress works.

But NFTs and their ilk still don't actually solve any of the problems we have today.

So please stop moving the goalposts.

Maybe for email. TF2's spam filtering got worse -- the game is now overrun with malicious bots, and is unplayable on public servers.

> If this "transfer between games" thing is such a killer feature why isn't it happening now?

Do you even play games? It's literally happening between Blizzard games lol. Hearthstone and WoW had all kinds of cross-game cosmetics (mounts, card backs, etc.). Let alone all the goodies you get from Blizzcon in-game (which have a sizable secondary grey market on eBay).

Unless I'm missing something, those aren't cross-game cosmetics. They're cosmetics for a single game themed off of a different game.

A hearthstone card skin has no use in WoW.

It's like the MCEU (Marvel Cinematic Extended Universe) you need to build up the stories and assets so they tie into each other.

But they only do it for special occasions, otherwise the respective stores would be full of hundreds of them, which they aren't. And if they are doing it right now, NFT's don't provide any added bonus here.

Pokemon Home solved this traditionally. I can transfer pokemon between Pokemon Go and switch Pokemon games (e.g. Pokemon Legends: Arceus)

>can I transfer gems, skins, or titles between the games?

You could do that since the GameBoy Color and without having to trash the economy, become a fugitive and give Matt Levine writing material for years.

> but it would be trivial to let people transfer in cosmetic items (think stickers, color schemes, etc.) based on another ecosystem/game/achievement/etc.

It would not. Every one of those items would need to be intentionally added by the game devs. Every piece would need to be created, modeled, textured, and animated.

I suppose it would be trivial if you created a pile of uninteresting and uninspiring games with the exact same engine, assets, and art style, like so many NFT's of depressed-looking monkeys

> Every one of those items would need to be intentionally added by the game devs.

There are plenty of games that support user-created assets. There's like zillions of skins in CS:GO that don't need to be "manually created, textured, and animated" by Valve (by design). Your argument just betrays a complete non-understanding of modern game engines and how cosmetic items work/are created.

Gamedev here. Each engine and each game will have vastly different asset pipelines, you can't just copy something across and it just works. Models, textures, shaders, animations, etc usually go through several stages of internal tools before making it into the game. Of course, games with user generated content will make tools available to create things for that particular game, but you can take that and use it somewhere else.

And that's just the technical side, design and art would be horrified if you have no control on what can be added to a game.

Ok, so it's just textures, not new game objects, models, or animations? That's even more like the sad NFT monkey images than before!

You can't put those CS:GO skins into Skyrim. It would probably be easier, like I said, to move it to another source engine game with the same art style and the exact same models, but that's it.

I mean, file formats like VRM are a thing, which allows sharing avatars across many games.

> Cosmetic digital items (e.g. non-gameplay-impacting) are like a hundred-million-dollar+ industry.

Exactly. If I were a game studio given a choice between letting my users bring in objects from anywhere or forcing them to buy my objects, I would pick the latter.

What's in it for the game developers? They don't profit from the scam so why would they support it?

- All the kids like <random viral NFT> we'll get publicity if we implement it.

- Our game is inspired by <Genre defining game> we will pay homage to this game by including <Genre defining game NFT> in our game.

- Our game supports modding and enough people care about <NFT> that someone is willing to implement that NFT in the game via mods.

There's an order of operations here. These examples rely on the NFT already being meaningful in some community before it gets added in. Anything that a random person creates that nobody cares about would never be ported in.

> These examples rely on the NFT already being meaningful in some community before it gets added in.

Meanwhile, in the real world, whenever some company wants to implement NFTs they get massive backlash from their player base.

Yeah the whole gaming usecases are DoA until if/when that changes. I wonder if this backlash is really different then all the related gaming ones that proceeded it. Early Access, kickstarters, Pre-orders, day 1 DLC, micro transactions. I'm sure I'm missing some and all of these were hated by the gaming community at various times with various implementations and nuances. Meanwhile they generally seem accepted now that people know the red flags and how to judge an implementation.

I would think “tolerated” is a better description than “accepted”. And it’s often not the case depending on how egregious it is (e.g. Battlefront 2).

Almost all of those things are in some way user hostile, too (E.g. preorders, micro-transactions).

> Our game is inspired by <Genre defining game>

This is not something you want to admit to if it’s true, because you haven’t got the rights to old game you’re copying.

> - Our game supports modding and enough people care about <NFT> that someone is willing to implement that NFT in the game via mods.

Why don’t the mods just put the thing in? Mods don’t need to respect anyone’s NFT ownership.

"by including <Genre defining game NFT> in our game." The part you left out was meant to imply that the "Genre defining game" developer created the NFT's for the purpose of other people integrat them in the game and them getting free publicity,. Therefor rights would have been included.

> Why don’t the mods just put the thing in? Mods don’t need to respect anyone’s NFT ownership.

For the same reasons that people buy games instead of pirating them most likely. "Right click and save" is a fundamental part of the internet yet digital things are still are bought and sold. (edit including DRM type mechanisms if this pattern became a thing that actually mattered money wise).

But why does it need to be an NFT? Why not just sell a DLC themselves? As we're all aware, the NFT isn't the art.

I don't think it needs to be an NFT. The integration of "check if thing is in wallet" has a low barrier for entry for the needed operations: creation of the various NFT's, the checking of ownership, and cross platform (windows, playstation, steam, Nintendo) support. The key points are the digital wallet decoupled from the usecase and "tokens" that anyone can create which go in the wallet.

I would guess that if "Web3" becomes the thing crypto people aim for, GCP, Azure, and/or AWS will implement "public ledgers" that have a very similar interface and may or may not rely on blockchain underneath. Any decentralized blockchain would be forced to compete with those centralized offerings.

I think of NFTs as a DB entry on a shared database.

The benefit is someone else can make a marketplace, analytics or other tools that work for many items across many games without you having to spend time implementing them yourself or creating and maintaining an API for this data.

But why would I want them taking stuff out of my game? I can see the appeal of putting stuff in the game, but then again, if I wanted to put stuff in the game I could just put it in the game, the NFT doesn't' mean anything to me.

It's about the composability with external tools and users being able to trade assets without you having to explicitly code for it. Games companies want this for the same reason they want modders - because their game is enhanced by it and adds more value for its players.

You say that like it's technically easy to transfer assets between games that might use differentl engines. It's not like a database entry.

Also it's bad for players, as the visual identity of the game would be destroyed by items coming from other games. Yikes.

Building the actual game object in game is the hard bit - they already solved the "get an item from an external source" problem with keycodes.

They could be paid a fee when transferring your item to a different game universe.

Please don't poison the well by calling it a scam.

edit: -4... Time for some of you to read the HN guidelines I guess.

It's generally considered helpful to point out scams, and NFTs are 100% scam. They really have no redeeming quality. They seem scammy at first, and as you look into details, they fail to be useful at any conceivable level.

To give some examples: (1) they are not legally binding; (2) even when a legal contract exists between the NFT issuer and the first owner, the terms don't carry over in NFT trades, unless additional contract terms are signed outside the blockchain; (3) as such, they don't solve any problem they purport to solve, as buying the NFT itself on chain is irrelevant, only the off-chain contract matters; (4) they don't even contain the item they are about, or at least since hash of it, in the vast majority of cases; (5) they don't even solve the real problem of fungibility, as while the token itself may not be fungible, the item that it represents remains trivially copyable. I am sure there are more.

So an item you bought/found/won now costs you more money to move to a different game. Not only would you have it cost money but there's no guarantee the OrcFucker2000 in Game A has any meaningful ability in Game B. If that's not a scam is certainly is wearing a scam's uniform.

He asked how it could be done. I explained one possible way, there are probably more ways. I don't get why people get upset about this, it's a bit weird.

It could be cheaper than buying a similar item on the new game. I don't see how that is a scam, I just use the definition that's in the dictionary. Who is being deceived and defrauded here?

Why do you assume the item you transfer needs to have an ability? I don't make that assumption, lets keep it simple and assume it's just a cosmetic display item without any abilities and that it's possible to display this item in the other game.

edit: You could for example display the rank you have in one game in another game, assuming the possibility to do this exists of course.

> I don't make that assumption, lets keep it simple and assume it's just a cosmetic display item without any abilities and that it's possible to display this item in the other game.

Since it costs thousands of dollars to store any significant amount of data on the major blockchains, any game item will just be some reference stored on the blockchain.

Unless every game developer builds an appropriate model for every possible item there's no "simple" importing of an asset. Even if a full asset was shared between games no two games are guaranteed to display even a texture the same way.

Even your example of "rank" is meaningless. Rank in one game doesn't have anything to do with rank in another game. The number of goblins you killed in a fantasy RPG has no meaning to a racing game.

As for these being scams, there's no reason any of these things require a blockchain. Games have at various points supported custom player models, skins, spray decals, and all sorts of other shit. None of it needed the added rent extraction of a blockchain.

The only reason to add a blockchain is to get players to prop up whatever shitcoin blockchain is being used. They get vague promises of asset reusability but actually just get normal scammy in-app purchases.

You're missing the point here, the point is it's possible. There are many different blockchains, it's pretty evident noone is going to add some in game NFT to a blockchain where it costs several thousands of dollars. The technical details really aren't that important for my argument.

I'm not debating whether it's a good idea or not and I'm not interested in that debate either.

You're doing the same thing as you did before, you twist my words into something that is easier to attack. This is the third time now, please stop. Rank in other games is something people ask about or mention when playing somewhat similar genres so I can definitely see that being interesting to some people.

None of the things you mentioned has anything to do with scams? Rent extraction != scam. in-app purchases != scam. Blockchain != scam.

The point of BAYC was the community. So others could copy your image but that wouldn't provide them with access to the community. It's a single-factor login token to a private web forum, which is non-revokable by the client (but AFAICT is revokable by the hosting platform). So sort of the worst all worlds in terms of authentication technology.

To a reasonable approximation, no one actually cares about "access to the BAYC community". I'm sure they made some grandiose promises about it at some point, but the primary feature of their NFT is as a social symbol. I'm not convinced there even is a "community" there to access -- realistically, it's just a customer list.

I have no idea.

> realistically, it's just a customer list.

I'd pay decent money to never interact with a BAYC owner. So there might be a market for this list.

TBF to BAYC holders, there are benefits to being on a "promising suckers" list. In this case the price seems high for those benefits, ofc.

And to private parties. ApeFest just started in NYC a few minutes ago. If you own a BAYC or MAYC NFT, you get to go to a rave in Manhattan today. Food and drink included.

I'm imagining this as the opening scene of Blade but instead of one guy getting attacked by vampires it's a club full of gullible people getting scammed by con artists. "You must be THIS rich and gullible to attend."

You can go to raves in nyc without owning NFTs too.

Generally better ones with better demographic distribution too. But the NFT as a ticket thing is valid, even if I would not attend such a rave myself.

> But the NFT as a ticket thing is valid

No it isn’t. That’s exactly my point. There is no real problem being solved here, because clearly, events (even illegal ones!) that required tickets for admission have worked fine for ages without NFTs.

This is the problem with most proposed blockchain applications: they have no mechanism to compel behavior in the physical world. Someone controls access to this rave; at the end of the day, the only reason that they accept blockchain tokens instead of entries in a centralized database is because they’ve decided to arbitrarily.

You could totally feasibly create a private club whose members you track yourself in a spreadsheet (allowing them to sell their membership to other people, or not, as you prefer). Someone else, or more likely yourself, could then decide to give your members access to private parties, and everything would work the same way.

The only thing NFTs give you is irrevocability of the initially stated membership rules: with my example of a private club tracked in a spreadsheet, you could choose to change the rules at any time (say, charging a fee for anyone who wants to transfer ownership). You couldn’t for NFTs. But this advantage of NFTs is somewhat illusory because, again, whoever controls access to benefits in the physical world can themselves change the rules at any time, and so you haven’t really changed the number of parties you have to trust. Whatever organization is running these raves might decide tomorrow that you need a Super Duper Bored Ape that costs extra or has different transferability characteristics, and you’re back where you started.

You are missing some of the functionality you say you can’t do. You can. You missing permanence and open marketplaces aspects of it. I don’t own or think BAYC is a great thing, but as a membership token to some club it’s as good as a Costco card. and then someone did raves for Costco members.

If someone wanted to make a "Rave Club" and sell lifetime memberships, they'd be trivially able to do so without involving a blockchain of any kind.

In such a way that records would be preserved past the dissolving of the original issuer? In a way that doesn’t touch the existing financial system? In a way that permits trust less exchange of memberships?

Of course anything can be done without a blockchain, but it has trade offs. Not understanding the trade offs will drive you towards centralized solutions.

Why would Rave Club care if the Rave Club membership data doesn't survive past the dissolution of Rave Club?

This seems very much like the argument that, say, Blizzard would build support for NFT-based items into WoW so that people could buy NFTs outside of WoW and transfer them into the game (or buy them inside of WoW and still be able to use them elsewhere even if they quit playing WoW). Sure, it might have some value for the customers, but there's negative incentive for the actual companies to do it.

Everyone here understands the trade offs. There is zero benefit to a blockchain for this use case.

Why would I want to be part of a "community" composed solely of people stupid enough to pay money for low-effort cartoon monkey drawings? I would actually pay to keep losers like that away from me.

I thought the point was spreading Nazi propaganda.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpH3O6mnZvw

IME loudly reactionary types are over-represented in most pay-lots-to-enter social spaces (country clubs, common spaces in gated communities, that sort of thing). Or maybe it's just the flowing alcohol.

Most of this "documentary" is pure q-tier schizophrenia, not that I care about ape ponzy club to begin with.

Does your hatred of crypto prevent you from criticizing nazis?

That was definitely not 'the big pitch' of web3. That's a pitch of nfts. Different web3 companies have different pitches. Uniswap for example has little to do with virtual world items and is definitely web3.

Web 3 seems to want to monetize every web transaction under the guise of providing increased freedom.

So it may not have been the pitch, but NFT's are definitely Web 3. You're just moving the goal posts.

Web3 isn't equivalent to NFTs.

web3 isn't anything

it's just a brand name that's being used to trick crypto people into thinking that, in a couple decades, they'll invent the future of gaming

and the bullet list is always stuff we've had for decades

Too much money in the market looking for an investment. Well at least the boom times are over for now.

Web3 is the decentralized web. Not more, not less.

But the Web already is decentralised.

I just launched a web server on my computer (python -m SimpleHTTPServer) which anyone in the world can connect to. If I wanted to I could build an unmoderated Twitter or Reddit and foster a community maybe one day being the biggest in the world.

And if my current government decided to regulate me then I could move to a country that didn't.

Web3 seems to be much more about decentralised payments. Which is not really a problem many people are demanding a highly complex solution for.

Anyone could build such applications that they might hope become the biggest in the world, but there is still a conglomeration effect. You have centralization, but anyone can become the center. This is displayed by your "biggest in the world" winner takes all perspective. For decentralization, the graph of connectivity has to not have these large communities. There would be no single Twitter (unmoderated or otherwise) that is the biggest by far.

But Web3 does not prevent or impede centralisation.

Look at OpenSea. They take the blockchain data and augment it with their proprietary data.

> Web3 seems to be much more about decentralised payments. Which is not really a problem many people are demanding a highly complex solution for.

Stripe being a $100B company contradicts this.

Payments and especially finance is a gigantic industry that is still mostly centralized but doesn't need to be. If we can make wealth flow as easy as data does today without any gatekeepers or middlemen that is a huge upgrade for the internet.

"Decentralized" doesn't mean "large companies don't exist."

There are hundreds of thousands of banks, but hundreds of crypto exchanges. Imagining crypto to be less centralized than traditional finance is deeply, deeply incorrect.

Having centralized aspects does not diminish the decentralized aspects. People spend over $10M/day in fees to use decentralized platforms and they had $250B in wealth in them.

It's only a matter of time before decentralized rails become the primary form of wealth transfer on the internet, because they are much more efficient and composable than current systems.

> Having centralized aspects does not diminish the decentralized aspects.

There aren't any. "Decentralized" is just an in-group smurf word with no legitimate technical meaning, and which is not in any way a meaningful goal.

> It's only a matter of time before decentralized rails become the primary form of wealth transfer on the internet

We're 14 years in and it hasn't gotten anywhere close

You keep holding your breath, though. (You'll have to, with all the pollution being created.)

Note: "wealth transfer" is just a fancy way to say "online casino."

I literally work in decentralized finance, and so do now 20,000+ developers. Many of my financial transactions already happen in DeFi, and it's only a 2 year old industry.

Being confidently ignorant doesn't make you correct, it just makes you miss out on the future.

If you know how to run that kind of infrastructure, sure.

The rest of the world has to wait for other means of decentralization.

I can put that website in a container and run it on AWS Fargate.

End to end about an hour. And it would be capable of supporting effectively infinite traffic.

The web is the decentralized web.

A server that you can keep at home that you can plug in to make it part of this huge network of machines located all around the world that communicate with each other - this is the decentralized web.

"You" can do it, yes.

Most people can't.

That has nothing to do with centralization, and everything to do with the fact that it's hard to run a website with 0 computer skills, which crypto doesn't improve on in any way.

It has all to do with centralization and crypto certainly helps by providing a way of decentralization that doesn't require everyone to run infra in their home.

In the decentralized web you don’t have to run your infra either, you can use one of thousands of hosting companies that will run it for you.

Crypto today is dominated by a few central players (wallets, trading) with strict access requirements, including unambiguous government-issued ID. Even mining is dominated by people with much more capital than you have access to, so that it is never worth it to run a miner as a private individual. Everything "web3" has been co-opted by corporatized interests trying to invent fresh new ways to get in on the scam before regulators make it unprofitable.

Access is difficult for private individuals for more reasons than just "technology is complicated".

Web3 is centralized because the source of money causing it to appear to be a thing is coming from one place (a16z). It’s just a way for them to do securities fraud.

Although the entire crypto ecosystem valuation is based on another source of fictional money (Tether).

> They just protect the object's ID, not its content.

This is very similar to how DRM works (protects the ID, not the content, hence we need DMCAs if someone tries to illegally stream a movie on YouTube or whatever) and it seems to be doing a pretty good job. In spite of everyone hating it, we have the luxury of Spotify, Netflix, Apple+, etc. because of DRM. NFTs definitely have a use case in gaming and digital collectibles; they also happen to be consumer-friendly (unlike the current status quo of digital collectibles). I wish I could sell my thousands of items in WoW for real money, or my Fornite skins for real money, or my unneeded Magic Arena cards for real money, but I'm locked in their ecosystem.

The tokenomnics aspect of Web3 is mainly speculation, which imo also has a use case, but it most likely will be impacted by some much-needed regulation.

> I wish I could sell my thousands of items in WoW for real money, or my Fornite skins for real money, or my unneeded Magic Arena cards for real money, but I'm locked in their ecosystem.

That's exactly it: you may wish it, but the reason it won't happen isn't that NFTs weren't invented yet, it's that companies making these products really don't want you to. One simple reason is that it might make someone else play less if they could all those items by just paying a little money.

The other reason why selling in-game items for real money will never be permitted (again) is all the gigantic legal crap that it brings along. If the items are worth real money, you can sue Blizzard or other players for events which unfairly make you lose an item, or affect the value of the items you hold.

> If the items are worth real money, you can sue Blizzard or other players for events which unfairly make you lose an item, or affect the value of the items you hold.

This isn't true at all, because Magic (the card game) already has a vibrant secondary market with no legal problems. They nerf/buff cards all the time.

People like you are just pushing back so vehemently because it's popular to hate on crypto and NFTs right now. Rightfully so, even, as there's tons of scams out there, but that doesn't mean the idea and technology is interesting or useful.

> They nerf/buff cards all the time.

This is not true. It is exceedingly rare for paper cards to be nerfed or buffed. The only real notable example is with the Companion mechanic from a few years ago. Wizard's solution is to ban problematic cards.

> People like you are just pushing back so vehemently because it's popular to hate on crypto and NFTs right now.

And people like you hop into threads pushing your ideas forwards _so vehemently_ without disclosing your financial interest and involvement.

Magic: The Gathering was designed from the beginning as a Trading Card Game. Very importantly, it is a physical game, where the laws of physics prevent trivial copying of their cards, while the laws of copyright prevent them from stopping people selling the cards they bought.

There is also no way for someone to exploit a flaw in MTG and gain access to all of your cards to sell. Conversely, if someone exploited a bug to steal your WoW account and sell off your items for thousands of dollars, you would sue Blizzard for damages. Even worse, if you did something against their terms of service and they wanted to ban you, they would probably have to have some way to compensate you for all the items you would lose access to.

Further, WotC they actually do have problems because of this trading: they have had to create a list of cards they promise not to reprint, because of all the backlash from traders who perceived a re-print of Black Lotus as "flooding the market". Afterwards, they once wanted to still go ahead with a re-print of these cards with some special features, and again faced serious backlash and threats of lawsuits, so they backed down.

DRM protects a particular version of the content from being copied.

NFT does not perform an equivalent function. Be infinitely more useful if it did.

genuine question: what is the value of a virtual artifact outside of the sofware where it is played? What would one do with a token of a lotus123 addon?

There's probably a niche market. Some people collect boxed games or software so maybe there's some VR/AR collectable shelf in the future to put them on, but then the price needs to reflect that its some bobble collecting virtual dust on a virtual shelf.

> In spite of everyone hating it, we have the luxury of Spotify, Netflix, Apple+, etc. because of DRM.

I doubt this. All of these services have one thing in common: it's easier to just subscribe than it is to torrent the content. It's not particularly difficult to find original-quality torrents of Netflix content, for example.

haha I put a bunch of NFTs on OpenSea that connects to an Airtable base, so all the metadata and image just reflects what I put on Airtable.

In web3, the "curation fee" is gas fees.

Thing is.

What they're asking for is Digital Rights Management. The promise of NFT is DRM.

Seriously.

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