You probably have a very specific image of NFTs that was fed to you by crypto opponents and which is incomplete and naive. That doesn’t mean that I think you missed out on anything. That’s subjective
You probably have a very specific image of NFTs that was fed to you by crypto opponents and which is incomplete and naive. That doesn’t mean that I think you missed out on anything. That’s subjective
To take one of your examples- gating auth to a community.. the community is usually an off-chain centralized thing like Discord. Due to that, the auth logic sits behind closed doors. Verifying an NFT has no advantages over verifying a random string that only the intended user has. i.e. traditional bearer tokens of some sort.
The only advantage of NFTs is in systems that are completely decentralized or in systems that care about verifying a wallet for some reason (_not_ the same thing as verifying a user who goes through the centralized auth of discord or xbox)
So, for example, if the community itself were completely 100% on-chain. This doesn't exist because chains cannot scale the way simple socket servers do. There may be some chats or games that operate on-chain, but they are slow and feel like 30 year old tech.
Afaik the most popular use case for chains is trading crypto assets. Here, NFTs can be useful for establishing auth (or other on chain utilities like the concentrated liquidity you mentioned), but then it gets to the parent's point - for someone who doesn't care about trading crypto, there isn't a compelling use case, since it all boils down to "beanie babies" - the difference is that it's not the nfts that are the beanie babies, it's the crypto ecosystem driven by circular supply/demand.
I’m so tired of seeing people confidently post like this about crypto. There has been so much effort put into explaining, you really have no excuse anymore to parrot it.
Very easy rebuttal: NFTs can be minted in exchange for currency and can be traded between owners later – both functionalities rely on infrastructure that already exists. More complex rebuttal: you can get peer-to-peer (and even peer-to-pool) loans using your NFT as collateral (again, using permissionless infrastructure that is already built for you). How is any of this applicable right now to a HTTP header?!
Also, the only people I ever heard of mentioning “videogames fully on chain” are crypto opponents; they try to come up with the most bizarre scenarios, to “prove” that crypto is inadequate. It’s so irrational.
> Afaik the most popular use case for chains is trading crypto assets.
Yeah, it’s almost like blockchains are designed to be financial infrastructure. At least you got the basics right, I guess.
nftifi.com: "secure a loan funded by a lender seeking to earn returns from their investment."
Lol, It's part of the grift.
So can bearer tokens, client certificates, concert tickets, etc. Put up a webpage that takes payments (including crypto if you so desire) and hands out whatever authentication instrument you want upon successful payment.
> can be traded between owners later
A conventional, non-chain-based system can also include this functionality. Presenting your current bearer token and a contact for the desired new owner would invalidate your current token and email them a new one.
Any system where this kind of transfer makes sense and is willing to allow this kind of trade already has it - you can freely trade video game cosmetic items on most games, you can resell tickets on Ticketmaster (albeit for a fee), etc. If the platform owner doesn't want you to trade then NFTs are of no help either because the blockchain has a publicly-visible history of all trades which the platform owner can use to refuse access to any NFTs that have been traded (so if you want to trade you need to trade the actual bearer token - or private key in a cryptocurrency world - and hope the seller is honest and didn't keep a copy - again crypto/NFTs doesn't help here either).
The problem is that NFTs only make sense on-chain. As soon as you go off-chain you lose most/all of the advantages of NFTs, at which point you may as well rely on an authentication instrument also issued and managed off-chain.
No it doesn’t have it. That was the whole point. The examples you gave had to each build their own in-house bespoke infrastructure for this functionality. With blockchains it already exists, it’s secure and any new app or user can start using it right away.
The difference between Firebase and Ethereum+metamask isn't a significant development cost for anything beyond a toy weekend project.
The difference is only about trust.
The argument you want to make is that we shouldn't trust Firebase, they could steal our auth tokens and act on our behalf without our permission, so we need trustless decentralized solutions.
That would be a valid argument, but a hard sell to an audience that doesn't buy the premise. I'm not going to debate it.
However, it has nothing to do with the technical layer of auth which is just "prove that you know the secret" in all cases.
Either you don't understand how this works, or you're deliberately avoiding the point.
Where do you think Metamask stores your private key?
It would be trivial for Firebase to release a browser extension that used LocalStorage to store the secret, like Metamask, instead of regular web storage.
However, in blockchain it's the combo of your private key to sign your wallet, along with the consensus engine where decentralized voting decides to accept the generation and association of new tokens.
In centralized servers, it's the combo of your credentials to login, along with the servers that update the database.
Once you own a token, you can create signatures for it that other peers can validate. For example
https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/admin/create-custom-to...
I've already addressed your points about collateral and loans. That's purely business logic, and has nothing at all to do with NFTs (which are _only_ user<>token_id mappings)
So if i have a software licence and i want to exchange it for a concert ticket that a stranger doesn’t need anymore, where precisely do i go, today, to make this happen? What’s the app name or the website i go to? Because i know exactly where to go to exchange NFTs, in a secure, configurable and trustless manner.
> That's purely business logic
Call it whatever you want, the infrastructure that enables it and that is already functional today is only compatible with NFTs.
This doesn't even make sense for most chains since software licenses generally depend on some sort of secrets or drm that can't work on transparent chains (anyone can look at the tx and impersonate the owner to grab an activation code).
The actual product and ecosystem of these things is the hard part. You can't actually do anything at all with NFTs because they are merely mappings of users to random strings.
They have absolutely zero utility in and of themselves. Not as rights to jpgs and certainly not as proof of concert ticket ownership.
The business logic is what makes it all actually work, and can be applied far more easily in centralized systems.
Again, the usefulness in Blockchain is not authorization tokens, it's decentralized consensus, which is only useful insofar as you distrust the centralized alternative.
The auth token itself, whether NFT or any other bearer-like, is neither innovative nor interesting nor inherently useful. It only becomes useful where decentralization is useful and compelling products use it for practical needs.
I'm repeating myself now, no point in beating a dead horse.
> NFTs can be minted in exchange for currency and can be traded between owners later
The part of dApps that recognizes NFT ownership for releasing funds is just business logic that can be replaced with anything we can imagine - including but not limited to checking the storage for an Address->RandomString lookup (in fact, if you squint, that _is_ what's happening in transactions due to the step that verifies wallet signatures via cryptographic hashes)
There is nothing at all in the spec that allows for them to have any special meaning in terms of vouchers for currency
> More complex rebuttal: you can get peer-to-peer (and even peer-to-pool) loans using your NFT as collateral
I don't think you understand how NFTs work. This isn't even a more complex rebuttal, NFT contracts don't care if the owner is another contract or a human with a wallet. They only care about the owner to token id mapping. If anything, p2p loans is a _simpler_ example because you're moving the logic out of contracts and into, perhaps, humans who decide to act on nft transfers. It's a weird example imho, but regardless, it's only an extension of the above points.
> How is any of this applicable right now to a HTTP header?!
In HTTP, you acquire a random string (via some web app), and then you later provide it to prove authorization
In Blockchain, you acquire a random public/private keypair (via wallet generation), and you later sign data with this random key in order to prove authorization
In NFTs, you use the Blockchain infrastructure to sign transactions that associate you as the owner with arbitrary token ids.
Do you not see that it's fundamentally the same thing?
> Also, the only people I ever heard of mentioning “videogames fully on chain” are crypto opponents; they try to come up with the most bizarre scenarios, to “prove” that crypto is inadequate. It’s so irrational.
Ok. I mean, I've hands-on deployed CW721 contracts on cosmos with a Unity frontend for on-chain gaming demos. Your ad-hominem attacks are pretty weird from where I'm sitting and, frankly, reek of "dunning-kruger effect". But I don't want to get into a pissing contest, let's stick to facts:
1. Most chains require you to sign transactions all the time. It's a crappy UX. Near avoids this to some extent, and it's a clientside thing that can be skipped, but generally at the expense of security most users aren't comfortable with.
2. Transaction time is slow af compared to what you get with regular socket servers. I'm talking a difference of speed in terms of decades of progress. Not years. Decades.
3. Nodes go out of sync, you have race conditions, there are real problems to solve that robust game server tech deals with and blockchain doesn't concern itself with. Working around these are doable but painful and not out of the box.
4. Most games depend on randomization and/or hidden state that clients cannot be made aware of to prevent cheating. There are some chains like Secret Network that propose solutions to this, but overall, blockchain is transparent in ways that are showstoppers for on-chain games.
> Yeah, it’s almost like blockchains are designed to be financial infrastructure. At least you got the basics right, I guess.
Yup.
Rephrased, in a game that depends on proprietary centralized servers, what do I gain by having a public ledger that the game can query to say I own some asset? Or, alternatively, in a game that recognizes arbitrary decentralized permissions, what do I gain by having proprietary centralized servers? Let's avoid flowery language and deal with reality:
Scenario 1) I buy a sword from Joe on OpenSea. Epic games recognizes NFTs as a generic spec and lets me import it and use in the game. That's wonderful, but in this case I do not need to buy anything from Joe, I can just mint my own sword for free, since they'll recognize any spec-compliant contract.
Scenario 2) I buy a sword from Epic on OpenSea. Epic games only recognizes NFTs that they have the authority to mint. Yay. But now why didn't I just buy it from Epic directly, since I already depend on them fully for auth (they can just migrate the nft contract at will), what does having it on Ethereum add?
Scenario 3) Just like Scenario 2, but Epic recognizes a list of official partners that they trust but do not own. Meh. it's not that interesting. Might be a little more interesting if those partners are themselves DAO-controlled. Still, I think it's more in the category of "kinda neat" instead of "gamechanging"
Scenario 4) I earn a "high score" NFT by playing an Epic game, and they mint an NFT for me (I've gone through their login _and_ associated my wallet with their account). Other games recognize this specific NFT address as being owned by Epic and give special utility. Again, this is pointless, we've already placed all our trust in Epic's closed system, they might as well just expose an endpoint
Fully on-chain ecosystems with no leaks are a different beast imho. Decentralization is cool! It's just extremely crappy for game ux right now. I expect the tech here to catch up eventually. When it does, we can have:
Scenario 5) Doesn't exist now - but I play an on-chain game and earn some NFT. This is then recognized in another on-chain game that gives added functionality. Everything is governed by DAO. Interop can be voted in
This is cool. However, what's innovative about this is that it's basically open-source collaborative business. I do think that's pretty huge, in theory, if it took off. The hard part would be the actual programming and game design to make the interop interesting. The NFT part is still just an auth token, nothing more.
Literally read my comment that you replied to.
> Scenario 5) Doesn't exist now - but I play an on-chain game and earn some NFT. This is then recognized in another on-chain game that gives added functionality. Everything is governed by DAO. Interop can be voted in
This is how Illuvium works right now.
This is not what I meant at all
Their videos which tease advanced game mechanics look like pure hype to raise money from the gullible. Their white paper says nothing about how this works and their repo has no code.
Here's what I want to know:
Player 1 shoots. Can player 2 see the trajectory of the shot before it hits them?
If yes- how do they avoid cheating?
If no- how is this on-chain?
Eagerly waiting an answer to that
There are many more problems for on-chain games (that are not just trading with pretty skins), but let's start here
(probable spoiler alert: they don't have an answer to that, they don't actually have any on-chain physics or game mechanics beyond trading crypto assets, they only made the demo video to dupe investors)
There’s gameplay demos on youtube dude. There are users beta testing the games.
> they don't actually have any on-chain physics
Again, on-chain physics is stupid. Illuvium is just an example where the assets you obtain in one game are also integrated in a different game (interoperability, because you brought it up as something cool that you didn’t think existed yet).
There no practical use case there, unless the other games are pretty much the same. Unless you mean cross-platform, in which case who gets to keep the money you spent?
> that gives added functionality. Everything is governed by DAO. Interop can be voted in
What I mean by functionality is _actual_ functionality. Like, I earn a shield in one game and now it lets me deflect hits with new animations in another, so the DAO would need to vote in code changes. This is what I meant by interop too.
Not being able to see JPGs that you import across games. Like I said, I built something like that as a weekend project and custom cw721 contracts and unity. It's not hard. It's also not interesting to me.
Yes, literally how Illuvium games work. Eg in the mobile city-building game you build factories that extract minerals, which are then available either to trade with other players or to use in the desktop MMORPG as materials to forge weapons.
Like for example if these materials let you build new kinds of structures in Fortnite, if Fortnite were controlled by a DAO, which also implies that the code is running on-chain, because who owns the keys to upload to the Microsoft store etc.