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CSGO skins and lootboxes are tradeable digital items, but they are tied to the steam marketplace. If it used a blockchain they'd be NFTs

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Yeah and if I lit a match and dropped it in my house it'd be a housefire. Calling skins NFTs is patently false, because they are both not tokens and not non-fungible (nametags notwithstanding).

It's not the blockchain aspect of NFTs that is particularly offensive and relevant here, it's the creation of a speculation market for the selling of textures/jpgs with artificially imposed scarcity. The only difference between what Valve does and NFTs is an irrelevant implementation detail; Valve uses a centralized database instead of a distributed ledger, which is a much smarter engineering decision but it doesn't change the fundamental nature of what they've created.

It's cool and fun

Almost like people just kneejerk react to a bad word but don't understand why they kneejerk.

Sure there are some subteties to a centralized server vs. a distributed ledger, but the core goal is the same: companies want to be a platform owner, allow for generation of some speculative assets for users to trade, and take their cut as a middleman. To my knowledge, it's the middle factor that many have issue with.

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