That’s my hope.
This article doesn’t note the paltry number of NFT wallets out there discussed above, meaning most of that impressive dollar volume is being generated by a tiny number of wallets. Vast dollar volume with a tiny number of traders in a completely unregulated and largely unmonitored market is a flashing red warning light, not a green signal meaning there’s mass adoption.
This article is an typical specimen of reporting on the blockchain, which is not a compliment. To get the upsides of the blockchain, the reporter talks to some fervent self-described believers who have a financial stake in blockchain games doing well. And to describe the downsides of the blockchain, the reporter talks to … the same self-described believers. At no point does anyone ask, “is there an alternate way of doing these things that doesn’t involve NFTs?”
Because those things always existed and everyone knows it.
People have been selling CS:GO skins and TF hats for decades at this point.
I may not be following this properly, is the everyone we’re talking about here your typical Forbes reader?
I meant everyone in the industry. Which is decidedly not the average Forbes reader.
This is not gaming related but this is the NFT thread so…
The musings of an actual cryptography researcher (creator of Signal) on web3/nfts.
The parts of that excellent article that are most relevant to this discussion are:
- While NFTs are decentralized in theory, in practice they’re the opposite. That’s because ordinary users don’t want to host the blockchain themselves. To access the blockchain, ordinary users go through one of a handful of access providers like OpenSea. These access providers are, at their heart, regular old school web services - centralized, imposing their own terms of service, not especially secure, etc.
- Because it’s expensive to conduct transactions (see below,) almost all NFTs don’t store their image or other digital content inside the NFT itself. Instead they store a link to where the image is kept. Those images are stored on hosting services, of which OpenSea is the largest. The hosting service can - and as the article author learns, does - alter access to the images it stores, meaning the idea that “nobody can mess with your NFT” is incorrect when it comes to the image itself.
- It’s expensive to mint NFTs on a popular blockchain like the main Ethereum blockchain, say, $60 a pop. So you either deal with that and only mint NFTs you think will re-sell for that much or more, or you go to/create some other, obscurer blockchain where fees are lower.
Putting all that into the content of game development, publishers face a choice when deciding how to implement an NFT. They could do it the “standard” way and use a popular blockchain like Ethereum and a popular access service like OpenSea. This is quite expensive and means you’ll need to negotiate with a big player in the space (OpenSea) to get what you want for your title.
Or … you could create your own blockchain and coin, and then either create your own access service or pay a third party to build exactly what you want. For that matter, if you’re an online publisher already, you probably already have cheaper solutions in place that do most of what NFTs do in terms of accepting payments, doling out digital goods, etc.
So why use NFTs at all? The only thing it’s getting you is the name “NFT.” But if you implement NFTs in a in a way that’s cost-effective and gives you the control you want as a publisher, the crypto enthusiasts will just complain “You’re doing it wrong! You don’t get it!” etc. (as indeed they did at Ubisoft’s attempt.)
Blockchain is essentially a useless technology looking for a problem to solve.
That link is now discussed on 3 different threads, and I’m not even mad.
It does surprise me slightly that he confesses to running a pyramid scheme and unregulated financial derivatives, both of which are generally not great!
I’d like to introduce developers to my new standard Not Fuckin-useless Technology (NFT). It consists of a revolutionary de-distributed data store that allows greater control over your assets and avoids transaction fees associated with traditional blockchains. Licenses start at $100,000.
I think there is a subtle (or not) satire about cryptobros in there. He makes a pair of simple apps to test the tech, so what theme he uses, what could be considered a ‘typical’ example of crypto… oh yeah pyramid scheme and unregulated financial derivatives!
That was more or less what happened. I don’t remember how it surged because a demand of the market.
It really was some tech dude geeking about tech, and writing this whitepaper
thinking how it would be neat in how you could have a digital currency with a scheme of decentralized servers, math, hashes, and cpu power. “But why?” never entered in question, it was tech for tech’s sake. It was years later when people tried to search ‘problems’ to solve with this ‘solution’.
It was an exercise in futurism, too, thinking that in the future, cpu power will be basically free and limitless, so who cares if it wasn’t particularly efficient system.
The thing is, that’s not even true. Cryptocurrency is fundamentally based on the limitation of computational power. It’s built into the system. That limitation is required to prevent inflation.
If computational power becomes cheap, then it becomes easier to just create more currency, thus devaluing the existing currency.
Yes.
I refer to the fact that the whole thing consumes heaps of computational power (in comparison with any traditional non-distributed system).
edit: let’s say that if Bitcoin would be designed in 2022, instead of 13 years ago, with the current conversation of climate change we have now. I think it would be veeery different.
I don’t believe this is the case in any of the major cryptocurrencies. The rewards are basically released on a set time schedule (modulo stochastic effects). As more computational power is added, the amount that gets mined does not increase. Instead the odds of a single node being awarded the mined coin decrease, such that the total rewards stay at the desired level. (The way ).
At least Bitcoin was set up such that the mining rewards go down over time and 90% of the total supply have already been mined. It’s basically setup for deflation, not inflation.
Yeah, that struck me too. It was clearly making a point (and at least in the former case, up front about the pyramid nature), but I wouldn’t have thought that would necessarily prevent legal liability, especially for the unregistered securities issue.
https://venturebeat.com/2022/01/12/gamers-are-ready-for-nfts-whether-they-know-it-or-not/
Witek Radomski is Co-founder & CTO at Enjin , where he oversees the company’s technical engineering, product vision, and development. Witek wrote the code for one of the first-ever NFTs in 2017 and is the author of ERC-1155, a groundbreaking Ethereum token standard that enables developers to deploy both fungible and non-fungible items in a single smart contract.
Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. Content produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way.
OK, VentureBeat. LOL
Really wish media sites that allow companies to publish press releases would preface the heading with "SPONSORED: ", a tiny “sponsored” tag that’s only visible after you follow the link isn’t enough. But not even the Times does that.