> ... the NFT community is not interested in remaining a subculture. NFT community leaders believe that they are just early to understand that the future lies in virtual worlds, and that normies will embrace the metaverse in good time.
An alternative explanation is that they _are_ the normies who have bought into the techno-grift in exchange for social status in a small community of believers.
> Like, right now, if I have a sword in a video game, I only have it in one game. But if we had a metaverse, then I could take it anywhere, and it would still be mine. And maybe it’s like, the only sword in the whole world that could kill a certain monster. That would be really cool.
The idea that game companies will allow players to share resources between games with NFTs is both technically questionable and financially absurd.
---
If you can spare the time, I highly recommend watching Line Goes Up - The Problem with NFTs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g . It's a bit long-winded, and I suspect I'm preaching to the choir regardless, but it's worth it.
I suppose if (insert luxury fashion label here, let's say... Gucci) has an online store on Zuckverse, and also has one on TimCookVerse (where the plebian green bubble people don't come), they would allow owners of virtual Gucci bags free copies of their virtual bag on 2 different platforms.
Yeah, it's a ridiculous idea of the future, where people who currently walk around with $5000 purses ($20 for the utility of "it carries my things", $4800 for the brand name) will in the future be pixels on your VR googles walking around with $5000 pixel representation of purses, which you can right click, click "Properties" and confirm the digital certificate of. I've so far been an NFT-ignorant, but are those NFT exchanges the ones who want to be the digital certificate authorities? Couldn't Zuck or Cook just roll out their own?
They absolutely will roll their own and charge Gucci for the privilege. There's plenty of historical precedent. The Sims Online somewhat controversially contained McDonalds kiosks, paid for by McDonalds.
Yeah. I imagine there being "metaverse clients" that don't enforce any NFT DRM and will allow you to copy whatever 3D asset you see as well. I would definitely connect with a jailbroken client / choose the "Indie Metaverse" in which none of the NFT nonsense is enforced.
Joining an indie metaverse seems like insanity, I'd rather just keep socializing in the real world. Damn, have I reached "Get off my lawn"-age?
The rich and famous would still hang out in the "officially sanctioned" metaverse(s) though, but I guess going into the indie ones would be like going to the dodgy parts of town. Where the famous Hollywood/Netflix/Onlyfans/Twitch stars have alternative logins to go incognito.
And maybe the sanctioned metaverses will have exploits so "hackers" can still participate in it. My imagination of this future is a lame imitation the Matrix movies.
> An alternative explanation is that they _are_ the normies who have bought into the techno-grift in exchange for social status in a small community of believers.
I don’t think it’s just a small community. And I say this as a heavy skeptic of cryptocurrency and NFTs.
I think the article’s author has a point. With or without NFTs, conspicuous consumption of digital goods is already a normalized thing of minor social consequence in the form of video game cosmetics. It started out as a freemium monetization model, but games like Fortnite, Destiny, etc. have solidly cemented the link between spending real money and digital self expression, including the implied social status that comes with specific rarer cosmetics vs. more accessible ones. And to some extent the social status part follows you back into the real world if you all know each other in person.
I don’t think it’s a large leap to a scenario where people pay for designer avatars to bring into digital spaces if online, immersive socialization in some grand unified space becomes a thing. I don’t like that idea, but I think it’s not that much of a stretch.
> Between late February and November [2021], there were 360,000 NFT owners holding 2.7m NFTs between them. Of those, about 9 per cent — or 32,400 wallets — held 80 per cent of the value of the market, Chainalysis found.
> I don’t think it’s a large leap to a scenario where people pay for designer avatars to bring into digital spaces if online,
This already happens routinely for VRChat, a popular VR socialization platform. In their defense, users mostly don't care about NFTs, they just trade avatar design services (sans NFT) or design their own monstrosities. Tbh, for many in VRChat making their own avatar could be the first time ever that they use a computer for a creative endeavor of any kind, and they may even learn about "textures" "normal maps" and "non-photorealistic shaders". So, not the worst outcome ever.
Absolutely, my point was that the social phenomenon of paying money for digital conspicuous consumption is already here with or without NFT's, though I'm solidly in the camp that NFT's don't add value in this interaction.
Taking what I had intended to say one step further, if you look at the denominator of "people who participate in digital conspicuous consumption," the NFT people that this article discusses is just a niche/fringe in a movement that already has lots of momentum.
Personally, I hope the digitization leads to far more people becoming creators and not just consumers, but I'm not holding my breath for that outcome.
Yes, and I think this is a big part of how big the flashpoint is. We're about to hit a big economic squeeze, especially for energy costs, and people for whom everyday consumption of food, housing and energy is becoming less affordable are going to be really unimpressed with the new virtual yacht class.
Smaller cosmetics seem to have become OK, in the way that people will generally not begrudge each other wearing branded sports gear that's surprisingly expensive. Multi-thousand-dollar ugly profile pics though are entirely out of reach.
I second your recommendation. I've been following the Folding Ideas channel for a while, and deeply enjoy his long form video format. Where most online videos like to do a brief touch on a topic, covering the surface level detail before moving on, the guy behind that channel goes deeeeep in a way I find very satisfying.
I could see there eventually being some NFT project that gets implemented kind of like a shared library in a bunch of games, but I agree that it won't be most NFT projects (probably just one or two "winners", and probably no existing project that's out there right now, I'm betting, most are profile pic centered and not object/weapon-centered) and it certainly won't be all games that do it. There could come a time where it makes good marketing sense to include support for certain ones, though.
I agree that right now it would not make much financial sense as there's a lot of vehement hatred of NFTs out there and I don't think any project is yet big enough to recoup the time and investment spent, unless it's on some really basic level, like supporting importing of the images and putting them on the walls of a house or something (I've seen something similar like that already).
I do agree that people buying these things thinking everything they're buying they'll be able to take to every single virtual place they go to and be able to hold a 3d model of it and wield it in the future are likely just deluding themselves, unless there's eventually some software library that builds these things automatically without artists having to manually build them or developers having to put code in to support, it in the future.
And even then it will likely butt heads with various limitations of the game engine unless controlled, like number of polygons it can handle and not clipping through environments/animations, not being able to be much more than a static model without more metadata included/manual effort involved, etc.
Although perhaps for anything manual that is involved that person that owns the NFT could hire someone to adjust things so it works better in the game they're wanting to play, assuming there are tools included with the game to do so. Like there's already NFT projects out there making 3D models of certain NFTs specific for certain game worlds using their existing tools, or the owners currently commissioning new art based on their NFT art, etc.
Just taking it as it is currently on a profile pic level, we see that Twitter supports NFTs officially now with Twitter Blue, and Discord seems to be on the verge of supporting it, and possibly more sites in the future, and even if other sites don't support it officially, unofficially you could use an NFT as a picture anywhere (even those you don't own of course, but most people in these spaces do seem to stick with those they own). That's taking an NFT and using it in multiple platforms, and companies having a financial incentive to include support for it, right there.
It's not that much of a stretch to see that happening for some games in the future, especially those built with support of high levels of customization or with prior knowledge of the NFT space and trying to incorporate it from the start of development, which some of these metaverse-like games are definitely doing with Decentraland and Sandbox (albeit right now at the detriment of gameplay, imo. They're pretty boring spaces at the moment, mostly just run around and talk to people).
> I agree that right now it would not make much financial sense as there's a lot of vehement hatred of NFTs out there
I would consider that it's less “vehement hatred” rather than “clear understanding of the limitations”. The backlash comes from proposing NFTs where they don't provide an advantage. For example:
> Although perhaps for anything manual that is involved that person that owns the NFT could hire someone to adjust things so it works better in the game they're wanting to play, assuming there are tools included with the game to do so.
The problem here is that the person who owns the NFT doesn't own the rights to the assets. If the people who do want to grant permission to modify and reuse those assets, they can do so without paying significant amounts of money to a third-party.
Similarly:
> Just taking it as it is currently on a profile pic level, we see that Twitter supports NFTs officially now with Twitter Blue, and Discord seems to be on the verge of supporting it, and possibly more sites in the future, and even if other sites don't support it officially, unofficially you could use an NFT as a picture anywhere (even those you don't own of course, but most people in these spaces do seem to stick with those they own). That's taking an NFT and using it in multiple platforms, and companies having a financial incentive to include support for it, right there.
This is like Gravatar except that it costs hundreds of dollars, and it actually doesn't give the companies a financial incentive to include support for it unless they start selling NFTs. If they wanted to charge you to upload a profile picture, they could do that already and it's unclear why anyone else would want to encourage that.
> I would consider that it's less “vehement hatred” rather than “clear understanding of the limitations”.
Check pretty much any articles about NFTs on Kotaku, there's plenty of vehement hatred on there by both the writers and most of the commenters. Here on HN it's a bit more nuanced, sure.
> The problem here is that the person who owns the NFT doesn't own the rights to the assets.
Depends on the NFT project. But it doesn't grant copyright by default, correct.
"Indeed, it seems like the NFT space is bifurcating into two camps: projects where creators control the IP and Creative Commons projects, or CC0s, as folks are calling them...The big CC0 projects are CrypToadz, NounsDAO and Vine co-founder Dom Hoffman’s Blitmap. These projects are the most open, with no rights reserved to anyone. Bored Apes offers a more limited set of rights, only to the holder of the Ape, who can profit from the art and make derivatives."[1]
This isn't mentioned out of ignorance or possibly intentionally by most anti-NFT articles, including all of Kotaku's articles and from what I've heard (haven't sat down to watch it yet, but I intend to) the Line Goes Up documentary, so understandably most people not following these things just assume no one but the creator has the copyright, like with most other products. But the NFT space has evolved differently.
> This is like Gravatar except that it costs hundreds of dollars, and it actually doesn't give the companies a financial incentive to include support for it unless they start selling NFTs.
I already said why they might have a financial incentive and you're skipping over that again: marketing. Companies do all sorts of shit and spend tens of millions of dollars for the sake of marketing, and eventually (not yet, eventually) there could come a time where it makes sense from a marketing perspective, even if the company doesn't mint NFTs themselves.
I don't know when that will be the case, it could be 10-20 years out for all I know. And again I don't see there ever being the case where all games support all (or even any) of these projects, but some games supporting some projects I definitely see (and already see on a much smaller scale).
I would also agree that right now the starting price for most NFTs are ridiculous. There are cheap or free NFTs out there (I've gotten a couple to support some friends of mine for around $20-30. Considering I can easily spend that much on lunch, that's not super crazy to me), but they're unlikely to be projects that will get incorporated into these various things. Like Clone X might eventually be used in several games, and I could have gotten one at 2.5 ETH (almost $7.5k at the time, which is insane). And yet now, a month later, if I did happen to buy one then I could sell it for a minimum of 14 ETH or ~$43k, which is even more insane.
Almost all of that is speculation and that should calm down over the next 5-ish years once a lot of novelty wears off and as people get a better feel for what these can realistically offer. In the meantime there's definitely a greater fool effect going on, where people are buying expecting to sell to a greater fool at a higher price later.
Hopefully the projects that do become mainstream and integrated into all of these things end up with more reasonable price tags, at least for the common items (maybe some rares will be stupid expensive still). Considering way back in 2007 there's a World of Warcraft character that sold for $10,000[2], which is also something I would consider nuts, and farming WoW virtual gold to sell to people used to be a valid full-time profession for hundreds of thousands of people in some countries[3], I don't really forsee a future where there won't be any NFTs with crazy price tags to them.
If I understood that something was a scam, and kept getting it pushed on me by a wide variety of people both credulous and crafty, I would probably develop a reaction that would be pretty close to "vehement hatred", too.
Fair enough. Wasn't trying to argue that it there shouldn't be hatred against these things necessarily, especially as they exist right now, just that there is currently, so companies might decide to stay away for the time being.
You've got to ask marketing to who though? For example supporting BAYC only nets you 10,000 people at the very most after all. Which is less than 1/5 of the peak concurrent users on Second Life.
Also looking at where NFTs are supported Twitter Blue takes an expansive view. As long as you've minted on a platform they support you get the PFP. That means people can easily clone others paid for pictures which has already caused friction. So owners of expensive NFTs don't really get the exclusivity they might feel entitled too.
And ultimately even if the holder does get a broad IP license they still need to actively defend it for it to mean anything.
> You've got to ask marketing to who though? For example supporting BAYC only nets you 10,000 people at the very most after all. Which is less than 1/5 of the peak concurrent users on Second Life.
That's just that one collection, and the BAYC community already spills out into at least one more collection, MAYC, which has 11k owners and people buying in to that for a cheaper price than a BAYC (although I wouldn't be surprised if at least 60% of MAYC holders also hold a BAYC). I'm sure they'll create another collection (or two, or three) in the future as well, adding new users to the community with each one.
Regardless, there's no inherent limit to how restricted an NFT collection has to be. Sandbox has 137k items for example (only 19k owners though, but that could go up in time as more items are created and sold to new people). Town Star has the highest number of owners on OpenSea right now with 38k owners. That's almost 80% of your peak concurrent users on Second Life in your first point. Still might not be high enough yet (or the right project), but something else could come along in the next few years that does get enough owners. There's multiple new projects being released every week right now, by then there will almost certainly be hundreds more projects out there, one of which might break into the mainstream (or nearly so).
> ...So owners of expensive NFTs don't really get the exclusivity they might feel entitled too.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you're referring to the thing with Twitter Blue that people can mint a copy of a picture from a different NFT collection cheaply, and Twitter Blue will still show it as a verified NFT because it doesn't distinguish between official collections or not, just that "it's an NFT that was minted". People can click the PFP and see that it belongs to a fake collection. Or Twitter Blue can be changed so it will display a checkmark for official collections or something over the icon, just like OpenSea does it.
There's fake shit all over the internet. Hell I get emails every day of people pretending to be legit services I use, trying to get me to click their fake links and steal my identity, that looks legit except for the link. It's just something you need to be aware of. And if people aren't? Well that sucks, but what can you really do than educate people. I've had to sit through phishing education online classes every year at every corporation I've worked at.
> And ultimately even if the holder does get a broad IP license they still need to actively defend it for it to mean anything.
But they don't have to actively get permission to make derivative works, which was the main point. And a lot of these being CC0 means they're pretty much effectively public domain anyway, so yeah, there's no copyright to defend.
Copyright doesn't stop people from copying your shit. I say this as someone who has a video game I released, where I kept the copyrights, and have over the years discovered several people clone that video game (including the name half the time) and put it up on various app stores. Even C&D's don't stop people sometimes.
Hell, it's even been used in A.I. classes at least a couple of times, and included in an Adobe Press book without credit. I actually thought those were kind of cool (although it would have been nice to be credited), but they didn't ask for permission ahead of time, I found out after the fact (for the classes I actually had students hunting me down to ask me for help with their assignments). For another example, just look at the hundreds of Wordle clones and derivatives out there already (many posted to this very site). Copyright is a luxury for corporations and people with lawyers in this day and age.
> That's almost 80% of your peak concurrent users on Second Life in your first point.
Which is still miniscule if you think of the number of users you need to have that many people online at once (it's a lot more). And Second Life is hardly massively popular. Like you say the effort -> reward is way off.
> If I'm understanding you correctly, you're referring to the thing with Twitter Blue that people can mint a copy of a picture from a different NFT collection cheaply, and Twitter Blue will still show it as a verified NFT because it doesn't distinguish between official collections or not, just that "it's an NFT that was minted". People can click the PFP and see that it belongs to a fake collection. Or Twitter Blue can be changed so it will display a checkmark for official collections or something over the icon, just like OpenSea does it.
Right so poor UX and centralized authorities again.
> But they don't have to actively get permission to make derivative works, which was the main point. And a lot of these being CC0 means they're pretty much effectively public domain anyway, so yeah, there's no copyright to defend.
Well not if you own a BAYC image or anything not CC0.
And the point about your game is exactly what I mean the effort to actually enforce the license you bought is not trivial and really only available to companies. So why buy the thing in the first place?
> Which is still miniscule if you think of the number of users you need to have that many people online at once (it's a lot more). And Second Life is hardly massively popular. Like you say the effort -> reward is way off.
Yeah, it's not there yet. I've said as much. It might in the future. It could even be those same communities you've said if they grow their communities and add NFTs to match.
You couldn't buy bitcoin at an ATM or buy it from an exchange or to DeFi applications or have smart contract support (which required a different coin, Ethereum, but still that wouldn't have existed without bitcoin) or use it to pay your taxes or as legal tender in some countries or all sorts of shit when it first was created. The financial incentive wasn't there until the community and ecosystem grew to the point that it became desirable to do so.
Some of the people buying these things today believe (possibly incorrectly) that it's equivalent to buying a bitcoin before it could do these things, and positioning themselves to benefit once those things exist (I've literally seen a tweet that building for the metaverse is the equivalent of buying a $1 bitcoin). There are builders and coders actively working to try to make that a reality as much as possible. Will it succeed to the extent these NFT buyers are predicting? Most likely not. But will there be a much bigger community and ecosystem in five years than there is today, I'm relatively certain there will be.
> Right so poor UX and centralized authorities again.
I don't think most people care about decentralization or good UX as you think. Yes that's a selling point a lot of people make about Web 3, but it doesn't seem to matter that much. And I don't think we're ever getting to the point where everything is on the blockchain, because it just requires too much data and resources. So people are going to have to accept some form of centralization. Less centralization than Web 2 perhaps, but some centralization nonetheless.
I can see benefits to some decentralization without having to go whole hog and make everything decentralized.
> Well not if you own a BAYC image or anything not CC0.
What's your point? Yeah some people don't have the copyrights to their NFTs and those people can't legally make new things with them and/or games will need to get permission to include them in their games, just like the rest of the world works for everything right now. I've said from the beginning not every NFT will be integrated into every application (at least not legally).
> And the point about your game is exactly what I mean the effort to actually enforce the license you bought is not trivial and really only available to companies. So why buy the thing in the first place?
On integration with a game or app they can check that an NFT belongs to a specific collection and not the fake collection. Or not, depending on how they do it. It's just data and code, how do we keep track of real or fake digital items for anything else? I can right-click save a picture of a digital video game cover also, but without a verification code it won't unlock a downloadable copy in my Nintendo Switch.
>The idea that game companies will allow players to share resources between games with NFTs is both technically questionable and financially absurd.
I don't think that's necessarily absurd.
The sword in question would just have to be converted to work with the game itself, or you get a representation of it. Some games like RPGs have item budgets that determine how many stats are associated with it. So your NFT's "value" could convert to this item budget. Maybe instead of being a literal sword in a sci-fi game, it becomes a ship or a gun with the same name/description.
I think game companies are going to try it. It's not like they haven't tried charging players for silly things in the past.
> The sword in question would just have to be converted to work with the game itself, or you get a representation of it.
“just” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. For that to happen, you need all of the following to be done:
1. The second game's developers need to license the rights to use the first game's assets, which may not be possible at any price short of taking a controlling interest in the first game's owner.
2. The developers need to convert the assets into a format used by their engine: converting images, animations, sounds to the format they use (e.g. the major game engines don't even agree on which direction is up); things like 3-D meshes need to be imported and adjusted to the right size; sounds need to be normalized to match the rest of the game's assets.
3. Any custom behaviors (which are often why you care about this thing in the first place) need to be implemented and tested.
4. The item needs to be balanced so it's not too weak (the “owner” won't like that) or too powerful (everyone else won't like pay-to-win).
5. Game B needs to know that you hold that item in game A, and yank it if you sell it.
All of that costs real money, which means that the developers of game B are going to need to charge you even though you already paid a premium for it in game A. The part that NFTs can do is by far the easiest part and can be done far more cheaply in any scenario where step #1 has happened. If you do the easiest one (cosmetic only), it's still more expensive in terms of artist time than almost anyone is going to want to pay.
In all cases, the big question is opportunity cost: if game B's developers are going to spend a million dollars implementing something, do they spend it chasing items which game A's made the profit on hoping they can convince whatever fraction of the people who own game A but were unlikely to buy game B to change their minds, or do they build something they can sell to as many people as possible without having to share the profits?
And why wouldn’t the game developers issue these rare swords rather than a foreign non gaming) entity whose sole value is in creating made up scarcity. Game developers can do this themselves without grifters.
"This time is different. It’s not just speculation, it’s about community." (from article)
"Let me assure you that this is not one of those shady pyramid schemes you've been hearing about. No sir. Our model is the trapezoid!" (from The Simpsons)
But seriously, I can imagine that being in such a community would be all fun and games when there is a sufficient flow of new community members to keep the prices going up and so to keep making the existing community members richer and richer. However, at some point the music will stop and the party will come to an end, in which case what will happen to the sense of community then? And perhaps more importantly what will be its wider impact on society? If that community just forms a relatively small segment then the fallout could be contained, but if it sucks in an entire generation, or worse still an entire country, it could conceivably get physical. See also the collapse of pyramid schemes in Albania in 1997: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Civil_War .
>In the NFT community, we are witnessing the logical conclusion of a generation that is so alienated, so profoundly unfulfilled, that they are considering abandoning the physical world altogether.
the comparison to 1960s counterculture as a form of escapism for (presumably) Gen-Z is laughable. how is something counterculture when backed by the likes of billionaires, VC firms, and the gaggle of techno grifters that make up the space. any sense of "community" or "sticking it to the man" is to make money by getting others to buy your speculative assets for something that doesn't even exist yet
I love the writing of the piece, but found this idea not even believable for a second
I don't think it's possible today for a subculture to exist without immediately becoming the target of marketing departments everywhere. If more than two people share a common interest, somebody will try to sell them stuff.
That's true, but in the case of NFTs, the whole concept is rooted in highly financialised digital capitalism. This isn't businesses jumping on the bandwagon, the business bandwagon is itself the trend.
The icons of the 60s counter-culture were big music stars (backed by the record labels), "American dream" style cigarette and motorcycle advertising (backed by the respective industries) and a particular brand of Hollywood movie (backed by Hollywood). It was every bit as much co-opted by the establishment as the current countercultures are, these days the old boys record company execs have been replaced by venture capitalists but otherwise not much has changed.
Agreed, it’s some skilled and enjoyable writing here. But I think the author was suggesting that the NFT “movement” is actually different than the counterculture of the 1960s, in that it’s rooted in financial aspiration and capitalism, rather than rejecting it in favor of meaning.
My main problem with this "you can own a video game asset!" argument is that you just don't.
You own a token on the blockchain that currently points to something. Tomorrow, it could point to something else. Let's take the "only sword that can kill a certain monster" thing, and have a look at the parts involved.
The parts are:
- The token on the blockchain
- The art assets of the sword
- The stats on the sword (including what it can and can't kill)
- The list of games where this sword is a valid item
Of those, the NFT will only let you own or in any way control the first point. Let's say I get The Sword Of Dragon Murder in game A, and it is currently also accepted in game B. Woohoo, metaverse! The company in control of game B will control what it looks and sounds like in game B, and they will also control what it does there. Maybe it only kills dragons there, but the game has no dragons? It doesn't even need to be called the same. For a joke, they could have it display as "The Toothpick of King Arthur" and using it will have your character do a "pick your teeth" animation. Zero dragon murders to be had, no matter what you paid for the NFT.
Even worse is that you can't even control what the item does in the game you got it from. At any time, they can change the art assets so it looks like any ordinary sword, and remove the dragon murdering stats.
We even see kind of that in games now: Power creep.
When the next expansion comes out, your current gear is likely to be outdated, and you have to grind for the new stuff (or "microtransact" yourself up to date), and it doesn't matter if it's an NFT or a regular entry in a regular database, because your old stuff is still crap in the new area.
In your favorite MMO, take a five year old "best item" and try to sell it on the auction house. You won't get "best item" sort of prices. Why would that magically change with NFTs? Why are they exempt from this?
It seems obvious to me that the people talking about NFTs and secondary markets in games have not played any MMO for any length of time, or they'd know about nerfing and expansions.
> It seems obvious to me that the people talking about NFTs and secondary markets in games have not played any MMO for any length of time, or they'd know about nerfing and expansions.
The weirdest part is that origin story for Ethereum is literally what you're talking about but somehow everyone is pitching that as a solution despite it clearly not being capable of preventing the same thing from happening again:
> I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit.
I am FAR from an NFT apologist but I also dont think your answer represents an understanding of the reality of the technical constraints.
The pointer in an NFT is truly permanent. the concerns for lack of permanence relate to if you put in an impermanent thing like an http URL in the pointer but there are also permanent things you could put in the url like a hash or more or less permanant things like a ipfs address.
Judging a technology on an explicitly stupid use of that technology doesn't make sense.
Yes, your NFT will always be linked to object 238947872, but absolutely nothing about NFTs makes object 238947872 "a game sword" or even "a valid object in Game A", much less "Equivalent objects in form an function in both Game A and Game B".
Even if you somehow encode the visual representation and the stats into the NFT, using the most awesome method you could ever think of, that does not stop the power creep in a game.
Your Sword of Awesomeness does 3600 damage per second to the undead. You paid 36 ETH for this insta-kill weapon, and no undead could even be in the same instance with you without instantly becoming re-dead. Then the game gets a new zone where undead enemies have 40000 hitpoints and generate 7200 hitpoints per second. Your expensive sword is now a very impractical toothpick.
Even if you could make the stats permanent, you can't make it's usefulness permanent, nor can you guarantee it will be valid in any game for ever, much less several games at the same time.
Am I wrong? I want to know. Please elaborate on how you solve the "Object 238947872 is now a bag of chicken feed" problem and the "Object 238947872 is now obsolete because of power creep" problem.
Not even being sarcastic here. If I've misunderstood this whole thing, I want to know.
There are on-chain NFTs that have both the image and metadata on-chain, and the smart contract could allow for user manipulation of that meta-data (like leveling up, etc). Doesn't make the rest of your point any less valid, but these two things can and do exist in various NFTs already.
But for power creep specifically, not sure why the game developer can't see that metadata for a particular project and go "nah that's going to be too strong/weak, we'll divide/multiply all X stat for the objects from this NFT to make it even". There could even be a third party library that keeps track of this for multiple NFTs and does its best to keep things of relative equality that game developers could import like they do any other library.
Not saying that's for sure going to happen, just that it's not necessarily as big of a technical challenge as people keep making it out to be with the help of third party tool ecosystem that is likely to develop alongside this assuming these things become more and more popular, just like in any other space.
It’s not going to happen. What financial incentive does a gaming company have to keep the item they sold you effective? They made money selling the item, and will not receive further money from it. They will have already moved on to selling the next, more effective item.
> What financial incentive does a gaming company have to keep the item they sold you effective? They made money selling the item, and will not receive further money from it.
I think you probably have a good point in your head, but the way you've worded this makes no sense as written as no company does this today.
The simple answer to what you've written is they wouldn't do this for the same reason that any virtual item gets support today. Halo Infinite doesn't get any further money when they sells a unique costume for a week in their game store, but if a future update breaks support for it and they go "welp, not going to fix it, already got your money, not going to get any more for that item, just buy the new item in the store this week plzkthx" their users would be pissed and they most likely wouldn't buy future items.
Let me rephrase the question then: what financial incentive would a gaming company have to remove power creep, when they make money off of selling new, more powerful items?
Sounds like you’re depending on some form of loyalty from the gaming company, which I think is naive.
I'm not depending on anything personally :) I'm not buying any NFTs with the expectation that I'm going to be using them in anything beyond what already exists (or will exist in the short-term) today.
But power creep management will exist to the extent that gaming companies make an active attempt to control, just like any other game. Magic The Gathering might be a good template for how companies could (but won't necessarily) handle it.
Magic The Gathering is almost 30 years old at this point, has released over 140 sets over that 30 years, and has developed techniques to manage power creep pretty well (maybe not perfectly, I don't really pay attention to MTG much anymore, but they clearly think about it, as they have articles they've written about it[1]).
You can pretty much consider each type of card in MTG as an NFT. Certain tournaments allow certain cards or don't if it turns out they're too powerful, or only allow the most recent sets where they've balanced things better, or whatever.
Different types of games allow different types of things. Some games or game modes might let anything go, whatever you've got, bring it, no matter how broken it is, while more tournament like games or game modes might limit what's included to more tightly control it.
Kind of like what I heard in Halo Infinity, where professional players think the Mangler gun is too powerful and want it nerfed, while casual players are having fun with it and asking the devs not to nerf it, or at least not in more casual modes.[1]
It's not like these solutions don't exist elsewhere, it's just up to the developer how they're going to incorporate it. Will some players hate that X NFT gets banned in Y game mode for Z game, and will it devalue it some? Oh I'm sure it will, just like I got annoyed that my Mind Twist card and a couple dozen other cards I had in Magic The Gathering got banned. But I still have it 20 years later, and I still throw it in to play with friends every once in a while.
So what you're saying is that the problem people are trying to solve with NFTs has nothing to do with NFTs, and relies heavily on the good will of the corporation in control to work?
Yeah, nah, I'll stay on the fence until there is at least a strong proof of concept for this.
Absolutely. I don't advise jumping into these things right now unless you're wanting to take big gambles and speculate on flipping them, as that's about the only proven (but super risky) use case at the moment. From what I've seen immersing myself in the space I can see possible futures that these things might go down that are very interesting, and in general I see several interesting and creative things being tried with smart contracts (albeit not necessarily good or useful) at the moment.
Online/MMO things do this today! Destiny 2 for instance actively removed areas from _paid_ expansions. WOW updated away the game that people liked and paid for and over a decade later decided that it was actually worth the trouble to give back what they had removed, purely because they judged they could re-sell it.
And, as the GP posters described, every time there is an update or expansion the value of existing items depreciates.
You hash the bits that are the "thing". If it's one of these digital dresses the article talks about, there's some format for encoding that dress so it can be loaded into whatever environment supports an avatar's ability to wear it. So hash that. I don't think look and behavior are separable, they're both just attributes of the thing which are respected by whatever environment renders it.
> I don't think look and behavior are separable, they're both just attributes of the thing
Yes, they are both attributes, that have to then be interpreted by the 'rendering engine'. For example, the 'look' is based on the image format and the 'behaviour' is based on how the rendering engine interprets the rest of the attributes
> which are respected by whatever environment renders it.
But that is the entire point - _why_ should an environment respect those attributes?
To make it concrete, the original discussion was about something like a 'sword of dragonslaying' - great, that's what it does in the original game. Let us simplify this to having an attribute "dragonslaying". Now what? How does the second game that the asset is transferred to 'respect' that attribute?
Again, as several others have pointed out, this is not a technical problem that NFTs or blockchains solve. It is a question of game engine standards, and common rule sets, and so on.
Oh I follow you. Yeah no reason at all, at least until the economic incentives become strong enough (I doubt that'll ever happen but when knows.) What would a "dragonslaying" bit even mean in the context of, say, a puzzle game? Seems like the 'problem' (if you want to call it that, I don't) isn't even amenable to standardization. It's like saying you want to bring your signed cricket ball to the local park to use in a game of soccer and claiming the reason you can't is because of FIFA's failure to implement inter-sport ball portability standards.
I really enjoyed the article. It gives insights from inside that I couldn't understand from outside. The sense of community and the idea of getting some reputation (even if it only makes sense inside that community, as any reputation) helps me to understand some of the motivations of the people that are inside (I know is not the single and maybe not even the main one).
"All week in New York, the myriad token-gated parties and meetups applied social filters based on digital ownership. Tickets to these events could only be purchased once you connected your crypto wallet and proved that you held the correct NFTs. At any given party, the coolest people in the room were always the “whales,” semi-mythical figures who own over 1000 ETH ($3 million at the time of writing) in digital assets. Rumors of exclusive “whale dinners” trickled down through the ranks of attendees, who jockeyed in anonymous group chats for passwords to invite-only events."
This honestly makes me physically cringe. It's not even the worst aspects of new money, it's people LARPing as the nouveau riche. Imagine sitting in a room full of adults with status anxiety who compare their 20 dollar deviantart ape drawings they bought with their entire savings.
Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A couple of attendees were approaching him, strictly wannabes, they had maybe 200 ETH between them in deviantart apes. He flew away, somewhere in the twisting mazes of the market there would be exclusivity, only the billionaires with digitally executed works at hand to interact with.
When a work was digitally executed it was put into a room that functioned as a 3d scanner, then the room's heat was turned up high enough to vaporize iron. The 3d scan of the work would be saved to an NFT complete with digital proof of its absolute destruction.
Case was currently looking for the Gauguin, which, after its execution was now the most expensive NFT in the world, estimated worth, two billion dollars. Bezos would pay double that.
"The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically."
- Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy
Because not a lot of parents from the cyberpunk reading generation ran out to name their kids "Case". I mean if Case McGraw had grown up now to be a top NFL Quarterback, Case would not immediately raise connections to cyberpunk in your mind.
Is it so surprising? Humans desire status, this is pretty much baked in. Ambitious 20-somethings suffer from this even more than usual. If you cannot get status quick enough in the "real" world because the entrenched interests are too powerful, building your own subculture in which to be important is a tried and tested strategy.
This was also the case in eastern Europe during the Cold war - some countries came quite close to being classless societies, but people there nevertheless made up a bunch of status symbols out of fairly ordinary items - like jeans. Young people didn't flinch at spending one-month worth of income for a pair of jeans, while scoffing at nearly identical non-denim trousers, at 1/20 the price
There were also the car number-plates. Out here in Romania having a 3-digit car-number plate meant you most probably were part of the nomenklatura (the local one, if you had a county-specific number-plate, the national one if your number-plate was from Bucharest). The "normal" people had 4-digit number-plates, while the great majority of people had no car at all. Quite interesting.
I've heard Saudis will similarly pay as much for their license plates as for their sports cars, repeating or alliterative numbers being highly desired.
> some countries came quite close to being classless societies
This really does not comport with my own knowledge. At minimum there was always the nomenklatura and the ruled. None of the Soviet ruled states went as far as the Chinese in putting the boot on the educated class so the pre conquest educated class stayed relatively distinct. Soviet rule didn’t last that long. The extermination of the Jews and expulsion of the Germans had at least as large an impact on the class structure.
I believe, after survival, the #1 human driver is prestige. It is amazing how immediate it manifests. People moments after surviving imminent death will jockey for positions of influence with their saviors. It is baked into the human psyche, and as long as we ignore this Orwellian Driver of Human Personalities, we are doomed to repeating civilization wide failures.
Is there a specific example you are referring to re: “ People moments after surviving imminent death will jockey for positions of influence with their saviors”?
> Say that we actually give up on reality and fully shift our attention to virtual worlds. How would you find a real person to marry? Do we still need houses, or just dark rooms with computers? Do we make babies in test tubes? Do we still have to exercise? Does it matter?
It matters because somebody still has to build and peovision datacenters and defend them and the borders of the country. If (reduction to absurdity) nobody ever leaves home it's going to be easy to pillage infrastructure or even people.
Furthermore our bodies don't react well at sitting down all day long, every single day. Does anybody have that kind of health data about Japanese hikikomori?
"one man stumbled drunk through the party, wearing a tablet displaying an NFT cat cartoon around his neck. He was grabbing strangers for stability and telling them how owning his Cool Cat “changed my life.” “Before this cat, I was a loser,” he said to anyone who would listen, “but now, because of this community, my life means something."
I'm sure we could all write whole essays on the atomisation of society by reducing it to transactions, and the desperate attempts of people to buy their way back in. On the other hand, this is hardly a new phenomenon, it's every nouveau riche all the way back to Elizabethan sumptuary laws and beyond.
"Yet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets."
"Priced at 0.06 ETH each, Cool Cats first sold 300 NFTs, before lowering the price to 0.02 per mint. It took about eight hours to sell out, and in the days to come, the project would begin to explode across the NFT ecosystem."[1]
They might have bought one at mint, which at ~$2200 ETH prices in early July 2021, 0.02 ETH would have been around $44.
$44 on something that is now worth a minimum of $37k in less than six months can be life-changing. And if he got a more rare one it could potentially sell for 50-300 ETH, or 180k-1.1million USD.
Considering I've heard people say that $10k in student loan forgiveness would be life-changing for them, I'd say that's pretty life-changing.
If you feel the same way after reading the article -- that an actual metaverse _would_ be cool, and it doesn't need to be Zuckerberg's dystopia, I encourage you to do your own research and find one of the thousand companies that agrees and help them out.
In the right corners, it really does feel like "web 2.0" all over again -- and I mean that in the best way possible, because "web 2.0" set the course of internet technology for a decade.
Such as the longstanding occupier of this space, Second Life?
As people often point out on twitter, we're already in metaverse 1.0. The cyberpunk continuously connected world. It turns out that the 3D surface view of that isn't so necessary or even comfortable for a lot of users. But the connectedness is.
Second Life was a lot of fun and sparked a lot of amazing creativity. I still miss it. And I know it is still around, but I think because of some changes it is not the same - also maybe because the people are missing. But there are lessons to be learned and hopefully it can be improved upon.
One issue for me was the difficulty of creating a decent looking avatar, and other interface issues. Something NFTs could be poised to solve. (Yes, you could already buy avatars in SL, I know).
Second Life improved avatars by quite a lot in fairly recent times. There's also alternatives to it, eg, check out the project I work on: https://vircadia.com/
It's a sort of spiritual successor to Second Life, since it was started by the same guy -- Philip Rosedale -- after he left SL. It didn't quite work, so the commercial project died and got picked up by open source forks, which is what I work on. It's less polished than SL, but the avatar capabilities are excellent.
Is it difficult to integrate a new avatar system? I am dusting off my 3D reconstruction system from over 10 years ago, it looks like the market for avatars is finally going to happen. https://twitter.com/3DAvatarStore/media
I'm not well versed in the details of avatars, but as far as I know, it should be very doable, and we have people on the Discord that will know a lot more about such details. There's an invite leading to Discord and Matrix under "Community"
It helps create an industry where people can earn money for designing avatars. That already happened in Second Life, but a more open system could also allow designers to use better tools, and of course make it more worthwhile to begin with. Both for designers as well as for users, as there are more things they can do with their avatar.
I don't think burning electricity is the important part.
Maybe, but so far no company has managed to truly sell digital assets, or have they? If you "buy" an ebook on Amazon or music on Apple Music, it is technically still just borrowed afaik.
Of course they have, literally billions of times. Digital assets are represented by the intellectual property license you buy because as we know digital assets (and really most things trivially copyable) are not themselves scarce. This is true of NFTs as well, some of which grant no rights what-so-ever and some that do actually grant a license. That license grants you rights to use the asset in a set of circumstances. For example you can hire freelance artists to make models for a videogame and get full rights to the IP. Buying an e-book or music works the same way with less and different rights granted.
You can commission an artist right now to build you a VR Chat avatar, a Second Life avatar, a sweet PFP for Twitter and your own set of emoji's to use on Twitch etc. and get full rights to the images created. No NFTs needed.
If you want to take your VR Chat avatar into Second Life well that's going to need some kind of standardization not NFTs.
True you can commission an avatar. But selling it is more complicated. Of course it is not impossible without NFTs, you just need some centralized solution everybody agrees on.
I don't think you can sell music you bought from Apple, or ebooks you bought from Amazon?
How many NFTs are giving you full ownership rather than just a license to link to the content on their servers? Please cite sources.
(Hint: it's a lot smaller than the number of digital assets which have been truly sold in the history of the internet. This is not a technical problem.)
I spent a while working on one of the real early metaverses (IMVU) and we already figured out things like compensating artists for their work, enabling derivative works, and properly compensating everyone. We also let people show off art and create custom spaces to experience with their friends, without having to pay gas fees.
The absolutely miserable quality of stuff like decentraland combined with the high prices is pathetic, honestly. Tons of ordinary people have been experiencing the real metaverse for years on Second Life, IMVU, etc.
To me it's useful/entertaining in the ways forums and chats are, plus some additional features on top of that. Eg, you can talk to people, but in addition to that you have a collaborative 3D environment with positional audio where you can script, make games or do other stuff.
Recently a group using our project put up a Christmas Carol VR play, and the results were most impressive.
> in addition to that you have a collaborative 3D environment with positional audio where you can script, make games or do other stuff.
Well, I see no significant benefit here over a simple list.
Not saying that there is none but I am not convinced to do anything with it until I see some actual use for it (and FB is not involved in any way whatsoever).
> Well, I see no significant benefit here over a simple list.
I don't think I understand?
> Not saying that there is none but I am not convinced to do anything with it until I see some actual use for it (and FB is not involved in any way whatsoever)
FB is not involved in any way whatsoever in our project. It's not a new idea really. Second Life is close to two decades old at this point, and there's a long tradition of repurposing existing systems/games to other ends.
You seem knowledgeable in the field - I'm specifically looking to apply NFT tech to pop-sci publishing and debate, do you know of a group working on that or something adjacent?
> He cut me off. “[NFTs are] not art. Don’t call it art. That’s offensive to real art.”
This paragraph really drove home to me what NFTs are. They're another club, like having a blog or a TheFacebook account used to be.
> I didn’t tell him what I was actually thinking, which is that I suddenly could not imagine myself having children anymore, if I would just have to watch them slouch away into the confines of digital life. If I do have children, they will likely grow up in a world where living online is normal, or at least a viable option.
I think everyone who considers having or has kids worries about what kind of world their kids will grow up in. I know I have. The things we endure ourselves shouldn't be inflicted on our kids.
That said, a partially digital life that is available by choice (rather than being inflicted on someone) seems pretty awesome in some ways. Look at how mailing lists have helped foster knowledge sharing and community, or how youtube has made it so much easier to learn skills, and imagine that in a more accessible format.
Serious Question: how is NFT anything but Intellectual Property rights on steroids? It seems the ideal method to allow the elites/billionaires to track everything they own, in the online world?
Don't you think that it can be used as a basis to establish ownership of all those assets that are online though? Eg, I could see the basis for an automated billing for NFT + smart contracts for assets I have used online.
I'm not sure where you are with property ownership - perhaps this is a reference to Proudhon, or perhaps a reference to the legal fiction that we use to navigate this system? Whatever the case, given time, the legal system would likely end up supporting NFT ownership + usage fees I think.
I think that the (biggest) problem with NFTs is that they grant no rights that are recognized by the governments of the world - the people who can help enforce your ownership.
Worse, they require no rights to create. You don't have to be a copyright holder to create an NFT, you just need a URI.
Your ownership of an NFT implies nothing about your ownership of the referenced object in real life (physical or digital).
My take is: This is what some people (particularly in those groups) want them to be, so that they can continue to parlay wealth into exclusive access to all kinds of things even in a digital world where all scarcity is artificial.
However, as sibling comments note, they're actually very bad at it, because despite all the ballyhoo about decentralization, making that kind of thing work requires cooperation from centralized authorities.
Wow. Just...wow. Some things in the article just seemed right up satire;
the blonde dressed-up lawyer who left her job pursuing [buzzword]-[buzzword]ing ?
the drunk guy who now has a meaning in life by obtaining the latest [buzzword] ?
the crowd cheering crazy at the mention of the [buzzword] ?
it all seems too... weird and alien to me; I'm not a boomer, but I'm almost 40; I've cheered at the age of digitalization and I was publicly derided on my views of the internet in the mid-90s.
Now... is this how older people felt in the 80s-90s, when faced with news about the digital era? or the idea that internet will replace this-and-that?
How similar is this to the late-90s dot-com craze? I bet my ass off that at the time they had early-adopter parties like the one in the article.
In the same boat as you age-wise, but it was probably kind of similar. As young as I was back then, and just knowing a hint of HTML, I still managed to stumble upon people trying to make their own dot-com and hearing pitches for websites that were just as pie-in-the-sky as some NFT projects.
Like I remember one back then that had an idea (I don't even think they had the tech, just an idea) for a VR headset and an omnidirectional treadmill and acted like they were sitting on a goldmine in the next 2-3 years and if I would just kindly make a website for them (for free) I'd get in on the ground floor.
Clearly their idea never materialized, or at least never found success.
An alternative explanation is that they _are_ the normies who have bought into the techno-grift in exchange for social status in a small community of believers.
> Like, right now, if I have a sword in a video game, I only have it in one game. But if we had a metaverse, then I could take it anywhere, and it would still be mine. And maybe it’s like, the only sword in the whole world that could kill a certain monster. That would be really cool.
The idea that game companies will allow players to share resources between games with NFTs is both technically questionable and financially absurd.
---
If you can spare the time, I highly recommend watching Line Goes Up - The Problem with NFTs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g . It's a bit long-winded, and I suspect I'm preaching to the choir regardless, but it's worth it.