this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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The one example I’ve heard that makes sense are NFTs to represent a purchase of digital games. This then allows the selling of digital keys second hand.
Other than that it all sounds like a scam.
you dont need useless nft tech for that to be possible
Of course not, but what little I know of NFTs is they do the two things needed for that to be possible: one, ability to transfer ownership, and two, verify ownership.
I have no clue if NFTs are the best way to accomplish that, let alone even a good way, and people much smarter than me can figure that out.
In the end I don’t think it matters. For it to be viable it would require the big companies to adopt it, which I never see them accepting a legal way to do second hand sales of digital goods.
Yeah, if you are waiting for a company that loses money through second-hand sales to implement an NFT scheme to facilitate second-hand sales... That could take a while.
This post of yours is one that I completely agree with.
That's a fundamental issue with NFTs though. Every instance of a fitting use case already has a non-NFT way to accomplish the same in the way the people in charge want to keep it.
Why would e.g. Steam want you to be able to trade games without Steam being involved/getting a cut? They can just ask you go buy from them.
Why would a state want to hand over control over the land registry to some cryptobro?
Why would the whole financial side of the art industry want to hand over control to a block chain and make themselves redundant?
Also, revertability of mistakes is a core feature of any reasonable transaction system. A system without that is worthless.
Sorry, this turned into a rant.
I can see ticket sales being issued via nft. They could set a maximum the ticket can be resold for, thus hindering scalpers and the original seller can also get a stake in the resale of the ticket. Beyond that I have never seen another decent use.
But again, why do that if you can also bind tickets to names and use that to make yourself the only possible place where people can sell their tickets on, with a substantial fee (like Ticketmaster does)?
They have no incentive to let people freely sell tickets when thy can also force themselves in as mandatory man in the middle.
You remove the burden of verifying the names and storing the personal data and you don't need to handle the resale inhouse. Other than that yeah it's pretty much the same thing
To a reasonable company, this might be a burden. To a big corporation it's half the reason they are doing this.
Yeah that is true
Yeah and rent-seeking is the only real big business left in town besides personalized advertising.
No way a rent-seeking opportunity this great isn't going to be gobbled up by the existing players and instead given up for free so that they can use new, poorly performing, expensive technology instead.
You can't cap resale prices with technological limits because payment can be split between multiple channels before the seller transfers ownership.
Yeah, that's why I only said hinders not stops. I mean I personally wouldn't send two payments where one of the transactions is one sided because you just open yourself to bring scammed but I'm sure some people would
I could see that being a use case if it weren't for how much the underlying technology sucks ass. Blockchains spend too much time doing their silly little trust-less security nonsense dance to be able to perform at the scale needed by systems that will sell...say...Taylor Swift concert tickets.
Steam would get a cut
They arent. For the NFT to do anything in a game it has to interact with the game in some way. The game gets to decide how it interacts with each NFT. So you are already using a central authority to change your NFT to something of value in the game, So why bother with the whole distributed trustless aspect of the blockchain and not just have a row in a database table?
Also you can just do piracy
You don't, but nfts allow distribution platforms to let buyers do it while requiring little to no effort on their part.
they have no reason to allow you to do that, and you dont need nfts for that either
Never said it's needed, I said it could be used for it and would lower the amount of effort required on the distributor's side.
They also have no reason to allow people to sell in game items at the moment, yet look at Steam making bank from item sales!
Yeah and they only make bank because they sit in the middle of the transactions as the trusted third party.
The only way to possibly make NFTs work for Steam would be for them to also start up a side business of "SteamCoin" currency, because the only way to offload the enormous costs of running a blockchain network at scale is to have miners and nodes running the network for their own gains.
And even then, they'd lose autonomy over their own business and it would likely be slower in terms of transactions per second for normal customers.
It's a losing proposition pretty much all around. The only way that an existing company with an adequately equipped IT department would transition to this is if they were forced to by law...and I don't see that happening ever.
They most certainly do not allow buyers to do that. And again, this is already happening with existing technology, and much more efficient and secure.
The "could" was implied, I know it doesn't happen now, doesn't mean it couldn't.
Check wallet for nft proving a person owns the game (since wallet content is public), if the person sells the nft then they can't play anymore, the new owner can.
Ask people to send a certain amount of crypto from their wallet to prove it's theirs and associate it with their in game account (also becomes a way to get a cut from sales).
It's surprising it's not something that already exists since it solves the DRM issue (from the game distributor perspective).
As far as I know there are no major platforms to that allows players to sell their digital games, only in game items.
There's no business incentive to allow a second-hand digital games market, and there's no regulation to force them to provide one. It's pretty much that simple.
NFTs won't solve this, and even if there was a mandated way to sell "used" digital games (a concept that's actually pretty bizarre when you think about it) it would not be through NFTs or block chain, because the underlying technology is slow and costs a shit ton to run. Unless you're producing a coin on the side, there's also no simple mechanism to offload the costs of running it.
That is already possible without the use of NFTs, and much more efficient and secure.
There's no point in using NFT for that.
What assets are games going to allow you to import? Just anything?
Or only from authorized issuers (like the original game dev and authorized artists)? If so then you have no real place for NFT, you already have Steam marketplace and equivalent where the game dev sets up or integrates with an online marketplace.
Want transparency in the marketplace? Use transparency logs, not blockchains.
If you're allowing literally any NFT then this is no different from allowing people to import arbitrary assets, with the sole difference that some have a digital receipt attached.
Blockchains are really only useful for certain coordination problems among mutually untrusting parties who can't find a common trusted 3rd party. For most game devs that trusted 3rd party is Steam marketplace. It's really only if you want to share assets in both directions between specific games from specific other developers AND want to make them exclusive / player owned AND don't trust marketplaces like Steam, that it MIGHT be relevant to investigate if a blockchain solution fits.