NFTs and gaming

Grumpypants

Looks like the silly season bubble has started to burst. The guy that bought Jack's first tweet for 2.9 million tried to sell it for 49million and the highest bid was €270.

Hopefully that's the peak of inflated expectations done and once we are through the trough of disillusionment we will start to see this tech implemented properly.

Retr0gamer

I've still yet to see any beneficial use of this tech.

pixelburp

There's something deeply funny about an entity that fiercely touts itself the future of currency, that uses SCRIP to artificially bolster its scam based economy; NFT Pokémon ripoff is having troubles...

https://kotaku.com/axie-infinity-nft-crypto-hack-landlord-scholar-pokemon-1848800557

marcbrophy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118937916#Comment_118937916

I've still yet to hear any beneficial concepts for this "tech"!

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118937837#Comment_118937837

Brilliant! Warms my heart 🥰

Grumpypants

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118937916#Comment_118937916

I've friends that hang out in these VR worlds. Kinda like a second life thing where you have a character and can wear clothes etc and walk around chatting with other people. Some of the designers on there will spend hours and hours designing a piece of clothing and then when it's uploaded to gitlab someone else can just copy it. They see tech around NFTs as a solution to having their design singed to them so their effort is linked to their content.

Retr0gamer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118946778#Comment_118946778

Or they could upload it to somewhere that's actually secure.

And NFTs will not stop this either. You do know that only a tiny amount of code can be put in a token so basically it will just be a link to their item with the same level of security that people can copy anyway. As for smart contracts, they haven't been tested in a court of law and again there's not enough room for the code to house a contract so again it will be a link to a contract within a token.

And all this can be solved by using proper security like encryption and password salting. So again, where is the benefit?

johnny_ultimate

Not only can the digital outfit still be copied, I’m not really sure why the initial sale couldn’t be done using a standard digital marketplace that doesn’t use the blockchain? Second Life has had a robust economy for user-generated content for two decades (even if it is largely relegated to the furry community). Why the sudden need for a ‘signature’?

One of the great boons of digital media has been to make content more freely accessible due to its inherently replicable nature. To suddenly start imposing artificial rarity - which doesn’t even stop the material from being copied - is making digital media worse, and only shows a hyper-capitalist trend towards further commodifying absolutely everything.

NFTs are, once again, a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. The dramatic market crash of recent weeks shows there’s little interest in them from the general public. It’s a relief seeing this most redundant, dubious and wasteful of technologies crash and burn spectacularly.

jylyzucyj

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118937916#Comment_118937916

The same. I feel like an outsider when I see that all people are aware of NFTs and use them, while I don't even understand what it is.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118955660#Comment_118955660

Quoting Johnny's post as it contains a (very long) video that basically charts the history of NFTs and why, ultimately, they are nothing more than a Greater Fool scam masquerading as transformative tech. As I say it's long, and can veer into the technical but if you wanna learn everything about NFTs - you can't really do better than this video. The advocates' zeal that we might have ALL our private data from social security, driver's licenses and health info sitting on a secure cloud is a chilling prospect

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118542885#Comment_118542885

Nody

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118955660#Comment_118955660

NFTs are a link to a picture that only exist as long as people keep paying for the server upkeep to maintain the link. There's nothing stopping anyone from copying the image, re-upload it or do anything they want with it. And this is what people are trading with each other in the belief they are going to become millionaires.

Let's say all your skins in CSGO are suddenly NFT's, which can be sold on a market outside of steam for whatever cryptocurrency, which can eventually be swapped for fiat currency. Would that not benefit the player, rather than having all the money spent on skins in a closed system like steam.

marcbrophy

The only thing you own in an NFT, is a unique position, within a database.

The pictures or gifs or music files are only representatives of said position and can be subject to change.

Steam skins do not have an interoperability with other market places for that to even be conceivable.

It's a lie 🎂

ancapailldorcha

It's mad. I've a housemate who keeps banging on and on about how great NFT's and cryptocurrencies are and yet is somehow still a pleb like the rest of us.

johnny_ultimate

Aren't there already third-party marketplaces where you can sell Steam goods for real money anyway?

They're dubious 'grey' markets, but a crypto-based one wouldn't be any less dubious or grey without fundamental changes to Steam. If anything, it’d just add further layers of cost and complexity.

And if Steam was to change tact and support such marketplaces, why not ignore a crypto layer altogether for the exact same result? Or - better again - handle it all within Steam like they do now, just with an option to ‘cash out’ rather than operating on store credit alone.

Again: I don't see what an NFT could do in that scenario that couldn't be achieved with existing protocols. Any legal / practical problems that arose would be identical to the ones that exist now, just with extra layers of crypto complexity and waste.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118955974#Comment_118955974

Sounds about right: nobody gets rich with NFTs and that's by design: the whole structure requires you to find a Greater Fool, which from those in control of the tech is the rest of us on the ground floor; its evangelists are almost always the plebs buying into something they think is a get-rich-quick scheme. A lot of crypto and NFT is based on "pump and dump", which intentionally creates a false hype; it can't work without it.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118956200#Comment_118956200

Mad. Same person is a vegetarian working for some green consultancy. Some people look at these things as if they're going to get rich the same way. Greater fools is a superb way of summing it up.

McFly85

NFTs, like crypto in general, claim to solve problems that either aren’t problems or don’t exist, and generally causes more problems than it solves.

For gaming, the benefit is for the publishers only. NFT marketplaces will force you to buy whatever nonsense sh*t coin they’ve come up with, and the hope is the NFT marketplace takes off and therefore the value of their coin goes up. They’re essentially tying a financial bet to the store activity. There is nothing in there that proves something is yours or your creation that is more secure than your current steam account for example.

It’s a desperate grift hoping to create value out of something literally worthless.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118955982#Comment_118955982

It's effectively that 'cash out' option in a non-dubious, non-grey market is what some people want, rather than all the money being a sunk cost.

jylyzucyj

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118955716#Comment_118955716

I've tried to find a clear explanation what is NFT in Google, but you did it better than any other website.

marcbrophy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118964915#Comment_118964915

It's so hard for people like me who aren't blessed with the power of explaining things great!

Even the above sentence is shít 😆

But when you get the understanding of what this utter sham "tech" is all about, that one liner that makes it sink in, then thankfully you'll be okay.

You won't be the next jabroni roped into this gullible shíte under the pretence of making a quick buck.

Stand back and let the fools and their money be parted... 🙂

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118964915#Comment_118964915

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118966765#Comment_118966765

It's 2 hours and a touch technical but honestly you won't find a better deconstruction of NFTs and why they're scams.

I thought it'd take me ages to watch it but I was hooked by the stream of bullshít

https://youtu.be/YQ_xWvX1n9g

Grumpypants

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118964915#Comment_118964915

An NFT is very simply a digital signature that is stored in a secure decentralised Blockchain and links you as the owner to an item.

marcbrophy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118966928#Comment_118966928

Yeah a great watch!

I actually posted it in an AH thread before on NFT's but your man was just looking for some confirmation bias and despite every reply telling him not to get involved, he went and bought 2 😆

Mr Crispy

https://www.pcgamer.com/nft-bored-ape-marketplace-gets-hacked-people-lose-millions-in-ape-pictures/

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118976990#Comment_118976990

CastorTroy

I'll admit to not being able to understand a lot of the words in that article.

Penn

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118977398#Comment_118977398

I'd say a lot of the people who were scammed don't either, hence why they fell for it. They were probably lured in to something they didn't fully understand with promises of how profitable and secure the whole thing was.

Retr0gamer

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118976990#Comment_118976990

What a shame

Nody

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118977398#Comment_118977398

Morons who thought they would be rich clicked on a "double your money in a week" type scam link sent out on official accounts that then emptied their digital wallets.

It's honestly the perfect scam target as a group, you've already been identified as a group who are clueless (they bought NFTs already) and then offer them a chance "to get even richer" by being first buying new pictures from the same place. They think the NFTs will become even more valuable and think nothing of handing over their wallets for the scammer to buy it for them (even if it was never done that way before) because they have to be quick of course, it's a limited time offer etc.

Retr0gamer

I just love how blockchain is sold as being more secure than traditional methods, which from a brute force hack stand point is true. However traditional methods are so well encrypted that nobody is spending the literal years of computing power needed to crack them so nobody bothers to brute force them. Blockchain is just as vulnerable to social hacking, possibly more so due to the idiocy/gullibility of it's evangelists, but with the added bonus that reversing any malicious transactions is often totally impossible as it involves rolling back the blockchain and negating all transactions since the malicious transaction took place leaving an absolute mess behind unlike easily editable traditional methods.

Still looking for an advantage to blockchain because security really isn't one of them.