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It would be cool if the cards could be NFT'd[0] as in some sort of digital collectible that you could own.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token

NFTs are pure, unadulterated insanity.

From what I’ve read and come to understand, NFTs may one day become meaningful if they are legally recognized as a claim to ownership. Then, they can serve as a decentralized, easily sold form of copyright. To sell IP for example now, you need a bunch of lawyers and everything is all on paper anyways. There’s nothing tangible to exchange; it’s all dependent on contracts, lawyers. NFTs could expedite this process according to people whom I’ve asked what possible usefulness NFTs could have.

Bullshit. You're describing a system to replace the paper and ink part of copyright, at best. What you're proposing would still need law behind it to be meaningful as a replacement for copyright itself. So then what's the point?

Only the law stops you from using IP without permission today. And only the law will stop you with what you propose.

> So then what's the point?

It's useful to keep track of ownership of digital goods. And if you did it in a centralized way there are issues with that. We have seen with Amazon and Apple that there can be issues with ownership getting revoked, or services being discontinued as with Google music. It may also not be transferrable. And if you instead make the Government keep track of who owns what there can be some privacy concerns.

Ownership means nothing without adjudication and enforcement, and that's still centralized which means ownership is centralized.

NFTs don't change anything, they're not real ownership.

Yes it would need to be fit into a legal framework, and would benefit by being integrated with centralized systems made by companies. I think you are arguing against some kind of "everything should be fully decentralized" ideal, which is not what this would be. Rather, it could offer clear benefits here and now by integrating with current systems and institutions.

Like I said, if the ownership is centralized then what are you "decentralizing" exactly?

The point is there are no benefits. At best you changed how the paperwork is stored, which is a non-issue.

The reason I used to buy these was to play the game with my siblings and friends. If I wanted to have a computer involved I would have just played the official video game (which is pretty cool too, but only some of my friends enjoyed that.)

Why? People want the physical card.

As a kid, nobody had a clue how to play the game properly. But the pokemon tcg video game forced you to play it properly, and was pretty fun. Digital formats have appeal.

I was a kid when Pokemon first hit the states. All of us that collected them knew how to play. The game wasn't difficult and it already attracted a nerdy crowd to boot. At that, "house rules" are typically more fun than original. A digital version would stifle that.

Me and my friends went to Toys’R’Us every Saturday for the weekly tournament back in the late 90s, we all knew how to play properly.

But the TCG game let you get any card in the game without paying extra or there being limits to ownership. That's a good digital format, and adding NFTs to it provides no value-add. Probably negative value-add.

I think I agree. The problem with a traditional TCG is that there's a small set of cards. One could imagine a really cool NFT based game with only unique cards, and permadeath rules that cause you to actually lose the card when used or lost or whatever.

Maybe treat the NFT as a license of ownership that must be transferred if the card is traded, and let the owner of the NFT reprint the card for a fee in case the card is damaged or otherwise lost

What problem does this solve?

The card's ownership is public knowledge? Like, if the physical card is stolen or forged, then it's trivial to see that it's illegitimate.

(Not an NFT expert, correct me if I'm wrong please.)

How does it do this?

I assume by using the private key to sign a message. If the card holder doesn't also hold the NFT, they can't transfer the NFT to the buyer.

My understanding is that NFTs are useful when the cost of preventing theft, forgeries, etc. is higher than the cost of protecting a private key. If "ownership" is agreed to require proof of holding the NFT as well, then it's not good enough to steal some cards from Target, you have to also steal the private key for each card, or coerce the owner to transfer the NFTs to you, etc. I guess we could think of it as a kind of two factor auth?

You're describing a contract. But specifically done digitally. We've been able to do that since the 70s. What do NFTs add?

Proof that the person who claims to be current owner, is the person that the previous owner transferred ownership to (I guess more specifically, proof that they hold the private key). And simultaneously, proof that owner n-1 is who owner n-2 transferred ownership to, etc.

You're just describing an ordinary contract signed using ordinary public key cryptography.

An ordinary contract transferring ownership from owner i -> i+1 does not demonstrate that ownership was transferred from i-1 -> i.

Decentralized consensus based authorization backed by the blockchain, instead of relying on some central authority to verify and enforce the validity of the contract?

At least, afaik that's the concept behind ethereum's "Smart Contracts"

The validity of the contract can only be enforced by the justice system anyway!

I don’t think anyone disagrees with that.

Strictly ties a given card's value to its rarity, instead of rarity*condition. Mainly useful for, well, rare cards.

If you own a rare card and damage it or lose the physical version, it's okay because the publisher will send you a new one for a small fee.

On top of this, it acts as proof of authenticity; if someone's trying to sell a rare card, instead of the buyer having to figure out whether it's a fake, the seller just has to prove ownership of the NFT and ideally the publisher would maintain a catalog of valid NFTs.

Trading these cards can use existing nft platforms instead of the publisher having to handle marketplace concerns; all the publisher needs to do is be able to issue the NFT to the owner of the physical card

> If you own a rare card and damage it or lose the physical version, it's okay because the publisher will send you a new one for a small fee.

Is this a real issue?

> On top of this, it acts as proof of authenticity; if someone's trying to sell a rare card, instead of the buyer having to figure out whether it's a fake, the seller just has to prove ownership of the NFT and ideally the publisher would maintain a catalog of valid NFTs.

This just shifts the burden to authenticity of the NFT. How does that help?

> Is this a real issue?

In a sense? It's an issue that there are a number of solutions for, from card sleeves to just being super careful. Having this possibility available would probably hurt the industry around protecting cards.

> This just shifts the burden to authenticity of the NFT. How does that help?

Proving authenticity of the NFT is easier than proving authenticity of the card? The latter involves intimate knowledge of the properties of the card, and the former just involves looking at the NFT and seeing whether the first owner/issuer was the publisher.

"Looking at the NFT"? You still need to tie the card to the NFT...

Ooooor..you can just print and sell limited paper cards and whoever physically owns the card is the owner.

Just as decentralized of ownership as an NFT lol

Physical cards can get damaged or lost or stolen. I guess nfts can also get lost or stolen, but they can't get damaged

I don't see this as a Replacement for physical cards, but as an add-on

Pretty sure the card maker can just give out text keys they store in a DB and it'll work better.

You'd have to be a bad technical decision-maker to use an NFT for that feature. Or trying to get some free NFT hype money lmao.

Heh yeah that's fair.

The other thing I was imagining was that trading a card could just utilize existing nft platforms, instead of the publisher having to set up an ecommerce marketplace for managing card trades.

Although yeah this is definitely more "solution looking for a problem"

Actually the publisher wouldn't even need to have a db full of keys or maintain a catalog of valid NFTs. Authenticity could be proven by just seeing whether the initial owner/issuer of the NFT is the publisher

> Maybe treat the NFT as a license of ownership that must be transferred if the card is traded, and let the owner of the NFT reprint the card for a fee in case the card is damaged or otherwise lost

How would you do that - $0 for a card and $300,000 for the license of ownership? Possession of a card is ownership. How would someone even reprint holographic cards? This, unfortunately, isn't doable.

I wasn't imagining the Owner reprinting the card, but that the publisher is providing the reprints as a service to those who own the nft.

Specifically, I'm imagining a case where people still go to the store, buy a card, and each card comes with a QR code or something. You can go online, scan the QR code, and have the NFT representing that physical card transferred to your NFT deck.

You could play games virtually with only cards that you have Proven you own, and if you ever lose the physical card the publisher will send you a new copy.

A key idea here is that every Instance of a card would have a unique identifier and thus a unique NFT; two people scanning the QR code for the same card shouldn't result in them both getting the NFT.

Thank you for the explanation. Most people want to see their physical card in front of them.

In the system you describe people would almost certainly sell the NFT and keep the physical card, while saying they lost it. This would drive the value of collector's memorabilia down to zero. Nobody really cares about NFTs.

I guess I'm imagining tournament use playing a role, but more generally tying the concept of ownership & legitimacy to the NFT. Ideally it would move the value of the asset into the digital representation instead of the physical, which is what would happen if the physical representation of the asset is easily replicated.

Like sure they could sell the NFT and keep the physical card, but at that point the physical card is now illegitimate. And a lot of the value is in legitimacy, right? If the only value was the physical representation, couldn't a collector could just print a counterfeit?

NFTs work when the important part is the abstract idea of "owning the thing", where the value of the thing is more extrinsic than intrinsic. The specific idea here is making the physical representation is worthless, putting all the value in the digital one. People would start caring a lot about NFTs if it was the "One True Source" of legitimacy.

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If we wanted to have both representations be equally as valuable, the idea would instead be to have to trade in the card to get the NFT. Trading in the card would involve burning the physical representation and issuing a digital one. If you want the physical rep back, trade the NFT back for a printed card.

If you haven't heard of Unisocks (https://unisocks.exchange/), It's an implementation of this idea.

That would be good for Digimon - arguably what that brand should have been all along.

Good luck recovering those NFTs you bought and forgot about 20 years ago. At least people's old MTG cards might still be in the back of a childhood closed.

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