The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game | Hacker News Reader

The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game

spectrum.ieee.org

394 pointscycomanic360 comments

I read these articles sometimes about crypto games, but they all never seem to describe the actual game, it’s like crypto is the primary concern, and game is secondary, and i’m getting the distinct impression none of these games are any fun and everyone in the space has to avoid mentioning it.

I think that the people writing these things only have a very slim grasp of gaming, but they know it would be a good market to capture

Gaming with being able to earn money is something I normally call gambling or work.

It's depressing to think about it.

And yes people who made gold in wow were also not gaming but working. It wasn't cool, fun or whatever 10 years ago

Gambling and gaming are quite interconnected, maybe you can describe it as a spectrum between games and gambling. Free single player games are the 'purest' games, you're only betting that it's worth your time. Cheap single player games, you're still gambling in that you're 'betting' the game is worth your time and $5. Closer to the gambling side are things like Poker, CS Skins, the Diablo Auction House, Eve Online mining, etc. Probably the purest form of gambling is slot machines, since they are purely random chance.

This is an absurd argument! By that logic buying a book is akin to gambling: You don’t know how good it is until you start reading.

Books have nothing in common with gambling except for the books about gambling.

People with absurd notions very often conflate the colloquial definition and the precise definition of words and then try to draw conclusions out of the confusion. Like anti-science people who talk about theories and theories.

I suppose I'm overlooking something, since I cannot follow this line of reasoning.

When I buy a book, I usually don't know its contents beforehand (the exceptions are I had copied it somehow in my earlier years, and now I want to buy it to come clean, or it is a classic I just never bought yet).

Most of the time, I rely on a friends reference, or a review online, or maybe I just buy by chance. And in either of these cases, there is a less than 50% chance I perceive the book as good. Which, to me, is a gamble. So I suppose there is an edge I don't get?

Not all "risks" are "gambling"

There is no gambling involved in buying a book. I give you $X you give me a book.

Gambling is I give you $X I have a,b,c % chance of getting A,B,C. Usually I get nothing. Nothing I can do can effect the outcome.

Colloquially, you might say "I don't like this author, but the reviews say blah was a blah, so I took a gamble". But that is clearly not the same as pure chance gambling.

That... actually makes sense to me. You're gambling the cost of the book that the amount of enjoyment you get out of it is worth the time it took to read it.

If you enjoy the book, your payout is those feeling of enjoyment. If you lose, the price is the cost of the book and the time you wasted reading it - but you have the paltry consolation prize of a now-second-hand book that you can sell at a loss to a used book shop.

And you can affect your odds of winning or losing, by going with a genre or author that you already have an affinity to (or not!)

Unfortunately, that definition of "gambling" is so encompassing that it effectively means everything is a form of gambling. Which is, of course, absurd.

I could be said to be gambling that my comment will be read. I am also gambling that someone will not disagree with me. I am gambling that by writing this comment I'm not wasting time that could have been better spent in other endeavors. I am gambling that I will not die of a stroke just after writing my comment, making my final conscious act a pointless one.

If it sounds absurd, that's because it is. Of course it's not gambling, and neither is reading a book.

I sort of mixed up risk and gamble in that analogy. I stand by the part that many games fall on a spectrum between “game” and “gamble”. counter strike, wow, eve online are games with a gambling element: loot boxes, skins, etc. Poker is a gamble with a game element, e.g, bluffing. Slot machines aren’t games at all.

I think cryptokitties is somewhere between Poker and Slot machines.

This is leaving out the most important part of the incentive structure: most books are entertainment and their value to the reader is based on things other than money. That means they’re not interchangeable and people make decisions based on things like the author or publisher’s reputation as opposed to the current exchange rate.

Your argument started well but veered off the tracks. The examples I would give of parallels between gambling and gaming are arcades, loot boxes, merchandiser machines, and free-to-play games with a virtual currency

I also had fun making gold in Skyrim, which was offline. I don't recall it being work, but whatever.

It can be a puzzle with a built in score and fun, but rarely are these direct-to-cash games fun.

D3 got much better when the real money auction house closed.

I mean, the real improvement to D3 was they massively upped the drop rate of rare items, which "coincidentally" happened when they stopped taking a cut off people selling their rare items for real money.

Yeah. The money always causes a conflict with the fun. Only the pure cosmetic games seem to avoid that when the money flows.

Very much agreed, but…

My favorite AH score was a max stat level 3 chest piece that I sold for $25.

That piece was good for 5 or maybe 10 minutes of gameplay at the start of the game.

I knew it was a premium piece for that level and type. I knew they didn’t stay on AH long. That said, I didn’t want to compete with all of the lower price point folks, so i set the price to something absurd just to see what happened.

I have no idea why they bought it.

I had much better late game stuff for sale for much cheaper that never sold. It was a strange market — I’m glad it is gone.

People would search by “best I can equip” and you caught a whale.

In my opinion, nothing has ever come close to the rich economic system that emerged naturally in Diablo 2. Maybe it just hit me at a good time in my life, towards the end of high school.

I spent probably half my time playing that game just doing arbitrage trading. For example a sorceress or necromancer would always give you 4-5 Perfect Skulls for a Stone of Jordan (SOJ) ring, and you could pretty easily buy an SOJ from a barbarian or amazon for 3-4 Perfect Skulls. Through nothing but these trades I was able to go from a couple SOJ (the most valuable 1x1 item in the game) to about 40 or 50 over the course of a few months.

There was a stable economy time where there weren’t continual “buff patches” dumping more and more items, and it was a good time.

You sound like you've never played Eve Online

I would disagree with that.

D3 RMAH was bad because D3 was bad. At that time there was basically no itemisation, everything gear was basically dps/main stat/trifecta. D3 was so bad that the fix was to remove trading completely and never been brought back.

People traded D2 items for gear, runes and/or real money for decades, there is no problem and the game is alive for well.

Offline is key here

That's not the point I was making.

Playing a little bit with game economics is fun to a certain point.

You are obviously not a gamer or understand the appeal.

Very interesting to find this type of sentiment on hn.

But let me clarify: I lived the wow time.

It destroyed 3 relationships from friends I know, it broke carrier chances for 2.

Yes there is a difference between grinding a little bit of gold vs playing it all day, not doing anything else anymore for your life and bragging about being able to buy a month abo with in-game gold

I totally get the appeal of challenges in well running raids but there was always the one person who made the game the only life content.

And yes there are still people being hardcore addicted to games like shooter. Depressed friends risking everything worthwhile for it.

Understithe appeal doesn't invalidate my comment.

The status quo in gaming today is that people work thousands, or 10s of thousands of hours building, collecting, exploring, etc, and it's all owned by some emotionless gaming company that might just decide to delete all your stuff, or just disappear all together, without notice. Giving players control of the things they worked hard to get just seems like the natural progression as we assign more and more value to the lives we live in virtual spaces.

Vitalik famously was first inspired to build Ethereum when Blizzard nerfed a sword he had in World of Warcraft.

Yeah I guess, but grinding/mining is not sybil proof. So the only thing that cryptocurrency improves is replacing that with buying and trading items with actual money, or mining stuff with PoW.

You couldn't have a blockchain equivalent of World-of-Warcraft. You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example.

The only thing you can really implement with cryptocurrency is a market game, gambling on the outcome of a game, or crypto-tokenized items/stats. These have their own problems as well, mostly being that their development structure is usually not decentralized enough to warrant the use of cryptocurrency.

> You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example.

Surely you could have a smart contract that implements that (and, in the extreme case, I guess you submit the random seed for this boss fight and a hash of the button inputs you used or something - of course there's no way to stop you using a bot to automate pressing the buttons at the right time, but that applies to real WoW too).

I have considered this already. That does not solve anything here, for the reasons you have mentioned yourself.

To the extent that it is broken in world-of-warcraft, it will be more broken here because there will be fees associated with playing, so players will be incentivised to make the most of their money by cheating and trying to optimize the smallest possible "proof".

Eventually, so many people will cheat that the actual game is considered to be a minor nusance. It's like TF2 idle servers. You incentivise players to not play the game.

> To the extent that it is broken in world-of-warcraft, it will be more broken here because there will be fees associated with playing, so players will be incentivised to make the most of their money by cheating and trying to optimize the smallest possible "proof".

Ultimately on a technical level it's just another form of proof of work - the boss issues a challenge and the player has to figure out a response that meets that challenge - but if you can make it a kind of "work" that's easier for a human player than a bot, then you get a game that works. As far as I know, even though there are gold farmers etc. in WoW they haven't found it worthwhile to script the raids / boss fights, so it seems like games designers are still able to stay ahead of the automation at the moment, and while the financial incentive would be stronger for a blockchain game it seems like a difference of degree rather than a really radical change.

With a normal bot, you can only run one boss-fight at a time and you are subject to network latency and imprecision of your actions.

In this blockchain scenario, couldn't you run millions of different simulations of the boss fight on your own computer and publish the one in which you get the most loot, take the least damage, produce the most compact proof, or whatever?

In any case, the "proof-of-victory" as I'll call it is a useful technique for a provably-fair gambling system. For example, you could have players gamble over the outcome of some turn-based game (with provably-fair randomness) like poker, or nethack. If you can implement a time limit, it would also work for something like chess.

> couldn't you run millions of different simulations of the boss fight on your own computer and publish the one in which you get the most loot, take the least damage, produce the most compact proof, or whatever?

Sure, if your computer is up to running the boss fight that many times over. I assume the game would only let you run each "challenge" once (and I guess might charge you a tiny fee to enter the boss fight) and most random inputs would lose; in that case they just have to make it more expensive to do that than to make currency by mining.

> Sure, if your computer is up to running the boss fight that many times over.

The boss fights have to be very CPU and bandwidth-efficient because every other computer on the network will have to verify many of them. One exception could be that if the probability of winning is low enough with most seeds, you could just make it so that you don't need to broadcast your game (you only broadcast your "proof-of-victory" claim the reward, so if you get a losing seed you just have to broadcast a transaction that pays for your "entry ticket"). That way you could make it difficult to simulate many games while keeping the network performant.

Actually, maybe that's not right because you might be able to make a program that checks to see if you got a lucky seed, so it will just effectively add an annoying roulette-style gambling element of getting good RNG. I don't know.

Anyways, I think a somewhat-fun single-player game may work if it's something like this:

(1) You pay a fee to play a provably-fair deterministic dungeon-crawler type game like nethack.

(2) When you die, you get an NFT for every item you earn. There are massive network fees that prevent you from easily trading the NFT on an open market. So it's preferable to get them through the singleplayer game.

(3) The NFT is used in some hearthstone-like multiplayer card game that encourages you to collect a variety of cards. The "rarer" NFTs are not explicitly better than the common NFTs, they just allow for more exotic gameplay situations so they will simply be more desirable because they are more fun. This encourages you to play the single-player game many times to collect a wide variety of items.

(4) Optional: implement competitive (tournament pool) gambling on top of the card game.

Making a bot to do the singleplayer game would be difficult/undesirable here because:

- you would have to program it to understand the user's different tradeoffs between going to different parts of the dungeons and getting different types of loot, which is sort of subjective decision making.

- trading rewards between players is infeasible due to fees, and there's no trustworthy way to "buy an account" off of a botter.

- the reward is mostly cosmetic and has sentimental value: you can just fork the card game to play it without the NFTs, even to gamble.

- the singleplayer game is somewhat fun in itself, and has a skill cap to prevent bots from stomping actual players (Sort of like TF2's MvM)

I think a crypto game like this could work if it was open source, 100% of fees go to miners, and the development is funded-by-donation. But many crypto games are pretty scammy so they don't pan out.

A hash of the inputs can't be used to replay the game and thus verify what happened. You'd need the full input list, including mouse movement. In my experience FPS games send around 200MB/h in networking, so assuming only a 1000th of that is needed to store the inputs that comes out to ~5600USD/h. Even if it took just a kB that's still ~30USD just to play the game for an hour. (This of course ignores actually running the game inside a smart contract, which would also take an obscene amount of gas)

Game boss dies, triggers a web3 call which mints the NFT. What’s the problem?

Who gets to trigger the web3 call? a centralized server?

Having a regular commercial centralized game with decentralized NFT items is an awkward halfway point that doesn't get you the full benefits of decentralization.

If the game itself is decentralized too, that changes things, but it's unclear if it's possible to make a game like WoW like that.

> You couldn't have a blockchain equivalent of World-of-Warcraft. You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve an item from killing a boss, for example.

Anywhere else and I would assume you were joking. This being HN, I have to assume you're being serious. So, at the risk of stating the obvious, that's the point of the blockchain. That you can provide verifiable proof for things like this.

Alright, care to enlighten us then? How would you go about implementing such a thing?

The two methods mentioned here are quite flawed:

Kerbonut mentions the use of the signature of a gameserver to verify the loot. This obviously is not decentralized, and is essentially the same thing as having a centralized itemserver. This is part of what I mean when I said that "their development structure is not decentralized enough to warrant the use of cryptocurrency"

lmm mentions the use of a "proof-of-victory" given a random in-game challenge produced with a provably-fair RNG seed. Not only would this require a ton of bandwidth and CPU to store and verify these proofs (unless it's a turn-based game like chess or nethack I suppose), but it is not really sybil-proof. In other words, it puts people who play the game at a significant disadvantage to those who just bot. It incentivizes not actually playing the game.

Edit: note that this Decentralized-WoW thought experiment is fundamentally different from axie infinity. The case of axie infinity is a two-player game where they essentially gamble using the depreciation cost of their pokemon. It falls under the category I described as "gambling on the outcome of a game"

The blockchain proves a chain of custody. Please explain how you mint the proof of boss kill without an authority.

The idea makes no sense unfortunately. If the game dies so does the meaning of the NFTs. It's even more pointless in the context of Vitalik's WoW example because the NFT has no relationship to the game mechanics, the creators of the game could trivially nerf, alter, or remove previously minted NFTs at their own discretion.

> it's all owned by some emotionless gaming company that might just decide to delete all your stuff, or just disappear all together, without notice. Giving players control of the things they worked hard to get just seems like the natural progression

This makes no sense to me.

You are always at the mercy of the gaming company. "Stuff" in games has no meaning outside games. If you assign it meaning, you don't need an NFT or whatever: it's in your mind.

Vitalik could have drawn a picture of his magic sword, or simply relive his fond memories of it.

If Blizzard or whatever company takes the game down, the "stuff" becomes meaningless. Existing in blockchain is meaningless. Outside the game engine, it means nothing.

I've also heard "but other companies could take your NFT and...". Well, I'm skeptical. It's still the case that your stuff had its meaning attached to a game or account that no longer exists; whatever other companies do with it cannot replicate the original experience that gave it meaning, I.e. the game.

It's also unclear why Blizzard (or whatever company) would cooperate with making the ingame "stuff" remain outside their control.

Finally, if another company could build an enticing experience rivaling the original game, it's unclear why they would artificially tie it to a competitor (even risking lawsuits if they mentioned trademarks).

> people work thousands, or 10s of thousands of hours building, collecting, exploring, etc

It's only work when that is not inherently fun - and if it isn't you don't solve that by letting people pay others to do the work so you get the results directly. If anything, putting monetary value on in-game achivements devalues the experience of getting them yourself and provides perverse incentives for the developers to make getting them without payment less fun.

> and it's all owned by some emotionless gaming company that might just decide to delete all your stuff, or just disappear all together

For centralized MMO games maybe. For single-player games or games that support self-hosting (or really, any third-party hosting independent of the original developer) this is not a problem. And if the developer is unwilling to allow third-party hosting then why do you think they will support a blockchain they can't control in some way?

> Giving players control of the things they worked hard to get just seems like the natural progression as we assign more and more value to the lives we live in virtual spaces.

Giving players control of virtual items means letting them copy and modify the bits. That's a great goal. Let's reform copyright so that you can freely modify software in a reasonable amount of time (much less than an average lifetime!) and require escrow of source data including reuitred server components to get copyright in the first place so that it is available once copyright expires - then Vitalik can have his own WoW version with the balance he likes (in theory at least).

It does not mean trying to further monetize what should be entertainment.

Thing is in WOW you had a large population of actual gamers who were willing to pay real hard currency for ingame currency. Because the game in itself was attractive as a game. Cryptokittens have none of that value.

CryptoKitties is a lot of fun, for what it is. It's super deep and while it's more of a sandbox than a typical game, I became obsessed with it when it came out, though not for monetary reasons (if it has one huge drawback as a game, it's always been how much it costs IMO).

Became so obsessed that I ended up hired by Dapper Labs and working on the CryptoKitties team, later helped design and launch NBA Top Shot on Flow. Now that we have (the markedly cheaper and easier) Flow and lots and lots of lessons learned from building NFT products, I'm excited for us to bring the next generation of CryptoKitties to life.

If you want to check out a fun crypto game that just recently launched from another developer, I urge you to check out dimensionxnft.com with an open mind.

OK but WHAT IS THE GAME? What do you DO with CryptoKitties?

You breed them. It reminded me of horse breeding games my girlfriend used to play. Kind of fun. Not worth the ongoing cost though.

For me it's the Mary Kate and Ashley horse breeding game on the Game Boy Color.

Disclaimer: I haven't played it, but I read this article.

It looks like a pet breeding game. You "own" cartoon cats - visual representations of distinctive bundles of characteristics contained in a NFT. You generate more NFTs by "breeding" two existing cats (executing the smart contract), which results in random combinations of their characteristics in offspring.

What to do with them? Speculate on their value, same as any NFT.

As a "game" this sounds incredibly unsophisticated compared to normal video games - something that might have passed during the flash era of gaming, or maybe today on itch.io as a weekend project. The only "hook" outside of this is the speculation / potential to earn (and I imagine if you're in on the scam, earning is a lot of fun).

Breeding is a complex and nuanced game mechanic, which when coupled with the worldwide marketplace unlocks a dizzying rabbit hole. Once you understand the mechanics, you realize just why a Gen 1 Tendertears would be a grail collectible to own.

I called it more of a sandbox than a game, but there are also Fancy Chases, events where a specific limited-time breeding goal is introduced and it's a race to be among the first to achieve this goal and breed a Fancy Kitty.

Not saying it's for everyone, but it's definitely something that thousands of people found and find pretty darn fun (again: if expensive).

Maybe it's just fun to spend money you don't need, or stole, or swindled, or need to launder.

I knew someone who described slot machines like that

He ended up declaring bankruptcy

Sounds like gacha, where folks feverishly "collect" pointless pieces of little plastic. All these things (hoarding, compulsive buying, gambling) go hand-in-hand [0], and ends up emptying pockets and possibly devastating lives.

0: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181956/

CK's breeding mechanics are about as complex as Pokemon Gen1's breeding mechanics, and simpler than Gen3. Congratulations on passing the GameBoy bar. Additionally, all of the talk about openness is now out the window since the breeding code is closed source.

Congratulations on also doing limited time events, welcome to the year 2000 of online gaming!

Just because it's tradition to not let "someone being wrong on the internet" stand: https://www.cryptokitties.co/blog/post/learn-how-our-last-my...

Thanks! Now there's improvement, from "we're not sure just how simplistic those mechanics are" to "well fuck me that's some first year in college simple mechanics".

> it's definitely something that thousands of people found and find pretty darn fun (again: if expensive).

But do they? They could just as easily be compulsively chasing some chance to cash out big.

You can trade them, or breed them with other cryptokitties.

There's a free mobile game called Clusterduck which is basically the same idea but without the crypto nonsense.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pikpok.wtd...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clusterduck/id1531250914

You basically don't do anything except watch what weird mutations come out from the breeding. In Clusterduck, you can only have up to 30 ducks, so once you hit the limit, you have to throw a duck into the pit to sacrifice it. Sometimes when sacrificing a duck, a large monster spawns from the pit, and if you tap it enough times, it'll spawn a duck with a "cursed" trait of some sort.

You know how they call the lottery "a game"?

You cannot have a conversation about "crypto games" without addressing how crypto makes the game better. For the sake of this conversation, it doesn't particularly matter how fun CryptoKitties is. What matters is how does the blockchain integration make the game better than it would otherwise have been.

From my point of view so far, even the best crypto game out there would have been better if it wasn't for the crypto aspect of it.

If this ecosystem is to provide value beyond the potential for making money, then what is it? It's hard to be excited about something that only has downsides.

HyperDragons. Someone made a game where you bred dragons that could eat CryptoKitties to absorb their attributes. The composability and interoperability of the blockchain means anyone can extend your game and build mechanics with your assets, without your permission. It's truly an open API.

And what here does the blockchain offer that a database table doesn't? Other than the ability to monetize.

The fact that I can build upon CryptoKitties with no obstacle. If CryptoKitties was on a private database I would need to get access to their API and also trust them with the ownership/management of the assets. Now I can just build it on the blockchain and have people destroy CryptoKitties in my smart contract to get benefits in my game. No API functionality or permission from CryptoKitties needed.

So how does this open API works? Every time you use it you have to pay a third party?

What do you mean? All of the data is on the chain. It's a global "third-party" that everyone is a part of.

You submit the action you want to do, anywhere in the ethereum network, and if it's valid (e.g. if you're running an operation that destroys a kitty then you'd better include a digital signature showing that you own that kitty) then it will be accepted and published. You have to pay a "gas fee" which in theory a) should be pretty small and b) is what pays for the running of that ethereum network. In practice under the current implementation those fees got to be big enough that they kind of killed cryptokitties, but this might be fixable.

Even "the ability to monetize" is hardly unique - it would also be trivial to monetize that database table (see: Diablo 3).

That the two projects both shared the same DB.

Couldn’t that have been done equally well with a centralized ledger? Lots of games have “high stakes pvp”, such as eve online. They don’t have a blockchain, and yet you can still steal stuff permanently from other players if that’s how you want to play the game.

Let's say I want to build a game where you can destroy your EVE Online spaceships to get bonuses in my game. How would that work? That's what happened with CryptoKitties and HyperDragons.

Just to clarify: someone who owns a CryptoKitty decides to send it to the HyperDragons smart contract that handles the absorption. It's not about stealing anything. You use your assets in CryptoKitties to boost your dragon in HyperDragons.

This is not inherently made possible by the blockchain itself though.

The mechanisms to transfer a Kitty to the HyperDragons lie within the CryptoKitty Smart Contract. This is not particularly different than a regular API, where the available operations have been chosen, specified, and made available to the public at large by the developers.

The only real difference with a public-facing documented traditional API is that said API will outlive the original product. But that doesn't make CryptoKitties a better game, since Cripto Kitties won't be a thing anymore when that comes into play.

> This is not inherently made possible by the blockchain itself though.

It basically is. This is impossible on Eve, if you don't have permission from the people who make Eve.

But, with something on the blockchain, you don't need permission from the person who made the original asset, on the blockchain.

The asset is on the blockchain, and it is much more difficult to stop me from using that asset, compared to a centralized Eve database.

Two things are wrong here:

1) The reason it can't be done with EVE is not because EVE is not on the blockchain. It just happens to not be possible because the devs didn't make it so. They could have, but they chose not to.

2) Something being on the blockchain does not make it automatically permission-less. It depends on how the smart contracts involved are coded.

I think point 2) is something that a lot of people don't realise wrt/ NFTs. The NFTs are transferable without the author being involved because the Smart Contract that drives them has a function (aka an API endpoint) that provides that feature. It is not a property of the blockchain itself. It is a property of an arbitrary piece of code that happens to reside on the blockchain. A property that any web service is capable of providing without the blockchain having to be involved.

> It just happens to not be possible because the devs didn't make it so. They could have, but they chose not to.

And then they could change it at any time, as they would be the central authority. There would be not way to stop them from changing it.

Well, thats not true technically. I guess one way that they could implement it, such that they cannot change their mind in the future, would be if the game was run on some sort of decentralized public ledger, with a consensus mechanism.... oh wait, what does that sound like? Oh yeah, we have a word for that. Its called a blockchain.

> Something being on the blockchain does not make it automatically permission-less.

If I read the code, and the code makes it permissionless, the author can't change it later, if the code was written in a way that I can verify that.

Thats the point. Yes, someone can always say "yep, I totally pretty please promise that I won't change anything! Just trust me!"

And it is quite another thing for it to be a smart contract, that verifiably cannot be changed by the original author. Thats the difference.

> (aka an API endpoint) that provides that feature.

> A property that any web service is capable of providing

Oh? A feature, such as a public, immutable ledger, that is decentralized in such a way, using a consensus algorithm (such as PoW or PoS), such that there is no central authority that can change it unilaterally?

That feature? The feature that is, by definition, a blockchain?

Yes, it is true that if you add all the features that a blockchain has, to your software, then by definition it has all the features of the blockchain.

But that makes it a blockchain. You just re-invented the blockchain.

Blockchains are not the only way of achieving what you describe. It's just one mechanism. You seem to be conflating the "result" achieved with the "mechanism".

If a game company wanted to provide the same properties without a blockchain they could do so in other ways. A more extreme example is they could provide you with an actual legal certificate of ownership and transfer all rights to the digital property in that certificate. A deed of sorts. It could include a full description of the item and the available operations on it. You could host your own API to allow interactions. You could even host it on the blockchain if you wanted.

In the case of many of these digital game assets out there you have a record of ownership but the actual asset itself is hosted by the company of origin. Which means that if they go down you have proof of ownership but no still have no recourse when the asset in practice goes poof. The more required it is for the game company to provide api's for the asset the less actual gameplay is possible. smart contracts are pretty limited and the more operations they allow the more expensive it is to actually play the game which creates a market pressure for the game to trivial as regards the gameplay on the chain itself. Because of this market pressure what happens is a boom/bust cycle for the game.

The only way out is to host more of the gameplay elements off chain which defeats the purpose.

Does the blockchain make interoperability easier? yes but so does any interoperability standard. Do the cryptographic guarantees of the ledger make it easier to prove ownership? yes but that doesn't address the issues with gameplay being both trivial and expensive because of the market forces you inserted into the game.

> Blockchains are not the only way of achieving what you describe. It's just one mechanism

But you agree that there is some set of features that are only available on a Blockchain, right?

Well whatever that set of features is, that is the features that I am attempting to refer to.

So yes, if you agree that there are features that are only possible on a Blockchain, then I am correct that this set of features is only possible on a Blockchain and that is what I am talking about.

> If a game company wanted to provide the same properties

Not if I am talking about a feature that is only possible on the blockchain. So whatever featureset that you agree is only available on a blockchain that is what I am talking about.

Except that I don't agree those features are only available on a Blockchain.

But there are some features only available on a Blockchain right?

Do you agree that there are any features at all, ever, that are only on a Blockchain?

If so, then whatever features that you think are only available on a Blockchain is what I am talking about.

You are speaking in extreme hypotheticals. I am unaware of any set of features that require a blockchain to satisfy them. Is there an as of yet unknown set of features that require a blockchain? I don't know but I'm unaware of any such set right now and your reluctance to specify such a set suggests that you don't know of them either.

Really? You are going to claim that there is literally zero features that a blockchain provides, that are not solved elsewhere?

Like, you think there are equally good ways to solve the double spend problem, on a public ledger, in a decentralized manner, with no central authority, without a blockchain, and the various consensus algorithms involved in that?

yes

Ok, if you have a magic, better than blockchain solution that solves the Byzantine generals problem, and allows you to run a global, public, decentralized ledger, with no central authorities, that solves the double spending problem, then I would encourage you to release it and make billions and billions of dollars from that.

If you've got this magic solution, you could make so much money doing the same thing that blockchains and consensus algorithms do, in a better way.

The money is yours for the taking! Or maybe you could win a turning award! Go for it!

Go release a research paper, with your better than blockchain solution, and get a PhD from it, or computer science award, or billions of dollars in funding.

I look forward to you releasing your groundbreaking research paper, and upending the entire industry.

So, let's see. To emulate the ERC-721 smart contract you would need:

1. An API to transfer ownership, updating the owner_id field in the database for the spaceship.

2. Legal obligations preventing EVE from reversing the transaction or tampering with your "wallet".

3. Legal documents making you the owner of said spaceship where you and only you can administer it in the future, forever.

4. A full and open audit log of every API call to said API endpoint.

5. Legal assurance 1 and 4 are true and transparent.

6. Measures taken to assure that the API and database will stay online and legal obligations enforced forever.

Even with all these fulfilled a rogue actor could wreck havoc since it would still be centralized, while in a smart contract these things are enforced in code. For me, that difference alone is so big that I can't even compare them.

In all honesty, it feels the only reason we don't just say "wow, it's cool that we have a technology that intrinsically supports this" is because it's a cryptocurrency.

> A property that any web service is capable of providing without the blockchain having to be involved.

No, then you run into the Byzantine generals problem, which is the specific problem solved by blockchains.

So maybe the problem is you still don't understand what a blockchain is.

You don’t have the Byzantine generals problem with a centralized database.

Whatever the database says is authoritative.

Unless the intellectual property assets (art and character designs) have been licensed putting them on a blockchain does not make them legal to use.

What do you mean? HyperDragons is just interacting with the CryptoKitties smart contract. They are not using any art or other IP from CryptoKitties.

So cyptokitties are not cartoon characters like Pokemon?

All I'm saying is, if Nintendo made a Pokemon NFT, another company such as Ubisoft would not be able to add Pikachu to their blockchain based game without an intellectual property license by Nintendo. This would seemingly make a Pokemon NFT rather pointless.

I would still be able to build applications utilizing the Pokemon NFT, and use it in my game, without infringing on the copyright. The NFT itself is just an ID with some meta data and doesn't contain any IP. The IP is in Nintendo's own front-end for the NFT.

So I've been thinking about this and working on this for years, so I have a different perspective. Is everything fully better for having blockchain integration? Clearly no. Are the benefits worth the trade-offs? I'd argue yes, on the whole.

1. The global worldwide market place. While this introduces commerce/real money, which come with very real downsides, it also makes the game high stakes (meaning most people play to the best of their ability). WoW and other games showed how much a vibrant marketplace can add to a game experience for some players, and having everything trading for essentially real money doesn't change that underlying level of engagement.

2. Permissionless development. While there are many examples of attempts at building on top of CryptoKitties fizzling out, there are also success stories, especially around "WCK"—a fungible token created by an unaffiliated third party developer that essentially created a worldwide "Give a Kitty, Take a Kitty" pool that let you send away any cat you didn't want and get back one that you preferred. And because it's on the blockchain and uses blockchain standards, it can also be used as liquidity and barter, both of which add to the experience. I don't believe I've ever seen something like this built on top of a non-blockchain game... certainly it wouldn't be quite as easy as this was to build! Some examples of other third party creations include an auto-breeding platform, a Kitty racing game, a Kitty battling game, Kitty cosmetics (your cat NFT can own its own hat NFT!), and a trustless Kitty bounty smart contract.

3. Almost unparalleled transparency. This has all kinds of fun side effects from allowing the community to fully "check the work" of the developer to what amounts to an open-to-everyone API. And what's more, this is a standardized API so that someone who builds tools for CryptoKitties would be able to also use those tools for Cheeze Wizards. Again, there are amazing third party tools built on the backs of APIs of online games all the time, but it's actually cool how much you get "for free" by being on the blockchain. The verified fairness is pretty cool IMO.

4. Immortal assets. I poured a lot into City of Heroes back in the day, and then one day the devs shut down the server, and took all my heroes with it. This is a very common refrain. As long as there are nodes out there running Ethereum, anyone can breed their Kitty NFTs. That's not nothing. (There's a lot of nuance here about art assets, IP rights, user interface, etc., and it's messy and still very much being figured out, but that's how the world works—you build it, then you improve it!)

5. Value capture. Yes, this almost always has evolved into speculation and nonsense valuations and irrational behavior. But still: when you buy a Kitty, you have the right to sell that Kitty. When you breed a new Kitty, you have the right to sell that Kitty. This is enabled by blockchain almost for free! Note this is distinct and different from point 1. WoW has a marketplace, but when you earn a legendary BoP sword, you cannot then capture that value by selling it if that's what you want to do. This point is as often riddled with downsides as it brings upsides, but the unique and novel truth of it makes it better than a non-blockchain game for some people.

Again, this comes from years of being in the space, playing with these toys, building these systems, being a part of these communities. For some of us, this has been incredibly exciting, and fun, because we chose to explore and figure out for ourselves what upsides this new frontier might hold for us.

1/ Making people play to the best of their ability.

People have always been insanely competitive, without bringing in a token in the middle. All you're doing is making it impossible to play (or not lose money) if you're not trying your hardest, all the time.

2/ You're really going to pretend you've never seen communities make their own services on top of a game? The only real difference is that it is fully automated in this case, but service markets have existed forever. Path of Exile has a whole discord with tens of thousands of users just to exchange things.

3/ Only if Cheese Wizards is a carbon copy of CryptoKitties, just changing names. Otherwise, data structures are different behaviours are different, and your work just has to be redone. Like in the current world. But it's true, at least it's open.

4/ You gotta really fucking love your game if you're willing to keep minting (and therefore paying) for NFTs that are worthless and unusable anywhere else

5/ This is an absolute cancer that has made every single game that added real money trading objectively worse. It makes every interaction with your game make you take into account the potential money loss. Like making your kitties spin? Too bad sucker, that's not the optimal money making strat, enjoy feeling ever so slightly bad every time.

The only useful point is the openness of the API. Everything else are things we already do in games (good and bad), but worse. Anyone in this industry not seeing this has either zero experience with games, or destructive tendencies just to make a bit of cash on misery.

Agreed, plus it raises this question: why would any gaming company cooperate with an API that effectively removes their control over their assets and enables competitors and third parties from building on top of them without requiring authorization?

I can only see the "open API" benefit for free open source games. So it wouldn't have helped Vitalik and his famed WoW sword.

Then again, making fun games is hard, and there's no escaping it. So maybe it wouldn't help free games either.

Thank you for the verbose answer, though I disagree with most points.

1) "having everything trading for essentially real money doesn't change that underlying level of engagement." It has been long established that this is absolutely the case. A classic example of this would be Diablo 3's RMAH effectively destroying the game by having the entire economy be driven by real-world profit-seeking grind

2) I consider this to be very misleading. All of these intra-game features are not made available by the blockchain itself, but by the details of the various Smart Contracts involved. In that sense, the set of instructions available to would-be developers to interact with a game is going to be limited by the operations (and the various rules governing them) that are present in the smart contracts. If a game features permission-less development like this, it's because its developers have decided to make the requisite operations available and documented. This is no different than a regular documented public API.

3) I see nothing preventing this from being done without the blockchain.

4) This is the one potentially interesting wrinkle, but I find it to have marginal interest at best. Assets are inherently immortal unless explicit steps are taken by developers to prevent them to be. What is actually at play here is Immortal Entity Ownership, aka Immortal Scarcity. That's very interesting from a revenue-making potential, but not really much more than that.

5) That does not make the game itself better though.

#2 is the most important one to me, so I'll address that specifically.

MOST games I've seen don't provide a public API for players to interact with, and even when players do reverse engineer them, they get accused of cheating, hacking, whatever, and often get their accounts banned.

In the world of blockchain gaming, it's trivial to build tools and meta-games around anything, and there's basically nothing that the original developers can do to stop it. I can host a small bit of static HTML that gives users the ability to battle cryptokitties with each other, and capture each other's kitties. Then at the end of the day, the winner can go back to the main cryptokitties site, and breed their new kitties like normal. I don't need to ask anyone's permission, and all I need is a stable place to land some HTML, and maybe deploy some contracts depending on the level of integrations I want to build. I don't need to apply for an API key, or start up an email conversation with anyone at Dapper Labs. I can just build it, and anyone with a web3 capable browser can play along.

This is the magic of "permissionless" systems, and it's the standard across the blockchain gaming ecosystem.

Sure, but my point is that the lack of blockchain technology is not what's preventing most games from featuring this, it's only the developer's willingness to do so.

These reads to me as: Haven for asian bot farms.

Why do anti-crypto people always seem to go into all every conversation with completely bad faith?

It's fun to take something someone else built, and do something new and not planned by the origional devs with it. That's it, it's just not necessary to assume bad faith.

Because the world they seem to be advocating for is a dystopian hellhole.

> Why do anti-crypto people always seem to go into all every conversation with completely bad faith?

It's not bad faith. It's reality. It's also spotting logical and technological holes the size of Jupiter in any of the proposals from clueless[1] crypto maximalists.

[1] Many of them are not clueless, just grifters

I'd add, someone can have a master's in math and be a phenomenal software engineer and still clueless vis-á-vis crypto.

It's like Dunning-Kruger, except the bar for "doesn't know enough to know he doesn't know enough" is right at the ceiling

You don't have to be a master in math or a phenomenal software engineer to use common sense and logic. And common sense is more than enough to deal with crypto.

> In the world of blockchain gaming, it's trivial to build tools

It's not trivial, because making fun metagames is hard, because game design is hard, and blockchain is not a shortcut to it.

> I can host a small bit of static HTML that gives users the ability to battle cryptokitties

This is backwards. A game about battling kitties must start with kitty battling gameplay that is fun. This is like discussing the programing language -- who cares? Tell me how your game is fun.

Blockchain won't help you at all there. Nothing about it makes anything "fun".

You are proving the other commenter's point: blockchain is not a special sauce for games. Whether a game is enjoyable or not has nothing to do with blockchain. In fact, it turns to be the opposite: if blockchain is involved, you can almost bet there's very little gameplay at all, because that's not what the developers care about.

> 1) "having everything trading for essentially real money doesn't change that underlying level of engagement." It has been long established that this is absolutely the case. A classic example of this would be Diablo 3's RMAH effectively destroying the game by having the entire economy be driven by real-world profit-seeking grind

It doesn't need to be "real" money, just something people value (even if its in-game assets). But having something at stake definitely does alter the gameplay

Try playing poker for "fun" (without real money), and then agin with money at stake. People play a lot more seriously, the psychology of the game changes.

> 4. Immortal assets. I poured a lot into City of Heroes back in the day, and then one day the devs shut down the server, and took all my heroes with it.

Had City of Heroes implemented their heroes "on blockchain", this would have gotten you nowhere.

CoH's heroes would have been useless outside their servers, blockchain or not. They mean nothing if you don't have the game's engine to make then do fun things.

NFTs only work when they are the meaning in themselves, but this can only happen when the "game" is fundamentally trivial and uninteresting, like CryptoKitties. Real games require an engine to run them, and if the engine shuts down, your "assets" become meaningless.

Gameplay is what matters. Making a server open-source is more meaningful than running the assets on blockchain.

I view crypto as a good way to create an ecosystem rather than just a single game. But to create an ecosystem requires multiple games, by multiple companies. At the center of it all, you probably need a selfless company with tons of money to bootstrap the core IP, that simultaneously cares very much about its IP but also doesn't care too much so they let indies and amateurs experiment with it.

I can see the "end game" and it looks nice. But I don't know how to get there. I don't know if its even possible to get there given the hurdles involved - some of the required attributes from the involved actors feels contradictory.

Color me surprised that the person claiming to have enjoyed a crypto game is trying to shill a different crypto game

They are like porn games, the gameplay is not the focus, fucking is.

Except it's you getting fucked in crypto.

There are some porn games that are considered very fun and even influential on the larger games industry, particularly coming out of Japan such as Rance[0], a grand strategy series that's run for over 30 years.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rance_(series)

I wonder if there are any prn games where the gameplay is so good you forget about the prn

The Fate series which later spawned a massive franchise (multiple games, movies and books) started off as an eroge.

It doesn't have a whole lot more sex than your average fantasy novel, and like your average fantasy novel it's also an extremely long retelling of the author's tabletop game.

(Fate somehow has exactly the same magic system as White Wolf Mage even though it's too old to have copied it. Not sure how that happened.)

> Fate somehow has exactly the same magic system as White Wolf Mage even though it's too old to have copied it.

Unless there’s a different Fate that also started of as eroge and spawned a massive franchise, it was first released in 2006, 13 years after White Wolf first released Mage: The Ascension, and so was very much not too early to have copied from Mage.

The setting was written in 1996 with Mahoutsukai no Yoru/Kara no Kyoukai.

Also the other half of the setting is all about vampires, and it's definitely kind of like White Wolf Vampire, but not close enough to look intentional.

Wait, Kara no Kyoukai and Fate are set in the same universe?

Sort of, the setting is the same but none of the series are actually in continuity with each other. Even Fate/Zero isn’t actually the same universe as Fate.

If they did that it’d restrict the story too much - Nasu loves setting rules about how the magic stuff works, but he only does it so he can break them later to make someone look cool. That’s why he’s the world’s best fantasy writer.

> The setting was written in 1996 with Mahoutsukai no Yoru/Kara no Kyoukai.

Still three years after Mage was published.

Not in Japanese though.

>It doesn't have a whole lot more sex than your average fantasy novel

The all-ages versions of Fate also remove all of the sex with minimal effect on the story.

The Melty Blood fighting game series is a spinoff of an adult visual novel as well

I remember when CryptoKitties clogged the ETH blockchain and it has become unfeasible to do most of the transactions.

Anyway, the game is very simple and it actually makes much more sense than the recent NFT fud. Essentially you combine characters to create new characters that have some of the traits of the parent characters. It's a breeding game.

I kind of see how it can be valuable to own an NFT character with certain traits that can be used to create other NFT characters. Unlike the recent NFT stuff, it makes sense within its universe. The NFT market on the other hand is just a hot patato game where you speculate that there exist a greater fool in a rigged marketplace.

Gamer sentiment is generally very anti micro transactions, all the crypto games I’ve seen so far are micro transactions front and centre on steroids

Check https://www.cryptokitties.co/guide/ways-to-play

The reason it seems like they didn't describe the "actual game" is that there is no actual "gameplay". You just pay to collect cats.

You can trade the cat tokens with other people, try to sell them on the marketplace, pay to generate semi randomized new cat tokens via "breeding", and... just have them under your wallet / name. There is no action, no RPG, no platforming, no game board... basically nothing besides collecting and swapping tokens. They actually do show the entire "gameplay loop" in this image from the article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-flow-chart-with-ar...

They encourage you to collect more with timed events, where you "win" a bonus for having collected a certain type of cat token, but that's about it.

If you're of a certain generation, you might remember a craze of kids collecting and trading Pokemon cards, and never really playing the game. It's basically like that except there is no underlying game to play, all you have are the tradable cards.

I remember the craze around collecting the cards without really playing the game. And then, separately, playing the game without collecting the cards, with the "Pokemon Trading Card Game" for game boy.

There is a magic the gathering like trading card game on ethereum that seems neat. I doubt it will get big enough to make sense, but having come from paper MTG as a kid and not being able to really digitally collect cards since... that would be super cool. You would actually 'own' the cards.

Are you talking about sky weaver?

I started playing it and I am having fun, unfortunately I'm not good enough to beat any real players though.

Haven't heard of sky weaver -- It was listed here, but none of these are ringing a bell, so I think it maybe already died! https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/?category=gaming

This is one of the few areas where I think there's a legitimately useful role for NFTs. WoTC (the owners of MtG) could "mint" a limited number of cards each year, just like today, controlling the rarity of certain ones, etc. People could pay WoTC for them, and they could be traded in the blockchain, which shows the "chain of custody" all the way back to WoTC, which is what makes it "authentic". Online tournaments could check your ownership of cards via the blockchain, and I can even see IRL tournaments checking the blockchain too, if you want to print a copy of your card.

They already do this sort of thing with MtG Online, I think you can purchase and trade cards in-game. They also let you send them physical cards, and they will give you the in-game card in your account in return. Not sure if they go the other way around.

From WoTC's perspective, one of the downsides of a "public" blockchain would be that they don't get a cut of any transaction beyond the first one.

> They already do this sort of thing with MtG Online

Exactly. They can track all this stuff in their own database. WotC doesn't stand to benefit from putting anything on a blockchain.

Generalized case: no one stands to benefit from putting such things on a blockchain.

Except the people making money by running or grifting off a blockchain.

I think it's possible they might see some benefit. It would basically hinge on people's faith in WotC vs a blockchain to administer that data. If the blockchain was more trusted - say because of concerns WotC might go out of business one day, etc - then using it might entice people to put more money in.

If gameplay is also mediated through WotC's servers, though, then the cards would lose any intrinsic value when/if WotC goes under or stops supporting the game.

And if others are allowed to create their own servers so that the game can live outside of WotC's auspices, that would also undermine the value of the NFT cards, since anyone who is able to create their own implementation of the game could just as easily start creating non-NFT versions of the cards that people can use.

I don't think that's the case. It's also a tabletop game so the rules are all out there in public and not even inhumanely complex.

Even if WotC's servers go down, you could use the blockchain to prove ownership of a card for use in a live tournament. It's also possible for a third party to create their own server to implement the game, and then refer back to the blockchain for ownership.

As for non-official cards, I mean, yeah? That's the case with physical Magic cards too. Not even actual counterfeits have held the MTG secondary market back from astounding prices. Meanwhile non-NFT cards would be the equivalent of proxy cards - cards that aren't X, but both players agree to treat as X - which haven't been any more successful than counterfeits in holding Magic prices down.

I'm not claiming there would be greater faith in a blockchain than WotC, I'm just saying I see it as possible.

> It's also possible for a third party to create their own server to implement the game

No, it wouldn't be possible because the concept of IP and copyright exists regardless of blockchains.

Neither apply to game mechanics.

Even if all the WotC IP ends up with the most determined patent troll ever, the game itself could still be implemented.

As for the card art... who knows what the legal situation would end up being. But even if it's totally legally off limits, the ability to load custom art would render it practically moot anyway.

That really depends on the community that grows around the game. People spend money on all kinds of expensive stuff that they could replace with a cheap replica if they wanted to, but they don't, they want the original thing. If the community sees value in an original WotC NFT, they'll have value.

Furthermore, if said community creates tournaments and online services that require official WotC NFT to participate, that will further cement their value.

That you can create your own NFTs and your own tournaments isn't going to be of much use when the rest of the players only plays with the official NFTs and won't accept yours.

Your words are contradictions.

You say they will see benefit.

Yet all you mention is how the blockchain might usurp the faith wotc relies on.

Why would wotc ever fund their potential demise or depend on people that never had faith on their product in the first place?

WotC doesn't care if a potential consumer trusts their long-term business model, but they sure do care if the potential consumer trusts their purchase won't poof out of existence one day.

By throwing it on the blockchain, WotC could market it as the digital card being basically as safe from vanishing as a physical card. "Even if we go bust in 50 years, your digital cards will all still be yours! You'll still be able to prove ownership of all your cards, and will still be free as ever to trade coughsell for incredible profitcough them!"

I have no idea if the market as a whole would bite, or how deeply. But there is a not-insignificant number of people who count on Magic cards gaining significant amounts of value over time. Some use it as a way to justify the purchases, while others have turned it into an outright investment strategy.

I can only imagine that digital cards reliant on WotC's active involvement to exist would suffer significant discounts.

But maybe being digital is such a huge hit in the first place that it doesn't ultimately matter. I have no idea. Hence, why I said it seems possible.

What is this mysterious demographic that were never interested in the decades old proven track record of wotc but suddenly interested in digital marketing bullshit that don't actually last forever(links go dead all the time without a caretaker, nfts aren't an exception)

Ah, wild short term speculators while depending on another foreign caretaker with no interest in your products?

No thanks. Enough with the stupid ideas.

I don't get the hostility, nor why you keep trying to shove words in my mouth.

I never said anything about new customers, nor even old customers.

I've also been very explicit that I'm just talking about seeing a plausible possibility, and not made any claims about it's probability. Nor said I think any person or entity - WotC included - should actually do anything or not.

And I've absolutely not made any particular judgements on the intrinsic value of NFTs.

I get you don't like the whole crypto thing, but this reaction is way beyond the point of reason.

I'm really not much of a fan either, honestly. That doesn't mean we should demonize our own thoughts if they point towards a hypothetical possibility that some other people might find value in it.

The collectibles WotC issues could be much more valuable if they are issued on the blockchain where both exchangeability and access to provenance are guaranteed.

I would argue it's the opposite. The physical copies are unique objects that only one person can own and enjoy. With the way NFTs work, the blockchain version of one would be an infinitely copyable file that just happens to have a scoreboard somewhere that says that only one person can "own" it in some very specific sense. But everyone else can still enjoy it just as easily.

Unless it's hosted on some WotC server where only the NFT owner can access it. But that also undermines its value, since then you don't really own it any more than someone "owns" a Kindle book: barring breaking DRM, as soon as Amazon decides to shut the Kindle service down, its either gone now, or its days are numbered.

Note I'm comparing digital collectibles with provenance determined by WotC servers to digital collectibles issued on the blockchain, i.e. NFTs. I'm suggesting the latter could prove to be more valuable than the former. I am not comparing digital collectibles to physical collectibles.

>>With the way NFTs work, the blockchain version of one would be an infinitely copyable file that just happens to have a scoreboard somewhere that says that only one person can "own" it in some very specific sense.

There are already NFTs worth tens and in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars of ETH (see CryptoPunks NFTs) so we know people are willing to pay for something where the image is copyable, but the original can still be authenticated.

In the case of the physical copies, people can easily photocopy them or share their images digitally, yet the verifiable original still retains its value. I don't believe inability to copy the image associated with a physical or digital collectible is what imparts the collectible with value.

People are only willing to "pay" for worthless NFT garbage due to the bigger fool theory. The grifters who created scams like CryptoPunks are already running out of fools.

That's an entirely speculative claim, and doesn't even make sense.

There is no difference in a digital Magic card and a physical one in terms of motivations to pay for one.

The anti-decentralization camp used CO2 emissions as their excuse for their wholesale condemnation of NFTs before. But now that that's gone, there doesn't seem to be anything of substance to support their blanket condemnation of them.

I'm not anti-decentralization. But obviously only a moron would pay for an NFT regardless of the CO2 emissions.

Again, there is no substance behind your claim. There is no difference in a digital Magic card and a physical one in terms of motivations to pay for one.

That you're anti-decentralization is just speculation on my part, as I can't think of any other plausible motivation for you inexplicably singling out NFTs as worthy of derision, and not centralized digital collectibles or physical collectibles.

But WotC doesn't want them to be more valuable, it wants to be able to capture more value from them. These are not equivalent goals.

And this is one of the big things with many of the apps crypto promoters wave around that are about big incumbents adopting crypto: they implicitlt require those incumbents being motivated to create value that people invested in crypto infrastructure (the exact for depending on the particular cryptocurrency model) can capture rather than seeking to capture created value themselves.

Ceteris paribus, WotC can capture more value when the collectibles it issues are more valuable. It can sell them at a higher initial price.

Whether post-issuance value capture is sufficiently increased by controlling the platform to compensate for the lower market value those assets can command can be argued of course, but I intuit it is not.

As it is WotC captures almost no value from secondary market exchanges of its physical collectibles. I don't see why the prospect of creating a valuable secondary market for its digital collectibles, where it is the sole seller in the primary market, wouldn't be a more attractive prospect for it than trying to create a digital walled garden where there would be significant OPEX costs and no assurance of market demand.

> Ceteris paribus, WotC can capture more value when the collectibles it issues are more valuable

Obviously, but equally obviously we aren't talking about a situation where ceteris paribus even approximately holds.

Yes, I think it was clear I wasn't implying that it was, given I went onto address the other factors right afterwards. The ceteris paribus was just an analytical device to control for one factor - initial sale price - and establish what its effect is on WotC's profitability.

I hate it so much that you've outlined a very viable use of a blockchain.

The obvious question would be why do you hate it so much. I can't recall the viability of any piece of technology affecting me so negatively. We create technology to solve problems. Even if you can't think of a reason why some technology should exist, I can't imagine why it should elicit such strong emotions.

The CO2 footprint for one.

You're a day late with that argument... https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/15/1059520/the-merg...

So bitcoin has moved to proof of stake?

Bitcoin doesn’t even have smart contracts. How is it relevant?

Is it not a blockchain technology?

It is, however, not the blockchain technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

And yet it causes more climate change than Scotland.

The entire thread is about Ethereum...

I doubt it, they just hid the dirty little secret that everyone putting up the stake will now mine it on another chain

(Pssst, you're supposed to move the goalposts to "inequality")

Now think about whether anything at all would be amiss if "the blockchain" were to be replaced by a good old trusted database.

What happens when someone turns off the database?

The MtG NFTs should be traded on MtGox so we come full circle.

They can do that even more easily with a standard server...

It was all just marketing all along :) Thanks for the enlightening comment!

>It's basically like that except there is no underlying game to play,

Do you think anyone paying >1k for a Pokémon or Magic card is actually using them to play?! That shit is in a sealed case and only sees daylight to impress people or to resell it. I've met collectors who use home printed cards because they are too scared to damage even 10$ cards.

But you can choose what to do with your cards. And there are formats that don't need you to spend tons of money to have fun.

they should set up a fractional reserve system, where you deposit your valuable cards at a card bank and get a "card voucher" you can then use to play actual games with. The card bank could then lend out the cards to other players for profit.

over time, you may not even need the actual cards anymore and just have the vouchers.

Yes I do! My legacy decks have a value between 5-10k and they see play almost every week. Just go to a tournament to see people playing with the real cards as proxy are not allowed. For Magic the high price is mainly driven by the need to have copies to be able to play.

> Why breed Purrstige Traits? Breeding a Purrstige Trait can be challenging, but it’s rewarding too. Because Purrstige Traits are time-limited, they’re particularly rare — and especially valued as a result. Plus, Purrstige Traits are always a nice visual treat, creating some of the game’s most beautiful and unique cats.

From the docs, lots of talk about value. Not much reason why. It reminds me of the Beanie Babies Valuation books. Made everyone scream over a $7 plushie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania “A fool and his money…”

If you were gambling on tulip futures in taverns, you knew exactly what you were doing.

What is challenging about it?

I can’t wait for the world to wake up from this insanity.

They won't ever. Some part of the population will always fall for it. Hope is a powerful emotional that overrides all logic.

Ya…

Has anyone done something similar for a "gacha waifu" type game ala Genshin Impact? If they get the random generator making nice looking characters, I can see the ability to trade unique and attractive characters appealing to some. But it has to be backed by a decent game.

This isn't crypto and I don't know if things are tradable, but Arrowmancer checks the waifu and randomly generated aspect.

Thanks that's interesting. Crypto isn't required for trade of course but I guess one place it helps is that the developer doesn't need to implement the trade details themselves, just read results from the blockchain. Not sure if this is even possible at the fidelity level people would want though without external data hosting, most NFTs I heard about just link to a resource on a server anyway, and that could be troublesome in a game.

dev here: the characters aren't tradeable atm.

but something we do allow is for players to create characters on the main waifulabs site[1], and then share QR import codes of that custom characters with friends.

[1] https://waifulabs.com

With 2D, rather than 3D: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sizigi.wco...

Back in 2002 I used to hang out in Yahoo pool rooms. I was in a league even.

At the time a lot of people in there were cracking Yahoo rares. Names that you can't make as username anymore.

Most coveted were ones with capitals, special characters, underscores at the beginning. People bought and sold those for thousands of dollars.

That made more sense to me than these crypto games. Those were at least something scarce and not manufactured. They had intrinsic value, especially for the cracker because they had to come up with name lists, and brute force the passwords, and use potentially trojan ridden hacking tools from shady phpnuke sites.

The usernames were pretty cool in contrast with the new username rules Yahoo had. Card trading just seems boring AF.

You might be interested in minecraft name trading. Much of the same things ring familiar with what you said

Yea i miss those days. I have 1 id still left out of all the ones i had. You_can_suck_it_just_dont_bite

The other ones i had i was young at the time and dumb and let someone hold onto them and they got me never heard from him again good ones too

Probably slightly less dumb than collecting bored money pictures. But only slightly.

Neopets, Valenth & more come to mind as early 2000s crypto-less versions of this. You can make the exact same comments about the fun-ness of those games. And yet people loved them.

So yes, crypto is the focus and yes, gameplay is lacking (for those who seek different kinds of games). But those are separate issues rather than related.

In other words, CryptoKitties innovation was never going to be gameplay, because it is explicitly a clone of pet collecting games of yore with the spin being different underlying infrastructure & payments technology.

Those were just kids games no? Monetizing something like that with the crazy fluctuations in prices seems incredibly problematic, kids can trade cards for sure, but when you tie money to every transaction it looks more like selling cigarettes to kids

Once again, there's nothing there. Pay, breed, sell. That's it! You didn't miss anything!

I generally agree with your sentiment.

It's also not helping that so many of these games are just card collecting games, because there was a need to integrate NFTs somehow (that's where profit is for the developers) so collectibles was the easy answer... and then they have pasted some lousy "gameplay" on top of it.

Also there is a whole exploitative side to certain of these games which setup a deliberately very high cost of entry, incentivizing a rent-seeking market where rich owners borrow their entry ticket and let poorer people work to earn the daily rewards available in game for them (because at this point it isn't really playing anymore).

I know of one notable exception, Cypto Royale [0], it's definitely a simple appearing game, basically multiplayer rock/paper/scissor mechanics, but if you do play it you can notice few more layers in gameplay (placement, size/hp management, wall physics)... so there is a bit of strategy and skill involved. Unlike so many other cyptogames they also don't require you to own or even know about crypto to play (it is free to play, it doesn't even require an account). Their approach, even for a simple looking game, seems way closer to actual gaming as a way to potentially get players accustomed to crypto.

[0] https://cryptoroyale.one/

The game is the game of life where you try to make the most money

Chiming in because we have an open source game engine on Saito (https://saito.io/arcade) which imo is the future of crypto gaming but is usually overlooked by people who want to talk about crypto gaming because what they want to talk about is tokens and speculation rather than actual games.

If you check out the Arcade you'll see there are lots of fun games - my personal favorites are Twilight Struggle, Poker and Red Imperium. You can do things have encrypted peer-to-peer chat and video channels while gaming, and all gameplay is provably fair.

Agree there is a bias in media coverage, but it's not because there isn't fun stuff happening and is more because of selection-bias towards talking about speculative assets and token speculation. Also not a tremendous amount of overlap between people who actually play games and those pitching breathless articles to tech media.

Yeah lots of “cart before the horse” happening in this space. When talking about games these days we often imagine rich engaging audio/visual interactive experiences. The crypto people don’t really seem to understand that kind of game.

But there are also more turn-based games which really are about the mechanics of which items/stats/buildings/lands you have, what their effects are, how to level up etc which all could be encoded in the chain. Its not a mainstream gaming format but thats where crypto ‘gaming’ could provide a new kind of experience. Although I would say the term on-chain game is more specific. The “game” could become as much about finding tools that give you an edge in accessing and navigating the on-chain data from yourself and other ‘players’. The genre is then competitive turn-based strategy with a turn timer (block time). I would compare it to playing competitive Civilisation with full map vision and real cash rewards. Which isn’t really mainstream gaming atm although I’m sure there is a minor audience for it, but for now I expect real on-chain gaming to stay pretty niche.

Something like the 40-year-old-and-still-ongoing DnD game might make sense in this setting [1]

Considering blockchains survive for 40 years which is not a given.

[1] https://nerdist.com/article/dungeons-and-dragons-neverending...

wow, thats a nice example as well

See Dark Forrest which I believe is the best example of a game, on Ethereum, which is crypto native.

https://blog.zkga.me/announcing-darkforest

Crypto aside, most collectable card games aren't very much fun in my opinion.

I interviewed the head of a group who funds crypto games and his take was that these types of games no longer get funded exactly because of that. They aren't really fun because they aren't really games.

https://youtu.be/0hzyW-MLSBw

It’s just a remnant from the year when ‘blockchain’ and ‘crypto’ where the big buzzwords that attracted investors.

> What Went Wrong?

It's in the title of the article. It's a "Blockchain Game". That's what went wrong. It was a flawed concept from its inception. Blockchains are pretty cool from a math/cryptography standpoint, but they really do not provide added value in most areas people try to apply them to.

CryptoKitties is a digital trading card game. You get cards, you can "breed" cards together to make new cards, you trade/buy/sell cards. That's it. Nowhere at any point in this "game" is a blockchain necessary. Nowhere at any point does a blockchain add any value whatsoever. In fact, due to transaction fees, I'd argue the blockchain actively detracts from the game.

The idea of an artist signing their work in a cryptographically unique way is not new or revolutionary, and it certainly doesn't need a blockchain. There's a reason the general sentiment the art community has towards NFTs is overwhelmingly negative: it's because they literally actively harm us.

More accurately it can be described as a digital trading card game built on Ethereum.

In the real world, people play trading card games all the time and a big part of the ecosystem is trading the trading cards. Only, it is really annoying to have to ship around and maintain physical cards, and I want my card collection in the cloud. Some people would thereby prefer to play an online version of, say, Magic: The Gathering, or whatever the Pokémon one is called, etc.

The problem now is... how do you do the trading part? You could go to the trouble of yourself building a marketplace for the cards and then integrating all of the payment methods required, and then dealing with all of the trust and fraud issues that result from people sending money via banks or PayPal that they later chargeback or refund, all while dealing with whatever crazy tax implications come up from running a market.

But you don't want to do any of that: you want to code a game, and it isn't like Wizards of the Coast is trying to take money off of the aftermarket! They just make money by selling the initial randomized official card packs. Because you went digital now you are doing a ton of extra work and are wasting a ton of time dealing with payment processing issues when none of that is related to your actual business model or product design.

And, at the end of the day, doing that giant marketplace is a hard job that other companies specialize in. If I told you eBay provided some kind of digital asset API that let you simply assign tracking numbers to products but then eBay kept track of the ownership as it changed and all your game had to do is ask "what cards does this user still own?" when it opens, I imagine a ton of developers would jump on that bandwagon.

Only, eBay doesn't provide that API, and likely would avoid doing so out of concern you would shut down the game on a whim and cause them issues; and, even if they did, now your entire game backend would then be built around a single marketplace that might randomly pull your game for some reason and shut down your entire company in a way where you are SCREWED as your end-to-end ownership pipeline is modeled inside of eBay's database rather than being something you control and can migrate.

If only there were some off-the-shelf technology for tracking digital assets that you could trivially add as a dependency to your project, letting you write a few lines of code to define your asset and which had APIs for querying ownership... one which was an open ecosystem controlled by a shared protocol instead of a single company, thereby allowing not just one market but any number of competing markets with different ideas on auctions or escrow to exist. Wouldn't that be amazing?!

Well: that's Ethereum; like, that's precisely what Ethereum is doing. If you think collectible trading card games aren't a dumb idea--and even if you hate them and think the premise is bad for gaming, I am going to remind you that these things are SUPER POPULAR and so your opinion doesn't in some sense matter here as you are just ignoring reality--then Ethereum is a GLORIOUS idea that makes it absolutely trivial for game developers to build them and for users to participate.

I think the argument that Ethereum/etc provide useful off-the-shelf APIs/services for implementing something like this might be the one point in their favor

> If only there were some off-the-shelf technology for tracking digital assets

Isn't this any relational database where you can set the owner_id of an item?

> your entire game backend would then be built around a single marketplace that might randomly pull your game for some reason and shut down your entire company

Most online games have some sort of digital assets they have to keep track of, and that's one of the trivial things to implement.

i think you missed the part about having to run that service yourself and all the headaches that entails

But you already have to run yourself a similar infrastructure for the game itself, the digital asset tracking is just a small part that can be integrated within the existing systems.

No: most online games don't maintain a marketplace where users can trade their assets for cash, running auctions or whatever similar to eBay. That is the issue here: people want to be able to sell their cards to other players, and now you need to build a mechanism that supports that correctly without becoming riled in the customer support issues.

Also, BTW: part of what makes the physical cards valuable in the long term is that even if the company that sold them goes out of business, the cards don't disappear and they still work to play the game... your dismissive attempt to build this sort of thing using centralized tech is thereby pretty ridiculous on the face of it even if you didn't try to tackle the money issues yourself.

What you want is a game that has no backend and preferably is coded using forwards-compatible technologies like HTML/JavaScript that can use these APIs to access their state for the long term... and again, that's Ethereum.

(Note: I ran a market for apps for over a decade and before that I was a game developer for almost half a decade; I thereby know what things are and aren't hard.)

For the marketplace-specific functionality in multiplayer games it could be useful, but I don't see how blockchain makes it any easier to implement or safer. All the stored transactions and data are meaningless if the front-end of the application is not supported anymore, so you can no longer view your items in 3D and use them in-game.

What's the point of owning a Fortnite skin if the game is gone and you can not use or showcase it anymore? Not to mention that even if you somehow manage to retrieve the 3d asset from the information stored in the blockchain, you probably can't legally use it anywhere else due to copyright laws.

> That is the issue here: people want to be able to sell their cards to other players, and now you need to build a mechanism that supports that correctly without becoming riled in the customer support issues.

I mean, if you put it like that it sounds as if the main advantage of the blockchain technology here is to offload responsibility for the inevitable issues that arise when people start trading for real money, such as scams or people regretting their purchases. But you're not actually solving these problems, you just gain the ability to point to the decentralized blockchain and claim there's nothing you can do about it.

> Well: that's Ethereum; like, that's precisely what Ethereum is doing.

Then why does OpenSea etc. exist?

It seems to me that Ethereum just solves the trivial problem of providing an API to do the trade itself. You could easily have a trusted company providing the exact same service cheaper and more efficiently with a centralized database. If having a unified trading backend provided was something game companies actually wanted, it would have existed already. You don't need blockchain for that. You may have problems with the company providing the platform going belly-up and the backend disappearing, or that they messed with the trades and broke trust. Then you could say Ethereum would be a good replacement providing additional value (in exchange for cost/speed/efficiency though). But the thing Ethereum would be replacing and improve upon never existed in the first place, which tells me nobody really wanted it.

Building a service on top of Ethereum that facilitates the trades, lets you view items, lets you store the data behind the items in a robust way.. that's what would provide most of the value. But that's hard. And it seems we're pretty far from having a really robust/universal solution built on top of Ethereum, for anything more than URL to JPEGs. And even when we do, I'd argue that we never needed Ethereum as the backend to begin with. Most likely the items on the Ethereum blockchain will still be completely meaningless and without significant value without a huge frontend built by some large corporation. And then that corporation might as well have used a centralised ledger to track those items. I.e. something we could do 10 years ago, and would have been done 10 years ago if there was interest for it. Enthusiasts could build open-source replacements, yes, but by the time they get there the items will probably have lost most of their value, the fad will have passed.

Creating collectible/tradable cards and items is hard. It takes physical work. You need convince shops to get it out in the market etc. That's what provides a lot of the rarity of those things. When Ethereum makes it easy to create new collectibles, you'll flood the market continuously. Fads will come and go much faster. It'll be harder for the items to have staying value. Ethereum might ruin the very thing it's trying to facilitate.

Or I could be completely wrong. We'll see in a decade or so I guess.

> The idea of an artist signing their work in a cryptographically unique way is not new or revolutionary, and it certainly doesn't need a blockchain.

It creates a provable, transferable, composable, tamper-proof "ownership" record of the digital signature.

doesn't gpg do a pretty decent job of that? i guess it's not transferable but... why do you need that?

I'm getting voted down for talking about the value-add here, but I'll give it another shot. I hope I get some replies this time if people find anything unclear.

Transferability is useful for key rotation. If you can't transfer your ownership to a new key, then if the old key becomes compromised, you can't prove ownership anymore because anyone else can sign using your key. To fix this you have to rely on the original signer to provide you with a revocation and an updated signature, which they may not be willing or able to do (and what if they themselves have rotated their key?)

Basically, to get key rotation to work properly you have to get revocation to work, which means ultimately you have to recreate a trustworthy timestamping service for digitally signed events, which is what a blockchain definitionally does.

Either that, or everyone has to agree on a third party to keep track of revocations, much like with OCSP or the MIT key server. Then, trust that third party not to tamper with the timestamps, and trust them to continue providing their timestamping service far into the future.

But irrevocability is a problem for this use case, right? Someone is bound to get hacked, lose keys or whatever, and then there's no way to actually prove, inside the blockchain, that it wasn't a legitimate transfer.

Anyways, I think the bigger problem is that neither GPG nor blockchain actually solve the "ownership" problem of digital assets. These can be copied without any problem, so proving which ones are original and which ones aren't is impossible without some kind of DRM or verification service, and that's not something that can be done with the blockchain.

> But irrevocability is a problem for this use case, right? Someone is bound to get hacked, lose keys or whatever, and then there's no way to actually prove, inside the blockchain, that it wasn't a legitimate transfer.

Irrevocability is an issue with physical assets too, but it's a compromise we deal with. If someone pickpockets you on the street, in general there's no getting your money back. You don't necessarily have to hold digital assets in a software wallet under one private key, which is the digital equivalent of walking around with something expensive in your pocket - you can choose to store the item in the digital equivalent of a safe or bank vault.

The nice thing about a digital system is that the user can easily choose where along the spectrum they want their ownership to reside. They can choose to manage the key themself, or have an institution do it for them, or anywhere in between (which involves multi-signature schemes of themself along with other persons and/or institutions of their choosing.)

Furthermore, the digital asset can itself optionally be coded to respond to certain third parties for dispute resolution. Current tech allows for an issuer to create a digital item that contains code such that it allows its ownership to be changed through a dispute process. The dispute resolution authority that's coded in could be as simple as a trusted third party or as complex as a legal system unto itself.

There isn't a single one-size-fits-all approach. Every asset issuer gets to choose their own approach, and they get to maintain interface compatibility with all other assets. For example, USDC is controlled by a company that has full blacklisting capability, but it has the same software interface (ERC-20) as WETH, which is an asset where no third party can exert any control over its functionality.

> Anyways, I think the bigger problem is that neither GPG nor blockchain actually solve the "ownership" problem of digital assets. These can be copied without any problem, so proving which ones are original and which ones aren't is impossible without some kind of DRM or verification service, and that's not something that can be done with the blockchain.

I generally agree, but I believe it's an identity issue, not an ownership issue. If there were some way to prove that a certain private key were in the sole possession of a certain person, then proving whether an asset were original or counterfeit would be as simple as checking to see whether the item was signed by the issuing person's key.

How would you have a digital collectible without blockchain? The alternative is just a private database somewhere that depends on the whims of a company/individual for its continued existence.

> that depends on the whims of a company/individual for its continued existence

As do most things so it's really neither relevant nor a drawback worth discussing.

This argument is non-sensical.

>Why does ${PROJECT} use ${TECHNOLOGY}?

>So it doesn't have ${DRAWBACK}.

>Most other things have ${DRAWBACK}, so it's really neither relevant nor worth discussing.

People that are fans of NFTs and crypto gaming imagine a world where someone has a token contract with the hash of a public key that corresponds to a private key that only they have somewhere in it registering their ownership of a hash of a file with art in it cryptographically signed by an artist, and that system proving that they alone own the original version of the art. But these are fictions, just as copyright is fiction, a legal fiction but fiction all the same, and all any of this does is demonstrate it, make it more plain. And I'm happy about that, art is useless if it isn't on a wall, and art on a wall looks just as pretty printed. Who owns a picture doesn't matter to me, or to anyone really, if I find it pleasant I'll hang it up, and if it's digital art then mine will look just as nice as the print hanging on the wall of the person who paid 36 ether for the privilege of doing so.

We are talking about a toy game about breeding cats, not archiving humanities greatest knowledge. No one will care if if 10 years it’s all deleted.

And yet Neopets, which fits that description perfectly, was wildly more popular than even the most popular blockchain based game.

Right click and download the JPEG of a cat. Done.

Also as Morty would say, it just seems like a pyramid scheme with extra steps.

Pyramid Scheme Pro Max Plus Ultra 2022 v2.0: Electric Boogaloo

I know the blockchain has been kind of tainted by the way it's been used for the past few years, but I do believe that there can be valid uses for it.

Lately I've been thinking if it would be possible to have an MMORPG game where instead of a server all the data would be saved in a blockchain/linked list. The biggest concern I have though is the latency and speed.

Could blockchains be fast enough or in some other way protected from malicious actors to allow actual real time game play? Like World of Warcraft, or would it just be too slow.

I've been thinking about this, because servers are expensive and doing it this way you would have, kind of, solved the problem of scalability - no queues.

There would be no coins or NFTs or anything like that.

Just a decentralised MMORPG server/game thus saving the developers from the server costs.

> Lately I've been thinking if it would be possible to have an MMORPG game where instead of a server all the data would be saved in a blockchain/linked list.

What for? What advantage would this have over storing data on a server?

> I've been thinking about this, because servers are expensive and doing it this way you would have, kind of, solved the problem of scalability - no queues.

You're just offloading the cost onto the players, and offloading the queuing mechanic onto the blockchain.

I'm sorry to be rude, but this is another comment desperately trying to find a use for the blockchain, casting out a rod into infinite idea space, and pulling out a boot.

>What for? What advantage would this have over storing data on a server?

Mostly because I'm kinda poor and can't even think about buying it renting servers. That's why I thought that such a solution would allow me to keep developing my game while the players could still play the game.

If it would be possible, which from replies to my comment, I'm guessing isn't, it would also mean that even if I died, people could still play because the "servers" wouldn't shutdown.

>You're just offloading the cost onto the players, and offloading the queuing mechanic onto the blockchain.

That's kind of the point, MMORPG are, from what I understand, quite expensive to run. Thus if they were run by the community it would be cheaper for the developers and those resources could be further used to work on the game.

>I'm sorry to be rude, but this is another comment desperately trying to find a use for the blockchain, casting out a rod into infinite idea space, and pulling out a boot

I am surprised by the negativity that the HN crowd has poured onto me. Since it would solve one of the biggest issues with MMORPGs, which is - servers shutting down.

I love MMOs and it breaks my heart knowing that I'll probably never ever again be able to play Tera and many other MMOs...

It’s a non-zero cost to develop the game. I sympathize with your desire to build an mmorpg that will pass the test of time without relying on servers, but you will definitely need a lot of money to make this come true. Crypto or otherwise.

Block times are complete state updates. The transactions that rely on the state of another transaction in the chain are 100% optimistic, and will roll back all dependent transactions. Now, that’s fine if you’re willing to roll back say…3000ms of your game state. But that’s all client side stuff, and that code is 1000% exposed, and you can’t upgrade it in the normal fashion. You also need validators for chain transactions, and your game can just be forked at any time by validators, splitting the player base. Kind of cool, but kind of defeats the balance and minimum population required to keep a game running. Also…the validators still need to run. Recovering a forked chain can only happen is someone has the state somewhere and is willing to seed new validators.

Sometimes, things need to end for another thing to begin. Sometimes it’s just best to move on.

> I am surprised by the negativity that the HN crowd has poured onto me.

I'm sorry. I'm not trying to insult you directly - but I do think your idea is not a good one, I don't think it solves the problems you think it does, I don't think the problems you posit are the biggest issues with MMORPGs, and I think it'll create even more problems even if it did address the issue you brought up.

If such blockchain would be truly distributed (a-la Ethereum or BTC) then it's bandwidth would be atrocious for an MMO, or it would require some insanely powerful and centralised nodes to handle this, or it would use some L2 solution which would mean a lot of exploits and bugs in the game due to async issues.

Or the the blockchain would be centralised and so useless.

This idea fails even in the abstract.

I had a feeling that it might not be doable, but I had hoped that maybe I've missed something and that the HN crowd would shine the light upon it.

"Cost savings" is never a valid reason to use blockchain technology. It is and always will be inherently more expensive than running a normal database.

The only reason that users might be willing to eat that cost is if they believe they are "owning" an asset that will appreciate somehow (a la Cryptokitties). The second the thing they own stops appreciating, they stop paying to play.

Do you not think that keeping the servers alive for the game that they love would be enough?

It would be for me and since many private servers exist for many different games, it is for others too.

This would, if it would be functional, just spread the burden of the server to all players.

In that sense, just by playing the game, you would be keeping it alive.

I guess what I'm looking and thinking about is just peer-to-peer MMORPG game, but because the data has to be stored somewhere, it could be stored everywhere.

That's is if the latency could be fast enough for normal gameplay.

One thing I don't see addressed in this article is that as far as I know, it's basically impossible to trust the reported price or volume of NFT transactions, because there's no way to distinguish fake wash trades from real ones.

So it's hard to draw any conclusions about whether the data reflects an actual peak in user activity, or just a peak in scams.

Or selling NFTs to yourself to launder money.

How does that particular thing work? You run the exchange, then have dirty untraceable money traded on the exchange to dirty participant and you take the exchange fees? You'd have to KYC both participants, right?

Not everyone, the "participants" in the chain (typically 8-10 addresses) can arbitrarily inflate pricing by only paying fees which are trivially covered by the final trade. Once inflated, that final address can use a "mixer" to exit (for example) and essentially if KYC is performed in the conversion to fiat, it's after the mix and relatively untraceable.

Buy a “rare” NFT with clean money. Sell it a few months later for some multiple of the original price, the “buyer” is still you but using dirty money.

NB: I work in fintech but have no particular experience on the fraud / KYC / AML side of things. This is just how I imagine it would work at a high level.

But if you do that, I think you'd be first on the list of people investigated for the dirty money. It has to be cleaned in some way by obscuring it.

The approach described here seems more plausible https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32857382

Thanks for this!

Imagine you have $X million from a hack on wallet A, and you want to launder it. First, you run it through tornado cash (RIP) a few times and move them to wallets B1 to B1000. Then, you mint an "exciting NFT collection" on your public, KYC'd wallet C, list them on a "decentralized exchange", and have wallets B1 to B1000 buy those NFTs. Even better, seeing how fast your NFTs are selling out, a few suckers join in on the stampede and get mixed in alongside B1-B1000. Well, now on wallet C you have $(X - gas fees - minting fees) etc., that is totally legal and clean. You cash out on Coinbase, give the taxman his due, and you are good to go!

> Well, now on wallet C you have $(X - gas fees - minting fees) etc., that is totally legal and clean.

It's not "legal" at all, because it's still proceeds of crime. Although it may "appear" legal and be very difficult to trace back to the source, it's still not actually legal.

Yes, that's how money laundering works.

It is legal until proven illegal -- just like you are innocent until proven guilty.

Only need to do Tornado cash once, and you can still do that, it still works

Nobody cares that you sold your nft to a virgin address funded solely by the tornado cash relay

The Tornado Cash tumbler allows you to create sort-of-Sybils so it looks organic. The no-KYC Dex allows you to push from a no-KYC account to a KYC'd account. The KYC'd account lets you withdraw fiat.

I see. Okay, each of the pieces are necessary. Thanks for the explanation.

Isn't that always the case? My friend was talking about a rare Magic The Gathering card being worth a silly amount of money... Except the card had only been sold once or twice at that price.

Unless you have enough comparable items (e.g. paintings by the Dutch masters) it's really difficult to determine the value of something that's rarely sold.

"value" is kind of a made-up thing, so I'd argue that by selling something for the first time you're setting its value, not determining it

It's important to note that price, the last traded price, and value are all distinct concepts. The last traded price is the only one of these we can measure ahead of time, so we often use it as a metanym for these other concepts. But we don't know the price of something until we make a binding offer on it and it is accepted; that doesn't necessarily mean the next transaction won't be very different, we just have heuristics about how the next price ought to look. But it's the process of negotiating a deal or bidding on an auction that defines the price, not the historical prices. If you go to a grocery store and see that milk costs $5.25, and you remember last week it costs $5.00, you don't say the price is wrong; you understand that this is the offer the store has made you, and that the price has gone up since your last visit.

When the oil futures went negative, it wasn't the case that the value of oil was negative - this was about the structure of the market and the sorts of positions people were caught in when the pandemic hit. We continued to consume oil throughout the pandemic, and so I'd say we continued to value it.

Another example would be, if a rancher has a lot of cow poop, they might pay a farmer to take it away. You could say that the cow poop has a negative price on it. But the farmer is going to make use of it as fertilizer; from the farmer's perspective, this is a commodity that has value.

It's true though that there are a million theories of value and it's impossible to say what something's value is definitively, you can only make a decision about what is value is to you.

But when wash trading is and to impact the perceived value, it does so fraudulently; it supplies information to traders - "there is a lot of interest in this security, and the (last traded) price is rising" - which is a lie. Some people will argue this too is a normal and healthy part of markets, but I don't think they've given enough thought to what sort of equilibrium that game will settle into.

There's a big difference between an illiquid market where wealthy collectors are so keen to hang onto things they only change hands at crazy possibly-not-to-be-repeated prices and a fake market where the illusion of deep-pocketed collectors is created by the auctioneer and owner colluding to pretend an item changed hands at a massive amount of money.

The amount of wash trading in the fine art world is certainly not zero.

True, but I don't thing wash trading is integral to convincing people that fine art is something people want...

There's perhaps a difference between an original DaVinci and whatever the latest paint splatter on canvas modern art is, though.

I'm pretty sure it's integral to convincing people that ~99% of the >$1,000,000 fine art is something people want enough to pay the 'going' price for.

There is also a big difference between Russia having to shut down a gas pipe for maintenance and politically motivated energy blackmail.

...Or is there?

> Except the card had only been sold once or twice at that price.

You see this practice in art and collector car sales. It's rumored that if you see a painting go for an insane amount of money, often these sales are between "friendly" parties for the sole purpose of driving up the value of that art.

see Beeple's 60M NFT sale as a great example

The same can happen at low prices so that the owners can claim the paintings have lost value and can offset some other capital gains.

Funny you should mention MtG, since the first big crypto exchange collapse was MtGox.

I always thought it was "Mt. Gox", like a mountain of sorts. Turns out it's Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange.

Edit: MtG seems like it has some kind of evergreen popularity, and various format changes, changes in the list of banned cards, reprints, and changes in the metagame will mean that prices of individual cards can vary wildly over time. So if something was sold for a ridiculous price a couple times, it's possible that something changed (Targmogoyf used to be very expensive, for example).

Wizards seems pretty good at catering to a variety of players, both collectors and non-collectors.

It did pivot away from its ancestry and at that point it was indeed referred to as "Mount Gox".

Indeed, and that's even the branding used in the Wikipedia article on it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox

Not to be confused with the Berkeley Unix software company called "Mt Xinu". (The operating system's name is a recursive acronym, while the company's name is a backwards spelling.)

"We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu

Famous for the great posters they handed out at Usenix:

"4.2 > V" BSD -vs- System V, X-Wing / Death Star Poster

https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/

I love all the old telephone equipment in the explosion!

The old magic the gathering game blog had a lot of good game design topics. One of the articles talked about the 3 or 4 player archtypes they tried to design for. Worth the potential rabbit hole.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/t...

This is only half true. From Wikipedia [1], the name did originally stand for Magic The Gathering Online eXchange, but the domain was only used for that purpose for a couple months in 2007.

When it launched as a Bitcoin exchange in 2010, the unused domain was "Mt. Gox" from the beginning.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox#Founding_(2006%E2%80...

Probably similar to you, I also heard of MtGox first via crypto, and thought it was an obvious reference to Fort Knox. Only later did I realise the original meaning.

Another intersting wrinkle is that the original MtGox was created by Jed McCaleb, co-creator of eDonkey, who was later involved with the cryptocurrencies Ripple and Stellar Lumens.

What?! Now that's what I call a fun fact. I didn't know about those roots at all. Thanks for sharing.

It does happen a lot in physical collectible markets. It is what happened with WATA Games and the lawsuit against their employees for market manipulation through auctions. Or the Nike scandal with a VP's son using her CC and employee discount buying massive amounts of hyped sneakers and reselling them, which just made everyone more aware.

Trading cards and NFTs have a lot in common.

- Scarcity, artificial or otherwise.

- Subjective value. Neither an NFT or a trading card provides substantial, measurable utility to its owner. But, we can agree they have "value" of some kind.

- Lack of oversight. Governments doesn't have entire offices monitoring irregular sale prices for Obelisk the Tormentor or Mickey Mantle.

- Low transaction volume. If you're the only market-maker, you can set your own price.

These attributes lead me to believe that NFTs and trading cards would both very effective tools for someone trying to launder money.

You can take away any one of those attributes, and the asset would become much more difficult to use for money laundering. For NFTs, oversight seems inevitable in the next couple of years. One can only hope.

> Subjective value. Neither an NFT or a trading card provides substantial, measurable utility to its owner.

Trading cards kind of do - TCG card prices generally hinge on actual play utility as much as rarity.

Outside of really old cards that are just valuable because of their extreme rarity lots of cards that are technically rare are still only worth pennies because they aren't actually any good in the game. While cards that are no rarer or older, but are much better in play are worth tens or hundreds of dollars.

And even those cards that are mostly expensive because they're exceptionally old and hard to find, like from first print runs of games that weren't popular yet still differ in price quite heavily based on their utility in actual gameplay. Albeit mostly from the cachet that that gives them rather than from buyers desire to actually play them. e.g. Black Lotus is more valuable than other cards printed in the same quantity in the same set because it's also the most powerful card.

The sealed product hoarders probably have the smartest business model. Buy a bunch of sealed product as a distributor, hold it in a warehouse for 5-10 years, sell for a tidy profit when there’s just not many sealed packs left.

The sealed product command a gambler’s premium individual cards cannot, and the market has more liquidity as its way more fungible than a specific individual card. Where individual card prices are more or less an auction, sealed product actually trades like a commodity. But this commodity’s scarcity increases over time.

Of course Wizards of the Coast could print the secondary market out of existence at any time, like Pokémon TCG has done recently. But they haven’t done so for 30 years and seem to prefer to conspicuously ignore the secondary market, while obviously being aware of it.

> there's no way to distinguish fake wash trades from real ones

Ah, like that $532M Punk wash trade that was clearly visible on-chain?[1] I guess we'll never know if it was real or fake.

[1] https://decrypt.co/84756/no-someone-didnt-really-pay-532-mil...

Please explain your comment for the rest is us. Was that a sarcastic "it really happened because it made it to the chain" or a "we'll never know whether value was exchanged from one person to another because the owner of both wallets could be the same person" - or both, neither or?

Commenter said "there's no way to distinguish fake wash trades from real ones" and I showed a case where a wash trade was, to anybody looking at it, very obviously fake.

I agree with the other part of the comment. Blockchains do not track "persons" but "wallets" and so metrics like "number of users" will not be accurate. But it is not accurate to imply that it is impossible to recognize wash trades. In many cases they are very obvious, and even can be automatically flagged. In other cases - like with CEX mixers - only the authorities can detect the fraud.

OP probably meant fake wash trades and real non-wash trade ones, not fake and nonfake wash trades

The flash loan trade was a wash trade, obviously “fake.” Other wash trades are also - very often - obvious because the blockchain is transparent and easily analizable.

How can we tell that the buyer and the seller are two different people in real life?

Correct, not possible if you dont want someone to know

But of you’ve ever traded NFTs its hard to really begin with the assumption that trading volume is fake because bots and market makers buy from you so fast. You know that wasn't a fake or wash trade, while there is a pervasive audience of onlookers that are trying to prove a negative.

You know that funds in bankruptcy court have successfully sold $30,000,000 worth of the NFTs on their books as ordered, without issue or further controversy about where the proceeds came from

You know that DAOs have liquidated $30,000,000 worth of NFTs on their books as determined by the community, without issue

How much convincing does anyone need to move off of “its all wash trading and money laundering” to “yeah thats possible there is also lots of liquidity”, it doesn’t really make sense to make the former perception their whole identity

"because bots and market makers buy from you so fast"

Does that still hold true today, or was that the case six months ago before the NFT market crashed?

it still holds true today for the same top projects

most collections are essentially just tokens with a picture, the same practices on token exchanges are prevalent on nft marketplaces

Right, I'm not saying there's no real trading, just that it's impossible to say how much. Which makes the graphs and anecdotes quoted in the article a bit meaningless, IMO.

I agree that the data collection possibilities are limited

this is more so for others who are looking for validation of only wash trading. I’m mostly saying some assumptions have to be made, and relative comparison to other projects and understanding actual trades occur… a lot, moves the assumptions towards more distinct market participants than assuming the nonexistence of any market participants

Can someone tell me how to successfully do a wash trade? because I frankly have no idea.

If you fund it from your coinbase account, coinbase is going to tell the taxman about both your wallets... so no buerno. If you fund another wallet from a known wallet... the tax man can still see that. If you use Tornado cash, Coinbase is going to block it. I just don't think it's as easy as people think it is.

You can report everything to the taxman. Wash trading in this context isnt to do with taxes. Its about how you hard it is to verify claimed sale prices since you can transact with yourself.

> Today, CryptoKitties is lucky to break 100 sales a day, and the total value is often less than $10,000.

This seems shockingly high to me

"Bluechip" NFTs like CryptoKitties become commodities that people trade day in and day out.

> What went wrong?

Absolutely nothing went wrong. 1-3 USD is a totally fair price for a random set of bytes producing random picture of cat. What was wrong in the beginning with those who paid thousands - that is the question.

The article threw me off, saying that the project had “crashed” or had a “demise” as of it were no longer operating or there was some sort of scandal. They’re still operating and nothing major has happened other than them losing value.

They’re inflationary collectibles that were a fad, of course they’re going to lose value. The article feels intellectually dishonest.

Calling CryptoKitties a "game" is a bit generous.

Everything is a game once you look for an equilibrium.

Newsflash: watching paint dry is a game (until the solvents reach an equilibrium with the air).

It was the gateway to getting gamers interested in crypto/web3, which resulted in the absurd "play2earn" concept which has been the subject of justified mockery.

Wait until you learn about "game theory"!

I'm always surprised that projects like cryptokitties are referred to as games. I guess saying "game" makes it sound more legitimate, but there's almost nothing to do with your characters besides sell them.

"Gaming" often refers to gambling. There is a whole world of gaming separate from video games—online slots, poker, etc.. Intentional or not, most crypto games are much closer to traditional gaming than video games.

My intuition about CryptoKitties and many other NFTs is that market manipulation has been ridiculously easy and profitable, everything is somewhat more scrutinized nowadays, but I think that the scams and schemes are far from over.

Impersonating both sides of a transaction does not seem too difficult, and not very costly, as long as the fees are kept small.

CryptoKitties was a great initial introduction (for me) into the mechanics of setting up a wallet, transferring funds, trading nfts,etc. The wild monetary value swings definitely captured the BeanieBaby mentality they were aiming for as well.

So basically, as Ethereum gets more popular, the price of gas goes up. Eventually the cost of making a transaction will often become higher than the transaction itself, all of which you have no control over because it is all determined by how many people are using Ethereum.

If true, this seems insane.

What seems insane to you about using an auction model to efficiently price a scarce resource? (The auction model is the transaction fee bidding market, the scarce resource is block space until/unless Ethereum scales.)

If you're sidelined by the market because resources are being used by people who feel they have a greater need for them than you (who bid higher), that's an efficient market. It's no different than being priced out of buying corn or wheat - there's not an infinite amount available for everyone to buy at whatever price they please.

Ok, I’ll keep using the credit card and traditional banking system where I don’t need to enter an auction and pay $20 to make a transaction.

This is such a weird flex, I don't understand what you're trying to say. Continue not purchasing things you don't get value out of, I guess? Good for you.

No, he’ll continue paying for things he gets value from using a medium that works for him.

Mediums are themselves services that a consumer decides whether to use based on marginal cost and utility.

They are services that are used to purchase products and services. Purchase decisions are made about these services in the same manner as purchase decisions about the end product, at least under the rational choice theory of economics.

So under that theory, the medium of Ethereum will increasingly not be chosen.

Of course. Once it becomes too expensive because too many people are choosing to use it, then nobody will choose to use it.

At that point, nobody will go there anymore because it's too crowded.

So... the original comment is not a weird flex at all then.

Insane is a strong word. But your description ("efficiently price a scarce resource") is economics textbook language and irrelevant to the end consumer. What's "insane" about a currency where on any given day the effective purchase price of goods can fluctuate by 100x (from $5 gas fee to $500) is that it's not a usable medium of exchange. As a consumer I need price stability. Getting "priced out" of buying a t-shirt, or playing a game, and whatever other thing I want to buy (or sell), is an inconvenience that would cause me to just use a network with sufficient capacity to never be "scarce".

The resource I want isn't "block verification". That's Ethereum's problem, not mine. I want the thing I'm trying to buy. So I disagree the market is efficient, there's a tax on goods unrelated to the good in question, and I would use Visa to avoid it, as the other poster said in what you call a "weird flex".

> But your description ("efficiently price a scarce resource") is economics textbook language and irrelevant to the end consumer.

I don't understand what you mean by this.

> What's "insane" about a currency where on any given day the effective purchase price of goods can fluctuate by 100x (from $5 gas fee to $500) is that it's not a usable medium of exchange.

I don't consider Ether to be a currency, I consider it to be a commodity. The very fact that people bid the fee market up to high levels, despite the Ethereum network running constantly at its full capacity of a bit over one million transactions per day, is itself proof that the network is a medium of exchange that people choose to use.

> As a consumer I need price stability. Getting "priced out" of buying a t-shirt, or playing a game, and whatever other thing I want to buy (or sell), is an inconvenience that would cause me to just use a network with sufficient capacity to never be "scarce".

I don't believe that Ethereum is currently very useful for buying t-shirts or playing games. Most of the usage so far has been to run code on the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

> The resource I want isn't "block verification". That's Ethereum's problem, not mine. I want the thing I'm trying to buy. So I disagree the market is efficient, there's a tax on goods unrelated to the good in question, and I would use Visa to avoid it, as the other poster said in what you call a "weird flex".

The good that Ethereum sells (service really) is the ability to run code on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. If you don't derive value from that service, no one is forcing you to use it. Ethereum wasn't created to dethrone Visa as a payment network for t-shirt purchases at Walmart. It's fine if it isn't used for that.

My point remains that pricing a service based on supply and demand (in this case VM execution) is very much sane in an economic sense. When certain customers cease purchasing a service because the price is bid higher than the benefit those customers receive from it, that's market efficiency, not insanity.

It’s not in any way a scarce resource. They are cryptokitties.

> the scarce resource is block space

Artificially created scarcity.

Block space is created from computing power and disk space, both of which are naturally scarce.

Only because the algorithm makes it so.

I don't understand what this comment means.

The scarcity is artificial and baked into the algorithm. There’s nothing “natural” about it. It’s by design.

VM execution requires computing power and disk space. Those are both naturally scarce, especially in the world's most redundant VM. The same VM instruction is run on more physical CPUs and its result is stored on more SSDs than any other VM setup in history. The overhead required for this kind of redundancy is insane, and it's why the Ethereum VM has such extremely limited throughput.

If the VM's cap were lifted and it allowed anybody to use it for free, the demand for VM resources would quickly exceed the clients' ability to host the VM. The Ethereum VM would pin even the beefiest host's CPU at 100% and require each network participant to maintain petabytes of disk space.

The way Ethereum works, every client needs to execute every calculation that every other client wants to run on the VM. Every request to run code on the VM is basically an amplification attack against the network, which is why execution is strictly metered and charged for. It's a ballooning On^2 resource problem that is very much limited by the natural scarcity and limitations of the silicon it runs on.

Supply and demand for gas, it's logical.. there's limited blockspace, so you let the highest bidder get it. Avalanche solves this problem by horizontally scaling using something called Subnets. As games or applications outgrow the main-net they can move to their own dedicated chain which is interoperable with the mainnet. When the games moved, demand for blockspace shifted, and gas prices went down for everyone (including the players).

Yes, all nft collections suffer from supply dilution if the creator wants to keep making money.

The “NFT” aspect distracts most from the obvious:

The physical collections market is hugely profitable, supply is hugely manipulated and unknown, and we just had no transparency into any of this until it went onchain

None of the consumer activity in the NFT collections market is really unique, we just get to see issuer revenue numbers in real time and supply

All the market is saying is “wow I should really be selling stuff to collectors“

I agree with the part where they describe existing on chain games as too simplistic. The handful I saw indeed sucks.

No skills really needed beside being able to click and pay the initial fee.

I feel that NFT pricing exuberance (or lack thereof) is distracting both critics and even fans from the core innovation here - 1. the capacity to signify a digital original and 2. to decentrally organize ownership (though it's more like possession) of these items.

The ultimate question for crypto as a whole is whether the mass market wants digital possession that transcends a single centrally managed database. Personally am convinced we'll get there, but the onboarding mustn't happen through speculation, but specific unique utility, mostly interoperability/composability.

The major distraction is that a 'digital original' is a fiction. I can ignore your blockchain and make any digital IP fungible.

Yep. Just to tack on - even if you minted a "master copy" of your digital asset on the Blockchain, it still doesn't represent anything meaningful:

- It doesn't guarantee that you are the first or exclusive owner of this digital asset

- It doesn't correlate to physical ownership

- It doesn't hold any water in a legal sense, if you want your ownership of an NFT to be ratified then you need to use the same centralized avenues as everyone else

You're one evil motherfunger!

>whether the mass market wants digital possession that transcends a single centrally managed database

Even if the market wants this, it's certainly not what is being offered. If OpenSea delists your NFT in their single centrally managed database, it may as well no longer exist.

This is a problem that's actively being worked on (SudoSwap as an AMM for NFTs, Scatter.art as a competitor, et cetera).

Most regular people really, really need a working "I forgot my password" feature.

> 1. the capacity to signify a digital original and 2. to decentrally organize ownership (though it's more like possession) of these items.

There is nothing novel in this. You could do it in Bitcoin too by agreeing that a certain transaction structure that includes a digital hash is a valid way to signify an original with that hash, and a spend from that address represents an ownership change.

It's simply a convention, and people don't do it because it's mostly a useless diversion from established ways to record and trade IP.

The true NFT innovation is the marketing gimmick that such a convention has any real world relevance and somehow magically makes the IP non-fungible. This enabled massive speculation on essentially worthless (and fully fungible) IP, expressed in a clunky and impractical distributed database.

The core failure seems a lot more fundamental than that to me. The only things you can "digitally" possess are digital items. But people don't care about owning blockchain entries. They want to own paintings and houses. Property rights are a legal matter, however. The only way ownership of a blockchain entry can entail ownership of a physical good is if the law says so. And, at least for now, law is centralized. Only the state can make it and only the state can enforce it. If the entity that arbitrates and decides property claims is centralized, whether or not their ledger is also centralized makes no difference.

"digital original" is on its face absurd

An analog original could be valuable or at least meaningful because it's impossible to create an identical copy of anything in which exists in the material world.

But there is no way to distinguish between two copies of digital data.

I'd like to read the op ed about the first painting that ever sold for substantial money, and its eventual theft or destruction.

Setting the scene: Before there were Banks, Mayors, Kings, or Mob bosses. Some random town or village. The wealthiest farming family has bought/fought (an exchange of a different type of resource) for most of the land in the town. That family has started to employ people on their land to build more wealth. This family doesn't know what to do with their wealth. They own all of the gold and jewels the traveling sales people bring by. They have built a castle and store treasures in their vault. They hire a militia to keep the peace. They have more money coming in than they know what to do with. Even the people in the town are happy. They now have a big wall paid for by this family. The family's militia is no fun, but it really has kept the peace. Trade is going well, and the towns folk haven't had gone a winter hungry in years.

Scene 1: One day a traveling artist brings canvas with chalk based drawing. A young adult from the wealthy family, called X, have seen similar, but this one is big. Its bigger than ever and connects with them emotionally. They want it. Sadly its already been sold. The artist offers to get a second made and bring it next month. However, X has connected with it emotionally. They connect with it so much they don't just want it, they want no one else to have it. They offer the artist more money than the artist's lifetime earnings to never again make chalk on canvas again. The canvas is hung up.

Scene 2: Everyone else in the town laughs/grumbles, "they spent 10 lifetimes of our earnings on a big canvas of chalk?". "No so that the artist would never make another". "... but the artist doesn't even live here. Couldn't they just make another?"

Scene 3: 3 years later, the canvas is a big deal in town. To some, laughable. To others, luring. Many more artists brought over canvas of chalk and many wealthyish families bought them for more reasonable amounts, but the wealthy family didn't just have any old canvas of chalk, theirs was a "..." no other could be made. The others are bought and sold, but their canvas is priceless.

Scene 4 - Alt A: Its the middle of the night. A band of thieves, orphans barely in their teens, an adultish figure keeps them in order and has directed them into the castle. The jewels and gold are in the vault, its very guarded but the children don't turn right towards the basement. Everyone that has tried for the vault has been hung in the town square. They move quietly to the great room. Their orders are clear. They pull down the canvas, open the frame, roll up the canvas, and are out. (in the morning) The town bells ring. The streets are a mess of militia. The thieves are already miles away and meeting their fence.

Scene 4 - Alt B: There has been a multi year famine in town. The town is upset, angry with the family. The solution is to go to war! They do battle with the neighboring city. They just happen to win. The cost was many lives but now they have enough reserves to get through many winters. This doesn't solve the actual root cause and the fields still don't make food. The resources continue to deplete and the canvas of chalk was sold at a massive loss to some close enough but far away town's wealthy family. Mostly as a reminder / teaching tool for their children not to "waste" money like X. "It drives a town to famine".

Both versions of this story have happened through human history. They just predate documentation. Meanwhile, Art today can still be worth a lot of money.

This is not a “game” any more than beanie babies or tomagachi is a game. These are digital collectibles, and digital pets.

If you’d like to see a “blockchain game” that is succeeding and not dependent on simple buy/sell token mechanics, see Dark Forest and 0xMonaco.

https://dfwiki.net/wiki/Main_Page

https://www.0xmonaco.com/

I remember back when cryptokitties came out KNOWING that useful real world blockchain applications were right around the corner.

Simpler, happier times.

There's an amusing mobile game similar to CryptoKitties about breeding mutant ducks https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clusterduck/id1531250914 , but it's single player

(self plug) I'm also working on an NFT parody game https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1609874752 - it's a simulated trading & collecting market for emojis.

I'm always confused why people call cryptokitties a game, there's barely anything to play with. Maybe using blockchain makes it a lot harder to implement actual game features, or maybe it just corrupts your incentives lol.

In a vacuum I'd have assumed that attempting to make transaction fees undercut things like credit card processing fees would have been a key design goal of post-bitcoin block chains, so it's surprising to me (as someone not terribly invested in keeping up with crypto) to realize that transactions fees can be so high (though in some ways I suppose it's kind of like combining title registration with supermarket checkout more than it is just a transaction).

But besides side chains are there other approaches to allowing newer crypto currencies to be highly liquid and handle large volumes of transactions at low cost? This issue seems like it's a recurring problem for crypto.

CryptoKitties was amazing and a pioneer before NFTs were even a thing. You shouldn't conflate them with the current wave of play-to-earn scams.

Know zero about NFT market caps, but if I pull up few years on the site below, hardly looks like a collapse:

https://nftgo.io/collection/cryptokitties/overview

Anyone with more knowledge able to clarify?

I think that you can get your answer from the tooltip on that market cap widget:

> Market capitalization is calculated as the sum of each NFT valued at the greater of its last traded price and the floor price of the collection, respectively.

So their market cap calculation does not attempt to capture a current fair market value for all outstanding CryptoKitties. For a non-fungible asset like this, just using the last sale price like this will always give a lagging indicator. In some sense, you could argue that it lags the fair market value by a possibly infinite amount of time.

Concretely, this method would assume that the Dragon cryptokitty that the article discusses has been worth a constant 600 ETH that hasn't fluctuated by even one iota in over 4 years.

I don't know how much better one could do for a market cap calculation. It certainly wouldn't be practical to individually appraise all 2 million cryptokitties on a regular basis. Perhaps one could look at how prices of more frequently traded cryptokitties have fluctuated over time and use that to generate a scaling factor for the old ones. But even that might have downsides. How do you account for the possibly large percentage of cryptokitties that belong to wallets whose keys have been lost? It doesn't make sense to count those into the market capitalization, because they are no longer part of the market. The method being used at least has the advantage of being clean and objective. It's just not particularly useful, is all.

There's no liquidity. The market cap is pure fabrication based on historical sales, there's no current day sales, so no way to pull money out of that cap.

Market cap is not really significant, if the sales are down. Most of the market cap is from old sales.

I could create a new coin with a huge market cap very easily: I'm creating 1,000 billion coins, and I'm selling to a friend one coin for $1, then never selling anything again. The market cap is now $ 1,000 billion right?

Yes, but to realize it, you have to get (bribe) a major exchange to list your coin.

> Dapper Labs, which owns CryptoKitties, has moved on to projects such as NBA Top Shot, a platform that lets basketball fans purchase NFT “moments”—essentially video clips—from NBA games.

So do they own the rights to those clips or is it another url to something someone else owns?

As you have clearly guessed already, no, they literally don't own anything.

Any news/sport organization that wants to use some clip of LeBron dunking that's been "tokenized" doesn't need to reach out to, pay, or even care about the NFT "owner".

NBA Top Shot is more like a collecting game and it's officially licensed by the NBA IIRC. So like a digital version of baseball cards, except you don't need to worry about shady ebay sellers

Is there a curated list somewhere of all the examples of crypto/blockchain being used for grifting and fraud?

It's your lucky day https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

Precisely what I was curious for. Thank you.

I bought some cats back in the day for $30USD, and I made out with a whopping 5x-10x over the years on those cats. I still have half my supply, and occasionally would get a purchase come through. I will remain hopeful for the resurgence

They keep talking about technology but the primary issue here is social phenomenon, these are memes.

Cryto Kittes -> Beanie Babies -> Cabbage Patch Dolls

Cryto itself is like an ideological movement, a bit akin to the heady utopian populism of socialism in the start of the last century.

It hasn't collapsed, the endgame is just a much much higher difficulty

Is it though...

This thread will be interesting to look back at in about 5 years.

CryptoKitties is the only interesting blockchain use case besides BTC. It’s over for ETHcels.

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