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Comment by CrazyStat | Hacker News Reader

What benefit would NFTs provide over storing item ownership in a database, as games usually do?

Nothing. It's not like game developers are going to implement NFTs from other developers' games into their own, that's work.

Not even that it's work. It makes zero sense on multiple levels

NFT's are a waste of time and the sooner they die out like the digital beanie baby fad they are the better

That reminds me I need to feed my Tamagotchi

EVE, no, but you could imagine a game with a mechanic in which players may write and deploy code. Some sort of distributed coordination layer may be the best choice to enable this mechanic. It may make the most sense in that context to store ownership inside the execution environment rather than externally in a database.

I’ve always thought a cyberpunk game with this type of a mechanic as a core ethos to the system would be sweet as hell to both write and play.

Emphasis on "hell"?

No more so than any other game dev ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Now you've gone and made me want to see corewars played on a blockchain:)

coughEthereumcough

What advantage would be gained from distributing the coordination layer? It seems cheaper, more efficient, more performant,you have more control, can enforce game rules and tweak them for fun and fair gameplay more easily, etc. if you do this with centralized control.

I'd say two things: 1. Proof to players that game actions are actually permanent instead of something that a server moderator can change at will. 2. A publicly accessible API layer which does not need to be paid for by the developer* that can be used for community-driven plugins & third-party integrations, guild & tournament websites etc.

(*because it is paid for by transaction fees)

You're not making a very convincing case.

(1) Unless the server itself is running on the blockchain, which is impractical for anything like Eve, nothing stops the server owner from ignoring what the blockchain says about ownership and changing things at will.

(2) This is just externalizing costs incredibly inefficiently. The blockchain transaction fees will necessarily be greater than the costs of simple database storage, probably by several orders of magnitude based on current implementations. Eve already provides a fairly full-featured API [1], so this would provide little to no benefit at exponentially increased cost.

[1] https://esi.evetech.net/ui/

Nfts are unnecessary. You can get those benefits with just boring old PKI.

1. Trading card game leagues that have banned cards you purchased and irrefutably own because you have it in your hand would like a word

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