web4

you are probably right, but I will not be so pessimistic as to resign to favouring Steam and Apple stores and take rates as a necessary evil and permanent facet of the web’s future. I am happy to see web3 at the very least attempting to challenge this, however weakly it is currently being done.

> Do these pages belong to the same person?

what does your gut tell you?

despite knowing so little about art market and art history that you’ve never heard of the world’s most influential and highest sold living artists, you can probably still make a rational guess that this NFT collection is a copymint. perhaps the fact that the artist never once mentions or links to the collection from their Instagram profile acts as a hint.

this is what I mean by “trivially easy” compared to art forgeries in the real world, which do take professional art historians and years of study, and yet still leaves many of them fooled.

it’s worth noting that the collection has not sold, and very likely never will.

the only need for NFT in a game is decentralization and disintermediation of payment and ownership. if you wish to distribute game assets and give players a form of transferable and scarce digital ownership that is not locked into a walled corporate garden, CC0-licensed NFT represents one approach.

it always comes back to the same argument: crypto is bad because a couple centralized companies handle this all for us just fine, and people in some countries already have great interbank transfers.

also please lose the ad hominem, it is not needed.

the system can and does favour those by social class, connections, race, gender. discrimination in financial and lending services is a well documented issue. the fact that the banking system “imposes limits and barriers until you reach a certain social class” is not a point in favour of the banking system.

most private clients are getting cushy services such as better lending and interest rates, faster payment times, better wealth management services.

but I digress. the banks are useful obviously, despite their flaws, and in the EU and UK the banks tend to be some of the best in the world. this is not to say banks as a whole are useless, but banking systems on average across the globe have many aspects that fall short of our ideals. crypto does not fill all of those, and has plenty of flaws and issues as well, but it does excel in certain areas and at the very least provide a competition that forces us to more closely consider the pitfalls of our typical financial structures.

this was with CHAPS.

> was in the destination account the next day

that’s probably CHAPS as well then as FP is within 2 hours. still a a lot slower than crypto’s 30-60 seconds, and extremely opaque process that could have taken additional days without any information to the customer.

but undoubtedly, both CHAPS and FP are very fast and inexpensive, and some of the best systems in the world for interbank transfers. unfortunately it only works from one UK bank to another UK bank, which makes up a small portion of global population. even within UK you will often have need to pay somebody who doesn’t have a UK bank.

great! now Dropbox owns all of our assets instead of Steam. brilliant. /s

PoS removes the environmental burden.

as I said in my original post: this is a niche application. some share of users will be happy to own and trade CC0 licensed assets that are not centrally owned by a single game company, and not sitting in their steam or apple account.

similarly, some share of devs and gamers like to publish and purchase work on Itch.io, even though it’s the minority compared to Steam or Apple.

yes, games and game stores hold records of ownership under your account. some of that may be purchased, some of it may be acquired through another means like an in-game achievement.

nfts are literally just records of ownership of a digital asset that are upheld without a central entity.

“it’s a lot like owning assets in a game” is exactly correct with the distinction that it’s decentralized

you are making it seem like it is difficult to tell a David Hockney NFT is a fake. step one: does the artist have a clear history of minting associated with an address? if no, and the artist is not making any claims to making nfts, then most likely it is a fake. if yes, and the artist is promoting the nft at that address, it is probably not a fake.

in the case of Hockney as he has been expressly against nfts and has never publicly made one, a fake is easily detectable. in the case of Beeple who has been expressly for nfts, it is easy to authenticate as it will be associated with his address.

yep. the rich tend to be given access to better banking services than the poor: higher limits, direct line of contact with a bank manager, additional services. when your account reaches a certain wealth threshold the bank will step in to ensure you have a better experience than the poor.

banking is a radically different design philosophy than a protocol where all addresses and transactions are treated equally regardless of wealth, class, and other social factors like race and family connections.

ETH fees at time of writing are about $1-3 for a transaction finality of < 60 sec. note that is fixed, the same if you transfer 1 or 100 or 1000 tokens.

though eventually as these networks scale most users will be transacting and interacting with L2 rather than L1. fees in L2 are in cents on the dollar, transaction finality is often very quick, and security assumptions are typically good enough for most use cases.

https://www.useweb3.xyz/gas?source=ethgas.watch&referrer=eth...

it’s easy to dismiss nft and the like if you are dead-set on your opinion that it’s all ponzi, but it is making traction in art and media: see Christie’s and Sotheby’s and a variety of notable artists and galleries not to mention Meta, Spotify and other platforms.

> you can just use cash?

this question sorta gets at one of the primary values of crypto, that it’s peer to peer, transferred non custodially and pseudonymous. many countries are moving away from cash into digital only forms of transactions, and having a system that upholds peer to peer transactions can be useful.

replace abortion in that example with other legally questionable actions depending on your state. maybe buying marijuana or psilocybin for medical purposes, paying somebody like Edward Snowden for giving a lecture, or purchasing a VPN subscription. for citizens who are rebelling against their state in some way, such as abortion rights protests, or climate activism like extinction rebellion, or a person that lives in a less democratic regime, it may be desirable to use certain crypto systems to mitigate state oversight.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/14/style/abortion-crypto-don...

that limit depends on your bank. for large transfers you will often need to visit your branch in person which can be a multi day process.

and yes UK faster payments system is great but it is not yet the backbone of global payment processing. the world is larger than the UK and as we continue to connect globally online and become more digitally nomadic there will be more need to pay users outside of a UK-to-UK bank system.

use case depends on consumer. paying for an abortion in a southern US state or paying a Russian or Iranian contractor for web design services might be a suitable example of crypto. paying for an in-game asset to avoid 30% App Store fees may be another use case in the future. or purchasing digital assets like art, domains. and smart contract functionality like escrow, auctions, loans and lending, global crowdfunds is another use case.

whether it is better or worse for each of those depends who you ask and what their goals are, and also in what year you ask. ten years ago it was inconceivable to do these things with crypto, ten years from now it may be that these systems will continue to improve in terms of fees, privacy, scalability and user experience. consider the current cohort of users to be beta testers who are taking on additional risk and technical burden while the system continues to improve.

large (> 10K) bank and wire transfers within UK and EU are still in the order of days, not seconds. the last large bank transfer I did took 5 days without any way for me to track this transfer. the same amount I was able to transfer within crypto networks in 30 seconds and the transaction progress and it’s validation status was visible for the entire duration.

the EU and UK banking system is far better than the US but still it is not a global payment processor network and API, hence why the web even in EU and UK relies on Stripe, visa, Apple Pay and PayPal and their corporate and centralized infrastructures. building an alternative infra that is not based on a single corporate entity is net positive for the world long term

not everybody lives in the UK.

the point is not to be a system that beats a single service for sending GBP from A to B in the UK. the point is a system that has a variety of uses and applications accessible by anybody, regardless of which country the user resides in.

even in countries with good banking like UK, many e-commerce companies will still choose Stripe VISA and PayPal to reach customers outside the UK and integrate a payment processor API. an online shop could offer crypto as a payment mechanism if they wanted to avoid using these companies and if it met their needs.

sure, if you just want USD then hold that. if you want an asset that tracks USD, but has the freedom to exchange in crypto markets, be held in a non custodial way, and operate with smart contracts, a USD pegged stablecoin makes sense.

many wires will be multi days long, encumbered by weekends, holidays, business hours, international checks, and occasional bounces (ask any company their experience with wires for international contractors).

Zelle is between US banks only. some people live outside of the US, surprisingly.

the point is that Stripe achieves some features for certain users that a wire does not. and crypto achieves some features for certain users that Stripe does not.

and now there is one more way to do that: crypto.

it is like asking “Why Does PayPal Exist When We Have iBAN?” obviously some subset of the globe finds it more useful than iBAN transfers for their needs (like setting up an online shop).

the majority of crypto is being held in non custodial wallets, not exchanges.

a better way to frame your comment: why does the world use Stripe and PayPal when you can just go to your bank and ask them to setup a multi day long wire process from bank A to B for less fees?

the fees on exchanges are very small compared to paypal and similar products. Coinbase Pro fees are less than 0.6% and go down to nearly 0%.

for payments over 10K the fees may be less than Wise or a wire, and faster.

for average users the end game is L2 and direct on- and off- ramps from CEX and services like Ramp, and more payment processors accepting crypto so off-ramps will not be always needed. fees in L2 are in cents.

lol, players saying NO to reducing the take-rates of app stores from 30% to 0-2.5%, and saying NO to having the assets they purchase stored anywhere besides the privately owned servers of their favorite centralized megacorps

> Because the following statement from you is a blatant lie ... It's impossible to say whether something is from a legitimate artist or not.

lol, have you ever looked at the chain? if an artist has been minting work for 1 year on the same public address and then suddenly somebody purchases a lookalike token from a different public address there is a high likelihood it is a copymint. you can avoid this by comparing the addresses, it does not take an art history expert to detect this form of copyminting.

many platforms will show attribution based on address and username. so if the artwork is attributed to b33ple.eth instead of beeple.eth then it is likely a copymint.

> DeviantArt has sent 90,000 alerts about possible fraud to thousands of their users since then, company executives said

it’s clear copyright infringement, but easily detectable to the point that DeviantArt is able to automate their search, and not a sophisticated form of forgery. still you are not able to provide evidence of significant funds being consistently lost here despite it being so prevalent, especially when you compare to trad art forgery where you can easily find evidence of millions of dollars per year being mistakenly spent on forged artworks.

it is like Nigerian prince email scams. part of the protocol that some unfortunate and naive users might fall for, but most users will learn to recognize and avoid this problem in time.

so re: MtG, this goes back to my original point. most of the game depends on scarcity. I was recently informed about proxies where users can print their own cards, but it still sounds like the majority of players value the cards themselves rather than just a self printed version of it. apparently there is something special about "owning" MtG card rather than just a proxy

> Why would the game publisher, Google, or Apple want to make an effort to recognize assets from a blockchain they do not control and do not profit from?

they don't and probably will not do this, unless it starts to compete with their profits. this is what we are seeing with nfts in art world, llike Christie's and Sotheby's now selling nfts, Instagram and Meta adding nfts, and now Spotify announcing they will explore nfts. these corporations see value that they can extract, in the same way opensea is extracting 2.5% on each trade and as a result making millions in profit.

if more gamers begin to use and demand decentralized marketplaces for games and assets, the major publishers will step in to those spaces as well to try and keep their foothold and avoid becoming obsolete in a new market.

if scarcity is not needed or desirable for MtG players why would they not just release all cards individually for the same price? why should any card be harder than another to acquire?

if MtG uses this model for deck building it sounds like pay-to-win.

a blockchain game can just be pay-to-own and play-to-own like most games on the App Store, except the assets assigned to the user is not attached to a single App Store account and do not involve a 30% take fee. imagine these game assets could still be held even if you switch from Apple to Google phone, because the assets are detached from your phone company’s accounts.

you are right: it is trivially easy to publish any media file and assign an NFT to it and then list it for sale, and there is a lot of copyright infringement as a result.

all of these articles claim widespread theft and stolen work, but a surprising lack of data on how much of that is actually sold considering all of those payments should be publicly traceable on the blockchain.

imagine putting a Damien Hirst image on OpenSea only for nobody to purchase it. is this a complex form of art forgery and art theft? in some cases this process is automated by bot-scripts scraping DeviantArt, and the end result is like spam mail. maybe there is a buyer naive enough to purchase your Hirst image thinking it is authentically from the artist, and in that case I sympathize just as I do when an unsuspecting user falls for an email scam.

it is also trivially easy to look at these scam tokens and realize they are not from the authentic collection they claim to be, or that the minter does not match the artist's public address, or that the artist is not even claiming to make nfts and therefore a nft of their work is unlikely to be authentic.

if you look at art forgery in traditional media, not only is it rampant but it actually accounts for millions of dollars per year, and many high value paintings do not have a clear provenance and authenticity as this information is easily lost and altered over the course of history.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/fake-art-...

the blockchain allows anybody to publish nfts that point to any media, so naturally there is a lot of spam and copy-minting. anybody can publish to OpenSea a Picasso NFT but this does not mean it will be valued by the market as a Picasso. the same is true of an impersonator trying to mint a new Pak or Beeple or whoever you think is a popular nft artist.

almost all of these "thefts" come in the form of social engineering and impersonation rather than forging the token itself. and if you look at the data, 99% of these copy-mints are not actually selling and are not making any impact in the market.

a copy-mint of crypto punks is trivially easy to discern as a fake because its contract hash will be uniquely different than the crypto punks contract, which has a long and clear historical trail associated with it on chain. if a copyminter starts to post new work that resembles a popular artist like Beeple, it will be under a new public key hash or address, and also easy to discern.

compare this crypto art copy-minting to paintings like Salvator Mundi which countless experts have been investigating for years and still are not able to discern the authenticity of the painting despite its $450 million price tag.

> prove you have the card

this is where blockchain is well suited. user can sign a message with their private key and cryptographically prove ownership where all other parties can also verify it cryptographically

> proxies are allowed in tournaments without proving anything

cool! but not what most refer to when talking about trading card games. if you have access to all cards in the game at any point there is no need to trade or do anything in particular to acquire and own a specific card except to say “I choose that.” if a game works like that it wouldn’t make sense to build blockchain based ownership around it.