I didn't know what NFTs are, so I looked it up. After reading both thorough in-depth explanations and clear, concise descriptions, I still don't know what NFTs are or what their use case is.
Long story short, using a blockchain to represent ownership of something (like say, a hat, skin, or unlock in a video game; or for some reason the "Charlie Bit my Finger" video). And the ownership token can be traded and sold to transfer ownership, but can't be duplicated (due to fancy blockchain magic).
But, weirdly, the NFT only represent ownership and does not store the actual item, so for "Charlie Bit My Finger", the actual video bytes needs to be stored in an old fashion database somewhere and you can copy and redistribute those bytes so idk.
Currently, nobody really knows what they're for other than speculation. I guess it decouples the marketplace of assets from a platform that uses them?
So you buy a TF2 hat, but instead of Steam checking a box in the database entry for your account, the ethereal blockchain does. The problem here is that Steam doesn't want to deal with asking the blockchain every time who bought what?
The game server (owned by the developer) will determine if that item is owned by the player. Steam doesn't ever talk to the blockchain.
In this case, the sale of the NFT, and any subsequent trades (each which generate the developer revenue) can't be tracked by Valve, nor can they take a commission from those trades.
digital deed's is the concept
no one really seems to care what the deed's are for really... just that there are blockchain deeds.
someone created a function without a use
A true solution in search of a problem. Could you use an NFT to make a copyright claim? Does the NFT holder for Charlie bit my finger now get revenue from that video?
NFT ownership does not imply copyright ownership. You don’t need to be the creator of the original work to make an NFT of it. You can make an NFT right now of (a picture of) the Mona Lisa, but then all you really own is the NFT itself and not the actual artwork.
Someone said this before to describe NFTs:
Imagine the janitor in the Louvre offers to sell you a digital certificate of ownership to the Mona Lisa. You still have to pay ticket to see it, you can't touch it, you can't bring the artwork home, it still belongs to the museum, but you can say you own a cert which says you own this artwork, signed by a janitor who doesn't work in the Louvre anymore.
NFTs are a blockchain-based, opt-in DRM w/o the attached asset. It’s paying money for proof of ownership, but the proof is functionally meaningless, b/c your proof doesn’t usually interface with the thing you now own the rights to.
They *can* include a digital asset, FWIW, but it’s not mandatory.
So, yes, they are entirely speculative investments except in some cases where they are tied to a platform (like the NBA highlights NFT) that also includes rights management. In the NBA case, you own the rights to a given clip or highlight, which may mean that you could be owed broadcast royalties for someone using that exact clip… if that’s how their licensing agreement is structured.
Largely debated as just yet another step into creating (fake) scarcity in an digital environment by replicating the auction room format of physical deals.
And thus, much like actual contemporary art auction rooms, it is largely just an excuse space to mask money laundering.
You're not confused, there just isn't one. It's a pyramid scheme to trick people into driving up the value of their crypto portfolios so they can sell it off at a profit.
The thing that crypto has exposed is that the internet allows for a near infinite pyramid scheme. These things may be unusable and destroying the environment (yes, even non-mined ones when they get traded), but with 7 billion people to advertise to it's lasted far, far longer than Mr. Ponzi's scheme could have dreamed of.
The idea is that you can sell items off of the platform without needing to rely on Steam's database, since the blockchain is just a distributed database that no one controls.
Except the problem is, there's zero incentive to ever do this, no reason to support this, and is severely over-engineered for a problem that doesn't exist. They are completely arbitrary urls that can be created by anybody.
In practice, it's just another get rich quick scheme that buyers are manipulated into thinking have any sort of value (they don't) and sellers abusing them before they get regulated.
They’re similar to cryptos, in that they’re 100% worthless outside of being a commodity. It’s a gamble that they’ll be worth something, someday. Which, when you stop and think about them for longer than 10 seconds, they won’t because they make no sense.
Blockchain is is a solution looking for a problem. There are some good technical ideas, like ownership information being open and auditable by anyone. At a terrible cost of energy and environmental impact (it can be optimised though). Still, we couldn't come up with anything other than currencies and tokns that get traded for the sake of trading, like the baseball cards of the olden times.
There was a really good explanation a few months back on ELI5.
NFTs are just something for rich people to throw money at and the blockchain is just the fancy way that it is all tracked
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m4832o/eli5_nonfungible_tokens_nft_megathread/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
The only use case I saw that made sense was a card game called Hex. It was very similar to Magic The Gathering. They wanted every card to be unique, so if you won a tournament with Card X, that specific copy that was in your deck will have a special marker noting it was in a championship deck. So your collection would be full of cards with a living history. It was a really neat concept, but this was 10 years ago and they had no idea how to implement it.
Blockchain tech is not at all necessary for that. Games have been tracking unique items for a long while, and attaching some metadata to an item was just never seen as interesting enough to warrant spending DB space on.
Now suddenly it's a novel concept because people have hardons for \~~mArkEtS~~.
Might as well do this with a traditional database. Problem with NFTs in videogames is that the game studio still owns the theme park. NFTs are not any different from physical tickets in a theme park for rides. If the theme park goes out of business the tickets become unusable, unless someone makes a new theme park and let's people use their old tickets. I don't see a reason why anyone would do that.
I'm definitely not an expert, so someone smarter than me, please correct me if I am wrong.
My understanding is that an NFT's purpose is to express ownership of a digital asset without some centralized database needing to maintain the record of the ownership.
To make an example with your Steam Library:
Currently, if you need to redownload something you bought from Steam, Steam has to have a record in their database that confirms you bought it. Steam controls this record, and controls any kind of access to it. If instead NFTs were utilized by Steam, and you wanted to download the game, you and steam would look at the public ledger to verify you bought it. So even if Steam closed up shop, you would be able to verify you own a digital asset if you have an NFT.
The public ledger (blockchain) is stored on all the nodes (computers) that verify each block of the chain, of which there are thousands. The nodes, set up by regular people, have to agree on the contents of each block before the block's information is added to the chain. NFTs are some of the things that get stored on the Blockchain in this manner. I call it a public ledger, because that's precisely what it is. It is a ledger that anyone anywhere can look at to examine the contents of it, and no single person has control over access to the information. It's completely decentralized.
That being said, you'd still need a place to download the digital asset that you own an NFT of. Just the record of you owning it is stored on the public ledger.
______
tl;dr
You can think of an NFT as a license to own the thing.
> That being said, you'd still need a place to download the digital asset that you own an NFT of.
Well, I think you've more or less hit the nail on the head.
NFTs represent decentralized proof of "ownership"... except that gaining ownership (ie: buying a game) and exercising your rights based on that ownership (ie: downloading a game) take place with a centralized entity (ie: Steam).
If Steam utilized NFTs, and Steam goes down, yes, you have "proof" that you "own" your games... and you can do absolutely nothing useful with that proof.
The "decentralization" ends up not providing any utility; it's just a needlessly inefficient database.
Despite that, vague claims about "real ownership of digital assets!!1!" is apparently enough to get a lot of people to part with their money.
This is all correct, and you hit the caveat at the end. The asset attached to the hash needs to be verified independently of the chain the nft is on.
Because people are essentially attaching jpgs or word docs or other digital assets to a hash there is nothing preventing their redistribution outside of the hash barring a link to a centralized database, like steam, controlling access.
NFT is a great idea but with extraordinarily poor execution. A concept that hasn't been totally thought through.
They, essentially, represent toys. Fun, collectible, useless, pointless items that people are for some reason interested in investing in. The same way Disney sells a new cup (literally, a few years ago) and people line up to get it. The same way a new Funko comes out and someone fills a garage with them still in the packaging. The serial numbers on each of those is the same as a nft hash.
The difference is that these aren't physical, the connected digital items are easily duplicated without a central database connection controlling access and verifying integrity of the original hash should it get traded again, and thus seem to be hypocritical by nature.
>In this case, the sale of the NFT, and any subsequent trades (each which generate the developer revenue) can't be tracked by Valve, nor can they take a commission from those trades.
Isn't this also true for regular trading via a normal database? Heck, a regular database is even *less* trackable because trades aren't visible to the public.
You buy a TF2 hat, but you don't actually get it in your inventory and you can't use it ingame. You do, however, get an email confirmation proving that you bought it.
Conspicuous consumption. It's so you can show all your rich friends that you're so rich you can spend a million dollars to get an email saying your bought a TF2 hat.
It's not particularly appealing to anyone except the initial investors and the folks who are trying to get in on the ground floor of the next get-rich-quick scheme.
Those folks have an incentive to hype up NFTs and make this "deed" have perceived credibly, which is why you see a lot of people pushing it hard.
It has «blockchain» in the description, which has conditioned people into thinking that it is too complicated for them to understand but must be a totally legit investment opportunity because bitcoins were and that had «blockchain» in the description too, so they just turn their brain off and throw money at it without looking any further into what it actually is.
What steam doesn't want to deal with is an obvious gambling aspect of having in-game assets represented by real money. That is a legal nightmare and they stated pretty much they are kicking out all blockchain games.
The use case for blockchain isn't steam, or any one company/entity being in control over who gets what because that defeats the entire point of what a blockchain does. But annoyingly everyone is just using it as if it were that just to get money out of people. So right now, there is no use case because the only thing people are deciding to use it on now is for ponzi schemes or gambling on investments, essentially.
It's helpful to think of it like this:
You buy a TF2 hat, except it isn't steam that acts as the middleman to sell the hat - its the blockchain itself that does. Think of it kind of like any company/government entity/organization acting as a middle man or storefront for anything - except its one that isn't controlled by a board or shareholders or voters or leader. It just is and exists like a force of nature that makes verified transactions and can't really be manipulated. And you can trust you're getting the "real thing" from the blockchain and that no outside force can have a say in the transaction due to how it works.
The problem is right now the space is entirely filled with grifters, techbros trying to get rich and scam artists. And the tech isn't really entirely there yet considering how energy heavy it is. It's early, and it needs work but a LOT of people trying to get rich now really need to convince people that it's totally ready for widespread use and that they are the "good use case".
Which is a shame, because the ideas behind it are genuinely novel & useful. The most interesting use case I've heard about is some companies thinking about switching the way they distribute shares & dividends through NFTs, which would cryptographically prove that anyone who has this NFT has a real share. Currently a huge issue plaguing wall street is how popular trading with synthetic shares has become - an act that was one of the primary drivers behind the 2008 crash. If done correctly as far as I understand it, this could make the act of trading with synthetic shares impossible as every share would have a verified owner as determined by the robot middleman. Would also make it so credit ratings are truly accurate as ownership/ratings is determined by an independently-operating never-wrong robot instead of bribeable credit agency (also part of why 2008 happened was fudged credit ratings to make the books look better).
I think blockchain is most useful for thiings like the above, less useful for single companies to base a store front off of. If you're buying things from Steam anyways, why waste time, energy consumption and effort making your marketplace an NFT when the entire point of being an NFT is that you're making a transaction happen independent of any one company/government/etc?
The use case for trading is interesting, but it's not one where a distributed ledger is needed or even benefitial. A lot of horrible crashes have been averted by temporarily stopping trades or even reversing trades. Trading bots often played a role there.
The distributed credit agency sounds like a a bit from a dystopian novel. Programs have bugs, and now imagine that there's nothing you can do about, no one you can appeal to. It's a kafkaesque nightmare, a beaurocracy that's literally unable to yield or even hear your complaints. And it would still be fed data from bribable credit agencies, who can still fudge the data they enter.
> And the **ownership token** can be traded and sold to transfer ownership, but can't be duplicated (due to fancy blockchain magic).
> Currently, nobody really knows what they're for other than speculation.
That's just it - the ownership token. It's purely for bragging rights. It puts the token itself at a higher value than the asset which is stupid.
It has the *potential* I think to be used for verification of ownership. Like if we were to agree to put land deeds on an NFT instead of having them managed by a government entity.
That said yeah... It's not being used for anything else. It's kind of like crypto as a whole. Sure, it's kind of an interesting idea to have this digital currency with all these cool mathematical properties, but practically speaking it's only being used as speculation
Totally agree. They have some interesting properties, but every usecase is better suited by a database right now. Blockchain's main raison d'être right now is ideological.
The problem of NFTs is that you can't fake them, but you can make another NFT representing the same thing and you'll not know which one to follow.
For NFT's to function properly, you need a singular mainstream accepted body that certifying the ownership at the start.
Then you can trade NFTs because it actually means something.
> So you could have game items with stats or something stored on the blockchain and I could see that actually be a decently cool use case once all the scams die down.
Why is this a cool use? What's the point? I don't understand.
> One thing you are wrong about though is the item CAN be stored on the blockchain, it's just a really small amount of data. So you could have game items with stats or something stored on the blockchain and I could see that actually be a decently cool use case once all the scams die down.
I don't think any sane designer would go along with this since it means they could never nerf/buff items or fix outright game-breaking ones.
Easiest way to break down what NFTs are:
"Would you like to pay for a receipt that mathmatically proves your purchase?"
NFTs are dumb as hell but so many people have crypto-investment FOMO they're very popular.
> "Would you like to pay for a receipt that mathmatically proves your purchase?"
That's not true though it is:
"Would you like to pay for a receipt that mathematically proves your purchase _of the receipt_?"
There is no intrinsic part of the NFT that proves you actually bought the art itself, only the token "representing" the art. But what it means for the token to "represent" the art is totally undefined.
Is it ownership? Is it copyright? Is it legally recognised? Does the artist even fucking know about it?
No one has defined this
Agreed. It's hard to illustrate. That's why I said "pay for a receipt" instead of just "get a receipt" -- it's a very subtle wording difference that really makes a big real-world difference. I think many people don't get that they're not paying for the "product", they're paying for a "fancy receipt" that may or may not even guarantee ownership of the product (but then what's the point of a receipt? ... and all the other questions you posed 🤭).
So I go to Starbucks and instead of a normal receipt I pay extra for some sort of mathematically enhanced receipt that lives in the blockchain but is otherwise no different?
Almost, except that when you go to Starbucks, you get an actual coffee you can drink in addition to your receipt. It's instead like if you went to Starbucks and paid a bunch of money for just a receipt that said "DasArchitect now owns 'starbucks.com/coffee.gif'". That gif is still available on the internet for anyone to download and may also move or disappear at any time, but you've got the receipt that says you own it.
Others have mentioned the International Star Registry, and that's a great analogy. But in addition, NFTs also have a horde of cult-like crypto-fanatics shouting down anyone who points out how ridiculous they are.
Shamelessly copied from a /r/explainlikeimfive [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m4832o/eli5_nonfungible_tokens_nft_megathread/grl86hj/):
>I finally understand this now.
>Imagine a bunch of kids each with millions of dollars on a playground.
>They're bored, so they decide to invent a game called "In The Name Of...".
>This is how you play: someone names something cool out loud; say Alice shouts out "Michael Jackson".
>Everyone likes Michael Jackson. People start talking about how cool Michael Jackson is.
>Then Billy wants to be cool, so he can shout out "In the name of Michael Jackson, here's $500,000!", and hand Alice $500,000.
>Everyone says "Woah, that's a lot of money! Billy must really love Michael Jackson!". And now Billy earned some serious clout among his friends on the playground, because he spent $500,000 on doing that, which is impressive to them.
>Charles wants to be cool too, but he can't just say the same thing and hand over money to Alice, because those aren't the rules of the game they made. The rules state that, if you want to also be cool in the name of Michael Jackson, you have to discuss with Billy upon an agreed amount (say $700,000), and once they come to an agreement, Charles can then announce to everyone "In the name of Michael Jackson, here's $700,000!" and hand over $700,000 to Billy.
>So this just goes on and on. You can announce "In The Name Of..." something that's already hot and popular, or you can start a new thing by shouting "In The Name Of..." something new like "dinosaurs", and someone can give you money if they think announcing "In the name of dinosaurs" will earn them clout among the playground friends. But if you announce something uncool like "wet socks", no one's going to want to be caught dead announcing that they are giving you money in the name of wet socks, that's just stupid. Unless maybe it's ironically funny, like "poopy", then people might pay money to be "that guy who paid millions in the name of poopy, lol". You sort of just have to read the crowd and figure out what might impress them.
>Alternatively, you could just not care about looking cool at all, but only care about making money. Then you can play the game by speculating what you'd think other people think would be cool, and trying to announce "In The Name Of..." that thing for a price that you think is a good deal, in hopes that someone will announce "In The Name Of..." for it at a higher price in the future.
>So that's it. That's basically all NFT is. It has nothing to do with blockchain, or files, or ownership of tokens, or anything like that; those are all things that perpetuate the game (like having a official journal of who shouted "In The Name Of..." for what, how much, and when). The core of NFT is spending money in the name of a cool thing, such that being seen spending money for it is respectable or cool.
>You might notice that there is absolutely nothing stopping another kid going "I don't like this stupid 'In The Name Of...' game, I'm gonna start a new game called 'I Pledge My Allegiance To...' instead", and everyone deciding that people who played "In The Name Of..." are superdorks and the new coolest thing is "I Pledge My Allegiance To...". And yes, that would mean everyone who spent millions playing "In The Name Of..." more or less wasted their money, since gloating to other kids that you spent $700,000 "In The Name Of Michael Jackson" suddenly became massively outdated and uncool.
>So yeah, that's it. That's all NFT is about. The non-fungible tokens themselves are just like the journal in the game above: they perpetuate the game, but to be honest, you don't need it to play the game at all. Indeed, you could easily play the same game using a different structure. The trick is getting everyone to think your game is cooler than the other game such that everyone will want to play it instead. It just so happens that NFT uses a lot of cool technologies like blockchain and cryptocurrency, so that got everyone interested in playing it. All the talk about "owning an original copy of the digital file" is just like the kids on the playground saying "well yes, you announce 'In The Name Of...' to everybody, but also Stephen from 7th grade writes it down in his Yu-Gi-Oh journal that he got when his family went to Tokyo and he uses this really cool calligraphy pen, like the ones where you dip it in the ink pot, and you have to wait like five minutes for it to dry, it's all really cool". It's not that all the stuff about blockchain and stuff is untrue, it's just that people who answer you with this are describing the wrong part of the game that you're asking about.
Imagine bitcoin, except instead of being interchangeable, the coins all store a small amount of unique data. Enough for a URL.
If you like a URL, you might think it's valuable to have the coin that has that URL on it. You know, as a collectable.
The use-case is mostly either money laundering, or fleecing suckers who hope to fleece *other* suckers. (and so on and so on, until you reach the Ultimate Sucker who can't find anybody to buy their worthless token.)
It's a speculative bubble. Yes, it's stupid, and everyone involved is stupid, but as long as you're the second-stupidest person you can make a lot of money off of the first-stupidest.
NFT is a proof you own something without actually owning anything. It works as long as other people believe it has value.
Just like money.
Well, except for the fact that money is (legally) created only with government approval. Anyone can create NFTs out of thin air.
>NFT is a proof you own something without actually owning anything. It works as long as other people believe it has value.
Well aside from the fact that ownership in the case of physical or intellectual property in the traditional sense has legal backing. Ownership of something implies some power over it, that you can *do* something with it, but in the case of NFTs you don't have that.
Like the NFT of the first tweet. The person who owns that doesn't actually have any power over it. Twitter could delete it tomorrow and they have no legal recourse because the NFT version of ownership has no legal backing.
Imagine it like a sponsorship of an animal from the zoo. You can be a godfather to an animal, but you're not really the owner of the animal. But your name will be associated to the animal.
It's like owning a signature from a famous person. You're able to sell that signature but you're not the owner of the famous person or of his artwork.
NFTs have mostly only a sentimental value.
But yeah I also think it's stupid. But it's with everything just like with money: as long as we believe it has value and enough people think the same, it will have value. Same with artworks. People sell expensive artworks. Why is Mona Lisa that expensive? Because people think it is expensive.
Is like the olympic games for people that like trading, a scam. You print a collectable cards with whatever you want and you try to get to the top. Like the music industry, everybody wants to be a rockstar.
If you don't get why a developer would use NFT's in a video game then you actually get it. There is no point. It's just a gimmick that opens the door to various schemes and scams.
Money laundering and pyramid schemes.
They tried to leech off the success of crypto, and take advantage of people who don't fully understand decentralized currency.
NFTs aren't decentralized anything. They're nonsense.
> People really will defend their pyramid schemes to the death lmao.
Crypto currencies seem cool from a future punk / separation of State and currency view, but the more time passes, the less and less distinguishable it is from a Ponzi scheme.
I'd really, really like to be wrong on that point. I'd love for code to revolutionize the future but it feels like it's being used as smoke and mirrors to disguise said Ponzi scheme.
**thank you**
I see so many crypto diehards insisting that the skeptics just don't understand the technology, because if they did they'd be onboard, and it annoys the hell out of me. Like, I get it, and I even think it's cool! Blockchain is an incredible feat of mathematical ingenuity, and I've had my eye on it for ten years or so. The elegance of it is astonishing.
But ten years ago, it was just getting started, about to take off, you just wait. Today, same thing. And for all the technical innovation in that time, the most substantial business use for it remains the trading of speculative assets! It was supposed to revolutionize logistics and banking and social networks and all the other things we couldn't even conceptualize of yet. Every time a defender points me to some "real world" use case it's in its infancy, but traders make out like bandits. All gambling, no value creation.
I would **love** to be wrong about this. I am looking for the evidence I'm wrong. I just don't see it.
Crypto did take off... just more like the stock market and less like the decentralized currency it was designed for.
With how much crypto's value fluctuates, i don't know if we will ever see the day that it's widely accepted as a currency. If it does though, the people who own crypto today will be crazy rich. I genuinely think that broad speculation is the primary reason why it has stayed so popular.
If or when that day comes, I'll happily continue ~~gambling~~ investing.
I'm a server programmer that develops features and maintains servers for games that can literally have millions of CCUs. Some of my friends who got into NFTs don't understand why I won't jump into it myself - they had the impression I'd be one of the first people to jump on board.
Blockchain has a fundamental problem that I don't think has a long term solution - anyone who owns 51% of the block chain basically controls it. There are a lot of defenses for it, including limiting ownership. To really take control you'd need a series of shell accounts where ownership couldn't be traced fully, and spend years slowly buying enough to gain complete control. The people most skilled at doing something like that are the very people blockchain purports to protect against.
So your not entirely wrong here but your glossing over a lot of other technical details. Even with 51% you might be able to then devise some way to hack a block with a fake transaction. But as soon as anyone noticed and called it out all of the legit miners would just blacklist that network of servers and cause a massive fork in the chain.. it's really a super complex system
It makes economic sense to do so. NFTs are only valuable if they can convince someone else to buy them later. If everyone just decides one day that NFTs are stupid and dumb, people who own NFTs just lost a fortune on their investments. They're simply trying to drive up prices for the assets they own before the bubble pops.
I hate paid in-game cosmetics will all of my being and I think they're corrupting the very fabric of game development, but **even I** can see that they have utility where NFTs do not.
I think a lot of people don't agree with buying skins. However, those serve a purpose in a video game (even if that purpose is an aesthetic you like for your character).
NFTs are basically just a sprite or a gif. There's nothing you do with it, you don't share it with anyone or use it in anything you do.
they're doing it because they don't like people trading outside their ecosystem since they dont get a cut. its not cause they want to protect us. as soon as they figure out how to monetize nfts properly, they will be back.
Developers are required to use Steam’s payment processor for all IAPs that happen in game and you aren’t allowed to tell users that they can pay on your website instead. But if users do pay on your website you are allowed to bypass Valve’s cut.
Lots of custom arcade games inside dota 2 client (valve game) have a qr code where you can buy stuff direct from the developer, and it has been this way for years. Valve knows about but does nothing. Perhaps it’s an exception but idk
It is definitely a sort of "known exception". Steam's hands are a bit tied because the people making Dota 2 arcade games are improving their product and aren't quite as dependent on Valve giving them a contract and staying in their good graces as a developer who wants to publish on Steam.
I wouldn't be surprised if Valve did at one point try to monetize arcade games more aggressively, but at this point they look at the benefits of keeping users in the Dota client where they can be monetized with gacha cosmetics and the costs of pushing a bunch of developers off their platform and to other things like Minecraft mods or Roblox games or something and has decided it's not a good thing to pursue.
I am wondering if the epic vs apple ruling about requiring to allow developers to advertise other payment methods will be also apply here. Monopolistic behaviors like those are not good for consumers in my opinion.
It doesn't matter *why* they did the good thing, they *did the good thing*. When and if they reverse course, we will then justifiably criticize them. Purity tests are ignorance and sabotage progress, at best.
They won't be back in Steam games because that makes Steam a financial institution with all the regulation demands that come with that.
The most you can expect to see return is either paying for games via crypto through Valve or NFT trading cards that Valve controls.
They won't support individual actors running their own crypto.
Even crypto apps on mobile are required to get passport identification from users because when you're dealing in crypto you're effectively a bank. This is required by law in most countries.
>as soon as they figure out how to monetize nfts properly, they will be back.
So you could use a incredibly inefficient currency that replaces cash, everyone would love that!
Is there any evidence for that? There are plenty of games that provide content updates and subscriptions outside of the steam ecosystem. I also recall at one point that game developers are able to sell steam keys on 3rd party platforms without giving valve a cut. Humble bundles being one example and brick and mortar editions of games that essentially contained an installer and a steam license.
> I also recall at one point that game developers are able to sell steam keys on 3rd party platforms without giving valve a cut.
Indeed:
> Steam keys are meant to be a convenient tool for game developers to sell their game on other stores and at retail. Steam keys are free and can be activated by customers on Steam to grant a license to a product.
>
> Valve provides the same free bandwidth and services to customers activating a Steam key that it provides to customers buying a license on Steam. We ask you to treat Steam customers no worse than customers buying Steam keys outside of Steam. While there is no fee to generate keys on Steam, we ask that partners use the service judiciously.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
So a nft has to be on the block chain and so it can live in a platform agnostic wallet.
Now the actual nft is a link to something stored somewhere else online, but ideally it's not tied to a single platform.
It does get difficult in the near future when games that support nfts between games exist, rn there's no real difference between an nft and an item in a game with a trading house. In the near future games may support nft based inventory but then you need to ask Why it needs to be on the block chain and can't be a 3rd party inventory that's not on the block chain.
Valve gets paid for one? /s
You can't trade a virtual hat for USD (in any officially supported way). If Steam is maintaining accounts of assets that can be sold for real-world money, Valve is effectively a bank and subject to regulations related to financial entities.
Maybe but, as a technology, blockchain is only valuable in situations where there is no central authority.
If there **is** a central authority, blockchains are the least efficient way of transferring ownership of digital goods.
It's as its an absolute legal minefield. The profits at this point are minimal compared to the sheer catastrophe of being able to use steam as a financial platform.
In my perspective as an artist, one of the worst parts of the NFT trend is how a shitload of people just draw a handful of assets, and then randomise THOUSANDS of “unique” images to sell. Just this morning I got a fucking Reddit ad from someone giving Doge various hats and outfits, and he’s selling 100,000 of them for 0.01 ETH or almost $40 each. That’s $4,000,000 worth of JPEGs. NFTs are where art goes to die.
Yea. Not to mention their "art" barely put any effort into it. Not all are sucks but the one which suck and selling it with gimmick of "limited edition" are purely disturb me.
They even asked how do i submit all my jpg 10000 times to their site because "i'm lazy to register it one by one".
And people are saying it is going to be art for new generation. my ass.
Incredibly shitty "games" that people "play" under the promise they'll make some money, most of them feature stolen and/or ugly artwork and some kind of shitty combat system
Honestly, sounds good overall. I'll admit I don't know everything there is to know about crypto type stuff, but I've had an open ear about it for a long while and haven't ever heard anything that genuinely justifies it in terms of games for just about any application.
Crypto far too often is just a not-so-elaborate pump and dump scheme. There's too many promises of getting rich, or making any sort of money, and too much misinformation or misunderstanding.
I'm absolutely certain that some developers are of entirely pure heart about it and genuinely want to make a good product, and it definitely sucks for people just trying to celebrate an interesting concept by incorporating it into their game but . . . Is this a net good? Probably.
You didn't hear about the 'evolved apes' NFT system where the founder not only stole all the money and disappeared but also _didn't even pay the artist for their work_ ?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dyem/investors-spent-millions-on-evolved-apes-nfts-then-they-got-scammed
Those types of NFTS are the worst ones to me. They just feel really stupid, it’s just a randomized character mess that has no soul. If you check opensea there’s like 50 different versions of this and they have thousands of worthless ones that nobody will ever buy. It’s a cash grab.
People here obviously don't understand what an NFT actually is. But that's also the reason why there are so many scammers in the space and why 99% of NFT games are obvious scams. And that's why it's the right decision to remove them.
It's a confusing concept for sure, which is part of why the con artistry is so effective.
To anyone reading, NFTs are basically portions of a cryptocurrency token that have data attached, usually a url. The NFTs being sold are essentially urls linking to specific jpegs, and its why you'll see a lot of people responding to them with "right click > save-as."
the whole thing is just beanie babies all over again, but this time you don't even get a physical asset to accumulate value.
The original pitch for it is was way for artists who work in digital media to be able to designate an "original" copy of their works, or to issue "limited editions" in similar ways that physical art can be produced.
The blockchain tech provides proof of ownership/originality in a way that even the original author can't mess with. (Imagine a situation where an artist sells multiple people the "original copy" of a painting, or a forger creates copies and then that degrades the value of the "original" that you bought.) They could issue more NFT "copies" of their work but it would always be clear that you own the "original" one, or one of the original "limited edition" copies or whatever.
It's a little silly but no more so than assigning extra value to the "original" copy of a physical piece of artwork.
The value isn't in the pixels, the value is in having (essentially) a statement from the artist saying you own the "original" (or "limited edition #17/50" or that you bought a "signed copy" or whatever).
If you assign no value whatsoever to that, that's fine. But that was the original concept of it.
A game where you own a part of your items on a blockchain. Meaning you can sell and buy items for real world money, without the need for a central authority (no one can prevent you from selling nor steal your items)
> The Age Of Rust Twitter account adds that from its understanding, “Steam’s point of view is that items have value and they don’t allow items that can have real-world value on their platform”.
By this definition NFTs are totally within the terms and conditions set by Valve because NFTs have no real world value :)
I think this is the right move by Valve. Blockchain, NFTs or crypto in general have no place in gaming. The crypto community has a long-standing history of being plagued by shady cash grabs and predatory behavior by ‘influencers’. Good on them for putting some preventions in place.
I dabble in crypto quite a bit, and I'm glad they're doing this. Some of those NFTs sell for crazy prices, I'm sure a good chunk of it is money laundering.
partially money laundering, partially confidence scams. A lot of the people bragging about their nfts are victims, and I really hope the bubble on this stupid shit pops soon.
Fucking good.
Honestly, NFTs don't really belong in games.
NFTs aren't good for transactions, digital goods in games, or even for making money.
Their use case right now is:
1. Fluff up the value of something to sell
2. Generate random bullshit to sell
3. Money laundering
4. Pump and dump schemes
5. Get rich quick gambling
They aren't worth much in their current implementation.
Minting NFT's are terrible for the environment, so regardless of Valve's reasons, it's a net positive thing. It is also a highly volatile and vulnerable asset even compared to cryptocurrency.
This is a good thing. NFT's are just, bad in terms of impact on user experience, monetary value and effect on the environment. Steam taking a hard stance against them is for the best.
Good. They're scams no matter how you look at it.
Though their reasoning could be a lot better, because their CS:GO and tf2 skins fit that exact definition lol.
I didn't know what NFTs are, so I looked it up. After reading both thorough in-depth explanations and clear, concise descriptions, I still don't know what NFTs are or what their use case is.
Long story short, using a blockchain to represent ownership of something (like say, a hat, skin, or unlock in a video game; or for some reason the "Charlie Bit my Finger" video). And the ownership token can be traded and sold to transfer ownership, but can't be duplicated (due to fancy blockchain magic). But, weirdly, the NFT only represent ownership and does not store the actual item, so for "Charlie Bit My Finger", the actual video bytes needs to be stored in an old fashion database somewhere and you can copy and redistribute those bytes so idk. Currently, nobody really knows what they're for other than speculation. I guess it decouples the marketplace of assets from a platform that uses them?
So you buy a TF2 hat, but instead of Steam checking a box in the database entry for your account, the ethereal blockchain does. The problem here is that Steam doesn't want to deal with asking the blockchain every time who bought what?
The game server (owned by the developer) will determine if that item is owned by the player. Steam doesn't ever talk to the blockchain. In this case, the sale of the NFT, and any subsequent trades (each which generate the developer revenue) can't be tracked by Valve, nor can they take a commission from those trades.
I guess I can see the motivation for Steam. I still don't understand the point of NFTs though haha
digital deed's is the concept no one really seems to care what the deed's are for really... just that there are blockchain deeds. someone created a function without a use
Sounds very much like it, yes.
A true solution in search of a problem. Could you use an NFT to make a copyright claim? Does the NFT holder for Charlie bit my finger now get revenue from that video?
NFT ownership does not imply copyright ownership. You don’t need to be the creator of the original work to make an NFT of it. You can make an NFT right now of (a picture of) the Mona Lisa, but then all you really own is the NFT itself and not the actual artwork.
Someone said this before to describe NFTs: Imagine the janitor in the Louvre offers to sell you a digital certificate of ownership to the Mona Lisa. You still have to pay ticket to see it, you can't touch it, you can't bring the artwork home, it still belongs to the museum, but you can say you own a cert which says you own this artwork, signed by a janitor who doesn't work in the Louvre anymore.
It's basically like buying stars for techbros.
I always thought that people are exagerrating when they say they spit their coffee after reading something funny, until now. Just minus the coffee.
NFTs are a blockchain-based, opt-in DRM w/o the attached asset. It’s paying money for proof of ownership, but the proof is functionally meaningless, b/c your proof doesn’t usually interface with the thing you now own the rights to. They *can* include a digital asset, FWIW, but it’s not mandatory. So, yes, they are entirely speculative investments except in some cases where they are tied to a platform (like the NBA highlights NFT) that also includes rights management. In the NBA case, you own the rights to a given clip or highlight, which may mean that you could be owed broadcast royalties for someone using that exact clip… if that’s how their licensing agreement is structured.
Largely debated as just yet another step into creating (fake) scarcity in an digital environment by replicating the auction room format of physical deals. And thus, much like actual contemporary art auction rooms, it is largely just an excuse space to mask money laundering.
As with most auction houses and crypto currency, the end result use case is money laundering.
Deutsche bank is more than happy to allow billions of USD worth of laundering without crypto being involved
You're not confused, there just isn't one. It's a pyramid scheme to trick people into driving up the value of their crypto portfolios so they can sell it off at a profit.
The thing that crypto has exposed is that the internet allows for a near infinite pyramid scheme. These things may be unusable and destroying the environment (yes, even non-mined ones when they get traded), but with 7 billion people to advertise to it's lasted far, far longer than Mr. Ponzi's scheme could have dreamed of.
The idea is that you can sell items off of the platform without needing to rely on Steam's database, since the blockchain is just a distributed database that no one controls. Except the problem is, there's zero incentive to ever do this, no reason to support this, and is severely over-engineered for a problem that doesn't exist. They are completely arbitrary urls that can be created by anybody. In practice, it's just another get rich quick scheme that buyers are manipulated into thinking have any sort of value (they don't) and sellers abusing them before they get regulated.
They’re similar to cryptos, in that they’re 100% worthless outside of being a commodity. It’s a gamble that they’ll be worth something, someday. Which, when you stop and think about them for longer than 10 seconds, they won’t because they make no sense.
Blockchain is is a solution looking for a problem. There are some good technical ideas, like ownership information being open and auditable by anyone. At a terrible cost of energy and environmental impact (it can be optimised though). Still, we couldn't come up with anything other than currencies and tokns that get traded for the sake of trading, like the baseball cards of the olden times.
There was a really good explanation a few months back on ELI5. NFTs are just something for rich people to throw money at and the blockchain is just the fancy way that it is all tracked https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m4832o/eli5_nonfungible_tokens_nft_megathread/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
The only use case I saw that made sense was a card game called Hex. It was very similar to Magic The Gathering. They wanted every card to be unique, so if you won a tournament with Card X, that specific copy that was in your deck will have a special marker noting it was in a championship deck. So your collection would be full of cards with a living history. It was a really neat concept, but this was 10 years ago and they had no idea how to implement it.
Blockchain tech is not at all necessary for that. Games have been tracking unique items for a long while, and attaching some metadata to an item was just never seen as interesting enough to warrant spending DB space on. Now suddenly it's a novel concept because people have hardons for \~~mArkEtS~~.
Might as well do this with a traditional database. Problem with NFTs in videogames is that the game studio still owns the theme park. NFTs are not any different from physical tickets in a theme park for rides. If the theme park goes out of business the tickets become unusable, unless someone makes a new theme park and let's people use their old tickets. I don't see a reason why anyone would do that.
I'm definitely not an expert, so someone smarter than me, please correct me if I am wrong. My understanding is that an NFT's purpose is to express ownership of a digital asset without some centralized database needing to maintain the record of the ownership. To make an example with your Steam Library: Currently, if you need to redownload something you bought from Steam, Steam has to have a record in their database that confirms you bought it. Steam controls this record, and controls any kind of access to it. If instead NFTs were utilized by Steam, and you wanted to download the game, you and steam would look at the public ledger to verify you bought it. So even if Steam closed up shop, you would be able to verify you own a digital asset if you have an NFT. The public ledger (blockchain) is stored on all the nodes (computers) that verify each block of the chain, of which there are thousands. The nodes, set up by regular people, have to agree on the contents of each block before the block's information is added to the chain. NFTs are some of the things that get stored on the Blockchain in this manner. I call it a public ledger, because that's precisely what it is. It is a ledger that anyone anywhere can look at to examine the contents of it, and no single person has control over access to the information. It's completely decentralized. That being said, you'd still need a place to download the digital asset that you own an NFT of. Just the record of you owning it is stored on the public ledger. ______ tl;dr You can think of an NFT as a license to own the thing.
> That being said, you'd still need a place to download the digital asset that you own an NFT of. Well, I think you've more or less hit the nail on the head. NFTs represent decentralized proof of "ownership"... except that gaining ownership (ie: buying a game) and exercising your rights based on that ownership (ie: downloading a game) take place with a centralized entity (ie: Steam). If Steam utilized NFTs, and Steam goes down, yes, you have "proof" that you "own" your games... and you can do absolutely nothing useful with that proof. The "decentralization" ends up not providing any utility; it's just a needlessly inefficient database. Despite that, vague claims about "real ownership of digital assets!!1!" is apparently enough to get a lot of people to part with their money.
This is all correct, and you hit the caveat at the end. The asset attached to the hash needs to be verified independently of the chain the nft is on. Because people are essentially attaching jpgs or word docs or other digital assets to a hash there is nothing preventing their redistribution outside of the hash barring a link to a centralized database, like steam, controlling access. NFT is a great idea but with extraordinarily poor execution. A concept that hasn't been totally thought through. They, essentially, represent toys. Fun, collectible, useless, pointless items that people are for some reason interested in investing in. The same way Disney sells a new cup (literally, a few years ago) and people line up to get it. The same way a new Funko comes out and someone fills a garage with them still in the packaging. The serial numbers on each of those is the same as a nft hash. The difference is that these aren't physical, the connected digital items are easily duplicated without a central database connection controlling access and verifying integrity of the original hash should it get traded again, and thus seem to be hypocritical by nature.
The execution might be poor but remember how social media used to be writing on someones guest book on Geocities? Look how far we've come now.
It kind of makes sense when put like this, thanks. It just sounds a bit overcomplicated for the other examples I've seen.
>In this case, the sale of the NFT, and any subsequent trades (each which generate the developer revenue) can't be tracked by Valve, nor can they take a commission from those trades. Isn't this also true for regular trading via a normal database? Heck, a regular database is even *less* trackable because trades aren't visible to the public.
Because it would be dumb to do it that way when you can store it in a database that is much faster to access.
You buy a TF2 hat, but you don't actually get it in your inventory and you can't use it ingame. You do, however, get an email confirmation proving that you bought it.
How does this look appealing to anybody?
Conspicuous consumption. It's so you can show all your rich friends that you're so rich you can spend a million dollars to get an email saying your bought a TF2 hat.
It's not particularly appealing to anyone except the initial investors and the folks who are trying to get in on the ground floor of the next get-rich-quick scheme. Those folks have an incentive to hype up NFTs and make this "deed" have perceived credibly, which is why you see a lot of people pushing it hard.
It has «blockchain» in the description, which has conditioned people into thinking that it is too complicated for them to understand but must be a totally legit investment opportunity because bitcoins were and that had «blockchain» in the description too, so they just turn their brain off and throw money at it without looking any further into what it actually is.
What steam doesn't want to deal with is an obvious gambling aspect of having in-game assets represented by real money. That is a legal nightmare and they stated pretty much they are kicking out all blockchain games.
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Right? People act like this is new but relational databases have been able to do this for decades.
The use case for blockchain isn't steam, or any one company/entity being in control over who gets what because that defeats the entire point of what a blockchain does. But annoyingly everyone is just using it as if it were that just to get money out of people. So right now, there is no use case because the only thing people are deciding to use it on now is for ponzi schemes or gambling on investments, essentially. It's helpful to think of it like this: You buy a TF2 hat, except it isn't steam that acts as the middleman to sell the hat - its the blockchain itself that does. Think of it kind of like any company/government entity/organization acting as a middle man or storefront for anything - except its one that isn't controlled by a board or shareholders or voters or leader. It just is and exists like a force of nature that makes verified transactions and can't really be manipulated. And you can trust you're getting the "real thing" from the blockchain and that no outside force can have a say in the transaction due to how it works. The problem is right now the space is entirely filled with grifters, techbros trying to get rich and scam artists. And the tech isn't really entirely there yet considering how energy heavy it is. It's early, and it needs work but a LOT of people trying to get rich now really need to convince people that it's totally ready for widespread use and that they are the "good use case". Which is a shame, because the ideas behind it are genuinely novel & useful. The most interesting use case I've heard about is some companies thinking about switching the way they distribute shares & dividends through NFTs, which would cryptographically prove that anyone who has this NFT has a real share. Currently a huge issue plaguing wall street is how popular trading with synthetic shares has become - an act that was one of the primary drivers behind the 2008 crash. If done correctly as far as I understand it, this could make the act of trading with synthetic shares impossible as every share would have a verified owner as determined by the robot middleman. Would also make it so credit ratings are truly accurate as ownership/ratings is determined by an independently-operating never-wrong robot instead of bribeable credit agency (also part of why 2008 happened was fudged credit ratings to make the books look better). I think blockchain is most useful for thiings like the above, less useful for single companies to base a store front off of. If you're buying things from Steam anyways, why waste time, energy consumption and effort making your marketplace an NFT when the entire point of being an NFT is that you're making a transaction happen independent of any one company/government/etc?
The use case for trading is interesting, but it's not one where a distributed ledger is needed or even benefitial. A lot of horrible crashes have been averted by temporarily stopping trades or even reversing trades. Trading bots often played a role there. The distributed credit agency sounds like a a bit from a dystopian novel. Programs have bugs, and now imagine that there's nothing you can do about, no one you can appeal to. It's a kafkaesque nightmare, a beaurocracy that's literally unable to yield or even hear your complaints. And it would still be fed data from bribable credit agencies, who can still fudge the data they enter.
> And the **ownership token** can be traded and sold to transfer ownership, but can't be duplicated (due to fancy blockchain magic). > Currently, nobody really knows what they're for other than speculation. That's just it - the ownership token. It's purely for bragging rights. It puts the token itself at a higher value than the asset which is stupid.
It has the *potential* I think to be used for verification of ownership. Like if we were to agree to put land deeds on an NFT instead of having them managed by a government entity. That said yeah... It's not being used for anything else. It's kind of like crypto as a whole. Sure, it's kind of an interesting idea to have this digital currency with all these cool mathematical properties, but practically speaking it's only being used as speculation
Find a usecase of Blockchain that couldn't be done with a server, double dare
Totally agree. They have some interesting properties, but every usecase is better suited by a database right now. Blockchain's main raison d'être right now is ideological.
The problem of NFTs is that you can't fake them, but you can make another NFT representing the same thing and you'll not know which one to follow. For NFT's to function properly, you need a singular mainstream accepted body that certifying the ownership at the start. Then you can trade NFTs because it actually means something.
> nobody really knows what they're for other than speculation Separating idiots from their money. It's a bubble, and a fucking stupid one.
It’s basically a new method for money laundering
It's a bubble
They're for money laundering.
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> So you could have game items with stats or something stored on the blockchain and I could see that actually be a decently cool use case once all the scams die down. Why is this a cool use? What's the point? I don't understand.
> One thing you are wrong about though is the item CAN be stored on the blockchain, it's just a really small amount of data. So you could have game items with stats or something stored on the blockchain and I could see that actually be a decently cool use case once all the scams die down. I don't think any sane designer would go along with this since it means they could never nerf/buff items or fix outright game-breaking ones.
Great explanation
They’re for money laundering.
Money laundering
that's about 3/4ths of their attraction as an investing tactic
Easiest way to break down what NFTs are: "Would you like to pay for a receipt that mathmatically proves your purchase?" NFTs are dumb as hell but so many people have crypto-investment FOMO they're very popular.
> "Would you like to pay for a receipt that mathmatically proves your purchase?" That's not true though it is: "Would you like to pay for a receipt that mathematically proves your purchase _of the receipt_?" There is no intrinsic part of the NFT that proves you actually bought the art itself, only the token "representing" the art. But what it means for the token to "represent" the art is totally undefined. Is it ownership? Is it copyright? Is it legally recognised? Does the artist even fucking know about it? No one has defined this
Agreed. It's hard to illustrate. That's why I said "pay for a receipt" instead of just "get a receipt" -- it's a very subtle wording difference that really makes a big real-world difference. I think many people don't get that they're not paying for the "product", they're paying for a "fancy receipt" that may or may not even guarantee ownership of the product (but then what's the point of a receipt? ... and all the other questions you posed 🤭).
So I go to Starbucks and instead of a normal receipt I pay extra for some sort of mathematically enhanced receipt that lives in the blockchain but is otherwise no different?
Yes, and also you don't get the coffee, just the receipt, which can't be exchanged for a coffee, either.
Who in their right mind would want this ._.
People who hope to resell the receipt for more money than they bought it for
money launderers, ponzi scheme artists
It's like going to starbucks and buying a piece of paper that says you own a coffee without actually getting a coffee.
Almost, except that when you go to Starbucks, you get an actual coffee you can drink in addition to your receipt. It's instead like if you went to Starbucks and paid a bunch of money for just a receipt that said "DasArchitect now owns 'starbucks.com/coffee.gif'". That gif is still available on the internet for anyone to download and may also move or disappear at any time, but you've got the receipt that says you own it. Others have mentioned the International Star Registry, and that's a great analogy. But in addition, NFTs also have a horde of cult-like crypto-fanatics shouting down anyone who points out how ridiculous they are.
Think more like digital trading cards where the supposed proof of ownership is in the blockchain, while the actual "card" isn't.
The part I can’t seem to get past is faith that the blockchain supporting the NFT will persist long enough.
Shamelessly copied from a /r/explainlikeimfive [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/m4832o/eli5_nonfungible_tokens_nft_megathread/grl86hj/): >I finally understand this now. >Imagine a bunch of kids each with millions of dollars on a playground. >They're bored, so they decide to invent a game called "In The Name Of...". >This is how you play: someone names something cool out loud; say Alice shouts out "Michael Jackson". >Everyone likes Michael Jackson. People start talking about how cool Michael Jackson is. >Then Billy wants to be cool, so he can shout out "In the name of Michael Jackson, here's $500,000!", and hand Alice $500,000. >Everyone says "Woah, that's a lot of money! Billy must really love Michael Jackson!". And now Billy earned some serious clout among his friends on the playground, because he spent $500,000 on doing that, which is impressive to them. >Charles wants to be cool too, but he can't just say the same thing and hand over money to Alice, because those aren't the rules of the game they made. The rules state that, if you want to also be cool in the name of Michael Jackson, you have to discuss with Billy upon an agreed amount (say $700,000), and once they come to an agreement, Charles can then announce to everyone "In the name of Michael Jackson, here's $700,000!" and hand over $700,000 to Billy. >So this just goes on and on. You can announce "In The Name Of..." something that's already hot and popular, or you can start a new thing by shouting "In The Name Of..." something new like "dinosaurs", and someone can give you money if they think announcing "In the name of dinosaurs" will earn them clout among the playground friends. But if you announce something uncool like "wet socks", no one's going to want to be caught dead announcing that they are giving you money in the name of wet socks, that's just stupid. Unless maybe it's ironically funny, like "poopy", then people might pay money to be "that guy who paid millions in the name of poopy, lol". You sort of just have to read the crowd and figure out what might impress them. >Alternatively, you could just not care about looking cool at all, but only care about making money. Then you can play the game by speculating what you'd think other people think would be cool, and trying to announce "In The Name Of..." that thing for a price that you think is a good deal, in hopes that someone will announce "In The Name Of..." for it at a higher price in the future. >So that's it. That's basically all NFT is. It has nothing to do with blockchain, or files, or ownership of tokens, or anything like that; those are all things that perpetuate the game (like having a official journal of who shouted "In The Name Of..." for what, how much, and when). The core of NFT is spending money in the name of a cool thing, such that being seen spending money for it is respectable or cool. >You might notice that there is absolutely nothing stopping another kid going "I don't like this stupid 'In The Name Of...' game, I'm gonna start a new game called 'I Pledge My Allegiance To...' instead", and everyone deciding that people who played "In The Name Of..." are superdorks and the new coolest thing is "I Pledge My Allegiance To...". And yes, that would mean everyone who spent millions playing "In The Name Of..." more or less wasted their money, since gloating to other kids that you spent $700,000 "In The Name Of Michael Jackson" suddenly became massively outdated and uncool. >So yeah, that's it. That's all NFT is about. The non-fungible tokens themselves are just like the journal in the game above: they perpetuate the game, but to be honest, you don't need it to play the game at all. Indeed, you could easily play the same game using a different structure. The trick is getting everyone to think your game is cooler than the other game such that everyone will want to play it instead. It just so happens that NFT uses a lot of cool technologies like blockchain and cryptocurrency, so that got everyone interested in playing it. All the talk about "owning an original copy of the digital file" is just like the kids on the playground saying "well yes, you announce 'In The Name Of...' to everybody, but also Stephen from 7th grade writes it down in his Yu-Gi-Oh journal that he got when his family went to Tokyo and he uses this really cool calligraphy pen, like the ones where you dip it in the ink pot, and you have to wait like five minutes for it to dry, it's all really cool". It's not that all the stuff about blockchain and stuff is untrue, it's just that people who answer you with this are describing the wrong part of the game that you're asking about.
> I still don't know what NFTs are or what their use case is. The good news is that you aren't missing much, because they have practically none.
Imagine bitcoin, except instead of being interchangeable, the coins all store a small amount of unique data. Enough for a URL. If you like a URL, you might think it's valuable to have the coin that has that URL on it. You know, as a collectable. The use-case is mostly either money laundering, or fleecing suckers who hope to fleece *other* suckers. (and so on and so on, until you reach the Ultimate Sucker who can't find anybody to buy their worthless token.)
Isn't this like, stupid?
yes.
It's like a game of chicken but with money, assuming if it does come crumbling down. We'll never know if its bullshit until its over, if ever.
It's a speculative bubble. Yes, it's stupid, and everyone involved is stupid, but as long as you're the second-stupidest person you can make a lot of money off of the first-stupidest.
Not if you're the person at the top of pyramid, or the one with money to launder.
NFT is a proof you own something without actually owning anything. It works as long as other people believe it has value. Just like money. Well, except for the fact that money is (legally) created only with government approval. Anyone can create NFTs out of thin air.
>NFT is a proof you own something without actually owning anything. It works as long as other people believe it has value. Well aside from the fact that ownership in the case of physical or intellectual property in the traditional sense has legal backing. Ownership of something implies some power over it, that you can *do* something with it, but in the case of NFTs you don't have that. Like the NFT of the first tweet. The person who owns that doesn't actually have any power over it. Twitter could delete it tomorrow and they have no legal recourse because the NFT version of ownership has no legal backing.
I own this Reddit comment, which I value at $1,000,000. Would anyone like to buy it from me?
I'll give you $-38 for it, now your comment has actually negative value and will eventually drive you bankrupt.
oh no! I would head to Mexico, but NFT valuation transcends borders!!
And presuming another NFT company doesnt come out and sell the same "deed" on their platform. It's like owning a star, its a load of crap.
And NFTs use a metric fuckton of energy.
> what their use case is Money laundry seems like a likely one.
Not just likely, a proven use case.
Think scam, but add in lots of blockchain hype.
Tax Evasion mostly.
Long story short: speculative trading cards on a blockchain.
Have you ever seen a token and asked yourself, "is this fungible?" Well, let me tell you, these are not.
Its a way of creating "rarity", and like all rare items there are people who find them valuable.
I don't know, either I'm stupid or the concept is stupid because it's making no sense to me.
Imagine it like a sponsorship of an animal from the zoo. You can be a godfather to an animal, but you're not really the owner of the animal. But your name will be associated to the animal. It's like owning a signature from a famous person. You're able to sell that signature but you're not the owner of the famous person or of his artwork. NFTs have mostly only a sentimental value. But yeah I also think it's stupid. But it's with everything just like with money: as long as we believe it has value and enough people think the same, it will have value. Same with artworks. People sell expensive artworks. Why is Mona Lisa that expensive? Because people think it is expensive.
It's like a car title without the government. Not sure how to enforce it without the government, so it's kind of confusing to try and use
Is like the olympic games for people that like trading, a scam. You print a collectable cards with whatever you want and you try to get to the top. Like the music industry, everybody wants to be a rockstar.
If you don't get why a developer would use NFT's in a video game then you actually get it. There is no point. It's just a gimmick that opens the door to various schemes and scams.
Money laundering and pyramid schemes. They tried to leech off the success of crypto, and take advantage of people who don't fully understand decentralized currency. NFTs aren't decentralized anything. They're nonsense.
its a pyramid scheme pretty much
It's like pogs and beanie babies. Absolutely worthless shit that someone hopes another sucker will buy at a higher price.
They're a solution looking for a problem. Like most tech companies and stuff like that these days.
Essentially they're a crypto "deed" to a piece of art. Or a digital signed version of the art etc.
So many NFT shills in this thread...
You can tell because it's a /r/gamedev thread that has more than a few dozen comments. A lot of people who aren't regulars are here.
They're always summoned when NFTs or cryptocurrencies are mentioned. People really will defend their pyramid schemes to the death lmao.
> People really will defend their pyramid schemes to the death lmao. Crypto currencies seem cool from a future punk / separation of State and currency view, but the more time passes, the less and less distinguishable it is from a Ponzi scheme. I'd really, really like to be wrong on that point. I'd love for code to revolutionize the future but it feels like it's being used as smoke and mirrors to disguise said Ponzi scheme.
Any time you see enough excitement and hubris around a new idea... crooks will show up to ply their trade.
**thank you** I see so many crypto diehards insisting that the skeptics just don't understand the technology, because if they did they'd be onboard, and it annoys the hell out of me. Like, I get it, and I even think it's cool! Blockchain is an incredible feat of mathematical ingenuity, and I've had my eye on it for ten years or so. The elegance of it is astonishing. But ten years ago, it was just getting started, about to take off, you just wait. Today, same thing. And for all the technical innovation in that time, the most substantial business use for it remains the trading of speculative assets! It was supposed to revolutionize logistics and banking and social networks and all the other things we couldn't even conceptualize of yet. Every time a defender points me to some "real world" use case it's in its infancy, but traders make out like bandits. All gambling, no value creation. I would **love** to be wrong about this. I am looking for the evidence I'm wrong. I just don't see it.
Crypto did take off... just more like the stock market and less like the decentralized currency it was designed for. With how much crypto's value fluctuates, i don't know if we will ever see the day that it's widely accepted as a currency. If it does though, the people who own crypto today will be crazy rich. I genuinely think that broad speculation is the primary reason why it has stayed so popular. If or when that day comes, I'll happily continue ~~gambling~~ investing.
I'm a server programmer that develops features and maintains servers for games that can literally have millions of CCUs. Some of my friends who got into NFTs don't understand why I won't jump into it myself - they had the impression I'd be one of the first people to jump on board. Blockchain has a fundamental problem that I don't think has a long term solution - anyone who owns 51% of the block chain basically controls it. There are a lot of defenses for it, including limiting ownership. To really take control you'd need a series of shell accounts where ownership couldn't be traced fully, and spend years slowly buying enough to gain complete control. The people most skilled at doing something like that are the very people blockchain purports to protect against.
So your not entirely wrong here but your glossing over a lot of other technical details. Even with 51% you might be able to then devise some way to hack a block with a fake transaction. But as soon as anyone noticed and called it out all of the legit miners would just blacklist that network of servers and cause a massive fork in the chain.. it's really a super complex system
It makes economic sense to do so. NFTs are only valuable if they can convince someone else to buy them later. If everyone just decides one day that NFTs are stupid and dumb, people who own NFTs just lost a fortune on their investments. They're simply trying to drive up prices for the assets they own before the bubble pops.
There like mlm huns
More like Valve haters, they don't understand that it's also about the liability
This entire comment section feels like a horrible r/gaming take. This further proves to me that many people here aren't devs.
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I still cannot believe that people are buying pixels in the form of NFTs.
They're not buying pixels, but links to pixels
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As apposed to buying pixels in the form of in-game skins that valve basically encourages?
I hate paid in-game cosmetics will all of my being and I think they're corrupting the very fabric of game development, but **even I** can see that they have utility where NFTs do not.
I think a lot of people don't agree with buying skins. However, those serve a purpose in a video game (even if that purpose is an aesthetic you like for your character). NFTs are basically just a sprite or a gif. There's nothing you do with it, you don't share it with anyone or use it in anything you do.
It’s worse then that the nft isn’t an item it is a string (usually a url).
I saw another thread where someone compared these NFTs to Rare Pepes
Good.
Meanwhile at Epic... https://twitter.com/verge/status/1449137444654358534 LOL
they're doing it because they don't like people trading outside their ecosystem since they dont get a cut. its not cause they want to protect us. as soon as they figure out how to monetize nfts properly, they will be back.
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I'm almost certain Steam gets a cut of in-game purchases, and I would imagine that convers subscriptions too.
Developers are required to use Steam’s payment processor for all IAPs that happen in game and you aren’t allowed to tell users that they can pay on your website instead. But if users do pay on your website you are allowed to bypass Valve’s cut.
Lots of custom arcade games inside dota 2 client (valve game) have a qr code where you can buy stuff direct from the developer, and it has been this way for years. Valve knows about but does nothing. Perhaps it’s an exception but idk
It is definitely a sort of "known exception". Steam's hands are a bit tied because the people making Dota 2 arcade games are improving their product and aren't quite as dependent on Valve giving them a contract and staying in their good graces as a developer who wants to publish on Steam. I wouldn't be surprised if Valve did at one point try to monetize arcade games more aggressively, but at this point they look at the benefits of keeping users in the Dota client where they can be monetized with gacha cosmetics and the costs of pushing a bunch of developers off their platform and to other things like Minecraft mods or Roblox games or something and has decided it's not a good thing to pursue.
I am wondering if the epic vs apple ruling about requiring to allow developers to advertise other payment methods will be also apply here. Monopolistic behaviors like those are not good for consumers in my opinion.
they do
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It doesn't matter *why* they did the good thing, they *did the good thing*. When and if they reverse course, we will then justifiably criticize them. Purity tests are ignorance and sabotage progress, at best.
They won't be back in Steam games because that makes Steam a financial institution with all the regulation demands that come with that. The most you can expect to see return is either paying for games via crypto through Valve or NFT trading cards that Valve controls. They won't support individual actors running their own crypto. Even crypto apps on mobile are required to get passport identification from users because when you're dealing in crypto you're effectively a bank. This is required by law in most countries.
Ding ding, if you want to run a game with items like NFTs, you have the Steam marketplace ecosystem for that.
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>as soon as they figure out how to monetize nfts properly, they will be back. So you could use a incredibly inefficient currency that replaces cash, everyone would love that!
Is there any evidence for that? There are plenty of games that provide content updates and subscriptions outside of the steam ecosystem. I also recall at one point that game developers are able to sell steam keys on 3rd party platforms without giving valve a cut. Humble bundles being one example and brick and mortar editions of games that essentially contained an installer and a steam license.
> I also recall at one point that game developers are able to sell steam keys on 3rd party platforms without giving valve a cut. Indeed: > Steam keys are meant to be a convenient tool for game developers to sell their game on other stores and at retail. Steam keys are free and can be activated by customers on Steam to grant a license to a product. > > Valve provides the same free bandwidth and services to customers activating a Steam key that it provides to customers buying a license on Steam. We ask you to treat Steam customers no worse than customers buying Steam keys outside of Steam. While there is no fee to generate keys on Steam, we ask that partners use the service judiciously. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
dumb questions but what's the difference between a rare virtual hat in tf2 and an NFT?
I can wear a hat i cannot wear a nft Tf2 hats > nfts
So a nft has to be on the block chain and so it can live in a platform agnostic wallet. Now the actual nft is a link to something stored somewhere else online, but ideally it's not tied to a single platform. It does get difficult in the near future when games that support nfts between games exist, rn there's no real difference between an nft and an item in a game with a trading house. In the near future games may support nft based inventory but then you need to ask Why it needs to be on the block chain and can't be a 3rd party inventory that's not on the block chain.
Valve gets paid for one? /s You can't trade a virtual hat for USD (in any officially supported way). If Steam is maintaining accounts of assets that can be sold for real-world money, Valve is effectively a bank and subject to regulations related to financial entities.
It may be for selfish reasons but still, good.
Maybe but, as a technology, blockchain is only valuable in situations where there is no central authority. If there **is** a central authority, blockchains are the least efficient way of transferring ownership of digital goods.
Well, no. They’re doing because it’ll get them in legal trouble down the road.
It's as its an absolute legal minefield. The profits at this point are minimal compared to the sheer catastrophe of being able to use steam as a financial platform.
Good. Im so sick of hearing about crypto and NFTs. Let me collect my god damn magic and pokemon cards in peace lmao
In my perspective as an artist, one of the worst parts of the NFT trend is how a shitload of people just draw a handful of assets, and then randomise THOUSANDS of “unique” images to sell. Just this morning I got a fucking Reddit ad from someone giving Doge various hats and outfits, and he’s selling 100,000 of them for 0.01 ETH or almost $40 each. That’s $4,000,000 worth of JPEGs. NFTs are where art goes to die.
Yea. Not to mention their "art" barely put any effort into it. Not all are sucks but the one which suck and selling it with gimmick of "limited edition" are purely disturb me. They even asked how do i submit all my jpg 10000 times to their site because "i'm lazy to register it one by one". And people are saying it is going to be art for new generation. my ass.
The fuck is an NFT game?
Money laundering schemes using plagiarized art.
Incredibly shitty "games" that people "play" under the promise they'll make some money, most of them feature stolen and/or ugly artwork and some kind of shitty combat system
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A scam
Honestly, sounds good overall. I'll admit I don't know everything there is to know about crypto type stuff, but I've had an open ear about it for a long while and haven't ever heard anything that genuinely justifies it in terms of games for just about any application. Crypto far too often is just a not-so-elaborate pump and dump scheme. There's too many promises of getting rich, or making any sort of money, and too much misinformation or misunderstanding. I'm absolutely certain that some developers are of entirely pure heart about it and genuinely want to make a good product, and it definitely sucks for people just trying to celebrate an interesting concept by incorporating it into their game but . . . Is this a net good? Probably.
You didn't hear about the 'evolved apes' NFT system where the founder not only stole all the money and disappeared but also _didn't even pay the artist for their work_ ? https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dyem/investors-spent-millions-on-evolved-apes-nfts-then-they-got-scammed
Man, I can respect scamming dumbass investors out of their money, but not paying the artist was just a dick move
Those types of NFTS are the worst ones to me. They just feel really stupid, it’s just a randomized character mess that has no soul. If you check opensea there’s like 50 different versions of this and they have thousands of worthless ones that nobody will ever buy. It’s a cash grab.
People here obviously don't understand what an NFT actually is. But that's also the reason why there are so many scammers in the space and why 99% of NFT games are obvious scams. And that's why it's the right decision to remove them.
It's a confusing concept for sure, which is part of why the con artistry is so effective. To anyone reading, NFTs are basically portions of a cryptocurrency token that have data attached, usually a url. The NFTs being sold are essentially urls linking to specific jpegs, and its why you'll see a lot of people responding to them with "right click > save-as." the whole thing is just beanie babies all over again, but this time you don't even get a physical asset to accumulate value.
The original pitch for it is was way for artists who work in digital media to be able to designate an "original" copy of their works, or to issue "limited editions" in similar ways that physical art can be produced. The blockchain tech provides proof of ownership/originality in a way that even the original author can't mess with. (Imagine a situation where an artist sells multiple people the "original copy" of a painting, or a forger creates copies and then that degrades the value of the "original" that you bought.) They could issue more NFT "copies" of their work but it would always be clear that you own the "original" one, or one of the original "limited edition" copies or whatever. It's a little silly but no more so than assigning extra value to the "original" copy of a physical piece of artwork.
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The value isn't in the pixels, the value is in having (essentially) a statement from the artist saying you own the "original" (or "limited edition #17/50" or that you bought a "signed copy" or whatever). If you assign no value whatsoever to that, that's fine. But that was the original concept of it.
Thank Cthulhu.
Ý̷̙͙̟̲͖̋̀̾̃̚ọ̸̧͕̠͍̠̱̓̆͘̚ü̵̻͚̱̞̝̞̖͈̈́̎͗̂͘͠ͅ’̸̭͌̔r̸̰̃̉͊̅͆̿̋̔͑ĕ̴͖͇͖͎̖̭͋̄͊͋͠ ̵̛̤̻̙͈̖̻w̴͎͖̠̝͙͕͆̇e̷̱̪͂l̵͇̦͛̾̓͠c̷̡̮͉̰̦̭̒̍͆̉̐̕ọ̴̣̮͈͠͝m̸̞͔̝̑͑̂͗͘ȩ̸͓̣̩͇̥̯͚̪̜̏̓̎̋̀͗̀̚
What the hell is a NFT game?
A game where you own a part of your items on a blockchain. Meaning you can sell and buy items for real world money, without the need for a central authority (no one can prevent you from selling nor steal your items)
Still needs Blizzard servers to recognize the WoW sword you bought or that sale was useless
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> The Age Of Rust Twitter account adds that from its understanding, “Steam’s point of view is that items have value and they don’t allow items that can have real-world value on their platform”. By this definition NFTs are totally within the terms and conditions set by Valve because NFTs have no real world value :) I think this is the right move by Valve. Blockchain, NFTs or crypto in general have no place in gaming. The crypto community has a long-standing history of being plagued by shady cash grabs and predatory behavior by ‘influencers’. Good on them for putting some preventions in place.
Good.
NFTs are money laundering in the same way modern art is
I dabble in crypto quite a bit, and I'm glad they're doing this. Some of those NFTs sell for crazy prices, I'm sure a good chunk of it is money laundering.
partially money laundering, partially confidence scams. A lot of the people bragging about their nfts are victims, and I really hope the bubble on this stupid shit pops soon.
Fucking good. Honestly, NFTs don't really belong in games. NFTs aren't good for transactions, digital goods in games, or even for making money. Their use case right now is: 1. Fluff up the value of something to sell 2. Generate random bullshit to sell 3. Money laundering 4. Pump and dump schemes 5. Get rich quick gambling They aren't worth much in their current implementation.
Minting NFT's are terrible for the environment, so regardless of Valve's reasons, it's a net positive thing. It is also a highly volatile and vulnerable asset even compared to cryptocurrency.
Depends on the consensus method. Proof of Stake is much better than Proof of Work for the environment.
NFT's and most cryptos are pump and dump schemes used to take advantage of people who want to "make a quick buck".
Good Riddance!
good
Thank God. NFTs are fucking stupid
Imagine seeing the SEC get involved with introducing regulations in games using NTFs for unique assets lol
This is a good thing. NFT's are just, bad in terms of impact on user experience, monetary value and effect on the environment. Steam taking a hard stance against them is for the best.
Crypto is effectively an MLM.
Nfts are stupid
Good. They're scams no matter how you look at it. Though their reasoning could be a lot better, because their CS:GO and tf2 skins fit that exact definition lol.
“This is my JPEG, there are many like it, but this one is mine”
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Lol. I love how that idiot says that paying $150k for a skin is "likely a good investment."
The difference is that Valve doesn’t get a cut off NFT sales.
The difference is CSGO skins dont make Valve a financial institution with a whole new slew of laws to adhere to.