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In addition to the fact that the very idea of NFTs is a scam, Valve doesn't want to enable money-laundering lest financial regulators drop the hammer on them. B

In addition to the fact that the very idea of NFTs is a scam, Valve doesn't want to enable money-laundering lest financial regulators drop the hammer on them. Banning any games that involve real-world assets (or anything easily convertible to a real world asset like crypto) is just smart business given current financial regulations. It also gives them a complete monopoly on their internal marketplace, so that's a nice bonus.

pcstl 5y ago
I actually think in-game content is one of the most legitimate uses for NFTs. It's also cool that since the on-chain data doesn't go away if the game does, it allows for in-game collectables which are not tied to a specific game. Lots of possibilities there.
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  Pardon my ignorance - but if the game goes away, what precisely does the NFT token which remain grants you? Isn't it just a confirmation that you own an item in a game that you cannot access/use anymore? I guess as always, I am looking for benefit of NFT/chain solution over simpler non-NFT/chain solution. I hear persistency, but in this case I don't see it in practical terms.
  - pcstl 5y ago
    It can be used by a different game. The token is just a token, what it means depends on how it's used. A smart game producer that sees a NFT-based game go down could say "hey, you know all those items you had on <game X>? Come over to my game and you'll get <benefit> based on that stuff!" Since ownership of the token is publicly visible and not locked into Game X's database. It could also be used by anything else, really. Lots of ideas where cross-game promotion could be done using NFTs to validate ownership of something in Game A within Game B without requiring the game developers to set up a specific intergame data link.
    - afavour 5y ago
      I love that idea but the cynical side of me says a game dev wants someone buying new stuff on their platform, not importing already bought stuff.
      - carlosdp 5y ago
        If you let people import their stuff, it's an excellent way to bootstrap a player base, which is the hardest part of game development by far.
        louloulou 5y ago
        Exactly, and they're not mutually exclusive. You can still let players buy new stuff on your platform as well as import other value/items.
        antifa 5y ago
        Why would a dev write a game that detects another game's micro transactions and then give the player the fruit of the dev's labor while ignoring that the other game's devs got the profits of the micro transactions? This is not a solid business plan.
        meheleventyone 5y ago
        But having a business model predicated on user acquisition by timing for a competitor game going out of business doesn’t seem a sensible bootstrapping plan.
        IanCal 5y ago
        You don't need them to go out of business, people enjoy multiple games.
        meheleventyone 5y ago
        In this space people tend to have a main game and customer retention is a significant part of revenue. So making your game compatible with a competitor such that they could easily walk away would work against your best interests. Otherwise these co-marketing activities would already exist since there is no inherent need for a blockchain to implement them. A soft example of this is games that include characters from other games. A lot of these suggestions fall foul of the same problem that they offer a great deal for the customer but not for the game maker. Which whilst altruistic is rather naive to commercial reality. A value add model like the Amiibo would work better but again is predicated on developers actually capturing some revenue from supporting it.
  - kfarr 5y ago
    I think the best case scenario it would be useful if game host goes out of business, primary game server closes but users still have assets which persist on the chain. It'd then be possible for the community to resurrect the game and use on chain data to restore functionality
    - notcoolbezos 5y ago
      reminds me of sword art online! This same concept is used in the anime, ids of the items from the base game were transferred over to the new game. Interesting to see something like this happen in a few years.
    - antifa 5y ago
      I think a better scenario would be if games I paid for worked offline after the developers leave, and there were no micro transactions.
  - whiskyant 5y ago
    The NFT pretty much acts as an entry in a shared public database. This means if it’s a popular NFT, multiple games can support the asset by building support for it in game.
    - munk-a 5y ago
      You know what else is a shared database? Shared databases. In the mobile market games already have a long history of key-ringing on common advertiser IDs to strengthen their Ad revenue (i.e. all Square Enix produced games might use a shared advertiser ID on OSes that support that (like iOS)). Additionally some games already have carryover content - it's rather rare but a good example is Total War: Warhammer - where DLCs from the first game also applied to the second game (i.e. allowing you to play the Wood Elves in Mortal Empires). The reasons these things are rare is that, except for some limited circumstances (like in TW: WH it was the same dev and publisher) you're usually cannibalizing your own sales to boost some other game's revenue which is just weird.
- WalterSear 5y ago
  Steam achievements could do that faster and better. But people don't want Steam achievements: they are chasing the excitement, that's chasing the money, that's made by wash trading gifs.
- sumeno 5y ago
  Who looks at video games today and thinks “what I want is to spend increasingly absurd amounts of money for in-game items”? That kind of microtransaction garbage is already ruining many games without the need for this NFT nonsense on top of it. The only people who want more of that are the people who think it’ll make them rich.
  - xtracto 5y ago
    > Who looks at video games today and thinks “what I want is to spend increasingly absurd amounts of money for in-game items”? I think it is a generational gap thing. I myself (40 year old) play CS:GO quite a lot (I'm really bad at it as well haha), but don't care about all the stickers and other custom stuff that people buy there. However, there's a huge market for those stickers. And there is people that really like spending money to "own" that stuff. I feel that my generation (X/xenials and older) don't have a strong sense of "digital property" (in the end, we grew at the time of napster, kazaa, edonkey, and downloading copies of anything digital. At the same time "games" were owned physically through NES, SNES, Gameboy, Genesis cartridges ) But for Millenails/Z, digital property comes more naturally and they "feel" the "ownage" of digital property.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      Ah, this explains everything. Not-young people who don't understand microtransactions thinks that young people really loves NFT's, and therefore spends a ton of money on NFT's hoping they will be valuable. But young people don't care about them at all. This is Beanie Babies all over again.
anonymoushn 5y ago
They already enable money laundering using csgo skins
- jimbob45 5y ago
  I was ready to come in and prove you wrong but I found this in the Steam Support FAQ: >Will you be asking me to provide tax information to you, and/or will you be providing 1099’s based on my transactions in the Community Market? No. Previously we required that U.S. citizens and residents provide us with certain information, including name, address and social security number, prior to exceeding 200 separate sales transactions in a calendar year. We have concluded that this information is not required and we will no longer be asking you for this information as part of Community Market participation. We will also not be providing IRS Form 1099’s with respect to sales activity in the Community Market. With that in mind, it seems like you can money launder fairly easily, right? I thought that the 1099s were the primary blocker to that.
  - Randosaurus 5y ago
    Most places have stopped asking me to sign when I make a purchase less than $X with my debit card (Generally around $25). Their thought process is that it's much faster cycling people through and the risk of money loss isn't worth the loss in throughput. What you quoted is specifically for less than 200 transactions in a calendar year. The implication being that any account involving 200 or more transactions in a calendar year will need that information. Which brings about two points. 1. Exactly how much money can someone launder buying < 200 csgo skins in a calendar year (are we arguing that they're paying $50k per skin?), and 2. How exactly does the idea that they've decided to take on some risk to decrease friction incompatible with not wanting to deal with NFT's, which *COULD* conceivably go for $50k a pop.
- anunnymouse 5y ago
  Maybe i'm reading too much into this, but are you suggesting they stop trying to prevent it from happening in any channels, because it might be possible in one?
lapetitejort 5y ago
Let's remember the convoluted money laundering scheme involving asset flips, card packs, gems, and Steam marketplace. What a mess that was. 1. Create an asset flip game with steam trading cards. 2. Generate steam keys and give to bots 3. Bots farm the cards. 4. Convert the cards to steam gems. 5. Buy legit cards with gems. 6. Sell legit cards on Steam Marketplace. 7. Buy sought-after game on Steam. 8. Sell game on the gray market for real money. Let me know if I messed up any of those steps. It's been a few years.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  Isn't there a lot of money lost in between all those steps? I mean steam keys cost money, bot farms, I doubt those gems have a very attractive exchange rate (it's a 'last resort' way to get rid of cards), buy / sell cards has Valve's cut, as does said game and the financial processors in between. It just sounds like a lot of effort. Can people still trade guns outside of CSGO?
  - ur-whale 5y ago
    >Isn't there a lot of money lost in between all those steps? I suspect OP is being sarcastic.
    - wheybags 5y ago
      I dont think they are. Money laundering, like any other financial service, costs money.
  - Uehreka 5y ago
    From a money laundering “user” perspective, would you rather have $1 million that will likely send you to jail, or $700k that you can spend freely without concern?
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    > I mean steam keys cost money Not if you're the developer of the game.
websap 5y ago
Steam support in-game purchases and trading of goods. I don't understand why NFTs are any different. To me this just about control and they are probably working out the best way to monetize this platform.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  because presumably steam can't guarantee any of the usual anti-fraud schemes or other obligations they have if the financial transactions happen outside of the purview of the ecosystem. Obviously it's about control and understandably so because letting uncontrollable financial transactions happen within applications on your platform sounds like a legal nightmare waiting to happen.
- carlosdp 5y ago
  You can't trade those goods in-between games though. Valve gets to say how you can use it.
  - WalterSear 5y ago
    Valve could say that you could. NFTs don't solve a technical problem here: it's just implementation.
knownjorbist 5y ago
The very idea of NFTs aren't a scam, but many of the current manifestations could be described as scams.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Selling signed URLs to frequently low-effort JPEGs, that don't convey ownership, don't guarantee the continued existence of the thing they point at, and don't come with any legal rights whatsoever? It's basically just a next-gen version of the star registry scam that's been going on for decades. [1] [1] https://www.star-registration.com/ https://www.star-registration.com/
  - knownjorbist 5y ago
    I don't see how this refutes my point. The concept is independent of any of these manifestations.
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      It's a scam because you're buying nothing in both cases lol. You're exchanging money, with value, for nothing.
      - knownjorbist 5y ago
        What if I didn't exchange any money? What if the token in question does provide value by granting me access to something?
        arcticbull 5y ago
        The former isn't really possible right, as you have to pay at minimum gas fees. The latter is extrinsic.
        knownjorbist 5y ago
ur-whale 5y ago
> It also gives them a complete monopoly on their internal marketplace Very probably their primary motivation. I'm pretty sure NFTs will be allowed back in as soon as they figure out a way to skim 20% off of every TX.
- knownjorbist 5y ago
  This is precisely why the "big" NFT games at the moment are all on boutique chains like Flow. They want full control, a % cut, and no secondary markets.
hungryforcodes 5y ago
Buying an NFT is most certainly NOT a scam. People do it because they want to. Or is there an approved list of Internet actions that you can provide us with. Also how is buying an NFT money laundering exactly? Especially if it's done on the blockchain, this seems to be the ultimate in traceability if it's done with ETH, which invariably it will be. I agree about the monopoly part.
- pwinnski 5y ago
  People buy into all sorts of scams because they want to. That's not the compelling counter-argument you seem to think it is.
  - hungryforcodes 5y ago
    But just because some random HN person says NFTs are a scam -- doesn't make them a scam. Your counter-counter argument is hardly compelling.
- Randosaurus 5y ago
  People send a certain Nigerian Prince money because they want to, and yet ...
  - hungryforcodes 5y ago
    But unlike the Nigerian prince -- when people buy an NFT they get what they bought. Or don't you know how they work?
    - HideousKojima 5y ago
      So they get legal ownership of the artwork the NFT points to? Wait, what do you mean they don't? What do you mean all they get is a legally unenforceable digital hash representing that they "own" it in some nebulous way? What do you mean the actual owner of the art can mint a million NFTs pointing to the same piece of art and sell them all? What do you mean someone who isn't even the actual owner of the art can mint an NFT for it and sell it? This deal is getting worse all the time!
calibas 5y ago
> In addition to the fact that the very idea of NFTs is a scam An NFT is just a digital certificate stored on a blockchain. It's certainly not a scam and has perfectly legit uses. For a variety of reasons, everything related to blockchain is ridiculously overhyped. What should be boring accounting technology is suddenly a pop culture fad, and that birthed thousands of get-rich-quick schemes. It's a flaw in human behavior though, not a problem with NFTs or cryptocurrencies.
- elevenoh 5y ago
  Truth. But hey, many have seen their friends have success in crypto while they've remained on the sidelines.. and they don't like it. They'll defame blockchain & nfts to no end rather than attempt to seek understanding. Intermediary-less digital ownership is incredibly powerful & will only grow in usage & utility by open-source evolving nature, perhaps exponentially.
  - Azsy 5y ago
    I think you're getting the FOMO the wrong way around. Im pretty sure an average HN reader understands a lot more about NFT then the average NFT owner. Bitcoin was technically interesting. Whatever your stance on all the negatives in the real world, everybody agrees its elegant in theory. It combined problems to create a solution. That's what real innovation looks like. NFT's as 'investments' are a scam. Claiming Git commit hashes as property is not valuable, innovative, or game-changing. From the bottom to the top of the pyramid its people who are salty they didn't make more money in 'crypto' and are afraid of missing out twice in their lives.
    - elevenoh 5y ago
      An nft can map to anything. This mapping is up to the implementer. I can show an nft that represents a role, access to an event, a cross-game asset, as a property title, as a binding contract, rights to use intellectual property etc.
- SahAssar 5y ago
elevenoh 5y ago
>In addition to the fact that the very idea of NFTs is a scam Is the concept of digital ownership a scam? If so, why?
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  If the Louvre decided to sell an NFT of the Mona Lisa, nothing prevents them from generating another NFT (or a few thousand) of it as well. Same thing for an NFT pointing to an image at some URL and containing a hash of that image, it doesn't actually generate ownership of that art in any legally meaningful (or enforceable) way. Digital ownership only works for things that 100% stay in the digital realm, and even then it's not a guarantee.
- xg15 5y ago
  From what I read so far, NFT "ownership" works about the same way as those certificates from the 60s that attest ownership of a plot on the moon. It's "ownership" of something without granting you any of the perks or rights that usually come with that. It's not even exclusive ownership - because, while you have exclusive control over your particular token, there is nothing that keeps some other entity from minting another token and declare that it symbolises ownership of the same asset that is symbolized by your own token. I think NFTs do have some interesting properties. The ownership of the token itself is indeed exclusive - this is enforced through the blockchain. Moreover, token ownership can be verified by software, without any human involvement. This could enable some moderately interesting use-cases, like resellable digital assets: You could imagine an online game where each character is bound to an NFT. You can sell the character by selling the NFT - and the game can restrict access to the character to the current owner of the NFT. But this doesn't seem to be what's actually done: Instead, NFTs are simply declared to symbolise "ownership" of some real-world asset, without having any kind of actual connection to that asset.
- lottin 5y ago
  Define digital ownership.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  uvgouy7tcr767g90in0n7g9 I bequeath to you digital ownership of this string. Let's imagine hn is an immutable forum. It represents a block of gold. What are you going to do with it?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bobcostas55 5y ago
Is a CCG that uses NFTs to track ownership of cards any more scammy than a CCG that uses a centralized DB to track ownership of cards?
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  You can now be scammed by the company that makes the game and third party sellers on the blockchain! The future is truly a wonderful and fascinating place.
andreilys 5y ago
In addition to the fact that the very idea of NFTs is a scam This makes no sense. It's like calling the very idea of an Oracle database is a scam. NFT's are basically a consensus-driven shared database, that can be used for legitimate reasons or for scams.

pcstl 5y ago

I actually think in-game content is one of the most legitimate uses for NFTs. It's also cool that since the on-chain data doesn't go away if the game does, it allows for in-game collectables which are not tied to a specific game. Lots of possibilities there.

NikolaNovak 5y ago
Pardon my ignorance - but if the game goes away, what precisely does the NFT token which remain grants you? Isn't it just a confirmation that you own an item in a game that you cannot access/use anymore? I guess as always, I am looking for benefit of NFT/chain solution over simpler non-NFT/chain solution. I hear persistency, but in this case I don't see it in practical terms.
- pcstl 5y ago
  It can be used by a different game. The token is just a token, what it means depends on how it's used. A smart game producer that sees a NFT-based game go down could say "hey, you know all those items you had on <game X>? Come over to my game and you'll get <benefit> based on that stuff!" Since ownership of the token is publicly visible and not locked into Game X's database. It could also be used by anything else, really. Lots of ideas where cross-game promotion could be done using NFTs to validate ownership of something in Game A within Game B without requiring the game developers to set up a specific intergame data link.
  - afavour 5y ago
    I love that idea but the cynical side of me says a game dev wants someone buying new stuff on their platform, not importing already bought stuff.
    - carlosdp 5y ago
      If you let people import their stuff, it's an excellent way to bootstrap a player base, which is the hardest part of game development by far.
      - louloulou 5y ago
        Exactly, and they're not mutually exclusive. You can still let players buy new stuff on your platform as well as import other value/items.
        antifa 5y ago
        Why would a dev write a game that detects another game's micro transactions and then give the player the fruit of the dev's labor while ignoring that the other game's devs got the profits of the micro transactions? This is not a solid business plan.
      - meheleventyone 5y ago
        But having a business model predicated on user acquisition by timing for a competitor game going out of business doesn’t seem a sensible bootstrapping plan.
        IanCal 5y ago
        You don't need them to go out of business, people enjoy multiple games.
        meheleventyone 5y ago
        In this space people tend to have a main game and customer retention is a significant part of revenue. So making your game compatible with a competitor such that they could easily walk away would work against your best interests. Otherwise these co-marketing activities would already exist since there is no inherent need for a blockchain to implement them. A soft example of this is games that include characters from other games. A lot of these suggestions fall foul of the same problem that they offer a great deal for the customer but not for the game maker. Which whilst altruistic is rather naive to commercial reality. A value add model like the Amiibo would work better but again is predicated on developers actually capturing some revenue from supporting it.
- kfarr 5y ago
  I think the best case scenario it would be useful if game host goes out of business, primary game server closes but users still have assets which persist on the chain. It'd then be possible for the community to resurrect the game and use on chain data to restore functionality
  - notcoolbezos 5y ago
    reminds me of sword art online! This same concept is used in the anime, ids of the items from the base game were transferred over to the new game. Interesting to see something like this happen in a few years.
  - antifa 5y ago
    I think a better scenario would be if games I paid for worked offline after the developers leave, and there were no micro transactions.
- whiskyant 5y ago
  The NFT pretty much acts as an entry in a shared public database. This means if it’s a popular NFT, multiple games can support the asset by building support for it in game.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    You know what else is a shared database? Shared databases. In the mobile market games already have a long history of key-ringing on common advertiser IDs to strengthen their Ad revenue (i.e. all Square Enix produced games might use a shared advertiser ID on OSes that support that (like iOS)). Additionally some games already have carryover content - it's rather rare but a good example is Total War: Warhammer - where DLCs from the first game also applied to the second game (i.e. allowing you to play the Wood Elves in Mortal Empires). The reasons these things are rare is that, except for some limited circumstances (like in TW: WH it was the same dev and publisher) you're usually cannibalizing your own sales to boost some other game's revenue which is just weird.
WalterSear 5y ago
Steam achievements could do that faster and better. But people don't want Steam achievements: they are chasing the excitement, that's chasing the money, that's made by wash trading gifs.
sumeno 5y ago
Who looks at video games today and thinks “what I want is to spend increasingly absurd amounts of money for in-game items”? That kind of microtransaction garbage is already ruining many games without the need for this NFT nonsense on top of it. The only people who want more of that are the people who think it’ll make them rich.
- xtracto 5y ago
  > Who looks at video games today and thinks “what I want is to spend increasingly absurd amounts of money for in-game items”? I think it is a generational gap thing. I myself (40 year old) play CS:GO quite a lot (I'm really bad at it as well haha), but don't care about all the stickers and other custom stuff that people buy there. However, there's a huge market for those stickers. And there is people that really like spending money to "own" that stuff. I feel that my generation (X/xenials and older) don't have a strong sense of "digital property" (in the end, we grew at the time of napster, kazaa, edonkey, and downloading copies of anything digital. At the same time "games" were owned physically through NES, SNES, Gameboy, Genesis cartridges ) But for Millenails/Z, digital property comes more naturally and they "feel" the "ownage" of digital property.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Ah, this explains everything. Not-young people who don't understand microtransactions thinks that young people really loves NFT's, and therefore spends a ton of money on NFT's hoping they will be valuable. But young people don't care about them at all. This is Beanie Babies all over again.

anonymoushn 5y ago

They already enable money laundering using csgo skins

jimbob45 5y ago
I was ready to come in and prove you wrong but I found this in the Steam Support FAQ: >Will you be asking me to provide tax information to you, and/or will you be providing 1099’s based on my transactions in the Community Market? No. Previously we required that U.S. citizens and residents provide us with certain information, including name, address and social security number, prior to exceeding 200 separate sales transactions in a calendar year. We have concluded that this information is not required and we will no longer be asking you for this information as part of Community Market participation. We will also not be providing IRS Form 1099’s with respect to sales activity in the Community Market. With that in mind, it seems like you can money launder fairly easily, right? I thought that the 1099s were the primary blocker to that.
- Randosaurus 5y ago
  Most places have stopped asking me to sign when I make a purchase less than $X with my debit card (Generally around $25). Their thought process is that it's much faster cycling people through and the risk of money loss isn't worth the loss in throughput. What you quoted is specifically for less than 200 transactions in a calendar year. The implication being that any account involving 200 or more transactions in a calendar year will need that information. Which brings about two points. 1. Exactly how much money can someone launder buying < 200 csgo skins in a calendar year (are we arguing that they're paying $50k per skin?), and 2. How exactly does the idea that they've decided to take on some risk to decrease friction incompatible with not wanting to deal with NFT's, which *COULD* conceivably go for $50k a pop.
anunnymouse 5y ago
Maybe i'm reading too much into this, but are you suggesting they stop trying to prevent it from happening in any channels, because it might be possible in one?

lapetitejort 5y ago

Let's remember the convoluted money laundering scheme involving asset flips, card packs, gems, and Steam marketplace. What a mess that was. 1. Create an asset flip game with steam trading cards. 2. Generate steam keys and give to bots 3. Bots farm the cards. 4. Convert the cards to steam gems. 5. Buy legit cards with gems. 6. Sell legit cards on Steam Marketplace. 7. Buy sought-after game on Steam. 8. Sell game on the gray market for real money. Let me know if I messed up any of those steps. It's been a few years.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
Isn't there a lot of money lost in between all those steps? I mean steam keys cost money, bot farms, I doubt those gems have a very attractive exchange rate (it's a 'last resort' way to get rid of cards), buy / sell cards has Valve's cut, as does said game and the financial processors in between. It just sounds like a lot of effort. Can people still trade guns outside of CSGO?
- ur-whale 5y ago
  >Isn't there a lot of money lost in between all those steps? I suspect OP is being sarcastic.
  - wheybags 5y ago
    I dont think they are. Money laundering, like any other financial service, costs money.
- Uehreka 5y ago
  From a money laundering “user” perspective, would you rather have $1 million that will likely send you to jail, or $700k that you can spend freely without concern?
- duskwuff 5y ago
  > I mean steam keys cost money Not if you're the developer of the game.

websap 5y ago

Steam support in-game purchases and trading of goods. I don't understand why NFTs are any different. To me this just about control and they are probably working out the best way to monetize this platform.

Barrin92 5y ago
because presumably steam can't guarantee any of the usual anti-fraud schemes or other obligations they have if the financial transactions happen outside of the purview of the ecosystem. Obviously it's about control and understandably so because letting uncontrollable financial transactions happen within applications on your platform sounds like a legal nightmare waiting to happen.
carlosdp 5y ago
You can't trade those goods in-between games though. Valve gets to say how you can use it.
- WalterSear 5y ago
  Valve could say that you could. NFTs don't solve a technical problem here: it's just implementation.

knownjorbist 5y ago

The very idea of NFTs aren't a scam, but many of the current manifestations could be described as scams.

arcticbull 5y ago
Selling signed URLs to frequently low-effort JPEGs, that don't convey ownership, don't guarantee the continued existence of the thing they point at, and don't come with any legal rights whatsoever? It's basically just a next-gen version of the star registry scam that's been going on for decades. [1] [1] https://www.star-registration.com/ https://www.star-registration.com/
- knownjorbist 5y ago
  I don't see how this refutes my point. The concept is independent of any of these manifestations.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    It's a scam because you're buying nothing in both cases lol. You're exchanging money, with value, for nothing.
    - knownjorbist 5y ago
      What if I didn't exchange any money? What if the token in question does provide value by granting me access to something?
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        The former isn't really possible right, as you have to pay at minimum gas fees. The latter is extrinsic.
        knownjorbist 5y ago

ur-whale 5y ago

> It also gives them a complete monopoly on their internal marketplace Very probably their primary motivation. I'm pretty sure NFTs will be allowed back in as soon as they figure out a way to skim 20% off of every TX.

knownjorbist 5y ago
This is precisely why the "big" NFT games at the moment are all on boutique chains like Flow. They want full control, a % cut, and no secondary markets.

hungryforcodes 5y ago

Buying an NFT is most certainly NOT a scam. People do it because they want to. Or is there an approved list of Internet actions that you can provide us with. Also how is buying an NFT money laundering exactly? Especially if it's done on the blockchain, this seems to be the ultimate in traceability if it's done with ETH, which invariably it will be. I agree about the monopoly part.

pwinnski 5y ago
People buy into all sorts of scams because they want to. That's not the compelling counter-argument you seem to think it is.
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
  But just because some random HN person says NFTs are a scam -- doesn't make them a scam. Your counter-counter argument is hardly compelling.
Randosaurus 5y ago
People send a certain Nigerian Prince money because they want to, and yet ...
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
  But unlike the Nigerian prince -- when people buy an NFT they get what they bought. Or don't you know how they work?
  - HideousKojima 5y ago
    So they get legal ownership of the artwork the NFT points to? Wait, what do you mean they don't? What do you mean all they get is a legally unenforceable digital hash representing that they "own" it in some nebulous way? What do you mean the actual owner of the art can mint a million NFTs pointing to the same piece of art and sell them all? What do you mean someone who isn't even the actual owner of the art can mint an NFT for it and sell it? This deal is getting worse all the time!

calibas 5y ago

> In addition to the fact that the very idea of NFTs is a scam An NFT is just a digital certificate stored on a blockchain. It's certainly not a scam and has perfectly legit uses. For a variety of reasons, everything related to blockchain is ridiculously overhyped. What should be boring accounting technology is suddenly a pop culture fad, and that birthed thousands of get-rich-quick schemes. It's a flaw in human behavior though, not a problem with NFTs or cryptocurrencies.

elevenoh 5y ago
Truth. But hey, many have seen their friends have success in crypto while they've remained on the sidelines.. and they don't like it. They'll defame blockchain & nfts to no end rather than attempt to seek understanding. Intermediary-less digital ownership is incredibly powerful & will only grow in usage & utility by open-source evolving nature, perhaps exponentially.
- Azsy 5y ago
  I think you're getting the FOMO the wrong way around. Im pretty sure an average HN reader understands a lot more about NFT then the average NFT owner. Bitcoin was technically interesting. Whatever your stance on all the negatives in the real world, everybody agrees its elegant in theory. It combined problems to create a solution. That's what real innovation looks like. NFT's as 'investments' are a scam. Claiming Git commit hashes as property is not valuable, innovative, or game-changing. From the bottom to the top of the pyramid its people who are salty they didn't make more money in 'crypto' and are afraid of missing out twice in their lives.
  - elevenoh 5y ago
    An nft can map to anything. This mapping is up to the implementer. I can show an nft that represents a role, access to an event, a cross-game asset, as a property title, as a binding contract, rights to use intellectual property etc.
SahAssar 5y ago

elevenoh 5y ago

>In addition to the fact that the very idea of NFTs is a scam Is the concept of digital ownership a scam? If so, why?

HideousKojima 5y ago
If the Louvre decided to sell an NFT of the Mona Lisa, nothing prevents them from generating another NFT (or a few thousand) of it as well. Same thing for an NFT pointing to an image at some URL and containing a hash of that image, it doesn't actually generate ownership of that art in any legally meaningful (or enforceable) way. Digital ownership only works for things that 100% stay in the digital realm, and even then it's not a guarantee.
xg15 5y ago
From what I read so far, NFT "ownership" works about the same way as those certificates from the 60s that attest ownership of a plot on the moon. It's "ownership" of something without granting you any of the perks or rights that usually come with that. It's not even exclusive ownership - because, while you have exclusive control over your particular token, there is nothing that keeps some other entity from minting another token and declare that it symbolises ownership of the same asset that is symbolized by your own token. I think NFTs do have some interesting properties. The ownership of the token itself is indeed exclusive - this is enforced through the blockchain. Moreover, token ownership can be verified by software, without any human involvement. This could enable some moderately interesting use-cases, like resellable digital assets: You could imagine an online game where each character is bound to an NFT. You can sell the character by selling the NFT - and the game can restrict access to the character to the current owner of the NFT. But this doesn't seem to be what's actually done: Instead, NFTs are simply declared to symbolise "ownership" of some real-world asset, without having any kind of actual connection to that asset.
lottin 5y ago
Define digital ownership.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
uvgouy7tcr767g90in0n7g9 I bequeath to you digital ownership of this string. Let's imagine hn is an immutable forum. It represents a block of gold. What are you going to do with it?

deleted 5y ago

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bobcostas55 5y ago

Is a CCG that uses NFTs to track ownership of cards any more scammy than a CCG that uses a centralized DB to track ownership of cards?

HideousKojima 5y ago
You can now be scammed by the company that makes the game and third party sellers on the blockchain! The future is truly a wonderful and fascinating place.

andreilys 5y ago

In addition to the fact that the very idea of NFTs is a scam This makes no sense. It's like calling the very idea of an Oracle database is a scam. NFT's are basically a consensus-driven shared database, that can be used for legitimate reasons or for scams.