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What I don't quite understand about Ubisoft's NFT offering is that, assuming it actually works and people get onboard with it and NFT items do actually start be

What I don't quite understand about Ubisoft's NFT offering is that, assuming it actually works and people get onboard with it and NFT items do actually start becoming valuable, wouldn't that mean you'd want to move your valuable NFT assets to a cold wallet? If they're in a cold wallet, you then wouldn't be able to prove you own them to use them in a game. If you keep them in a hot wallet then the game could verify they're still yours, but then you risk someone stealing them if someone finds an exploit in the Quartz code. Everything about the 'useful' side of NFTs where people actually use them for something promotes bad cryptocurrency opsec. One day someone will steal all the in-game skins and guns and hats or whatever, and there's nothing Ubisoft will be able to do about it. They won't be able to refund people, or replace items, of offer any sort of fix. That will be the end of the whole idea, and if Ubisoft have built it into the heart and soul of all their titles, the end of Ubisoft itself. It seems like a very high risk strategy. The only logical reason I can think of for them doing it is that someone at Ubisoft has sold the board on the idea, and is essentially running a Tezos pump and dump scheme, and they've made a chunk of change from the 30% increase in the price that this announcement brought.

echelon 5y ago
Ubisoft won't be building transactional support. NFTs are pogs. You can't use your Cornflakes Rooster Pog to unlock Minecraft content. There's no point in moving around your Ubisoft pogs. You can't use them in Fortnite. And because anyone in the world can print cardboard, they're infinitely inflatable and worthless. They're rows in the database. That's it.
- onion2k 5y ago
  People put value on weird random crap all the time, they arbitrarily decide it's worth tens of thousands of dollars for no good reason, and they buy it and sell it on trading sites. It happens. That's not the interesting part. The fact that the tech is quite boring and could be replaced by a MySQL database isn't very interesting either. The NFT angle is essentially marketing. Ubisoft are cashing in on the NFT hype. As far as that goes I'm quite impressed, and maybe even happy for them. People making money by spotting an up and coming trend and executing an idea for it is very much the startup ethos I admire most. What I don't understand is why you'd bet a company that has a $5bn market cap on it.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    They’re not betting the company on it. This is basically an experiment in one of their products.
  - echelon 5y ago
    Opportunity cost. Instead of investing in something long term, such as a rendering system to hedge against Epic Games and make inroads into film and immersive storytelling, they're chasing bullshit for a quick buck.
mattdesl 5y ago
I'm not sure it's really clear how their platform will work yet; but there is no way to distinguish a "hot" from "cold" wallet, and most of these applications understand that an individual can (and often does) hold tokens across multiple wallets. I'm not sure how a single actor could steal all of the tokens unless their smart contract development team is inept and accidentally included some kind of "transfer_all_tokens" function.
nybble41 5y ago
> … wouldn't that mean you'd want to move your valuable NFT assets to a cold wallet? If they're in a cold wallet, you then wouldn't be able to prove you own them to use them in a game. Just provide a way for the NFT owner to associate their assets with a particular in-game account, e.g. by storing the username on the blockchain with the NFT, or by signing a file with the username and details of the last trade. Once that's done they no longer need to keep the keys online. When the NFT is sold the new owner can update the username to refer to their own account. Presumably all the usual security measures such as hardware wallets for key storage would continue to work for these NFTs, at least as long as you're not forced to use game-specific wallet software.

echelon 5y ago

Ubisoft won't be building transactional support. NFTs are pogs. You can't use your Cornflakes Rooster Pog to unlock Minecraft content. There's no point in moving around your Ubisoft pogs. You can't use them in Fortnite. And because anyone in the world can print cardboard, they're infinitely inflatable and worthless. They're rows in the database. That's it.

onion2k 5y ago
People put value on weird random crap all the time, they arbitrarily decide it's worth tens of thousands of dollars for no good reason, and they buy it and sell it on trading sites. It happens. That's not the interesting part. The fact that the tech is quite boring and could be replaced by a MySQL database isn't very interesting either. The NFT angle is essentially marketing. Ubisoft are cashing in on the NFT hype. As far as that goes I'm quite impressed, and maybe even happy for them. People making money by spotting an up and coming trend and executing an idea for it is very much the startup ethos I admire most. What I don't understand is why you'd bet a company that has a $5bn market cap on it.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  They’re not betting the company on it. This is basically an experiment in one of their products.
- echelon 5y ago
  Opportunity cost. Instead of investing in something long term, such as a rendering system to hedge against Epic Games and make inroads into film and immersive storytelling, they're chasing bullshit for a quick buck.

mattdesl 5y ago

I'm not sure it's really clear how their platform will work yet; but there is no way to distinguish a "hot" from "cold" wallet, and most of these applications understand that an individual can (and often does) hold tokens across multiple wallets. I'm not sure how a single actor could steal all of the tokens unless their smart contract development team is inept and accidentally included some kind of "transfer_all_tokens" function.

nybble41 5y ago

> … wouldn't that mean you'd want to move your valuable NFT assets to a cold wallet? If they're in a cold wallet, you then wouldn't be able to prove you own them to use them in a game. Just provide a way for the NFT owner to associate their assets with a particular in-game account, e.g. by storing the username on the blockchain with the NFT, or by signing a file with the username and details of the last trade. Once that's done they no longer need to keep the keys online. When the NFT is sold the new owner can update the username to refer to their own account. Presumably all the usual security measures such as hardware wallets for key storage would continue to work for these NFTs, at least as long as you're not forced to use game-specific wallet software.