Philosophically, I think there is something there. How do you create scarcity in a digital infinitely copyable world, without an authority figure. With baseba

Philosophically, I think there is something there. How do you create scarcity in a digital infinitely copyable world, without an authority figure. With baseball cards and pokemon cards, you can create artificial scarcity by only printing so many in a run. NFT scarcity is really no sillier than baseball card scarcity. The original creator says "this collection has x amount." What makes that matter is that they said so, and the community believed them that their decision was important. Pokemon could print a "rare" card for every person on the planet, but that ruins game mechanics. In digital games, you can control scarcity with a central authority. EA or Ubisoft or Blizzard or Microsoft can only issue so much of an item, and they distribute them, and you cant copy it because the authority keeps track. In a decentralized world, a digital yet scarce item can be created, distributed, and reused. A game can go under, and a new game can pop up and respect the accumulated wealth of the community. A game can fork, where half of the community plays one teams version, and half plays a different one, with nobody losing their assets. A rogue developer can entice people to play by inviting people to reuse tools they acquired from a rivals game. A counterfeiting blacksmith can forge their own weapons, and a dark side community can vote to allow them in game, while a light side community can vote to only allow official weapons. What it will all come down to is consensus, the developers (and players voicing through where they spend their attention) of the game deciding which items should be allowed to be imported and which shouldnt. IMHO, there is something cool about the player stats of an RPG being isolated and separated from the game itself, and always owned by the player not the game company. From an investment perspective, I can see why it looks as dumb as anything in the physical speculative art world. But as a game mechanic, it does seem to offer a useful utility that previously depended on some server staying up forever or trust in a closed system. This is a brink or cusp, where theres a good idea out there somewhere, and maybe someone has or hasnt executed on it yet, but if it has been made into something truly useful, it still isnt popular enough to be well know by us plebs yet. They also, more simply, act as a membership card or vip pass. You can spend money to join a club, and then you get the corresponding experience that comes with it. Take for example the Matrix NFT. I fully expect there to be some somewhat cool experiences that real people get to really experience by consenting and paying to join that social experiment. Sure it could work roughly as well as a database entry at a central authority, but decentralization is one way to allow easy transfer of your membership to someone new when youre done, without the game developer having to care or keep track of who is who. It turns into Willy Wonka, whoever holds a golden ticket is allowed in, copying tickets isnt possible.