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This is why we need blockchain-based smart contracts and NFTs to enforce digital ownership rights. The political system is far too unreliable and corruptible to

This is why we need blockchain-based smart contracts and NFTs to enforce digital ownership rights. The political system is far too unreliable and corruptible to depend on for robust private property rights. If the nation-states can just maintain a free and open internet, decentralized opt-in protocols can do the rest.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago
None of that is going to be used the way you want it to. You know what NFTs are REALLY gonna be used for in the gaming space? Digital property ownership of in-game assets that remit value back to the publisher whenever these fake goods get traded. People are pretending that all these good things are gonna come out of smart contracts and tokens, when the reality is that the most useful thing to come out of them is going to be rent-seeking by digital creators. Ubisoft isn't going to throw your ownership of a video game on the blockchain, and even if they did, their license and their service governs whether you have access to the game, not a token.
- nikanj 5y ago
  The biggest and most important use of NFTs in gaming space is going to be raising money on Kickstarter for an NFT based video game - and then disappearing with the money
npteljes 5y ago
Who exactly will enforce that providers look at the blockchain instead of their own database, if not a political system? People maintaining an infrastructure just so they don't have control over it is also a pipe dream. This all is just like saying "if only we'd be nicer to each other", but in tech jargon.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Fair point. Smart contracts can only enforce digital property rights insofar as the digital property is constituted by smart contracts. So this would work with NFTs, as they are blockchain-based assets, but not classical video games, which are not. So what would work is if the providers of the game assets are governed by a decentralized protocol on the blockchain. An example would be a game which is dependent on a remotely provided computation element to run - say a massive collectively rendered virtual world - and this element is provided by a distributed set of providers who are compensated via a smart contract, mechanistically, upon the blockchain validating proof of work they provide to a smart contract. Such a game could provide a person with a guarantee that a particular NFT will have indefinite access to that virtual world, because the guarantee will be enforced by immutable smart contracts. >>People maintaining an infrastructure just so they don't have control over it is also a pipe dream They do it for the same reason Ethereum validators stake their ETH and validate blocks on the Beacon Chain: to earn income. But what they earn is enforced in a decentralized way, according to the rules encoded in the protocol, to make it maximally immutable/interference-proof.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

None of that is going to be used the way you want it to. You know what NFTs are REALLY gonna be used for in the gaming space? Digital property ownership of in-game assets that remit value back to the publisher whenever these fake goods get traded. People are pretending that all these good things are gonna come out of smart contracts and tokens, when the reality is that the most useful thing to come out of them is going to be rent-seeking by digital creators. Ubisoft isn't going to throw your ownership of a video game on the blockchain, and even if they did, their license and their service governs whether you have access to the game, not a token.

nikanj 5y ago
The biggest and most important use of NFTs in gaming space is going to be raising money on Kickstarter for an NFT based video game - and then disappearing with the money

npteljes 5y ago

Who exactly will enforce that providers look at the blockchain instead of their own database, if not a political system? People maintaining an infrastructure just so they don't have control over it is also a pipe dream. This all is just like saying "if only we'd be nicer to each other", but in tech jargon.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
Fair point. Smart contracts can only enforce digital property rights insofar as the digital property is constituted by smart contracts. So this would work with NFTs, as they are blockchain-based assets, but not classical video games, which are not. So what would work is if the providers of the game assets are governed by a decentralized protocol on the blockchain. An example would be a game which is dependent on a remotely provided computation element to run - say a massive collectively rendered virtual world - and this element is provided by a distributed set of providers who are compensated via a smart contract, mechanistically, upon the blockchain validating proof of work they provide to a smart contract. Such a game could provide a person with a guarantee that a particular NFT will have indefinite access to that virtual world, because the guarantee will be enforced by immutable smart contracts. >>People maintaining an infrastructure just so they don't have control over it is also a pipe dream They do it for the same reason Ethereum validators stake their ETH and validate blocks on the Beacon Chain: to earn income. But what they earn is enforced in a decentralized way, according to the rules encoded in the protocol, to make it maximally immutable/interference-proof.