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More People Own Items in Second Life Than Own NFTs
- atdrummond 5y agoIs this surprising? I would expect this to be the case based on two factors - one, SL’s much longer availability to end users and the much lower friction to acquiring items and two, the much smaller initial buy-in cost of SL items. Even a “free” ethereum NFT is going to cost a user over $100 for gas alone!
- LordHeini 5y agoI would say there are 3 factors. The SL items can actually be highly complex, scripted stuff, animations etc. Their purpose it to provide their buyers with entertainment like owning a movie in a digital library. An NFT serves no purpose at all. Other than collecting it for whatever reason.
- randomhodler84 5y agoWhile I think buying ingame SL items and NFTs is dumb, there is no reason an NFT cannot be as much or more functional than a SL item. The idea is that the token represents a non-fungible item is the same. The argument is portability — which I don’t think is that strong to be honest, as game devs are not likely to make mutual compatible items, it’s a point. Most NFTs “contents” are based off the ERC721Metadata standard, which is but one of many possible future formats. They don’t have to be ugly jpegs.
- LordHeini 5y agoThe key difference is the interactivity SL provides. In SL you could buy a virtual car and drive around in it with your friends. Good look doing that with an NFT. There is no world, no car and no friends to connect with. In truth most SL stuff is probably some sort of sex bed with a bunch of animations for two ;)
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoI think that parent's point is that an NFT can represent ownership of a virtual car in SL or a similar game. Of course, as they also point out, it doesn't really bring any value over the existing mechanism for owning SL items.
- davidweatherall 5y agoThere are other blockchains which are much more NFT friendly which you can mint an NFT for next to nothing. Avalanche or Solana for exanple, have a fraction of the gas fees but the same capabilities as Ethereum
- emptybottle 5y agoTezos (along with hic et nunc) are popular for clean NFTs as well.
- PretzelPirate 5y agoThey support smart contracts, but trade off censorship resistance and decentralization in order to achieve those low fees. NFTs are useless without those features and there are other, more secure alternatives to using “cheaper chains”.
- baxtr 5y agoThat’s actually support for a pretty strong bull case for NFTs…
- rsynnott 5y agoIt really isn't. The sort of money being thrown at NFTs would imply that people think they're going to become mainstream. Right now, seven years on from the first NFT and about three years since the hype started, and a year on from really enormous hype starting, they are clearly such a niche that another tiny niche (Second Life) makes them look small. That does not bode well for them.
- danbmil99 5y agoI recently went back to Second Life because it was the platform of a social group that was going virtual due to covid. I was able to buy a custom penis; the avatars do not come with fully functional sexual organs. However, when I put my pants back on, my member was clearly visible, protruding out of my pants. I had to manually set the penis to invisible, or else stop "wearing" it in public situations where nudity was not encouraged. Sort of amazing it is still around, when did it come out -- 2004 perhaps?
- simmerup 5y agoQuick question; NFTs don't store the image in the block chain, they just store a pointer to the image. So are there any guarantees the pointer won't get changed? Or is it a hash of the image or something? Could you effectively remove someone's control of an image by changing the pointer? Honestly NFTs seem utterly useless to me because there's no guarantee they'll keep in sync with the reality of the objects ownership.
- axg11 5y agoThere’s a fixation on this “pointer” problem with NFTs. Most projects use IPFS, making this a non-issue. There are plenty of other critiques of NFTs - this is not one of them.
- simmerup 5y agoThanks, I'll look into IPFS.
- gjsman-1000 5y agoUnless people on IPFS decide to stop storing your item. IPFS does not address incentives to store objects. It’s a protocol like HTTP - but that doesn’t mean you have any incentive to store people’s NFTs yet, just like how having HTTP doesn’t mean you have an incentive to host a website yet.
- detaro 5y agoSure, but you can always maintain (and/or pay others to maintain) the things you care about on IPFS, and if the implementation points there directly (afaik not all do...) the pointer remains useful. Whereas if it points to a random HTTP url, you cant maintain that without the domain holder cooperating.
- simmerup 5y agoMy main concern with this is that files hosted in IPFS aren't necessarily immutable, so what you own according to the NFT isn't immutable either.