Two swindlers arrive at the capital city of an emperor who spends lavishly on clothing at the expense of state matters. Posing as art dealers, they offer to provide him magnificent clothes that would be backed by a digital token which proves value to those smart folks who understand digital. The emperor hires them, and they go to work in a special minting room. A succession of officials, and then the emperor himself, visit them to check their progress. Each sees that the room is empty but pretends otherwise to avoid being thought a fool.
Finally, art dealers report that the emperor's suit and its token are ready for release. They mime dressing him and he sets off in a procession before the whole city. The townsfolk uncomfortably go along with the pretense, not wanting to appear inept or stupid, until a child blurts out that the emperor is wearing nothing at all. The people then realize that child is very stupid, not understanding simple principles of digital DeFi-fueled web3.0 economy. Still smirking at the child, the emperor continues the procession, walking more proudly than ever.
Awesome comment. Took me a bit to realize it was the emperor has no clothing.
I think NFT's applied to art make only nominal sense, and I assume that's what you were going for. I myself had to come to the realization that NFT's are really just flexing for the rich, because as anyone realizes, right-click save-as is all you need to have the art to.
However when it comes to gameing, its a whole different story. Want to own some unique special edition sword with rare attributes in the Zelda-verse? Buy the NFT block chain address to it that says you and only you can have it. Want to own the penthouse apartment in the zucker-verse? Buy the NFT key that says only you have ownership rights. Want to be a unique character with unique pets in World-of-crypto-craft? Buy the NFT's to unlock these. Sell them if you get bored for more money, and the game developer gets a cut!
The gaming application scenarios are enormous. That's why crypto gaming will likely be huge and I myself have invested in it's foundations for the long term (Enjin, Seedify-fund, etc). It's one of the few applications that makes sense outside of rich snobs flexing.
None of this requires NFTs, you're describing microtransactions. Diablo 3 in 2012 released with the infamous "real world auction house" that allowed players to sell random virtual loots to each other using real money, with Blizzard taking a cut of the transactions.
- Central authority over your ownership (The game developer/publisher)
- The right flag needs to be set to check if you own a specific item
- You buy the item from a central authority, who grants it to you in the game world (and can just as well choose to take it away from you again, they might not be able to delete the flag, but they can certainly ignore it)
You discovered databases.
If you move to player <-> player transactions, you have a basic ingame/platform marketplace...which exists already. Again no value is added here by adding NFTs.
> The gaming application scenarios are enormous.
The only way NFTs provide anything other than a slower, way less efficient database is if all publishers and developers somehow got together and agreed on a standard to carry your items across games from different publishers:
1. Why would any developer want this?
2. Why would developers want to develop and maintain a spec to make this work?
Lets say I buy the NFT the penthouse apartment in Zucker-verse. What is to stop Zuck from selling 100 copies of my penthouse on other planets in his second life clone?
If you want to pay to be the only person in the Facebook VR world to own a Yacht, you need a legal contract that gives you ownership of that. If you don't have a contract you cannot sue him for selling Yachts to other people inside of his VR world.
Now if you built a VR application where objects were only displayed if you could prove ownership of the private keys that would work, but there would be nothing stopping someone from modifying the VR application, or building their own VR application to give you access to a Yacht.
The trick here with Web3/DeFi is that there is so much indirection and abstraction.
What do these people do?
They are involved in DeFi projects.
What do those projects do?
They provide an infrastructure for DeFi.
But what does that infrastructure do?
It allows the DeFi transactions.
But what are those transactions?
Well it could be anything due to the open nature of smart contracts.
But what does it actually do today?
It moves digital tokens around.
When is it going to provide real value?
Many people have made a lot of money in Crypto already
And how did they make their money?
By owning tokens that went up in value
And how is that not a pyramid scheme?
Well the US Dollar is a scam. No one should be long US Dollar.
TLDR; Because the US Dollar is at risk of inflation, you should buy and hold onto a variety of digital trading cards. Somehow the Metaverse will include digital scarcity and those trading cards will make your meta rich.
and with DeFi I have taken out loans and bought "real world" things, all with trustless/permissionless contracts. I value that and so do many others. If you dont thats ok, its opt-in.
We are having fun, making things, and building community. At some point the critics have to show us what alternatives and new things they've been building, what their attempts look like, what they are offering that is so much better...
Take code collaboration (https://radicle.xyz/) Code Collaboration and team programming is a real use case that people can get value of.
I've been using git for 10 years to collaborate with other developers. Google docs has supported live document collaboration for years. Microsoft has a great tool as well. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/
If you prefer radicle.xyz over git or Google or MSFT, that is fine. But lets be clear that the technology to perform code collaboration is not dependent on Web3. Web3 is being inserted into an existing real world application.
sure, if that works for you then you dont need it.
its useful for the co-ops i work with. allows easy group ownership of repos and also basically gives us a group bank account and voting system all at once. like instant community group infra. It probably isnt needed for corporations or solo devs. but for smaller evolving communities it is an improvement on a github org or a google doc.
and id like to point out that we've gone from you saying "pyramid scheme" and talking about money, too "if you prefer..thats fine" in like two comments. maybe we can start toning down the moral panic on these things, and recognising there is useful stuff here, maybe not to you, but to some of us. thats why we are building it in the first place.
I only buy products from Multi Level Marketing companies. The sales people at MLMs are more friendly in comparison to just using a website like Amazon.com. Maybe that isn't useful to you, but to me it is. Therefor, MLMs are legit businesses and no one should ever criticize them.
I really like the Metaverse cherry on top of this cake. Originally a strategy trick made to steer attention away from fundamental ethical problems of Facebook brand, it just adds so nicely to that whole situation.
“Why? Because we will need it in Metaverse (the illusory future I have just invented).”
Finally, art dealers report that the emperor's suit and its token are ready for release. They mime dressing him and he sets off in a procession before the whole city. The townsfolk uncomfortably go along with the pretense, not wanting to appear inept or stupid, until a child blurts out that the emperor is wearing nothing at all. The people then realize that child is very stupid, not understanding simple principles of digital DeFi-fueled web3.0 economy. Still smirking at the child, the emperor continues the procession, walking more proudly than ever.