[HN Gopher] The Collapse of CryptoKitties, the First Big Blockch...
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The Collapse of CryptoKitties, the First Big Blockchain Game
Author : cycomanic
Score : 203 points
Date : 2022-09-15 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| [deleted]
| yellow_postit wrote:
| CryptoKitties was a great initial introduction (for me) into the
| mechanics of setting up a wallet, transferring funds, trading
| nfts,etc. The wild monetary value swings definitely captured the
| BeanieBaby mentality they were aiming for as well.
| O__________O wrote:
| Know zero about NFT market caps, but if I pull up few years on
| the site below, hardly looks like a collapse:
|
| https://nftgo.io/collection/cryptokitties/overview
|
| Anyone with more knowledge able to clarify?
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I think that you can get your answer from the tooltip on that
| market cap widget:
|
| > Market capitalization is calculated as the sum of each NFT
| valued at the greater of its last traded price and the floor
| price of the collection, respectively.
|
| So their market cap calculation does not attempt to capture a
| current fair market value for all outstanding CryptoKitties.
| For a non-fungible asset like this, just using the last sale
| price like this will always give a lagging indicator. In some
| sense, you could argue that it lags the fair market value by a
| possibly infinite amount of time.
|
| Concretely, this method would assume that the Dragon
| cryptokitty that the article discusses has been worth a
| constant 600 ETH that hasn't fluctuated by even one iota in
| over 4 years.
|
| I don't know how much better one could do for a market cap
| calculation. It certainly wouldn't be practical to individually
| appraise all 2 million cryptokitties on a regular basis.
| Perhaps one could look at how prices of more frequently traded
| cryptokitties have fluctuated over time and use that to
| generate a scaling factor for the old ones. But even that might
| have downsides. How do you account for the possibly large
| percentage of cryptokitties that belong to wallets whose keys
| have been lost? It doesn't make sense to count those into the
| market capitalization, because they are no longer part of the
| market. The method being used at least has the advantage of
| being clean and objective. It's just not particularly _useful_
| , is all.
| CaveTech wrote:
| There's no liquidity. The market cap is pure fabrication based
| on historical sales, there's no current day sales, so no way to
| pull money out of that cap.
| elcomet wrote:
| Market cap is not really significant, if the sales are down.
| Most of the market cap is from old sales.
|
| I could create a new coin with a huge market cap very easily:
| I'm creating 1,000 billion coins, and I'm selling to a friend
| one coin for $1, then never selling anything again. The market
| cap is now $ 1,000 billion right?
| Animats wrote:
| Yes, but to realize it, you have to get (bribe) a major
| exchange to list your coin.
| cwkoss wrote:
| It hasn't collapsed, the endgame is just a much much higher
| difficulty
| secretsatan wrote:
| I read these articles sometimes about crypto games, but they all
| never seem to describe the actual game, it's like crypto is the
| primary concern, and game is secondary, and i'm getting the
| distinct impression none of these games are any fun and everyone
| in the space has to avoid mentioning it.
|
| I think that the people writing these things only have a very
| slim grasp of gaming, but they know it would be a good market to
| capture
| Melchori wrote:
| Gaming with being able to earn money is something I normally
| call gambling or work.
|
| It's depressing to think about it.
|
| And yes people who made gold in wow were also not gaming but
| working. It wasn't cool, fun or whatever 10 years ago
| px43 wrote:
| The status quo in gaming today is that people work thousands,
| or 10s of thousands of hours building, collecting, exploring,
| etc, and it's all owned by some emotionless gaming company
| that might just decide to delete all your stuff, or just
| disappear all together, without notice. Giving players
| control of the things they worked hard to get just seems like
| the natural progression as we assign more and more value to
| the lives we live in virtual spaces.
|
| Vitalik famously was first inspired to build Ethereum when
| Blizzard nerfed a sword he had in World of Warcraft.
| root_axis wrote:
| The idea makes no sense unfortunately. If the game dies so
| does the meaning of the NFTs. It's even more pointless in
| the context of Vitalik's WoW example because the NFT has no
| relationship to the game mechanics, the creators of the
| game could trivially nerf, alter, or remove previously
| minted NFTs at their own discretion.
| cowtools wrote:
| Yeah I guess, but grinding/mining is not sybil proof. So
| the only thing that cryptocurrency improves is replacing
| that with buying and trading items with actual money, or
| mining stuff with PoW.
|
| You couldn't have a blockchain equivalent of World-of-
| Warcraft. You have no meaningful way to testify that you
| recieve an item from killing a boss, for example.
|
| The only thing you can really implement with cryptocurrency
| is a market game, gambling on the outcome of a game, or
| crypto-tokenized items/stats. These have their own problems
| as well, mostly being that their development structure is
| usually not decentralized enough to warrant the use of
| cryptocurrency.
| lmm wrote:
| > You have no meaningful way to testify that you recieve
| an item from killing a boss, for example.
|
| Surely you could have a smart contract that implements
| that (and, in the extreme case, I guess you submit the
| random seed for this boss fight and a hash of the button
| inputs you used or something - of course there's no way
| to stop you using a bot to automate pressing the buttons
| at the right time, but that applies to real WoW too).
| cowtools wrote:
| I have considered this already. That does not solve
| anything here, for the reasons you have mentioned
| yourself.
|
| To the extent that it is broken in world-of-warcraft, it
| will be more broken here because there will be fees
| associated with playing, so players will be incentivised
| to make the most of their money by cheating and trying to
| optimize the smallest possible "proof".
|
| Eventually, so many people will cheat that the actual
| game is considered to be a minor nusance. It's like TF2
| idle servers. You incentivise players to not play the
| game.
| Kerbonut wrote:
| Game boss dies, triggers a web3 call which mints the NFT.
| What's the problem?
| AgentME wrote:
| Having a regular commercial centralized game with
| decentralized NFT items is an awkward halfway point that
| doesn't get you the full benefits of decentralization.
|
| If the game itself is decentralized too, that changes
| things, but it's unclear if it's possible to make a game
| like WoW like that.
| cowtools wrote:
| Who gets to trigger the web3 call? a centralized server?
| reidjs wrote:
| Gambling and gaming are quite interconnected, maybe you can
| describe it as a spectrum between games and gambling. Free
| single player games are the 'purest' games, you're only
| betting that it's worth your time. Cheap single player games,
| you're still gambling in that you're 'betting' the game is
| worth your time and $5. Closer to the gambling side are
| things like Poker, CS Skins, the Diablo Auction House, Eve
| Online mining, etc. Probably the purest form of gambling is
| slot machines, since they are purely random chance.
| acdha wrote:
| This is leaving out the most important part of the
| incentive structure: most books are entertainment and their
| value to the reader is based on things other than money.
| That means they're not interchangeable and people make
| decisions based on things like the author or publisher's
| reputation as opposed to the current exchange rate.
| glitchc wrote:
| This is an absurd argument! By that logic buying a book is
| akin to gambling: You don't know how good it is until you
| start reading.
|
| Books have nothing in common with gambling except for the
| books about gambling.
| hinkley wrote:
| People with absurd notions very often conflate the
| colloquial definition and the precise definition of words
| and then try to draw conclusions out of the confusion.
| Like anti-science people who talk about theories and
| theories.
| reidjs wrote:
| I sort of mixed up risk and gamble in that analogy. I
| stand by the part that many games fall on a spectrum
| between "game" and "gamble". counter strike, wow, eve
| online are games with a gambling element: loot boxes,
| skins, etc. Poker is a gamble with a game element, e.g,
| bluffing. Slot machines aren't games at all.
|
| I think cryptokitties is somewhere between Poker and Slot
| machines.
| firebaze wrote:
| I suppose I'm overlooking something, since I cannot
| follow this line of reasoning.
|
| When I buy a book, I usually don't know its contents
| beforehand (the exceptions are I had copied it somehow in
| my earlier years, and now I want to buy it to come clean,
| or it is a classic I just never bought yet).
|
| Most of the time, I rely on a friends reference, or a
| review online, or maybe I just buy by chance. And in
| either of these cases, there is a less than 50% chance I
| perceive the book as good. Which, to me, is a gamble. So
| I suppose there is an edge I don't get?
| admax88qqq wrote:
| Not all "risks" are "gambling"
| Karellen wrote:
| That... actually makes sense to me. You're gambling the
| cost of the book that the amount of enjoyment you get out
| of it is worth the time it took to read it.
|
| If you enjoy the book, your payout is those feeling of
| enjoyment. If you lose, the price is the cost of the book
| and the time you wasted reading it - but you have the
| paltry consolation prize of a now-second-hand book that
| you can sell at a loss to a used book shop.
|
| And you can affect your odds of winning or losing, by
| going with a genre or author that you already have an
| affinity to (or not!)
| UberFly wrote:
| You are obviously not a gamer or understand the appeal.
| coding123 wrote:
| I also had fun making gold in Skyrim, which was offline. I
| don't recall it being work, but whatever.
| bombcar wrote:
| It can be a puzzle with a built in score and fun, but
| rarely are these direct-to-cash games fun.
|
| D3 got much better when the real money auction house
| closed.
| px43 wrote:
| In my opinion, nothing has ever come close to the rich
| economic system that emerged naturally in Diablo 2. Maybe
| it just hit me at a good time in my life, towards the end
| of high school.
|
| I spent probably half my time playing that game just
| doing arbitrage trading. For example a sorceress or
| necromancer would always give you 4-5 Perfect Skulls for
| a Stone of Jordan (SOJ) ring, and you could pretty easily
| buy an SOJ from a barbarian or amazon for 3-4 Perfect
| Skulls. Through nothing but these trades I was able to go
| from a couple SOJ (the most valuable 1x1 item in the
| game) to about 40 or 50 over the course of a few months.
| bombcar wrote:
| There was a stable economy time where there weren't
| continual "buff patches" dumping more and more items, and
| it was a good time.
| supernewton wrote:
| I mean, the real improvement to D3 was they massively
| upped the drop rate of rare items, which "coincidentally"
| happened when they stopped taking a cut off people
| selling their rare items for real money.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah. The money always causes a conflict with the fun.
| Only the pure cosmetic games seem to avoid that when the
| money flows.
| csa wrote:
| Very much agreed, but...
|
| My favorite AH score was a max stat level 3 chest piece
| that I sold for $25.
|
| That piece was good for 5 or maybe 10 minutes of gameplay
| at the start of the game.
|
| I knew it was a premium piece for that level and type. I
| knew they didn't stay on AH long. That said, I didn't
| want to compete with all of the lower price point folks,
| so i set the price to something absurd just to see what
| happened.
|
| I have no idea why they bought it.
|
| I had much better late game stuff for sale for much
| cheaper that never sold. It was a strange market -- I'm
| glad it is gone.
| bombcar wrote:
| People would search by "best I can equip" and you caught
| a whale.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Offline is key here
| TomGullen wrote:
| Gamer sentiment is generally very anti micro transactions, all
| the crypto games I've seen so far are micro transactions front
| and centre on steroids
| hgsgm wrote:
| naet wrote:
| Check https://www.cryptokitties.co/guide/ways-to-play
|
| The reason it seems like they didn't describe the "actual game"
| is that there is no actual "gameplay". You just pay to collect
| cats.
|
| You can trade the cat tokens them with other people, try to
| sell them on the marketplace, pay to generate semi randomized
| new cat tokens via "breeding", and... just have them under your
| wallet / name. There is no action, no RPG, no platforming, no
| game board... basically nothing besides collecting and swapping
| tokens. They actually do show the entire "gameplay loop" in
| this image from the article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-
| library/a-flow-chart-with-ar...
|
| They encourage you to collect more with timed events, where you
| "win" a bonus for having collected a certain type of cat token,
| but that's about it.
|
| If you're of a certain generation, you might remember a craze
| of kids collecting and trading Pokemon cards, and never really
| playing the game. It's basically like that except there is no
| underlying game to play, all you have are the tradable cards.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I remember the craze around collecting the cards without
| really playing the game. And then, separately, playing the
| game without collecting the cards, with the "Pokemon Trading
| Card Game" for game boy.
| alanfalcon wrote:
| CryptoKitties is a lot of fun, for what it is. It's super deep
| and while it's more of a sandbox than a typical game, I became
| obsessed with it when it came out, though not for monetary
| reasons (if it has one huge drawback as a game, it's always
| been how much it costs IMO).
|
| Became so obsessed that I ended up hired by Dapper Labs and
| working on the CryptoKitties team, later helped design and
| launch NBA Top Shot on Flow. Now that we have (the markedly
| cheaper and easier) Flow and lots and lots of lessons learned
| from building NFT products, I'm excited for us to bring the
| next generation of CryptoKitties to life.
|
| If you want to check out a fun crypto game that just recently
| launched from another developer, I urge you to check out
| dimensionxnft.com with an open mind.
| davidcbc wrote:
| Color me surprised that the person claiming to have enjoyed a
| crypto game is trying to shill a different crypto game
| Chabsff wrote:
| You cannot have a conversation about "crypto games" without
| addressing how crypto makes the game better. For the sake of
| this conversation, it doesn't particularly matter how fun
| CryptoKitties is. What matters is how does the blockchain
| integration make the game better than it would otherwise have
| been.
|
| From my point of view so far, even the best crypto game out
| there would have been better if it wasn't for the crypto
| aspect of it.
|
| If this ecosystem is to provide value beyond the potential
| for making money, then what is it? It's hard to be excited
| about something that only has downsides.
| alanfalcon wrote:
| So I've been thinking about this and working on this for
| years, so I have a different perspective. Is everything
| fully better for having blockchain integration? Clearly no.
| Are the benefits worth the trade-offs? I'd argue yes, on
| the whole.
|
| 1. The global worldwide market place. While this introduces
| commerce/real money, which come with very real downsides,
| it also makes the game high stakes (meaning most people
| play to the best of their ability). WoW and other games
| showed how much a vibrant marketplace can add to a game
| experience for some players, and having everything trading
| for essentially real money doesn't change that underlying
| level of engagement.
|
| 2. Permissionless development. While there are many
| examples of attempts at building on top of CryptoKitties
| fizzling out, there are also success stories, especially
| around "WCK"--a fungible token created by an unaffiliated
| third party developer that essentially created a worldwide
| "Give a Kitty, Take a Kitty" pool that let you send away
| any cat you didn't want and get back one that you
| preferred. And because it's on the blockchain and uses
| blockchain standards, it can also be used as liquidity and
| barter, both of which add to the experience. I don't
| believe I've ever seen something like this built on top of
| a non-blockchain game... certainly it wouldn't be quite as
| easy as this was to build! Some examples of other third
| party creations include an auto-breeding platform, a Kitty
| racing game, a Kitty battling game, Kitty cosmetics (your
| cat NFT can own its own hat NFT!), and a trustless Kitty
| bounty smart contract.
|
| 3. Almost unparalleled transparency. This has all kinds of
| fun side effects from allowing the community to fully
| "check the work" of the developer to what amounts to an
| open-to-everyone API. And what's more, this is a
| standardized API so that someone who builds tools for
| CryptoKitties would be able to also use those tools for
| Cheeze Wizards. Again, there are amazing third party tools
| built on the backs of APIs of online games all the time,
| but it's actually cool how much you get "for free" by being
| on the blockchain. The verified fairness is pretty cool
| IMO.
|
| 4. Immortal assets. I poured a lot into City of Heroes back
| in the day, and then one day the devs shut down the server,
| and took all my heroes with it. This is a very common
| refrain. As long as there are nodes out there running
| Ethereum, anyone can breed their Kitty NFTs. That's not
| nothing. (There's a lot of nuance here about art assets, IP
| rights, user interface, etc., and it's messy and still very
| much being figured out, but that's how the world works--you
| build it, then you improve it!)
|
| 5. Value capture. Yes, this almost always has evolved into
| speculation and nonsense valuations and irrational
| behavior. But still: when you buy a Kitty, you have the
| right to sell that Kitty. When you breed a new Kitty, you
| have the right to sell that Kitty. This is enabled by
| blockchain almost for free! Note this is distinct and
| different from point 1. WoW has a marketplace, but when you
| earn a legendary BoP sword, you cannot then capture that
| value by selling it if that's what you want to do. This
| point is as often riddled with downsides as it brings
| upsides, but the unique and novel truth of it makes it
| better than a non-blockchain game for some people.
|
| Again, this comes from years of being in the space, playing
| with these toys, building these systems, being a part of
| these communities. For some of us, this has been incredibly
| exciting, and fun, because we chose to explore and figure
| out for ourselves what upsides this new frontier might hold
| for us.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| 1/ Making people play to the best of their ability.
|
| People have always been insanely competitive, without
| bringing in a token in the middle. All you're doing is
| making it impossible to play (or not lose money) if
| you're not trying your hardest, all the time.
|
| 2/ You're really going to pretend you've never seen
| communities make their own services on top of a game? The
| only real difference is that it is fully automated in
| this case, but service markets have existed forever. Path
| of Exile has a whole discord with tens of thousands of
| users just to exchange things.
|
| 3/ Only if Cheese Wizards is a carbon copy of
| CryptoKitties, just changing names. Otherwise, data
| structures are different behaviours are different, and
| your work just has to be redone. Like in the current
| world. But it's true, at least it's open.
|
| 4/ You gotta really fucking love your game if you're
| willing to keep minting (and therefore paying) for NFTs
| that are worthless and unusable anywhere else
|
| 5/ This is an absolute cancer that has made every single
| game that added real money trading objectively worse. It
| makes every interaction with your game make you take into
| account the potential money loss. Like making your
| kitties spin? Too bad sucker, that's not the optimal
| money making strat, enjoy feeling ever so slightly bad
| every time.
|
| The only useful point is the openness of the API.
| Everything else are things we already do in games (good
| and bad), but worse. Anyone in this industry not seeing
| this has either zero experience with games, or
| destructive tendencies just to make a bit of cash on
| misery.
| Chabsff wrote:
| Thank you for the verbose answer, though I disagree with
| most points.
|
| 1) "having everything trading for essentially real money
| doesn't change that underlying level of engagement." It
| has been long established that this is absolutely the
| case. A classic example of this would be Diablo 3's RMAH
| effectively destroying the game by having the entire
| economy be driven by real-world profit-seeking grind
|
| 2) I consider this to be very misleading. All of these
| intra-game features are not made available by the
| blockchain itself, but by the details of the various
| Smart Contracts involved. In that sense, the set of
| instructions available to would-be developers to interact
| with a game is going to be limited by the operations (and
| the various rules governing them) that are present in the
| smart contracts. If a game features permission-less
| development like this, it's because its developers have
| decided to make the requisite operations available and
| documented. This is no different than a regular
| documented public API.
|
| 3) I see nothing preventing this from being done without
| the blockchain.
|
| 4) This is the one potentially interesting wrinkle, but I
| find it to have marginal interest at best. Assets are
| inherently immortal unless explicit steps are taken by
| developers to prevent them to be. What is actually at
| play here is Immortal Entity Ownership, aka Immortal
| Scarcity. That's very interesting from a revenue-making
| potential, but not really much more than that.
|
| 5) That does not make the game itself better though.
| px43 wrote:
| #2 is the most important one to me, so I'll address that
| specifically.
|
| _MOST_ games I 've seen don't provide a public API for
| players to interact with, and even when players do
| reverse engineer them, they get accused of cheating,
| hacking, whatever, and often get their accounts banned.
|
| In the world of blockchain gaming, it's trivial to build
| tools and meta-games around anything, and there's
| basically nothing that the original developers can do to
| stop it. I can host a small bit of static HTML that gives
| users the ability to battle cryptokitties with each
| other, and capture each other's kitties. Then at the end
| of the day, the winner can go back to the main
| cryptokitties site, and breed their new kitties like
| normal. I don't need to ask anyone's permission, and all
| I need is a stable place to land some HTML, and maybe
| deploy some contracts depending on the level of
| integrations I want to build. I don't need to apply for
| an API key, or start up an email conversation with anyone
| at Dapper Labs. I can just build it, and anyone with a
| web3 capable browser can play along.
|
| This is the magic of "permissionless" systems, and it's
| the standard across the blockchain gaming ecosystem.
| TylerE wrote:
| These reads to me as: Haven for asian bot farms.
| Chabsff wrote:
| Sure, but my point is that the lack of blockchain
| technology is not what's preventing most games from
| featuring this, it's only the developer's willingness to
| do so.
| [deleted]
| Kiro wrote:
| HyperDragons. Someone made a game where you bred dragons
| that could eat CryptoKitties to absorb their attributes.
| The composability and interoperability of the blockchain
| means anyone can extend your game and build mechanics with
| your assets, without your permission. It's truly an open
| API.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| Unless the intellectual property _assets_ (art and
| character designs) have been licensed putting them on a
| blockchain does not make them legal to use.
| pdntspa wrote:
| And what here does the blockchain offer that a database
| table doesn't? Other than the ability to monetize.
| Kiro wrote:
| The fact that I can build upon CryptoKitties with no
| obstacle. If CryptoKitties was on a private database I
| would need to get access to their API and also trust them
| with the ownership/management of the assets. Now I can
| just build it on the blockchain and have people destroy
| CryptoKitties in my smart contract to get benefits in my
| game. No API functionality or permission from
| CryptoKitties needed.
| lottin wrote:
| So how does this open API works? Every time you use it
| you have to pay a third party?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| What do you mean? All of the data is on the chain. It's a
| global "third-party" that everyone is a part of.
| lmm wrote:
| You submit the action you want to do, anywhere in the
| ethereum network, and if it's valid (e.g. if you're
| running an operation that destroys a kitty then you'd
| better include a digital signature showing that you own
| that kitty) then it will be accepted and published. You
| have to pay a "gas fee" which in theory a) should be
| pretty small and b) is what pays for the running of that
| ethereum network. In practice under the current
| implementation those fees got to be big enough that they
| kind of killed cryptokitties, but this might be fixable.
| landryraccoon wrote:
| Couldn't that have been done equally well with a
| centralized ledger? Lots of games have "high stakes pvp",
| such as eve online. They don't have a blockchain, and yet
| you can still steal stuff permanently from other players
| if that's how you want to play the game.
| Kiro wrote:
| Let's say I want to build a game where you can destroy
| your EVE Online spaceships to get bonuses in my game. How
| would that work? That's what happened with CryptoKitties
| and HyperDragons.
|
| Just to clarify: someone who owns a CryptoKitty decides
| to send it to the HyperDragons smart contract that
| handles the absorption. It's not about stealing anything.
| You use your assets in CryptoKitties to boost your dragon
| in HyperDragons.
| Chabsff wrote:
| This is not inherently made possible by the blockchain
| itself though.
|
| The mechanisms to transfer a Kitty to the HyperDragons
| lie within the CryptoKitty Smart Contract. This is not
| particularly different than a regular API, where the
| available operations have been chosen, specified, and
| made available to the public at large by the developers.
|
| The only real difference with a public-facing documented
| traditional API is that said API will outlive the
| original product. But that doesn't make CryptoKitties a
| better game, since Cripto Kitties won't be a thing
| anymore when that comes into play.
| [deleted]
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I view crypto as a good way to create an ecosystem rather
| than just a single game. But to create an ecosystem
| requires multiple games, by multiple companies. At the
| center of it all, you probably need a selfless company with
| tons of money to bootstrap the core IP, that simultaneously
| cares very much about its IP but also doesn't care too much
| so they let indies and amateurs experiment with it.
|
| I can see the "end game" and it looks nice. But I don't
| know how to get there. I don't know if its even possible to
| get there given the hurdles involved - some of the required
| attributes from the involved actors feels contradictory.
| midislack wrote:
| OK but WHAT IS THE GAME? What do you DO with CryptoKitties?
| JeremyNT wrote:
| Disclaimer: I haven't played it, but I read this article.
|
| It looks like a pet breeding game. You "own" cartoon cats -
| visual representations of distinctive bundles of
| characteristics contained in a NFT. You generate more NFTs
| by "breeding" two existing cats (executing the smart
| contract), which results in random combinations of their
| characteristics in offspring.
|
| What to do with them? Speculate on their value, same as any
| NFT.
|
| As a "game" this sounds incredibly unsophisticated compared
| to normal video games - something that might have passed
| during the flash era of gaming, or maybe today on itch.io
| as a weekend project. The only "hook" outside of this is
| the speculation / potential to earn (and I imagine if
| you're in on the scam, earning is a lot of fun).
| alanfalcon wrote:
| Breeding is a complex and nuanced game mechanic, which when
| coupled with the worldwide marketplace unlocks a dizzying
| rabbit hole. Once you understand the mechanics, you realize
| just why a Gen 1 Tendertears would be a grail collectible
| to own.
|
| I called it more of a sandbox than a game, but there are
| also Fancy Chases, events where a specific limited-time
| breeding goal is introduced and it's a race to be among the
| first to achieve this goal and breed a Fancy Kitty.
|
| Not saying it's for everyone, but it's definitely something
| that thousands of people found and find pretty darn fun
| (again: if expensive).
| opyate wrote:
| Sounds like gacha, where folks feverishly "collect"
| pointless pieces of little plastic. All these things
| (hoarding, compulsive buying, gambling) go hand-in-hand
| [0], and ends up emptying pockets and possibly
| devastating lives.
|
| 0: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181956/
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| CK's breeding mechanics are about as complex as Pokemon
| Gen1's breeding mechanics, and simpler than Gen3.
| Congratulations on passing the GameBoy bar. Additionally,
| all of the talk about openness is now out the window
| since the breeding code is closed source.
|
| Congratulations on also doing limited time events,
| welcome to the year 2000 of online gaming!
| alanfalcon wrote:
| Just because it's tradition to not let "someone being
| wrong on the internet" stand:
| https://www.cryptokitties.co/blog/post/learn-how-our-
| last-my...
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Maybe it's just fun to spend money you don't need, or
| stole, or swindled, or need to launder.
| secretsatan wrote:
| I knew someone who described slot machines like that
|
| He ended up declaring bankruptcy
| reidjs wrote:
| You can trade them, or breed them with other cryptokitties.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| There's a free mobile game called Clusterduck which is
| basically the same idea but without the crypto nonsense.
|
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pikpok.wt
| d...
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clusterduck/id1531250914
|
| You basically don't do anything except watch what weird
| mutations come out from the breeding. In Clusterduck, you
| can only have up to 30 ducks, so once you hit the limit,
| you have to throw a duck into the pit to sacrifice it.
| Sometimes when sacrificing a duck, a large monster spawns
| from the pit, and if you tap it enough times, it'll spawn a
| duck with a "cursed" trait of some sort.
| digitaLandscape wrote:
| You breed them. It reminded me of horse breeding games my
| girlfriend used to play. Kind of fun. Not worth the ongoing
| cost though.
| midislack wrote:
| For me it's the Mary Kate and Ashley horse breeding game
| on the Game Boy Color.
| hgsgm wrote:
| xani_ wrote:
| They are like porn games, the gameplay is not the focus,
| fucking is.
|
| Except it's you getting fucked in crypto.
| john_alan wrote:
| Mods?
| [deleted]
| jbverschoor wrote:
| ycta202249823 wrote:
| There are some porn games that are considered very fun and
| even influential on the larger games industry, particularly
| coming out of Japan such as Rance[0], a grand strategy series
| that's run for over 30 years.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rance_(series)
| mrtksn wrote:
| I remember when CryptoKitties clogged the ETH blockchain and it
| has become unfeasible to do most of the transactions.
|
| Anyway, the game is very simple and it actually makes much more
| sense than the recent NFT fud. Essentially you combine
| characters to create new characters that have some of the
| traits of the parent characters. It's a breeding game.
|
| I kind of see how it can be valuable to own an NFT character
| with certain traits that can be used to create other NFT
| characters. Unlike the recent NFT stuff, it makes sense within
| its universe. The NFT market on the other hand is just a hot
| patato game where you speculate that there exist a greater fool
| in a rigged marketplace.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| In a vacuum I'd have assumed that attempting to make transaction
| fees undercut things like credit card processing fees would have
| been a key design goal of post-bitcoin block chains, so it's
| surprising to me (as someone not terribly invested in keeping up
| with crypto) to realize that transactions fees can be so high
| (though in some ways I suppose it's kind of like combining title
| registration with supermarket checkout more than it is just a
| transaction).
|
| But besides side chains are there other approaches to allowing
| newer crypto currencies to be highly liquid and handle large
| volumes of transactions at low cost? This issue seems like it's a
| recurring problem for crypto.
| mkaic wrote:
| > What Went Wrong?
|
| It's in the title of the article. It's a "Blockchain Game".
| That's what went wrong. It was a flawed concept from its
| inception. Blockchains are pretty cool from a math/cryptography
| standpoint, but they really do not provide added value in _most_
| areas people try to apply them to.
|
| CryptoKitties is a digital trading card game. You get cards, you
| can "breed" cards together to make new cards, you trade/buy/sell
| cards. That's it. Nowhere at any point in this "game" is a
| blockchain necessary. Nowhere at any point does a blockchain add
| any value whatsoever. In fact, due to transaction fees, I'd argue
| the blockchain actively detracts from the game.
|
| The idea of an artist signing their work in a cryptographically
| unique way is not new or revolutionary, and it _certainly_ doesn
| 't need a blockchain. There's a reason the general sentiment the
| art community has towards NFTs is overwhelmingly negative: it's
| because they literally _actively harm us_.
| saurik wrote:
| In the real world, people play trading card games all the time
| and a big part of the ecosystem is trading the trading cards.
| Only, it is really annoying to have to ship around and maintain
| physical cards, and I want my card collection in the cloud.
| Some people would thereby prefer to play an online version of,
| say, Magic: The Gathering, or whatever the Pokemon one is
| called, etc.
|
| The problem now is... how do you do the trading part? You could
| go to the trouble of yourself building a marketplace for the
| cards and then integrating all of the payment methods required,
| and then dealing with all of the trust and fraud issues that
| result from people sending money via banks or PayPal that they
| later chargeback or refund, all while dealing with whatever
| crazy tax implications come up from running a market.
|
| But you don't want to do any of that: you want to code a game,
| and it isn't like Wizards of the Coast is trying to take money
| off of the aftermarket! They just make money by selling the
| initial randomized official card packs. Because you went
| digital now you are doing a ton of extra work and are wasting a
| ton of time dealing with payment processing issues when none of
| that is related to your actual business model or product
| design.
|
| And, at the end of the day, doing that giant marketplace is a
| _hard job_ that other companies specialize in. If I told you
| eBay provided some kind of digital asset API that let you
| simply assign tracking numbers to products but then eBay kept
| track of the ownership as it changed and all your game had to
| do is ask "what cards does this user still own?" when it
| opens, I imagine a ton of developers would jump on that
| bandwagon.
|
| Only, eBay doesn't provide that API, and likely would avoid
| doing so out of concern you would shut down the game on a whim
| and cause them issues; and, even if they did, now your entire
| game backend would then be built around a single marketplace
| that might randomly pull your game for some reason and shut
| down your entire company in a way where you are SCREWED as your
| end-to-end ownership pipeline is modeled inside of eBay's
| database rather than being something you control and can
| migrate.
|
| If only there were some off-the-shelf technology for tracking
| digital assets that you could trivially add as a dependency to
| your project, letting you write a few lines of code to define
| your asset and which had APIs for querying ownership... one
| which was an open ecosystem controlled by a shared protocol
| instead of a single company, thereby allowing not just one
| market but any number of competing markets with different ideas
| on auctions or escrow to exist. Wouldn't that be amazing?!
|
| Well: that's Ethereum; like, that's precisely what Ethereum is
| doing. If you think collectible trading card games aren't a
| dumb idea--and even if you hate them and think the premise is
| bad for gaming, I am going to remind you that these things are
| SUPER POPULAR and so your opinion doesn't in some sense matter
| here as you are just ignoring reality--then Ethereum is a
| GLORIOUS idea that makes it absolutely trivial for game
| developers to build them and for users to participate.
| yesimahuman wrote:
| I think the argument that Ethereum/etc provide useful off-
| the-shelf APIs/services for implementing something like this
| might be the one point in their favor
| reidjs wrote:
| More accurately it can be described as a digital trading card
| game built on Ethereum.
| [deleted]
| teraflop wrote:
| One thing I don't see addressed in this article is that as far as
| I know, it's basically impossible to trust the reported price or
| volume of NFT transactions, because there's no way to distinguish
| fake wash trades from real ones.
|
| So it's hard to draw any conclusions about whether the data
| reflects an actual peak in user activity, or just a peak in
| scams.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Correct, not possible if you dont want someone to know
|
| But of you've ever traded NFTs its hard to really _begin_ with
| the assumption that trading volume is fake because bots and
| market makers buy from you so fast. _You_ know that wasn 't a
| fake or wash trade, while there is a pervasive audience of
| onlookers that are trying to prove a negative.
|
| You know that funds in bankruptcy court have successfully sold
| $30,000,000 worth of the NFTs on their books as ordered,
| without issue or further controversy about where the proceeds
| came from
|
| You know that DAOs have liquidated $30,000,000 worth of NFTs on
| their books as determined by the community, without issue
|
| How much convincing does anyone need to move off of "its all
| wash trading and money laundering" to "yeah thats possible
| there is also lots of liquidity", it doesn't really make sense
| to make the former perception their whole identity
| simonw wrote:
| "because bots and market makers buy from you so fast"
|
| Does that still hold true today, or was that the case six
| months ago before the NFT market crashed?
| teraflop wrote:
| Right, I'm not saying there's _no_ real trading, just that it
| 's impossible to say how much. Which makes the graphs and
| anecdotes quoted in the article a bit meaningless, IMO.
| simsla wrote:
| Isn't that always the case? My friend was talking about a rare
| Magic The Gathering card being worth a silly amount of money...
| Except the card had only been sold once or twice at that price.
|
| Unless you have enough comparable items (e.g. paintings by the
| Dutch masters) it's really difficult to determine the value of
| something that's rarely sold.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > Except the card had only been sold once or twice at that
| price.
|
| You see this practice in art and collector car sales. It's
| rumored that if you see a painting go for an insane amount of
| money, often these sales are between "friendly" parties for
| the sole purpose of driving up the value of that art.
| cphoover wrote:
| see Beeple's 60M NFT sale as a great example
| nly wrote:
| The same can happen at low prices so that the owners can
| claim the paintings have lost value and can offset some
| other capital gains.
| klodolph wrote:
| Funny you should mention MtG, since the first big crypto
| exchange collapse was MtGox.
|
| I always thought it was "Mt. Gox", like a mountain of sorts.
| Turns out it's Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange.
|
| Edit: MtG seems like it has some kind of evergreen
| popularity, and various format changes, changes in the list
| of banned cards, reprints, and changes in the metagame will
| mean that prices of individual cards can vary wildly over
| time. So if something was sold for a ridiculous price a
| couple times, it's possible that something changed
| (Targmogoyf used to be very expensive, for example).
|
| Wizards seems pretty good at catering to a variety of
| players, both collectors and non-collectors.
| conscion wrote:
| This is only half true. From Wikipedia [1], the name did
| originally stand for Magic The Gathering Online eXchange,
| but the domain was only used for that purpose for a couple
| months in 2007.
|
| When it launched as a Bitcoin exchange in 2010, the unused
| domain was "Mt. Gox" from the beginning.
|
| [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox#Founding_(2006
| %E2%80...
| wyldfire wrote:
| It did pivot away from its ancestry and at that point it
| was indeed referred to as "Mount Gox".
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Indeed, and that's even the branding used in the
| Wikipedia article on it:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Not to be confused with the Berkeley Unix software company
| called "Mt Xinu". (The operating system's name is a
| recursive acronym, while the company's name is a backwards
| spelling.)
|
| "We know UNIX TM backwards and forwards." -Mt Xinu
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MtXinu
|
| Famous for the great posters they handed out at Usenix:
|
| "4.2 > V" BSD -vs- System V, X-Wing / Death Star Poster
|
| https://www.ericconrad.com/2008/12/
|
| I love all the old telephone equipment in the explosion!
| milesvp wrote:
| The old magic the gathering game blog had a lot of good
| game design topics. One of the articles talked about the 3
| or 4 player archtypes they tried to design for. Worth the
| potential rabbit hole.
|
| https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-
| magic/t...
| spearingthehead wrote:
| It does happen a lot in physical collectible markets. It is
| what happened with WATA Games and the lawsuit against their
| employees for market manipulation through auctions. Or the
| Nike scandal with a VP's son using her CC and employee
| discount buying massive amounts of hyped sneakers and
| reselling them, which just made everyone more aware.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Trading cards and NFTs have a lot in common.
|
| - Scarcity, artificial or otherwise.
|
| - Subjective value. Neither an NFT or a trading card provides
| substantial, measurable utility to its owner. But, we can
| agree they have "value" of some kind.
|
| - Lack of oversight. Governments doesn't have entire offices
| monitoring irregular sale prices for Obelisk the Tormentor or
| Mickey Mantle.
|
| - Low transaction volume. If you're the only market-maker,
| you can set your own price.
|
| These attributes lead me to believe that NFTs and trading
| cards would both very effective tools for someone trying to
| launder money.
|
| You can take away any one of those attributes, and the asset
| would become much more difficult to use for money laundering.
| For NFTs, oversight seems inevitable in the next couple of
| years. One can only hope.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| "value" is kind of a made-up thing, so I'd argue that by
| selling something for the first time you're setting its
| value, not determining it
| maxbond wrote:
| It's important to note that price, the last traded price,
| and value are all distinct concepts. The last traded price
| is the only one of these we can measure ahead of time, so
| we often use it as a metanym for these other concepts. But
| we don't know the price of something until we make a
| binding offer on it and it is accepted; that doesn't
| necessarily mean the next transaction won't be very
| different, we just have heuristics about how the next price
| ought to look. But it's the process of negotiating a deal
| or bidding on an auction that defines the price, not the
| historical prices. If you go to a grocery store and see
| that milk costs $5.25, and you remember last week it costs
| $5.00, you don't say the price is wrong; you understand
| that this is the offer the store has made you, and that the
| price has gone up since your last visit.
|
| When the oil futures went negative, it wasn't the case that
| the value of oil was negative - this was about the
| structure of the market and the sorts of positions people
| were caught in when the pandemic hit. We continued to
| consume oil throughout the pandemic, and so I'd say we
| continued to value it.
|
| Another example would be, if a rancher has a lot of cow
| poop, they might pay a farmer to take it away. You could
| say that the cow poop has a negative price on it. But the
| farmer is going to make use of it as fertilizer; from the
| farmer's perspective, this is a commodity that has value.
|
| It's true though that there are a million theories of value
| and it's impossible to say what something's value is
| definitively, you can only make a decision about what is
| value is to you.
|
| But when wash trading is and to impact the perceived value,
| it does so fraudulently; it supplies information to traders
| - "there is a lot of interest in this security, and the
| (last traded) price is rising" - which is a lie. Some
| people will argue this too is a normal and healthy part of
| markets, but I don't think they've given enough thought to
| what sort of equilibrium that game will settle into.
| notahacker wrote:
| There's a big difference between an illiquid market where
| wealthy collectors are so keen to hang onto things they only
| change hands at crazy possibly-not-to-be-repeated prices and
| a fake market where the illusion of deep-pocketed collectors
| is created by the auctioneer and owner colluding to _pretend_
| an item changed hands at a massive amount of money.
| samatman wrote:
| The amount of wash trading in the fine art world is
| certainly not zero.
| notahacker wrote:
| True, but I don't thing wash trading is integral to
| convincing people that fine art is something people
| want...
| DuskStar wrote:
| There's perhaps a difference between an original DaVinci
| and whatever the latest paint splatter on canvas modern
| art is, though.
| vkou wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it's integral to convincing people that
| ~99% of the >$1,000,000 fine art is something people want
| enough to pay the 'going' price for.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Or selling NFTs to yourself to launder money.
| renewiltord wrote:
| How does that particular thing work? You run the exchange,
| then have dirty untraceable money traded on the exchange to
| dirty participant and you take the exchange fees? You'd have
| to KYC both participants, right?
| officialchicken wrote:
| Not everyone, the "participants" in the chain (typically
| 8-10 addresses) can arbitrarily inflate pricing by only
| paying fees which are trivially covered by the final trade.
| Once inflated, that final address can use a "mixer" to exit
| (for example) and essentially if KYC is performed in the
| conversion to fiat, it's after the mix and relatively
| untraceable.
| stouset wrote:
| Buy a "rare" NFT with clean money. Sell it a few months
| later for some multiple of the original price, the "buyer"
| is still you but using dirty money.
|
| NB: I work in fintech but have no particular experience on
| the fraud / KYC / AML side of things. This is just how I
| imagine it would work at a high level.
| renewiltord wrote:
| But if you do that, I think you'd be first on the list of
| people investigated for the dirty money. It has to be
| cleaned in some way by obscuring it.
|
| The approach described here seems more plausible
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32857382
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| Imagine you have $X million from a hack on wallet A, and
| you want to launder it. First, you run it through tornado
| cash (RIP) a few times and move them to wallets B1 to
| B1000. Then, you mint an "exciting NFT collection" on your
| public, KYC'd wallet C, list them on a "decentralized
| exchange", and have wallets B1 to B1000 buy those NFTs.
| Even better, seeing how fast your NFTs are selling out, a
| few suckers join in on the stampede and get mixed in
| alongside B1-B1000. Well, now on wallet C you have $(X -
| gas fees - minting fees) etc., that is totally legal and
| clean. You cash out on Coinbase, give the taxman his due,
| and you are good to go!
| renewiltord wrote:
| The Tornado Cash tumbler allows you to create sort-of-
| Sybils so it looks organic. The no-KYC Dex allows you to
| push from a no-KYC account to a KYC'd account. The KYC'd
| account lets you withdraw fiat.
|
| I see. Okay, each of the pieces are necessary. Thanks for
| the explanation.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Only need to do Tornado cash once, and you can still do
| that, it still works
|
| Nobody cares that you sold your nft to a virgin address
| funded solely by the tornado cash relay
| jaywalk wrote:
| > Well, now on wallet C you have $(X - gas fees - minting
| fees) etc., that is totally legal and clean.
|
| It's not "legal" at all, because it's still proceeds of
| crime. Although it may "appear" legal and be very
| difficult to trace back to the source, it's still not
| actually legal.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Yes, that's how money laundering works.
| zeroclip wrote:
| > there's no way to distinguish fake wash trades from real ones
|
| Ah, like that $532M Punk wash trade that was clearly visible
| on-chain?[1] I guess we'll never know if it was real or fake.
|
| [1] https://decrypt.co/84756/no-someone-didnt-really-
| pay-532-mil...
| rnk wrote:
| Please explain your comment for the rest is us. Was that a
| sarcastic "it really happened because it made it to the
| chain" or a "we'll never know whether value was exchanged
| from one person to another because the owner of both wallets
| could be the same person" - or both, neither or?
| zeroclip wrote:
| Commenter said "there's no way to distinguish fake wash
| trades from real ones" and I showed a case where a wash
| trade was, to anybody looking at it, very obviously fake.
|
| I agree with the other part of the comment. Blockchains do
| not track "persons" but "wallets" and so metrics like
| "number of users" will not be accurate. But it is not
| accurate to imply that it is impossible to recognize wash
| trades. In many cases they are very obvious, and even can
| be automatically flagged. In other cases - like with CEX
| mixers - only the authorities can detect the fraud.
| pas wrote:
| OP probably meant fake wash trades and real non-wash
| trade ones, not fake and nonfake wash trades
| andrewmutz wrote:
| How can we tell that the buyer and the seller are two
| different people in real life?
| fab1an wrote:
| I feel that NFT pricing exuberance (or lack thereof) is
| distracting both critics and even fans from the core innovation
| here - 1. the capacity to signify a digital original and 2. to
| decentrally organize ownership (though it's more like possession)
| of these items.
|
| The ultimate question for crypto as a whole is whether the mass
| market wants digital possession that transcends a single
| centrally managed database. Personally am convinced we'll get
| there, but the onboarding mustn't happen through speculation, but
| specific unique utility, mostly interoperability/composability.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| I'd like to read the op ed about the first painting that ever
| sold for substantial money, and its eventual theft or
| destruction.
|
| Setting the scene: Before there were Banks, Mayors, Kings, or
| Mob bosses. Some random town or village. The wealthiest farming
| family has bought/fought (an exchange of a different type of
| resource) for most of the land in the town. That family has
| started to employ people on their land to build more wealth.
| This family doesn't know what to do with their wealth. They own
| all of the gold and jewels the traveling sales people bring by.
| They have built a castle and store treasures in their vault.
| They hire a militia to keep the peace. They have more money
| coming in than they know what to do with. Even the people in
| the town are happy. They now have a big wall paid for by this
| family. The family's militia is no fun, but it really has kept
| the peace. Trade is going well, and the towns folk haven't had
| gone a winter hungry in years.
|
| Scene 1: One day a traveling artist brings canvas with chalk
| based drawing. A young adult from the wealthy family, called X,
| have seen similar, but this one is big. Its bigger than ever
| and connects with them emotionally. They want it. Sadly its
| already been sold. The artist offers to get a second made and
| bring it next month. However, X has connected with it
| emotionally. They connect with it so much they don't just want
| it, they want no one else to have it. They offer the artist
| more money than the artist's lifetime earnings to never again
| make chalk on canvas again. The canvas is hung up.
|
| Scene 2: Everyone else in the town laughs/grumbles, "they spent
| 10 lifetimes of our earnings on a big canvas of chalk?". "No so
| that the artist would never make another". "... but the artist
| doesn't even live here. Couldn't they just make another?"
|
| Scene 3: 3 years later, the canvas is a big deal in town. To
| some, laughable. To others, luring. Many more artists brought
| over canvas of chalk and many wealthyish families bought them
| for more reasonable amounts, but the wealthy family didn't just
| have any old canvas of chalk, theirs was a "..." no other could
| be made. The others are bought and sold, but their canvas is
| priceless.
|
| Scene 4 - Alt A: Its the middle of the night. A band of
| thieves, orphans barely in their teens, an adultish figure
| keeps them in order and has directed them into the castle. The
| jewels and gold are in the vault, its very guarded but the
| children don't turn right towards the basement. Everyone that
| has tried for the vault has been hung in the town square. They
| move quietly to the great room. Their orders are clear. They
| pull down the canvas, open the frame, roll up the canvas, and
| are out. (in the morning) The town bells ring. The streets are
| a mess of militia. The thieves are already miles away and
| meeting their fence.
|
| Scene 4 - Alt B: There has been a multi year famine in town.
| The town is upset, angry with the family. The solution is to go
| to war! They do battle with the neighboring city. They just
| happen to win. The cost was many lives but now they have enough
| reserves to get through many winters. This doesn't solve the
| actual root cause and the fields still don't make food. The
| resources continue to deplete and the canvas of chalk was sold
| at a massive loss to some close enough but far away town's
| wealthy family. Mostly as a reminder / teaching tool for their
| children not to "waste" money like X. "It drives a town to
| famine".
|
| Both versions of this story have happened through human
| history. They just predate documentation. Meanwhile, Art today
| can still be worth a lot of money.
| simonw wrote:
| Most regular people really, really need a working "I forgot my
| password" feature.
| manholio wrote:
| > 1. the capacity to signify a digital original and 2. to
| decentrally organize ownership (though it's more like
| possession) of these items.
|
| There is nothing novel in this. You could do it in Bitcoin too
| by agreeing that a certain transaction structure that includes
| a digital hash is a valid way to signify an original with that
| hash, and a spend from that address represents an ownership
| change.
|
| It's simply a convention, and people don't do it because it's
| mostly a useless diversion from established ways to record and
| trade IP.
|
| The true NFT innovation is the marketing gimmick that such a
| convention has any real world relevance and somehow magically
| makes the IP non-fungible. This enabled massive speculation on
| essentially worthless (and fully fungible) IP, expressed in a
| clunky and impractical distributed database.
| sithadmin wrote:
| The major distraction is that a 'digital original' is a
| fiction. I can ignore your blockchain and make any digital IP
| fungible.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Yep. Just to tack on - even if you minted a "master copy" of
| your digital asset on the Blockchain, it still doesn't
| represent anything meaningful:
|
| - It doesn't guarantee that you are the first or exclusive
| owner of this digital asset
|
| - It doesn't correlate to physical ownership
|
| - It doesn't hold any water in a legal sense, if you want
| your ownership of an NFT to be ratified then you need to use
| the same centralized avenues as everyone else
| nonameiguess wrote:
| The core failure seems a lot more fundamental than that to me.
| The only things you can "digitally" possess are digital items.
| But people don't care about owning blockchain entries. They
| want to own paintings and houses. Property rights are a legal
| matter, however. The only way ownership of a blockchain entry
| can entail ownership of a physical good is if the law says so.
| And, at least for now, law is centralized. Only the state can
| make it and only the state can enforce it. If the entity that
| arbitrates and decides property claims is centralized, whether
| or not their ledger is also centralized makes no difference.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| >whether the mass market wants digital possession that
| transcends a single centrally managed database
|
| Even if the market wants this, it's certainly not what is being
| offered. If OpenSea delists your NFT in their single centrally
| managed database, it may as well no longer exist.
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| This is a problem that's actively being worked on (SudoSwap
| as an AMM for NFTs, Scatter.art as a competitor, et cetera).
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| "digital original" is on its face absurd
|
| An analog original could be valuable or at least meaningful
| because it's impossible to create an identical copy of anything
| in which exists in the material world.
|
| But there is no way to distinguish between two copies of
| digital data.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| My intuition about CryptoKitties and many other NFTs is that
| market manipulation has been ridiculously easy and profitable,
| everything is somewhat more scrutinized nowadays, but I think
| that the scams and schemes are far from over.
|
| Impersonating both sides of a transaction does not seem too
| difficult, and not very costly, as long as the fees are kept
| small.
| dopidopHN wrote:
| I agree with the part where they describe existing on chain games
| as too simplistic. The handful I saw indeed sucks.
|
| No skills really needed beside being able to click and pay the
| initial fee.
| Zaskoda wrote:
| Calling CryptoKitties a "game" is a bit generous.
| themagician wrote:
| "Gaming" often refers to gambling. There is a whole world of
| gaming separate from video games--online slots, poker, etc..
| Intentional or not, most crypto games are much closer to
| traditional gaming than video games.
| xtracto wrote:
| Wait until you learn about "game theory"!
| bze12 wrote:
| I'm always surprised that projects like cryptokitties are
| referred to as games. I guess saying "game" makes it sound more
| legitimate, but there's almost nothing to do with your
| characters besides sell them.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Everything is a game once you look for an equilibrium.
| H8crilA wrote:
| Newsflash: watching paint dry is a game (until the solvents
| reach an equilibrium with the air).
| minimaxir wrote:
| It was the gateway to getting gamers interested in crypto/web3,
| which resulted in the absurd "play2earn" concept which has been
| the subject of justified mockery.
| faangiq wrote:
| CryptoKitties is the only interesting blockchain use case besides
| BTC. It's over for ETHcels.
| bze12 wrote:
| There's an amusing mobile game similar to CryptoKitties about
| breeding mutant ducks
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clusterduck/id1531250914 , but it's
| single player
|
| (self plug) I'm also working on an NFT parody game
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1609874752 - it's a simulated
| trading & collecting market for emojis.
|
| I'm always confused why people call cryptokitties a game, there's
| barely anything to play with. Maybe using blockchain makes it a
| lot harder to implement actual game features, or maybe it just
| corrupts your incentives lol.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Yes, all nft collections suffer from supply dilution if the
| creator wants to keep making money.
|
| The "NFT" aspect distracts most from the obvious:
|
| The physical collections market is hugely profitable, supply is
| hugely manipulated and unknown, and we just had no transparency
| into any of this until it went onchain
|
| None of the consumer activity in the NFT _collections_ market is
| really unique, we just get to see issuer revenue numbers in real
| time and supply
|
| All the market is saying is "wow I should really be selling stuff
| to collectors"
| Kiro wrote:
| CryptoKitties was amazing and a pioneer before NFTs were even a
| thing. You shouldn't conflate them with the current wave of play-
| to-earn scams.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > Today, CryptoKitties is lucky to break 100 sales a day, and the
| total value is often less than $10,000.
|
| This seems shockingly high to me
| j0hnyl wrote:
| "Bluechip" NFTs like CryptoKitties become commodities that
| people trade day in and day out.
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