Crypto makes it possible to own something digitally.
Web3 incorporates this ownership. While Web 2.0 was about writing something to the internet and the World Wide Web was about reading something on the internet. It's a further iteration which just makes sense.
It does NOT make it possible to own something in any meaningful way. (Intellectual) property rights already take care of ownership. Ofc, there are illegal ways of just taking what you want, but that is a crime like under all other circumstances.
The only thing crypto enables is to have a ecologically destructive, slow, redundant database that says “X belongs to Y”. The thing is though, you could just create a different database. And having your entry in that database does not legally equal ownership. So it doesn’t solve anything but now there’s money involved so people try to scam you.
Why the hell do I need to "own" something online? Whatever I publish, people can do whatever the hell they want with it. I don't want DRM incorporated into the internet. Blockchain is a scam and anybody parroting its supposed advantages is either invested or naive.
I mean, if you don't want to "own" something online, then don't? Nobody is telling you what to or not to do. Don't get angry at another person's preferences. I think a much more cogent criticism is that it's very difficult for Web3/on-chain ownership to correspond to any form of meaningful ownership for the user. "Yeah I own digital <thing>, so what?"
I only really see a use when mapping to an actually digitally scare good, say an IPv4 block or a domain name. But that's it really. Maybe some gacha/collectible games, but that's iffy.
One thing I don’t understand is how does this migrate away from things such as copyright licenses ? Even if you “buy” a digital good What stops a license from being applied to it?
Everything you own with crypto, is some data inside this crypto's world. Without any connection to other worlds, those data have no value in itself. And the moment you connect it, laws come into play and your crypto is just a tool to manage this ownership. But for this, crypto has no real benefit so far. And it's questionable whether it ever will have. We get the same practical benefits without all the expensive crypto-bells&whistles.
You could own something digitally before crypto. I've got some pretty sweet digital 7th Edition Magic cards I've had for about 2 decades. I traded away some of them and sold others.
What would happen if WotC ran a Magic Online NFT edition and shut it down? Do you think they'd let a third party use their IP? Would Magic cards you can't play with or view the art of and are just urls pointing to a dead server have real value?
Have you read the list of restrictions Ubisoft has for their NFTs? Do people really own those?
Magic card art has very little value. The value is in the interactions between different cards.
Even today, there are 3rd party websites that let you play Magic online with other people, but you get to play with any cards you want which removes a certain aspect of the meta game.
As long as I owned the NFT on a decentralized blockchain, any 3rd party could verify my ownership and let me use those cards.
Or if the game that accepted those NFT as in-game items shuts down, then these items cease to exist as well in any meaningful way, at least for the reasons it might be valuable in the beginning when I purchased it (stats in game, rarity, etc.). If the game ceases to exist then the NFT is just, what, a trading card that shows some scarcity/rarity?
I really don't get this argument at all. I bought an in-game mount for World of Warcraft as a NFT, WoW shuts down, where the hell am I going to use the in-game mount again? A shitty game that tells me "your WoW mount works here as well!"?
It really feels it's all a preparation for the "metaverse" bullshit.
No game is going to do the "your X game items work here", since it cuts off any revenue stream they have, and the NFT itself is almost definitely not going to include a functioning asset, just a token that you own mount with an ID of XYZ. It would be on the game developers to create art and code for every single NFT they want to support.
Exactly what I assume, hence why I don't see the value on the argument of "owning an in-game item", there is nothing to own, everything is on the hands of the platform that enables whatever I own to exist.
NFTs != images. Art NFTs are one implementation of NFTs (and not one I’m a fan of).
A token representing a Magic card doesn’t need any association with the art on that card, it just needs to exist so anyone can verify that I purchased that card (and therefore the ability to use its mechanics) from WoTC. A 3rd party game that allows me to play Magic can verify the NFT card ownership and can use it’s own art or no art at all, just like they do today.
The only difference is that today’s 3rd party Magic sites don’t have verified ownership of cards so everyone uses the most expensive cards.
Only in a superficial way. A lot of the early NFTs pre the 721 standard did not bother with an URL; the Cryptopunks don't. The catalogue of what exactly each token represents can work perfectly well off-chain. If people care to trade Bored Ape tokens, they will do so even if the URLs are broken; whatever marketplace they are using will manually make sure the right images are shown etc.
If the game that is using the NFTs I bought is shutdown, what the hell is the value of these in-game items that I bought if the game for them doesn't exist anymore?
Yeah, someone else can create a new game and say "we accept the NFT items from Defunct Game X", you are still completely under the control of whomever is providing you the platform for these in-game items to actually exist. If that platform is taken away you just have some bits of data pointing to other bits of data with no meaning and no value at all...
> If that platform is taken away you just have some bits of data pointing to other bits of data with no meaning and no value at all..
They can still have meaning (we know what item it was); whether there are people who would value the pure notion of owning such a digital item in the absence of concrete functionality is indeed the question that NFTs explore/raise.
Either way, you're trusting the owners of Magic the Gathering Online. With a purchase from them they're actually holding the records, but even with a NFT there's nothing stopping them from no longer supporting or honouring those NFTs, or not honouring them if they've been transferred or sold or whatever.
I’m not trusting them. If they choose to ban a card, that’s fine since it’s an accepted part of the meta game, but there have been 3rd party services for playing Magic online with people for years. Those third party sites suffer from not having verified card ownership and NFTs would enable that.
I'd like to be more precise in this case and say that an NFT is an ability to prove original ownership.
We have of course been able to buy and own more or less exlusive licenses to digital goods for a long time now. The video game market is now larger than the music and film industries combined and quickly becoming entirely digital.
And if it's own work and the more literal form of ownership rather than just a license to it, these rights are well protected in law and don't really use to become a problem? Unless you live in a state with state-sponsored copyright infringement, but these would absolutely not respect NFT's and proofs of ownership either.
But if you for some reason need to support the specific case of proving original ownership, NFT is a technology that can help although I think this is becoming a too niche use for a widespread internet-wide revolution. It's still digital which can be made into perfect copies and I think this alone reduces the appeal even if it would come with a sticker that validates the product. At least it does so for me. Sure it's "useful" kind of like how an MD5 sum is, and now we get even further along the way than that but... it's still digital goods with everything that implies...
The same can be said about Lisk with 35 blockchain technology research papers already published and another 19 blockchain interoperability research papers to be published in spring.
You can do that in CSS now. I've noticed surprisingly many sites adjusting when I started using a Windows machine and set my system-wide preference to dark mode.
I'm affiliated with a cryptocurrency which is using Postgres as its underlying database since the beginning. So I agree with your sentiment.
Single node scalability is often overseen, but in my opinion has to come first, before you can expand scalability network wide. It's like standard computer science practices are not being applied in the crypto world, yet.
Lisk is a platform and framework for JavaScript developers to deploy their own blockchain and build decentralised applications. We have our own cryptocurrency LSK, are funded, still have a small number of employees, and we want to make blockchains mainstream.
* (Senior) Back end developer:
NodeJS, Javascript (ES5&ES6), PostgreSQL (PGpromise), Git (Gitflow), Test-driven development, Understanding of P2P networks and cryptography, Bonus: TypeScript
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Expert of HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript (ES5&ES6), and SVG, Advanced knowledge of Angular 1.x / 2, Knowledge of Grunt, NPM, Bower, and Electron, Git (Gitflow)
Feel free to apply with our contact us form (https://lisk.io/contact_us), or reach out directly: max @ lisk.io
Web3 incorporates this ownership. While Web 2.0 was about writing something to the internet and the World Wide Web was about reading something on the internet. It's a further iteration which just makes sense.