SO...I'm not that educated on NFTs and Cryptocurrency and Blockchains and such. I've seen some of our youtube creators talk about NFTs, read the news with the likes of Ubisoft and such, and saw a few jokes here and there about Elite and NFTs.
I've got a question and forgive me if it seems foolish. It is in fact ignorant - in that I don't know - which is why I'm asking:
How would NFTs be incorporated into Elite?
I'm not asking if they should be. I understand that can lead to very heated discussion. I'm just interested in the 'how'. How does it work? What does it do for me, the player, and for FDev, the developer/owner of the game? Feel free to describe other games, too, but I'm mostly curious how it might work in this sort of gaming space. To my knowledge, FDev has made no announcement regarding incorporating NFTs so this really is just my curiosity. I'm assuming a game like Elite wouldn't necessarily be the ideal target, anyways, but I dunno?
I sort-of understand the economic possibilities in games with player-created assets, such as Minecraft, Roblox, or even shooter games (trading skins and such)...but I want to emphasize sort-of understand. So, for the experts on how all this newfangled stuff works...please fill me in! I'd be delighted to be pointed to resources, too (wiki articles and the like) if that would be easier than explaining here. Thanks for the assist, commanders!
Ultimately, tokenized game assets are just a way for a publisher to capitalize on NFT hype. The purpose of an NFT on a decentralized blockchain is completely undermined if there is still a central authority (the game publisher) that can arbitrarily honor, reject, or limit the use or transfer of the token, and you can damn well bet that any terms in the game's license agreement, and the NFT itself, are worded to provide unlimited liberty for the publisher and as little as possible for the NFT holder.
So, "how" is the wrong question. It's a technical one that can be answered by putting "what is an NFT" into a search engine and applying some deductive reasoning. "Why?" is the more relevant question, and the answer is, thus far, to scam customers out of stuff that was either free, or beyond the purview of the publisher, before.
So NFTs (and the entire crypto space, really, unless you count funding ransomware gangs) are entirely smoke and mirrors and to the extent that they do something, other technologies already do it considerably better. Its very difficult to explain what they actually are, because any actual explanation runs into the "but that makes no sense" barrier.
The point is for them to make no sense, because that means only the truly gullible buy them, and they're the best marks.
As far as what they do:
- imagine you had a piece of paper which said "the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre" on it.
- imagine the piece of paper also had a unique serial number on it.
- congratulations, you now have a low-tech NFT of the Mona Lisa.
- now set fire to a rainforest and steal all the graphics cards from gamers to get the proper high-tech effect.
- if you can get someone to buy your bit of paper for actual money (just the paper, nothing to do with the Mona Lisa itself) you win
- you might have to hype up the whole concept and claim that your piece of paper is the Mona Lisa before someone takes the bait
I disagree with this, generally speaking.
Blockchains, as immutable, distributed ledgers of transactions, do something that has never been done before. Applications for that technology like cryptocurrencies, decentralized finance, and even NFTs, also do things that are impractical to do otherwise (it's thus far impossible to counterfeit, and simultaneously difficult to hide the provenance or prevent/revoke the transfer of BTC, for example. Another is a smart contract that will automatically be fullfilled upon certain conditions being met, without requiring any third party mediation or intermediary), but are generally still in an immature state where speculative investments are the predominant activity.
Sure you can technically make an NFT of anything and try to sell it, but even if the vast and overwhelming majority of NFTs and cryptocurrencies out there are either utterly senseless wastes of blockspace or scams, that doesn't imply that such uses are the only uses.
Now, a sensible person would ask "why would someone buy that paper for any amount of money at all?" and "couldn't I just make my own piece of paper with the words Mona Lisa on if I wanted one of those?". Great - we don't want sensible buyers, we want people who are sure that pieces of paper with the names and locations of artwork are the next big thing and will give us lots of actual money for them. (While I'm here, does anyone want to buy a bit of paper with the words Mona Lisa on for £10,000? I'll throw in free postage!)
This pretty much sums up my opinion on intellectual property in general.
For NFTs this is exacerbated even further as there hasn't been sufficient legal challenge or precedent to determine precisely under which circumstances terms set down in the contract that create an NFT are going to be enforced or upon what content it can be enforced. The recent judgement on the inability to copyright AI created art essentially invalidated a huge swath of NFTs in the US, for example...because people were taking AI generated permutations of one original piece and selling each as a discrete NFT. You can still buy that NFT, but such ownership is moot if no one is going to honor it, because the market value of intellectual property is wholly dependent on being able to excluded others from it's use.
Most early NFTs will be as forgotten as the blockchain allows them to be and there will be a lot of tears in the process, but the hype will eventually die down, people will start using the content of correctly formatted NFTs in legal disputes where they will be the deciding factor, and they will find a legitimate utilitarian niche. I have no idea how long this will take, or what blockchains will dominate the market in the long term, but I'm fairly confident they're here to stay.
