D&D General NFTs Are Here To Ruin Dungeons & Dragons

[Fanaelialae]

You know what?

None of that matters.

Let's pretend they actually care and tomorrow they all switch to renewable energy and that causes a solar boom. It will never happen and these farms are too decentralized for us to even reasonably pretend this, but let's just say it happens for the moment.

It doesn't matter.

Because it's still a technology in search of a purpose hopelessly mired in a culture of greed and grift that thrives on scams, taking advantage of people in poor and developing countries, steeling IP, worshipping conspicuous consumption, wallowing in ignorance of law, common sense and how technology works, constantly trying to expand itself where it doesn't belong and manipulate any subculture they think they can weasel their buzzwords into.

Saying they 'might' do something they will never and would never either want or be able to do doesn't fix the rot that goes straight to the core of crypto.

I think I see a nugget of truth there, but it's dripping with so much hyperbole and vitriol that it's hard to make out.

It's tech. It's just a thing. Not good; not evil; a thing. At worst it's an imperfectly designed thing that leaves a lot to be desired in terms of efficiency, et al. (I'd agree with that assessment.) Which really means that there's room for improvement (this should generally be expected of most emerging tech).

There maybe be subcultures that have formed around it that are rotten to the core (of that I have no doubt). But painting large groups of people with the same broad brush is never a thing one should aspire to, IMO. I don't believe that everyone involved in any way with crypto is some kind of aspiring scam artist.

I mean, wow. I generally think of myself as a cynic, but you just rekindled my hope that I could actually be an optimist. So thanks, I guess.

 

[Jer]

Especially, as @Vaalingrade says, because the whole thing is based around greed. And not even greed for something that's physically real or useful in any way.

This. So much this.

This is what's wrong with all of the crypto. It's cargo cult investment. We put up with the endless greed around the stock and currency markets because the traders are facilitating a system that allows the production and movement of goods and services. It's not terribly efficient, but it's better than many other alternatives and in exchange for having a system that greases the wheels some investors get very rich.

Crypto is an attempt to have a market with nothing marketable. There are no goods and no services being facilitated by the crypto market - it's all just moving bits around. It's mistaking the map for the territory and it's an ultimately pointless endeavor that doesn't add anything productive back into the world and yet costs an exorbinant amount of energy to do something ultimately worthless.

NFTs are a similar thing except they're a cargo cult reproduction of either the art market or the general collectible market (digital pogs). At least the art market serves to preserve works of art that might othewise be forgotten, lost or destroyed and facilitates eventually (if slowly) getting the works into the hand of people who will appreciate them even as it makes some folks very rich in their "investments". The collectibles market at it's best does the same thing, if at a smaller scale. NFTs don't do that - they create something that nobody wants and then trade it based on the idea that it will appreciate in value based on how other crypto items have appreciated in value.

It's all the negatives of capitalism without any of the benefits. And it's using more energy than many small countries do to do it. It's the most infuriating thing to see people think it's some kind of good thing when it's literally the poster child for a terrible idea.

 

[bulletmeat]

This. So much this.

This is what's wrong with all of the crypto. It's cargo cult investment. We put up with the endless greed around the stock and currency markets because the traders are facilitating a system that allows the production and movement of goods and services. It's not terribly efficient, but it's better than many other alternatives and in exchange for having a system that greases the wheels some investors get very rich.

Crypto is an attempt to have a market with nothing marketable. There are no goods and no services being facilitated by the crypto market - it's all just moving bits around. It's mistaking the map for the territory and it's an ultimately pointless endeavor that doesn't add anything productive back into the world and yet costs an exorbinant amount of energy to do something ultimately worthless.

But isn't investing in the dollar or credit card companies the same thing? People invest in banking but there is no real actual anything but what they value the dollar at. The way financial services are moving to digital only and fewer places take money this could be the move to digital.

I agree on the NFT part though.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I mean, wow. I generally think of myself as a cynic, but you just rekindled my hope that I could actually be an optimist. So thanks, I guess.

As much as a majority of my career is about bringing hope and optimism to people, this is not a thing to be optimistic about.

 

[Fanaelialae]

No, @Fanaelialae, I may not fully understand what you mean. But I think that "if we're lucky" isn't really good enough for now. Especially, as @Vaalingrade says, because the whole thing is based around greed. And not even greed for something that's physically real or useful in any way. Nobody needs to buy someone else's character sheet, especially not for these prices.

​

I'm sorry to inform you, but that whole greed thing is way more pervasive than just crypto. Our society and economy are essentially founded upon the principle of greed. Greed may be toxic, but it's a fairly effective motivator.

Physically real or no, plenty of things that people waste money on are not useful in any way. Beanie Babies, anyone?

And here I was thinking I might be an optimist. Silly me.

 

[Jer]

But isn't investing in the dollar or credit card companies the same thing? People invest in banking but there is no real actual anything but what they value the dollar at. The way financial services are moving to digital only and fewer places take money this could be the move to digital.

No. This is more cargo cult thinking - that because money isn't backed by gold that means that there's no value in money so anything can be money. That's not the case - the value in money is the belief that a country that issues it will be able to pay its debts - the currency you (or a bank) owns is a debt that country owes to you (or the bank). When countries default their money tanks because it's value is based on that belief and that's why it moves from being "money" to "worthless paper". When it's all electronic the only thing that changes is you no longer have the paper - but you still have the purchasing power of that money so long as the country that issues it is solvent.

The value of a bitcoin is literally just in the belief that it's value will continue to rise - it's completely disconnected from anything other than the mass belief of the holders and buyers of bitcoin. It doesn't represent anything the way money represents a debt to be repaid - it's literally just bits. That's why I call them "digital pogs" - the entire value of a pog was in how much other people were willing to pay for it. It had no real intrinsic worth unless you were one of the dozen or so people who actually played pogs with them. And once the speculators who were buying them up sure that they were going to be the next hot collectible stopped buying them, the entire market collapsed. Because they were a thing nobody but the speculators actually had any use or interest in.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Physically real or no, plenty of things that people waste money on are not useful in any way. Beanie Babies, anyone?

There is a massive gulf between 'sells useless item' and 'uses pretext of useless item to defraud, exploit, an rob people'.

 

[Jer]

It's tech. It's just a thing. Not good; not evil; a thing.

The tech is neutral, the purpose it's put to is not.

Blockchain is neutral. Crypto and NFTs are useless at best, actively destructive at their worst.

 

[Remathilis]

I'm sorry to inform you, but that whole greed thing is way more pervasive than just crypto. Our society and economy are essentially founded upon the principle of greed. Greed may be toxic, but it's a fairly effective motivator.

Physically real or no, plenty of things that people waste money on are not useful in any way. Beanie Babies, anyone?

And here I was thinking I might be an optimist. Silly me.

The pervasive joke is "at least with tulips, I got a flower out of it." Most NFT projects are vaporware. You get a procedurally generated image on a server somewhere and a link to it on the Blockchain. Every other aspect; cartoons, games, merch, access to events and people, even island nations, have either underdelivered, are MIA, or were rug pulls. It's the worst of Kickstarter scams on top of the virtual pogs.

If there was any use for the tech, the rampant scams have tainted it.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Vaguely related, other gaming companies (video games, in this case) are treating NFTs like catnip.

Sega Says 'Future Of Gaming' Includes NFTs And Cloud Streaming

It seems, like some other big video game publishers, Sega is also interested in adding NFTs into future games as revealed in an interview with various executives and producers. During that same interview, Sega talked more about its “Super Game” projects, confirming that it will be more than one...

finance.yahoo.com

It seems, like some other big video game publishers, Sega is also interested in adding NFTs into future games as revealed in an interview with various executives and producers. During that same interview, Sega talked more about its “Super Game” projects, confirming that it will be more than one game and some of them could involve streaming and cloud gaming.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Ancient Stockholder Who Knows Nothing About the Industry: What is the latest thing online?

Beleaguered Assistant: Well, NFTs, sir, but--

Ancient Stockholder Who Knows Nothing About the Industry: Draft a letter to the board immediately demanding to know how we will implement the Nifties.

(Later the Quarter)

Board Member: So... how will we be adding NFTs to our games.

Developer: I... there's no reason to do that and the proposed implementations like having the same gum across games doesn't actually...

Board Member: The stockholders want it and we are basically shackled and brainboxed to them, so do it.

Developer: Scummy cosmetic items sales? Look, I'm only here to do the 8th iteration of my good game for the chance to do some crap games I have a passion for. I'm not here to try to come up with ideas. We'll do the same thing we did with microtransactions only slower, dumber and more expensive. I mean the players already hate us and indies are starting to eat us alive anyway so nothing matters.

Board Member: Just say the buzzwords, make the numbers go up and let us gain favor with our doddering but wealthy gods.

Developer (heavy sigh) We are exploring NFTs, streaming and... uh...

Board Member: We need three faddy buzzwords.

Developer: (thinking back to 2009)... the... cloud?

Ancient Stockholder Who Knows Nothing About the Industry: ~Moneygasm~

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Board Member: Just say the buzzwords, make the numbers go up and let us gain favor with our doddering but wealthy gods.

Developer (heavy sigh) We are exploring NFTs, streaming and... uh...

Board Member: We need three faddy buzzwords.

“THE CLOUD! STREAMING! NFTs!” cough cough cough

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

“THE CLOUD! STREAMING! NFTs!” cough cough cough

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh NFT blockchain wgah'nagl fhtagn!

 

[Sacrosanct]

For $300, you can create a PC and I'll personally sign a letter of certification that you did indeed roll four 18s for your stats.

 

[Umbran]

At worst it's an imperfectly designed thing that leaves a lot to be desired in terms of efficiency, et al. (I'd agree with that assessment.) Which really means that there's room for improvement (this should generally be expected of most emerging tech).

That's not good enough any more. We are no longer in a position where we can simply accept that there's "much to be desired". It burns too much energy, and returns too little value, to justify its existence. It chews power at a rate that causes notable damage, to funnel money to people who already have money, allowing the damage of that activity to fall on those with less wealth.

Now, just to make that relevant to all us gamers - if a D&D character funneled wealth to themselves, and put the negative repercussions of that action onto others who could not avoid it it, where on the spectrum of Good to Evil would we put that activity, hm? Hint: it ain't good.

The old, "It is just technology, it has no moral implications in and of itself" is a dodge. Technology is irrelevant unless it is applied in the real world. And as soon as it is applied, it has impact on people, and that means it has moral repercussions attached to it. Ergo, the only technology that has no moral implications is the technology that nobody is using.

And no, setting up renewables to run it isn't enough either. Cryptocurrency has the problem that it uses a scheme that has ever increasing energy costs - each transaction increases the cost of the next transaction, without limit - so it will need ever-increasing renewable energy sources. Our renewable sources will never be infinite, and even renewable sources have ecological impact. So, the thing simply isn't sustainable, renewable or not.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Cryptocurrency has the problem that it uses a scheme that has ever increasing energy costs - each transaction increases teh cost of the next transaction, without limit - so it will need ever-increasing renewable energy sources.

I did NOT know that. Damn.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I did NOT know that. Damn.

The other implication of this that the cryptobros do not seem to have thought through, is that, once the computation cost escalates high enough, it is likely that control of the blockchain will come under a single entity (The one with the money to afford the compute and energy costs). At this time the blockchain becomes identical to a centralised database. So much for the transparency of distribution.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

The other implication of this that the cryptobros do not seem to have thought through, is that, once the computation cost escalates high enough, it is likely that control of the blockchain will come under a single entity (The one with the money to afford the compute and energy costs). At this time the blockchain becomes identical to a centralised database. So much for the transparency of distribution.

I think most cryptobros no longer care. The "old generation" cared about transparency and control, but the new generation are just thinking about using cryptocurrency as an "investment". Exchanges are centralizing cryptocurrency anyway, and rather than obey the rule of "not your keys, not your coins" people use them like banks. Of course lots of cryptobros fall into exit scams, which are only relevant if they give up control of their keys. The newer bunch also fall for liquidity scams (pump-and-dump schemes when they believe a new coin's value has increased by 8000% or so) which are obviously preying on greed.

 

[Jer]

I think most cryptobros no longer care. The "old generation" cared about transparency and control, but the new generation are just thinking about using cryptocurrency as an "investment".

Every scam needs sheep to fleece - the original crypto scam needed to have people who really believed in the idea of a decentralized currency with no entity controlling it because they were the original targets for the scam. Get them to invest their actual money (and more importantly compute power) into this thing because without them it all falls apart.

Once it becomes a self-sustaining thing that's when the general mass of speculators swoop in, and those folks are even easier to scam. Most of them are the definition of "more money than sense". At that point the need for the purported "noble goals" of the project can fall by the wayside because you have a different group of marks (also likely a different group of grifters - many of the original scammers would have cashed out at various points. I suspect there are some folks who can't believe this thing is still going.)

 

[Umbran]

I did NOT know that. Damn.

Yeah. This is why Bitcoin is up around $100 to process a transaction.

The other implication of this that the cryptobros do not seem to have thought through, is that, once the computation cost escalates high enough, it is likely that control of the blockchain will come under a single entity (The one with the money to afford the compute and energy costs). At this time the blockchain becomes identical to a centralised database.

Oh, I think they've thought it through. I think that if they can make their millions now, they don't care so much what happens in a few years.