D&D 5E The Glimmering - NFT Heroes in a Blockchain Campaign?

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Blockchain isn't even good for that. Unless you want have to patient data be re-identifiable, you'd have to go with a centralized, private blockchain, and private blockchains have none of the advantages of blockchain tech, which by nature is entirely about the advantages of public, decentralized databases.

Please, don't believe the hype. We spent four months straight researching and interview experts about this stuff at my job. Crypto is the only "valid" use of blockchain tech, and we all know how awesome and not-scammy crypto is.

I am not nearly as up on the tech as you and @MoonSong are, so much so that I was thinking of "Blockchain" as a generic, when it's actually a specific bit of software.

I do think there's a use case for decentralized secure data. I can imagine a future where we fight back against deepfakes, for instance, by having the history of those files spelled out for everyone to see. But we're not at that point yet (I don't think industrialized societies yet realize how much of a problem deepfakes are about to be) and I certainly don't trust any of the crypto-bros to be part of any real solutions to problems they didn't invent themselves.

 

[robus]

I guess with crypto and this kind of thing, my question. Is: what value do they generate? Good business produce things. Would this be particularly fun to play?

They create no value. Compare with the AI generative tool craze. The difference is that creates so much value at the click of a button people are genuinely fearing for their jobs (to my mind it’s still an IA tool - Intelligence Augmentation - as it still often needs some guidance and taste, but that‘s nitpicking).

Crypto has done nothing similar, anything it has tried to replace, it does so in a much worse way. It consumes value.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

I am not nearly as up on the tech as you and @MoonSong are, so much so that I was thinking of "Blockchain" as a generic, when it's actually a specific bit of software.

I do think there's a use case for decentralized secure data. I can imagine a future where we fight back against deepfakes, for instance, by having the history of those files spelled out for everyone to see. But we're not at that point yet (I don't think industrialized societies yet realize how much of a problem deepfakes are about to be) and I certainly don't trust any of the crypto-bros to be part of any real solutions to problems they didn't invent themselves.

Blockchain works as a generic term. But imagining useful, non-crypto applications for the technology always requires keeping thought experiments so vague as to be useless, because blockchain always dies in the details. Using them to deal with deepfakes, for example, would mean that all videos that anyone puts online would have to be registered on a public blockchain, which is a truly dystopic framework. Catastrophic amounts of extra compute and resulting energy consumption, and whatever blockchain the videos would be on would get impossibly large right away, requiring even more consumption and compute to ever do anything with it, and also making interacting with it extremely slow. Say hello to waiting an hour or more to upload a video of some natural disaster or similar event, or else risk releasing the video off-chain, and then no one thinks it's real.

Really, I'm not doomsaying for the hell of it. The logistics involved with public blockchains are untenable for everything that isn't entirely profit-motivated, meaning where there's a grift involved.

As for deepfakes...I mean, a lot of disinfo experts are trying to get people to realize just how little of a threat they are, compared to just churning out the usual fake articles and social media chatter. If you're worried about more incidents like that minor kerfuffle over the deepfake of Ukraine's leader, it's not like blockchain would have helped there anyway. Would have required everyone looking at the video to have access to the blockchain, using mobile phones in low-bandwidth, internet-compromised areas. Plus, bad actors could just register the video on a blockchain and it would look perfectly fine. Public blockchains let you audit a transaction, and edit the chain later (or make a fork, if necessary) but they don't actually verify the authenticity of anything on them.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

then why bother?

One of the reasons crypto worked so well as a scam was because it sounded complicated, kinda like how traditional investments can be hard to parse, since market fluctuations are so weird and the entire stock market is a shared fever dream. And crypto bros (and now web3 wonks) lean into jargon, acronyms, and other opaque language to obscure what they're talking about, feeding into the combined impression that this is very complex computer stuff that's above your head and also this is a new breed financial stuff that's even more above your head than past financial stuff.

The whole thing requires that you trust that there must be something to this, if all these smart bros are into it. It can't just be a scam. That's reactionary knee-jerk talk. There has to be something there!

The irony is that blockchain/Bitcoin started as an attempt to decentralize power, after the elites in finance wreaked so much havoc in 2008. But it almost instantly became the domain of a small collection of elites—many of whom were the same, traditional elites from last time (hello Winklevoss brothers, etc.).

And now a lot of crypto bros are switching to the next great hope for tech democratization and decentralization: generative AI. And the beat goes on.

 

[robus]

This has to be the funniest explainer I’ve seen:

 

[MoonSong]

Can't wait for quantum computing to be a thing and someone to get their hands on one of them, wipe clean all crypto wallets and beat everybody trying to do proof of work forever, efectively killing this stupid fad scam for good.

 

[MoonSong]

This has to be the funniest explainer I’ve seen:

She also explains NFTs

 

[darjr]

You're joking, right?
They have an immense photo booth outside the club, branded lanyards on every single badge, hosting games and seminars. But it's all very secretive. I was having a drink and a smoke with the lead designer (I'd say a guy who is extremely well respected in the game industry.) I looked up the project after the interaction, and it was concerning.

Ah there it is. Yuck.

 

[Umbran]

And all of this, since it is centrally organised could be done on a regular database.

Well, the point is that blockchain supports doing this in a non-centralized way.

Not that this makes a great argument for using blockchain. There's far easier ways to get to the same functional point without blockchain.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

As for deepfakes...I mean, a lot of disinfo experts are trying to get people to realize just how little of a threat they are, compared to just churning out the usual fake articles and social media chatter.

I hope so. We've had violent incidents occur because of disinformation and I'm worried that being able to "see" provocative actions happen on video will incite more of it, but it may just be that, soon enough, everyone is skeptical of anything that isn't from a known source of information. (But then I worry about how everyone is in their information silos already, so I spiral.)