RMT, Metaverses, Crypto, Blockchain And Now NFT

Interesting evolution of all over the last 20 years.

Just read an article about 5 crypto coins in various meta's that gained 20% in 24 hours..... Nutty stuff. Going to get into this, feels like the early days when Google went public.

People paid hundreds of thousands dollars for a banana duct taped to a wall. This is madness.

Normie internet ruined the internet, and society in general.

You never read about the people who put their life savings into it and loose everything though.

I say this as someone who put $20 into Dogecoin earlier this year and regret not putting more in at the time.

Yeah, I do wonder how many people and how much money they have lost compared to the gains. The existence of multiple crypto currencies is HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE IMO. The adoption of one as an acceptable currency had a lot of potential if the world globalised and had a single government. If not also, but less so.

I hear that. I put a few bucks into Doge when it was under a penny because my wife didn't want me "throwing money away." Months later, I told her that if I had invested just $1,000 into Doge, we could have bought our new house outright. She gives me a little more freedom with it now.

Speaking of!

https://opensea.io/collection/rmea-weapons-finalfantasyxi

Yeesh, that was less than a year ago when they released that right?

No comprende.

Should have yoloed it with 20k and now you could get a Lamborghini and a very expensive banana.

i think the last thread where FFXI NFTs popped up got closed rather quickly. regardless of what you think of NFTs, if this isn't a offer from SE themselfs then it's most likely a clear case of copyright infringement. however i'm not a expert.

Recommend this podcast for a good overview:

• https://podcasts.apple.com/it/podcast/a-crypto-optimist-and-a-crypto-skeptic-walk/id1548604447?i=1000538670903&l=en

My opinion,

Cryptocurrencies
While taking out the middleman seems like a good business proposition and would indeed reduce the friction of doing many different kinds of transactions, we still need regulatory oversight of some kind for financial transactions to control money laundering, terrorist financing, etc. People hate banks for charging so much for payments but the banks are the ones responsible for confirming all of the different details of a payment prior to releasing it and that pushes up the cost of providing the service. Removing the bank reduces cost and friction but that cost and is what it is necessary to prevent the negative exernalities caused by organized crime, money laundering, etc. Crypto without banks would be possible, but I think it would also introduce a number of newer regulations on individuals themselves (your identity and personal info also being exchanged on the blockchain at the same time as your financial transaction is). I don't think many proponents of crypto are ready to give over that information.

NFTs
Current applications just seem like scams to me (monkey pictures, axio, etc.) but I think there is an actual future here looking into, especially for gaming. The big attraction of NFTs is owning a digital asset that is transferrable to different platforms or usable across different services (copy of a song that could be used across Spotify, your PC, YouTube, within your own vr hangout space, etc.). Of course, all platforms would have to agree to support this transferability (their profits from platform lock-in go down).

To apply the concept to FFXI, for example, you could have an NFT for your RMEA. This sort of 'certificate' of ownership could carry over into other SE games. Own an RMEA in FFXI? Get a unique lockstyle/glamor in FFXIV for that weapon or house furnishing displaying your accomplishment. Or, your combined NFT's are pooled together by SE on their e-comm store platform to offer you discounts/rewards for being a loyal customer across games with different accomplishment levels (much more highly customized than simple Store rewards for # of games purchased). The point is, your accomplishment on one platform or game is transferrable in some way to another (provided the company builds out that capability). How that is applied is up to everyone's imagination. I find that exciting.

There are downsides though. Taken to its most logical, albeit scary, conclusion, some games could also make the NFTs earned in-game exchangeable on real-life e-commerce websites. Buy/sell RMEA on eBay, buy currency or progression in the same way. I think a lot of gamers would not be happy with that result, but as we've seen from other games already out there, there's many who really do like this.

Interesting times.

i don't think you need NFTs to reward customer loyalty within a companies ecosystem and i'm sceptical if there is enough of a incentive to create crossplatform/company skin rewards. why would they put work into making these NFT skin rewards where they'd probably have to share a % of the profits if they could just offer them in their ingame store?

not to mention that these "accomplishments" only make sense in the right context. if you don't know what i mean go showboat your REMA collection in a CoD lobby, just be prepared for lines like "yesterday i REMAed ur mum".

sounds like RMTing with extra steps.

now NFTs with their smart contracts in the context of 3rd party RMTing could make sense as it would remove the trust factor but (and this is just a guess, i don't have good enough understanding of NFTs and blockchain) to implement it you probably would have the developers design their game in a way that allows to weave in NFTs.
at that point your back at why would they put the extra effort in and share the profits if they could just implement your own e-shop and keep all profits to yourself?

Ahh, sorry I was not clear. NFTs don't necessarily have to involve a transaction or smart contract of any sort. They can just function as a proof of ownership/proof of completion. Get a Mandau, get verified as being owner of a Mandau. Does that have any validity on CoD? No, not at all. But depending on how SE manages their own platform, they can come up with unique ways to incentivize players to play in their 'ecosystem' of games more than others. That might mean skins across games based on in-game achievements, for example.

A Gucci purse was sold on Roblox for 4k. That in itself is just an eStore/Skin transaction, yes, but the difference with NFT is allowing that same 'asset' to be shared across platforms now. Buy your Gucci bag on Roblox, give it to your moogle in FFXI. The NFT is usable in both environments (provided both platforms build capability to support it). Yes, this seems ridiculous now. There is no cross-compatibility between Roblox and FFXi (doubt there will ever be) and there's no item equivalent to a bag in FFXI etc. etc., but it is the concept that's important. Sharing items across platforms opens a new framework of what digital asset ownership means and may inspire a whole new group of services to support that ownership. Ownership and money.

The incentive to companies is to give their users the opportunity to access and use their digital assets, which don't necessarily come from that same game environment, within a new platform. For example, with Facebook's Meta, if you have seen the introduction video, Evilburg gets dressed before he attends the weird chatroom place. In the future, people could buy NFT skins or clothes for the 'metaverse' and not only use them within the chatroom setting, but across other games plugged-into the Meta platform. Buy your shirt NFT, wear it in the chatroom, on your character in Farmville, on your CoD character. Yes, it would require buy-in from all those different services, but it is theoretically possible. As users demand the ability to do things like this, companies will respond in-kind, or miss out on that market.

Personally, I don't like the idea of a game's aesthetics or lore being interfered with by brands or status symbols (no thanks to Louis Vuitton Chango); I would rather see environments made to be themselves and stay themselves authentically (like FFXI for the most part, minus slime hats). I think it will dumb-down games in general if it becomes a shitshow of asset comparison across platforms. But, as other games have shown, there is a market for the people who want to have those skins, digital items and attach them to their online presence. They would love to be able to use them across different games or services.

NFT is the future of monetization in online video games.

So, NFT, are bought and sold over an overall cap of copies that are aloud to circulate across the internet or?....

Can buy 1/19336648506066888504883rd of a share of lolcat.meme.NFT?

I'm going to just leave this here:

https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/dear-yuxie-please-count-me-out-of-the-metaverse-future-b24ef45149fc

afaik you can sell multiple copies of a NFT or just a single one. ofc you'll want to limit the amount of copies since the entire idea of NFTs is to make digital goods artificially rare.
apparently you can also add smart contracts with conditions like each time the NFT gets sold (not just by you but also by new owners) a % of the sale price goes to the original sellers purse. i assume the smart contract part would also enable you to sell/buy shares of a picture but again i'm not very familiar with NFTs.



for its current applications like pictures and videos i can see how it's attractive for extremely wealthy ppl as it lets them do for example the tax evasion shinanigans they do in the art market but with the benefits of the digital realm like decentralisation, flexibility and maybe anonymity.
for instance the political system turns against you or you're charged for a crime and you have to leave the country asap but most of your assets are physical goods which are difficult to move and sell.
a NFT is probably that persons wet dream as he could sell his asset from anywhere in the world as long as they have internet access.

imho at the end of the day you just pay for the code/number that gets cobbled together in the tokenisation process, not the digital good itself. you still can copy/paste the picture, video, software or what ever was tokenised afaik.

as a average joe i can't help but think the emperor's new cloths.

https://www.siriquan.com/2021/11/25/digital-land-in-the-metaverse-sells-for-record-2-43m/

Wonder if SE will get in on this type of action. Maybe in their 3rd MMO, full haptic VR MMO. With NFT and block chain currency that can be sold for real world money.

Can you imagine, each on of these worlds having its own mini walstreet when commodities with in the game are day traded, etc.

Kooky. Seems like an excellent time to be studying 3D modeling, and getting into the reskin scene for sure.

I imagine for the skinning NFTs, they will have to come up with a code standard, that applies to all platforms, similar to ASCII, et al.

NFT, to my understanding, gets its uniqueness based purely on authenticity and forced rarity rather than actual value. Essentially they managed to put the "limited edition" into digital stuff.

Unique skins or mounts in games could be a type of NFT but they come with inherent problems: limited use. They are essentially locked into the platform and their leverage is based on the popularity of the platform. So the price of a unique skin of, for example, a unique armor set is limited to how popular the game it's in is and will be.

Going outside of the platform requires a lot of cooperation between the platforms. For example, you bought FFXI skin NFT and you are porting the whole thing to Overwatch. You need the cooperation from Blizzard as well as SE so they aren't suing each other for using the other guy's stuff and probably violating some trademark or looking indecent for the platform. Most platforms would just say "no" and skip the headaches.

Saw another article for a "yacht" in one of these, sold for 640k$ USD.... Bonkers. That's just for use on one platform.

How does stuff like that get built? I imagine, you have to build some sort of control to the thing, in order to be able to sail a meta-ocean, so to speak.

So combination of 3D modeling, and animation, combined with knowledge of the "games" code to create navigation?

Lol.
NFTs, as with everything crypto, is fueled by dumbasses, techbro talk and scams, be it rugpulls, ponzis, or money laundering.

There's nothing NFTs can do better than a standard cash shop, and nothing profitable in the current iteration of scam-pogs for integration into a game.

coinscam dot net sells an animated pixel gif of goatse, what profit is there for me if i incorporate it into my next racing game?

The majority of these nft sales are internal money transfers to appear as legitimate sales in order to lure a dumbass to purchase in some form, it's not an actual sale, it's just done to launder money and drum up 'news' to lure someone to piss away their mortgage or child's college fund.

hmbol no, crypto coins do quite a few dumbass things that make them exceptionally horrible as a 'currency'.

1. environmental waste. GPU scarcity, electrical requirements, yadda. the amount of power to process a payment in butts is a multitude more than to process a debit card.

2. b-b-but fees! several coins still have fees. go look at eth and it's gas fees, the recent failed 'sale' of that document at around a 76m bid involved 6m in gas to bring it in, and 6m in gas to bring the money out, and that bid lost. then there's exchanges and the like that try to centralize power... and charge fees for it.

3. zero trust security. fatfinger an address and black hole your wooden nickels, send money to a scammer, have an exchange close shop as the ceo runs off with a wallet to south america. in all cases there isn't jack ***you can do about it.

4.to the moon! a currency that is volatile and supposedly deflationary has a horrific effect on consumers and economic investment. if the best thing for me to do is sit on my monopoly money because tomorrow it'll be worth 'more'. it will destroy everything that makes a basic economy function. Investment and lending, purchasing goods, everything.

Guns, gold, ground, bullets, beans, and bud....

My portfolio...

JK I am a fiscal mess, haha.

https://newrepublic.com/article/164497/facebook-metaverse-cybercrime-marc-zuckerberg

If prototype, meta-worlds, aka OG MMOs, and of course the real world, the OG OG meta world, are any indication, then you can bet your sweet ***. There is already massive fraud and theft going on with fake crypto/trading agencies.

https://www.wired.com/story/brain-computer-interfaces-digital-reality/

Also, here comes the matrix!

This is it. The whole thing about crypto is just pure madness nowadays. It's like an insane pump and dump scheme of the ultra rich who bought wines and arts pieces for investment.

Bitcoin used to be a half decent attempt at being an alternative currency before all the hype but now people just buy the "currency", hoping they would raise and sell them to the next fool. Pray that they won't be the last fool left holding the bag. It's 100% speculation at this point.

NFTs are "okay" if you look at them as limited edition collector items like special skins or something. Now they just have more authenticity and allow people to use them more freely. Like importing the skin from a game to another game using a mod.