The hosting platforms (marketplaces, game engines and virtual world sandboxes) become massive centralization vectors in the NFTivere
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https://twitter.com/wintonARK/status/1430730151331991553
People want to buy .jpgs in order to social status signal.
They will naturally congregate on platforms that protect their status.
If the non-true owners of an avatar can similarly wear it on-platform, why buy an avatar at all (and what’s the fun in wearing it)?
/2
They will naturally congregate on platforms that protect their status.
If the non-true owners of an avatar can similarly wear it on-platform, why buy an avatar at all (and what’s the fun in wearing it)?
/2
Fortnite et al will seek to attract these whales, and so will disallow the use of non-owned assets.
The dominant platforms will enact this curation function which, at first blush, seems trivial (just verify ownership) but proves massively nuanced
/3
The dominant platforms will enact this curation function which, at first blush, seems trivial (just verify ownership) but proves massively nuanced
/3
(Consider, for the moment, that I could easily duplicate an owned .jpg and then mint that duplicate. I officially own a thing that is a copy of a thing; how does the platform establish who the rightful first creator is and whether my new minting is sufficiently derivative?)
/4
/4
There will be strong consolidation vectors at the platform level since they will all imbed and depend upon a social graph (social status signaling requires the social part), and the layering on of curation and reputation-building will only amplify platform dominance.
/5
/5
In effect the NFTiverse hosting platforms will become the trusted validator-set of whatever underlying blockchain is used to track ownership.
If a NFT can’t be displayed on-platform then the “owner” doesn’t really own it in a meaningful way at all.
/6
If a NFT can’t be displayed on-platform then the “owner” doesn’t really own it in a meaningful way at all.
/6
In effect ownership becomes subject to the curation function at the platform level and re-orgs can happen arbitrarily as political-social consensus shifts.
/7
/7
So it seems like an awful lot of trouble to dress up the ownership rights to these assets in an extremely expensive decentralized ledger when “true ownership” will actually be subject to the whims and goodwill of a handful of endpoint platforms…
/8
/8
I suppose one could think of this epoch as creating the marketplace in which those platforms can fairly compete to become the trusted validators, but in the end-stage it is not clear to me that the decentralized ledger does anything to secure your rights as a jpg owner at all
fin
fin
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