112
Steam is a ticking time bomb
(www.spacebar.news)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
112 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37702 readers
172 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
They are, though, by any reasonable definition. Despite what the cryptobros would have you believe, there is no need for a blockchain to have a tradable, persistent token associated to an asset. Besides the fact that the tokens are stored on Valve's servers instead of a distributed blockchain, there is no difference in how those work.
The cryptobros tried to convince everybody that a blockchain made the tokens "non-fungible" as in automatically interoperable and endlessly persistent, which was a lie that only survived until the first time the assets, which were all stored on servers and not in a blockchain, got deleted.
That's a different discussion in any case. The point is it's a stock market of tokenized, tradable items where the transactions are monetized by the company by taxing the trades. It's the same on Roblox and Steam (and in all the NFTs people dumped all that money on).
The public doesn't understand NFTs, and scammers abused that.
[Distributed blockchain] NFTs were never stored on servers, the GIFs were never NFTs, and NFTs usually point to an IPFS URL (a P2P type "server"), which needs to be seeded by someone, doesn't matter who.
In a sane world, the owner of an NFT would seed the corresponding assets on IPFS, because it's in their own interest. Instead, people got swindled into "investing" in NFTs without having a clue of what they were doing... until the inevitable reality check struck them.
It's true that Steam popularized NFTs, hats, digital trading cards, and so on. Those things also existed before Steam, way before the "crypto" NFTs... and if we go further back, check Luther's rant in the XV century about how the Vatican was mass printing "NFT" indulgences.