[flashdance]

> The game's top cat brought in $117,712.12 (£87,686.11) when it sold on Saturday, 2 December.

Is it weird that I think that the cat that was sold for 100K was a wash trade (someone trading with themself)? Who would honestly pay 100K for a 'rare' digital cat? Just because something's rare doesn't mean it's valuable.

I think it's interesting foreshadowing that the developers are calling these "breedable Beanie Babies".

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

[elif]

Well, I would say there are two things to consider:

1) it's not just an investment in the asset.

It pays dividends. The asset can breed once per week, so that could be $1k+ per week generated.. paying for itself over time. Since this is the lone genesis kitty, its offspring could fetch a totally arbitrary value.

2) This is ethereum we are talking about. If the ether was bought 1 year ago today, it would have cost $1,557.1. Someone could have made a $1.5k investment 1 year ago which is now paying for itself weekly.

[flashdance]

> It pays dividends

It doesn't pay dividends in ETH, it pays dividends in more kitties. Is that really a dividend?

If apple shares could only pay dividends in more apple shares instead of USD would they have any value?

> This is ethereum we are talking about. If the ether was bought 1 year ago today, it would have cost $1,557.1. Someone could have made a $1.5k investment 1 year ago which is now paying for itself weekly.

Ethereum at least has a purpose, cryptokitties do not seem to have one. Besides, you can't just say that the price of one crypto asset will go up because a different one has gone up in the past!

[bufferoverflow]

> Ethereum at least has a purpose, cryptokitties do not seem to have one

Neither do collectible stamps, yet people buy them regularly. The most expensive one costing $200K, with the face value of 15 cents.

[timthelion]

$200K?

"On May 22, 2010, the yellow stamp was auctioned once again by David Feldman in Geneva, Switzerland. It sold "for at least the $2.3 million price [that] it set a record for in 1996"." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treskilling_Yellow

[otp124]

> If apple shares could only pay dividends in more apple shares instead of USD would they have any value?

Um, yes.. as long as Apple shares can be sold for USD (which they can).

And it sounds like these “cryptogkitties” can be sold for ETH. Your analogy confuses me.

[nwah1]

Apple shares are worth money because they entitle one to a share of ownership and voting rights in a company that engages in real wealth production, and would be worth lots even if they reinvested all their dividends like Amazon.

The same cannot be said of these kittens... that this obvious point even needs to be stated is just sad.

[Kiro]

People are obviously paying for kittens, and skins in Counter-Strike and tons of other meaningless things. Are you saying these markets are imaginary?

[diab0lic]

He's not suggesting the markets are imaginary, simply suggesting that there isn't a backing asset to stabilize them. Sure people buy counter-strike skins right now but there is very little reason to believe that the current version of counter-strike in which these skins exist will be popular in perpetuity. At some point people will move on from the game, maybe even to the next version of counter-strike... at which point those assets values will decrease significantly. Just like people moved on from beanie babies, and just like they'll move on from crypto kitties.

To suggest that these things are anything other that highly speculative is intellectually dishonest at best, gambling at worst.

[TeMPOraL]

I think the point is one can imagine someone believing their $117k cat breeding lots of kittens that they can manage to sell for ETH (and/or later exchanged to USD), netting them a profit after some time.

[eximius]

No, it DOES pay dividends in ETH. You can set a `Sire Fee` and let your cat be the sire for other players cats.

[panarky]

> If apple shares could only pay dividends in more apple shares

Google shares don't pay any dividends at all.

Why exactly do people pay 1,000 USD for one share of GOOGL?

Are they buying an option on the right to receive dividends at some indeterminate point in the distant future?

Do they think they'll receive a fraction of the enterprise value when Google gets bought by a bigger company?

Will Google get sold off piece by piece and they'll get a pro-rata share of the liquidation proceeds?

Why would you pay "real money" for an electronic entry in the broker's ledger for an intangible asset that may never get converted back into USD?

[nsgoetz]

> Are they buying an option on the right to receive dividends at some indeterminate point in the distant future?

> Do they think they'll receive a fraction of the enterprise value when Google gets bought by a bigger company?

> Will Google get sold off piece by piece and they'll get a pro-rata share of the liquidation proceeds?

Yes, but also a bet on other people's demand for those things - its asset backed. Since they all are based on USD I think they're a little safer bet than a cat fad.

[panarky]

> Yes, but also a bet on other people's demand for those things

Exactly.

> its asset backed

Not really. Google's assets minus its liabilities are $139 billion. The value of its stock is $724 billion.

So 81% of the company's value isn't "backed" by anything -- not the company's assets, not the promise to pay dividends in the future, nothing.

[runeks]

> It doesn't pay dividends in ETH, it pays dividends in more kitties. Is that really a dividend?

No, that’s not paying dividends, that’s diluting share value.

The logical thing to do for a recipient of more shares is to sell them into the market for currency, thus diluting the value of remaining shares.

[LrnByTeach]

We saw this Virtual Pet Movie already in 2010 with Zynga and people buying virtual food with real $$ to feed Zynga Cats on facebook site and sub sequent Zynga IPO at $10 .

After few years of IPO we all know where Zynga virtual pet compapny is .

[Noos]

http://mashable.com/2009/12/31/crystal-palace-space-station-...

Project entropia is a notorious MMO that ran on real money, more or less. Your bullets literally cost real money. $330k for a space station in it, that the person hoped to make money off of.

[danblick]

You're right.

If I had a game like this, I would want people to think they could make a lot of money by playing.

An easy way to create that impression and to generate hype would be to make some high-value self-trades.

If the game founders or early adopters didn't do this, they probably should have.

It's not proof they did but there's means/motive/opportunity.

[bfuller]

neopets.com

[flashdance]

That's an MMORPG for kids. You can go on quests, enter contests, chat with friends, post on their forums, make guilds, do battle against other pets, solve puzzles, trade on the NEODAQ, and make a little home. Pets cost a few bucks. Honestly from googling neopets it sounds an awful lot like a better version of club penguin.

With cryptokitties we're talking about 100K for a picture of cat. From what I've read the platform is dedicated only to buying and selling these cats.

[elif]

Yea but, the thing about ethereum is its conceptually about building on top of the technology.

There is nothing stopping people from building on top of even the cryptocat system, making a game where these cats are usable for any of your listed game mechanics.

It doesn't need any kind of api-integration to cryptocats, it just needs to reference the already public cat compendium.

[RepressedEmu]

Wow this is an idea that I hadn't even considered before! That any smart contract is just a little piece of code with an API and an Ether cost. I'm getting so many ideas for cryptokitty horse racing...

[bfuller]

it was for kids in 2000 but now those kids are 20-30+. They never made the switch to mobile and that is when the site truly lost any chance of new players. In its heyday it was not uncommon to regularly see people with 10k$+ spent on their accounts.

While the site did have those features you mentioned, they were glitchy and never updated past the original 1990s php code. xss everywhere losing your account was inevitable

what people used the site for was the same as the crypto kitties. Collecting digital widgets and participating in the markets the buying and selling of those things created.

100k for a crypto kitty is pretty nuts but its the most rare and valuable not like they are commonly hitting that.

on neopets you could buy "wearables" to dress your pet but these couldn't be sold for the in game currency and buying in game points and items was illegal.

Neopoints went for $3 per million (now maybe a buck or two) on the forums dedicated to cheating which hosted off site marketplaces.

if you were a cheeky 13 year old and figured out how to use xss to steal a lot of cookies or even better their database with an sql injection you could easily amass trillions in neopoints.

When the off site marketplaces stick the price at a few bucks per million that is a lot of money you could make when you have thousands of stacked accounts with rare items and pets and neopoints.

I would say it is extremely likely someone spent 100k in a single purchase at least once. I personally saw people selling what they amassed at a bulk price of 10k many times.

The real money maker was selling hash lists and database leaks of account info. Sell accounts for a buck a piece, maybe one in 50 had anything decent, so just selling lists worked out to be a better way to make money because you aren't responsible for securing the hacked goods, and you make a profit every time even if the account is empty

gosh this makes me want to play again. maybe not violate the cfaa stealing their database, or performing xss to steal cookies, even though that is the most fun part of the game. Maybe looking for bugs to report them rather than to steal accounts items etc would be fun. Either way If you want to hang out and rum some fuzzers or figure something out let me know.

i will for sure rejoin to make bots again. writing bots for neopets (containing password stealers) was my very first taste of programming, and the code I wrote was surprisingly succinct and elegant.

[dluan]

clearly i was not playing neopets right

[bfuller]

It is a now pretty much dead fleshed out version of this. You can play all the features you mentioned of the game for free. Anything you can officially pay for is cosmetic, like clothing for your pet.

There are also entire off site communities dedicated towards selling items and neopoints

the site was bought from its founders by Viacom for 100m

I used to trade digital assets on games like this exactly like people trade crypto currencies today.

Both the interest in having a digital collectible and using electronic points as a store of value

[akerro]

As long as people want to pay for this it holds value. If someone is ready to pay 10k for it, it's worth 10k.

[runeks]

If only a single person was willing to pay 10k then, after he has done so, it’s no longer worth 10k.