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by duped 1855 days ago
If I own the arcade I can authenticate tokens in amortized constant time with a centralized ledger. It's also private so I don't leak details of my tokens to anyone, including my customers and competitors.

If I have a decentralized ledger I can authenticate tokens in (at least) linear time with the total number of tokens I have ever distributed. The ledger is also public so competing arcades know intimate details of my business. In some cases they might even know which games are most popular. My customers will also know the relative scarcity of tokens and how much they should be valued, potentially limiting my profits.

Why should I use a decentralized ledger for my arcade?

1 comments

If you are thinking of it as a game store like Steam, then broaden that thought to include in-game collectibles, currencies, character skins, etc. You'd want a public, transparent marketplace for players to buy/sell/trade based on whatever public value people assign to those items.

NFT's provide a mechanism (as I understand it) for royalties to creators. If this is implemented for games, then second-hand sales are entirely possible for a digital game. I don't think that's possible today.

I don't know that centralized/decentralized matters much to gamers, I would imagine most users would be signing into a web site with an account that manages all of that behind the scenes.

> NFT's provide a mechanism (as I understand it) for royalties to creators. If this is implemented for games, then second-hand sales are entirely possible for a digital game. I don't think that's possible today.

There's nothing preventing this today, and nothing NFTs solve that would force those features to be supported. It can be done with a centralized ledger (a database hosted by the marketplace implementer, like Steam). I don't see the incentives for the marketplace platform to implement itself in terms of NFTs.

However, I could see game developers and gamers have uses for NFTs using a decentralized ledger to cut out the marketplace vendors from the transactions (or requiring transactions take place only on their systems).