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Steam is a ticking time bomb
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this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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Technology
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I think they're implying that the digital items such as TF2 hats and weapons skins are NFTs
Yeah, I know. These and trading cards. I don't think they're run on NFTs.
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.