Calling CryptoKitties a "game" is a bit generous.
It was the gateway to getting gamers interested in crypto/web3, which resulted in the absurd "play2earn" concept which has been the subject of justified mockery.
The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game
21–30 of 377 posts
Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does that particular thing work? You run the exchange, then have dirty untraceable money traded on the exchange to dirty participant and you take the exchange fees? You'd have to KYC both participants, right?
Imagine you have $X million from a hack on wallet A, and you want to launder it. First, you run it through tornado cash (RIP) a few times and move them to wallets B1 to B1000. Then, you mint an "exciting NFT collection" on your public, KYC'd wallet C, list them on a "decentralized exchange", and have wallets B1 to B1000 buy those NFTs. Even better, seeing how fast your NFTs are selling out, a few suckers join in on t…
> Well, now on wallet C you have $(X - gas fees - minting fees) etc., that is totally legal and clean.
It's not "legal" at all, because it's still proceeds of crime. Although it may "appear" legal and be very difficult to trace back to the source, it's still not actually legal.
Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game
#23One thing I don't see addressed in this article is that as far as I know, it's basically impossible to trust the reported price or volume of NFT transactions, because there's no way to distinguish fake wash trades from real ones. So it's hard to draw any conclusions about whether the data reflects an actual peak in user activity, or just a peak in scams.
Isn't that always the case? My friend was talking about a rare Magic The Gathering card being worth a silly amount of money... Except the card had only been sold once or twice at that price. Unless you have enough comparable items (e.g. paintings by the Dutch masters) it's really difficult to determine the value of something that's rarely sold.
There's a big difference between an illiquid market where wealthy collectors are so keen to hang onto things they only change hands at crazy possibly-not-to-be-repeated prices and a fake market where the illusion of deep-pocketed collectors is created by the auctioneer and owner colluding to pretend an item changed hands at a massive amount of money.
Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that always the case? My friend was talking about a rare Magic The Gathering card being worth a silly amount of money... Except the card had only been sold once or twice at that price. Unless you have enough comparable items (e.g. paintings by the Dutch masters) it's really difficult to determine the value of something that's rarely sold.
There's a big difference between an illiquid market where wealthy collectors are so keen to hang onto things they only change hands at crazy possibly-not-to-be-repeated prices and a fake market where the illusion of deep-pocketed collectors is created by the auctioneer and owner colluding to pretend an item changed hands at a massive amount of money.
The amount of wash trading in the fine art world is certainly not zero.
Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game
#25Know zero about NFT market caps, but if I pull up few years on the site below, hardly looks like a collapse: https://nftgo.io/collection/cryptokitties/overview Anyone with more knowledge able to clarify?
There's no liquidity. The market cap is pure fabrication based on historical sales, there's no current day sales, so no way to pull money out of that cap.
Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game
#26One thing I don't see addressed in this article is that as far as I know, it's basically impossible to trust the reported price or volume of NFT transactions, because there's no way to distinguish fake wash trades from real ones. So it's hard to draw any conclusions about whether the data reflects an actual peak in user activity, or just a peak in scams.
> there's no way to distinguish fake wash trades from real ones
Ah, like that $532M Punk wash trade that was clearly visible on-chain?[1] I guess we'll never know if it was real or fake.
[1] https://decrypt.co/84756/no-someone-didnt-really-pay-532-mil...
Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game
#27I feel that NFT pricing exuberance (or lack thereof) is distracting both critics and even fans from the core innovation here - 1. the capacity to signify a digital original and 2. to decentrally organize ownership (though it's more like possession) of these items. The ultimate question for crypto as a whole is whether the mass market wants digital possession that transcends a single centrally managed database. Person…
The major distraction is that a 'digital original' is a fiction. I can ignore your blockchain and make any digital IP fungible.
Yep. Just to tack on - even if you minted a "master copy" of your digital asset on the Blockchain, it still doesn't represent anything meaningful:
- It doesn't guarantee that you are the first or exclusive owner of this digital asset
- It doesn't correlate to physical ownership
- It doesn't hold any water in a legal sense, if you want your ownership of an NFT to be ratified then you need to use the same centralized avenues as everyone else
Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game
#28One thing I don't see addressed in this article is that as far as I know, it's basically impossible to trust the reported price or volume of NFT transactions, because there's no way to distinguish fake wash trades from real ones. So it's hard to draw any conclusions about whether the data reflects an actual peak in user activity, or just a peak in scams.
Isn't that always the case? My friend was talking about a rare Magic The Gathering card being worth a silly amount of money... Except the card had only been sold once or twice at that price. Unless you have enough comparable items (e.g. paintings by the Dutch masters) it's really difficult to determine the value of something that's rarely sold.
> Except the card had only been sold once or twice at that price.
You see this practice in art and collector car sales. It's rumored that if you see a painting go for an insane amount of money, often these sales are between "friendly" parties for the sole purpose of driving up the value of that art.
Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game
#29One thing I don't see addressed in this article is that as far as I know, it's basically impossible to trust the reported price or volume of NFT transactions, because there's no way to distinguish fake wash trades from real ones. So it's hard to draw any conclusions about whether the data reflects an actual peak in user activity, or just a peak in scams.
Isn't that always the case? My friend was talking about a rare Magic The Gathering card being worth a silly amount of money... Except the card had only been sold once or twice at that price. Unless you have enough comparable items (e.g. paintings by the Dutch masters) it's really difficult to determine the value of something that's rarely sold.
Funny you should mention MtG, since the first big crypto exchange collapse was MtGox.
I always thought it was "Mt. Gox", like a mountain of sorts. Turns out it's Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange.
Edit: MtG seems like it has some kind of evergreen popularity, and various format changes, changes in the list of banned cards, reprints, and changes in the metagame will mean that prices of individual cards can vary wildly over time. So if something was sold for a ridiculous price a couple times, it's possible that something changed (Targmogoyf used to be very expensive, for example).
Wizards seems pretty good at catering to a variety of players, both collectors and non-collectors.
Re: The collapse of cryptokitties, the first big blockchain game
#30One thing I don't see addressed in this article is that as far as I know, it's basically impossible to trust the reported price or volume of NFT transactions, because there's no way to distinguish fake wash trades from real ones. So it's hard to draw any conclusions about whether the data reflects an actual peak in user activity, or just a peak in scams.
Isn't that always the case? My friend was talking about a rare Magic The Gathering card being worth a silly amount of money... Except the card had only been sold once or twice at that price. Unless you have enough comparable items (e.g. paintings by the Dutch masters) it's really difficult to determine the value of something that's rarely sold.
It does happen a lot in physical collectible markets. It is what happened with WATA Games and the lawsuit against their employees for market manipulation through auctions. Or the Nike scandal with a VP's son using her CC and employee discount buying massive amounts of hyped sneakers and reselling them, which just made everyone more aware.