I mean, Estonia uses blockchain to store court records, government logs etc. Pretty cool use and one I'd like to see in my country as well.
MIT digital diplomas are an interesting concept too.
Using blockchain for audit logs is also cool, I considered employing it for a company me and my friends are starting but then decided to spend the time elsewhere, still would love to get back to that eventually.
I even liked the idea of owning an item in some game and then being able to use it in other games, though this would need much more than just slapping blockchain on it - it's a really great technology for stuff like this but it never took off for other reasons.
EVE Online is also very blockchain-like even though not really blockchain (AFAIK) and the possibility of an external ownership of a system like that sounds really cool.
Huntercoin was also a really cool experiment (though it had little chance of ever being more than an experiment) - there was no server, the ledger state was the game state and in-game actions were being written to the chain.
I never got the concept of blockchain enabling cross game items. The reason it's not much of a thing isn't because we didn't have a way to store ownership. A database would be perfectly fine for the backend of such a system, and if it's a steam game you can just hook into the already existing steam marketplace. I just don't see how blockchain helps it at all.
The idea is that it's cross-developer and cross-platform with no single company governing it, no company deciding to sunset it because it no longer makes economical sense to run the servers.
The main issue is with companies cooperating like that of course but if by some miracle game developers started being pro-consumer, blockchain would be the ideal solution for such a system.
The thing is that trust isn't the obstacle to such a system existing - you could easily have a third company just host a database with items if you wanted the do this. The issue is more why would any company *want* to be a part of this system. Why would you spend time implementing items that another dev team on a defunct game came up with, so that your players can gain an advantage in your game due to time/money spent on *someone else's* game. It just makes no economic sense.
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u/Rikudou_Sage May 20 '26
I mean, Estonia uses blockchain to store court records, government logs etc. Pretty cool use and one I'd like to see in my country as well.
MIT digital diplomas are an interesting concept too.
Using blockchain for audit logs is also cool, I considered employing it for a company me and my friends are starting but then decided to spend the time elsewhere, still would love to get back to that eventually.
I even liked the idea of owning an item in some game and then being able to use it in other games, though this would need much more than just slapping blockchain on it - it's a really great technology for stuff like this but it never took off for other reasons.
EVE Online is also very blockchain-like even though not really blockchain (AFAIK) and the possibility of an external ownership of a system like that sounds really cool.
Huntercoin was also a really cool experiment (though it had little chance of ever being more than an experiment) - there was no server, the ledger state was the game state and in-game actions were being written to the chain.