Why Steam banned NFTs and other news you missed this week
Why Steam banned NFTs and other news you missed this week
Here’s the Web3 news from the past week
NFTs
NFTs and other Web3 concepts are still very much in its infancy stage. Every new technology goes through its growing up phase, while cryptocurrencies have been around for over a decade now, newer web3 concepts are in its earliest stage. Often the scammers and hype can overshadow fundamentally sound and interesting technology.
In an interview with RockPaperShotgun, Gabe Newell (valve president and co-founder) talked about why Steam recently banned games with NFT and crypto integrations.
“The actors that are currently in this NFT space, they're just not people you really are wanting to be doing business with. That doesn't say anything about the underlying technology, it's just a reflection of the people right now who are viewing it as an opportunity to rip customers off, or engage in money laundering, or other things like that.”
The NFT world is going through the same growing pains of scams, ineffective infrastructure, mis-leading narratives that crypto went through 10+ years ago (or the internet in the 90s). When the purchasers of “Cool Kittens” NFT were rugged, they fought back against the scam with a “reverse rug.”
Metaverse
Gabe Newell also recently made comments about the metaverse to PC Gamer
"There's a bunch of get rich quick schemes around metaverse," Newell said when I asked him if he believes metaverse trends are helping push technology forward.
"Most of the people who are talking about metaverse have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. And they've apparently never played an MMO. They're like, 'Oh, you'll have this customizable avatar.' And it's like, well... go into La Noscea in Final Fantasy 14 and tell me that this isn't a solved problem from a decade ago, not some fabulous thing that you're, you know, inventing."
Are we already living in a metaverse?
This is called the simulation argument and was proposed by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. Bostrom stated that there were several mutually exclusive possibilities, which I have simplified to two: (1) that no civilization ever reaches this point and no such simulations are created; or (2) that at least one civilization reaches this point and creates not just one but many simulated worlds.
If option 1 is true, then there is no chance that we are already inside a simulation because these types of simulation may not be possible. On the other hand, if option 2 is a possibility, then it’s likely that a more advanced civilization (imagine one that is hundreds or thousands of years ahead of us) already got there. They would then create billions of simulated worlds with billions of simulated beings who do not realize they are in a simulation.
DAOs
DAO infrastructure is nowhere near ready for mainstream. There’s still a long way to go. The Next Web wrote a good primer guide to joining DAOs.
A newly formed decentralized autonomous organization cofounded by Nadya Tolokonnikova, a member of the feminist rock group, is selling non-fungible tokens on Saturday to raise money for nonprofits in Ukraine.
Laura Shin @ Forbes have tracke ddown an Australian Programmer who likely hacked The DAO in 2016
My exclusive investigation, built on the reporting for my new book, The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze, appears to point to Toby Hoenisch, a 36-year-old programmer who grew up in Austria and was living in Singapore at the time of the hack.