CCP,
With new games (EG: Star Atlas, P2E) and others of the like utilizing blockchain technology, allowing them to deploy truly player owned economies / NFT’s etc, how will EVE online be able to compete? I have been playing this game since 2003, the last thing I want is for it to die. In my opinion EVE must become P2E.
Intelligence is defined as an organism’s ability to adapt; CCP, please adapt.
“Block chain” is just the latest buzz word for what used to be called linked lists and distributed processing. Powerful mechanisms, but they have to be applied to a problem that can’t effectively be solved otherwise; Not just thrown in to the mix because it’s the latest cool tech.
Sorry, but this is a laughable question for anyone in tech that is not sucked into the following hype circles: the Ethereum dev’s cult of personality / web3 / NFTs. There’s a lot of cool nifty soft words that make speakers feel like they’re in a cool club but they’re the kind of empty words that are so strong their vacuousness could have powered the entire generation of pre-silicon electronics. And left enough hot air left to bootstrap global warming.
This’ll be my only serious attempt at explaining.
“Blockchain technology” comes in two parts: a consensus protocol and the public ledger.
The former is simply to solve the problem of “if everyone is running the same copy of the software, who is the most correct at this moment?” by either: telling the computer hamsters to spin the wheels and spew greenhouse gases to brute-force the solution to a Sudoku which is tradeable for heroin (Proof of Work) or giving the rich guys that have roughly 12 million USD equivalent in crypto the ability to corrupt a sharded validation chain (Proof of Stake) – a price sovereign nations and multinational giants can pay many times over, if only to screw their opponents over.
That was the consensus protocol, and it is the more involved. The latter – the actual chain – just solves “how can a database both be public and trustworthy?” using a merkle-tree-ish inspired idea, if a tree only had a trunk and was planted upside down.
Now, all that being said, let’s look at the software running Eve and see if these problems crop up. TL;DR: No, because CCP Games is the undisputed authority on Eve Online. (Contrast: It was a problem with fiat banks because there’s always been people that have disputed the authority of fiat currency).
So, Tranquility and Serenity have authoritative servers running the game. The bit of code on our computers are just “dumb” clients in comparison, so it doesn’t matter in this discussion. The server code is not publicly available, and no one else is spinning up private “Eve Online” MMO game servers. If you think of sibling companies (like Blizzard) they have other avenues – like intellectual property rights and court systems – to keep it this way. Thus, there is no question about CCP Games’ authority over the state of the Eve Online game, and there is no real contention about a possible usurper in his mother’s basement spinning up a whole separate private EvE Online server.
Therefore, there is no need for a consensus protocol. CCP Games owns everything, all that ISK and spaceships that are “owned” by your account are really just rented/leased/loaned and still retained by CCP Games (see: the EULA, and other troll-baity forum posts about this topic).
Since we don’t need the former, let’s double check the latter: what about the problem of “how can a database both be public and trustworthy?”
Well, just call the ESI (formerly CRUST API) and you’re done. CCP Games is the sole authority, so it is by definition trustworthy, and they make some data available via the ESI, so there is not a problem in principle about getting public data (or even private data specific to your character/account). Of course, in practice the API goes down, is stale, etc, but “blockchain technology” is not needed to address these tractable problems as they were being solved long before Satoshi had to spend time coming up with their pseudonym.
Hence,
in this case means you have nothing to worry about
Right. Can’t even trust Hilmar to keep the fun in EVE, to keep the spaceships working to the benefit of the capsuleers, to restrain himself from forcing a playstyle on the players, to spend effort and funding to eliminate botting, to continue the development of aspects of EVE that have been abandoned, to hold himself back from taking the sand out of the sandbox but I’m going to trust him with my retirement plan.
Not only that but EULA says nothing in EVE is any of my property yet all those pixels are somehow going to magically manifest their value into financial benefits that would be able to be cashed in after 10, 20 or 30 years.
If there ever was a pipe dream, this is it.
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