Reddit Posts
Privacy in smart contracts; Examples of what can be achieved with private smart contracts (TEEs & ZKPs)
MIT Blockchain and Money course (2018); lecture 6 summary
Hate on NFTs is so big that majority don't see forest from the trees
Online stores for media and "this is what crypto solves #492"
How To Earn 150M% Apy!!! | Daruma DAO (DRM)
A crayon eater's thoughts on NFTs in Gaming
Mentions
I'm not sure crypto provides an opportunity for lower costs, but allows for more flexible pay-per-use or pay-per-second. For movie viewing, the best the Internet had was almost anything you want, unlimited viewing, $10 per month. Now that service doesn't have access to as much content. Access to all you want now requires multiple $15 monthly subscriptions What prevents pay-per-view? Until recently, the payment networks had a minimum cost per transaction, which makes monthly subscriptions cost-effective. See Amazon's per-view prices, typically $8 The other old-business practice which favors monthly subscriptions is ownership of the customer. You sign up and pay monthly. They record everything you search for and everything you watch A new model would eliminate the middleman. Instead of signing up with one or more catalog providers, pay $0.05 to download a movie from the movie producer (no sign-up). Download to keep and watch as many times as you want, no DRM, no limits. If you lose the file, pay another $0.05, download again As another comment says, this isn't actually a payment issue. It's inertia. The entire movie economy is stuck in the 20th century. The producer reassigns rights to a giant copyright aggregator, the lawyers negotiate licensing and the streaming aggregators own the customers Worse, most customers like the current system. Very few people can see the benefits of small-value pay-per-use The cloud service access idea has better prospects. The existing giant cloud providers are too inflexible to rent by the minute for small crypto payments. But they all offer API access, which can be exploited as a reseller platform and they do charge by the hour. So a reseller can pay a monthly usage AWS bill with his credit card and pass on the costs as pay-per-minute The awkward aspect of this is that crypto payment is only available via the middleman, because Amazon, Microsoft, Digital Ocean are unwilling to adopt crypto
> Why would the car need to be blocked from being refuelled? How would you require it so you have to use a private key if they weren't blocked from doing so without one? >You just track the car as an onchain asset, and connect the refuelling transaction to the car Again, how do you do that without either A) DRM that stops you from refueling the car without a private key or B) a complete monopoly on refueling stations where all require a private key to use.
How do you think you can make a car not be able to refuel from any generic pump without DRM? If DID can do that then its not distinct from DRM its just a form of DRM.
>Then you can never drive or dispose of the car, because to do so means you have to also use your private key to fill the car with fuel, or make a private sale Are you suggesting DRM-locked car fueling/re-sale market as a potential use for blockchain? What consumer would ever be in favor of that if they had any choice?
They also have 9 patents to protect their technology. Key functions include: 1. **Tracker Server Coordination**: Streamlines data fragment and payment transfers across peer viewers, Edge Nodes, and CDN servers, optimizing data delivery. 2. **Flexible File Sharding**: Improves decentralized storage, allowing robust and efficient data storage and delivery, alongside acting as a decentralized CDN. 3. **Data Caching and Delivery**: Utilizes a multi-layered network to optimize peer-to-peer video and data delivery, incorporating payment service modules for off-chain transactions. 4. **Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attack Prevention**: Utilizes verifiable delay functions to safeguard against DoS and DDoS attacks, enhancing network security. 5. **Decentralized DRM via NFTs**: Ensures content rights protection through NFT-based digital rights management, allowing secure, authenticated access to data streams. 6. **Peer Discovery for Optimized Delivery**: Leverages algorithms for superior peer node discovery, ensuring efficient and quality video delivery. 7. **Micropayments for Data Delivery**: Establishes a blockchain-based payment system for decentralized data streaming, addressing bandwidth limitations and incentivizing resource sharing. 8. **Decentralized Data Streaming Network**: The foundation patent for Theta's decentralized video protocol, detailing the network's architecture and functionality for data delivery. 9. **Global Edge Networks Connection**: Focuses on connecting devices for decentralized data sharing, facilitated by blockchain-enabled micropayments. These patents collectively enhance Theta's infrastructure for decentralized streaming, storage, security, and micropayment transactions, aiming for a scalable, secure, and user-empowered digital content delivery ecosystem.
No dude I’m saying that today, in popular, successful games, DRM already doesn’t exist, at all. I’m trying to tell you that the thing you propose would be adding DRM, where it literally doesn’t exist today. Who was it that wanted “full ownership” of their content again? ;)
Everything you mentioned are current issues which will be solved with hybrid approaches, you won’t be relying on a centralised data server it will be a distributed system. On the one hand you’re saying that DRM is the main reason for centralised distribution and on the other you’re saying gamers don’t want it need it. You’re willing the middlemen into existence when in looking to distribute that stolen value back between the actual producer of content and the consumer.
“Checking the game ID against the blockchain record” So I work in software engineering, let’s walk through what this entails: - The publisher to run a blockchain node (surely you don’t want someone to fake the state of the chain, right? How big is the Ethereum chain again, compared to maybe a gig at most for even a particularly large game’s accounts database) - The publisher to run an API allowing the game to query a license against your blockchain node (again, don’t want anyone to intercept the communication and fake the state of the chain) - An anti-tamper/anti-debugging product such as Denuvo (which is what you probably know as “DRM” — this prevents the user from easily patching out your license check) - User requires an internet connection to your license server to securely query the blockchain (imagine how frustrating it is to play a single player game that requires an online license check every time) Also you’re still thinking of DRM as something necessary. I prefer my games to be DRM free. (Insert we are not the same meme)
You still thinking of DRM as software running on top of the game, in this case it would be essentially checking the game ID against the blockchain record, much more secure and much harder crack and duplicate. It’s like a live service however a solid blockchain is always running and always available for verification
They still have to pay for DRM, otherwise you can just bypass the part of the game that checks for ownership of the token. GOG seems to be working fine, also you’re literally advocating for DRM to be added where there currently isn’t any DRM, it’s a bit ironic that you then go ahead to say I don’t like ownership of my content. My copy of Stardew Valley I bought from GOG doesn’t require anything to run other than the installation files I downloaded, and it’ll continue to work even without an internet connection. To me that’s what “ownership” means.
That’s my point, they would typically have to pay for DRM and have it damage their game, or they can just assign each digital copy to blockchain and have automatic DRM for free. Whatever you think about people’s “honour” in the digital realm I can assure you, tiny developer or not, they will steal your content
But indie games already don’t usually have DRM. Go on like, GOG, buy a game, you can share it with all of your friends, it’ll work fine. They just work off of the good faith belief that you’ll buy a legitimate license if you like the game. If you care about supporting the devs, you pay the dev directly; if you just care about playing the game, you can already pirate it.
Imagine an Indie game that can sell their game without requiring any extra DRM, minimal server costs and continued royalties without paying upfront and outright insulting service costs. You’re exactly the kind of person we don’t need in society; giving up on ownership because the conglomerates stole it from you and you’ll just roll over and accept it. I’d rather pay more to actually own a product than to buy content that can be taken away from you without any legal comeback at the push of a button. Suckers like you are happy to rent your content for your lifetime and own nothing, I don’t care if it take 20 years, I want to own my digital products the way I own physical objects and have a collection that has value. People create the marketplace not the publishers
Digital scarcity is *exceptionally* difficult to wrap your mind around. And this appears to be their primary argument. We have entire industries that sprung up over the past two decades to enforce DRM laws, because it's been understood that once it's digital, it can be copied to infinity. It's going to take another two decades for the masses learn that it's now possible to have something exist a single time digitally, and cannot be copied. It's the key to the whole thing.
Immutable global leaderboards from authentic game accounts. DRM free authentication to participate in owner-only content/competitions. Create a 3rd party chain that records/reserves your user-tag and non-cheating record across games, making it easier to manage cheaters. User driven marketplaces where creators get a cut. Play to earn achievement points that can be redeemed for prizes, like old school arcades.
* Digital rentals/resales - having a game copy that is tied to a unique token on a block chain would re-open secondary markets like rentals or allow people to resell their old games. (Though this likely would never be implemented because it requires a lot of technical cost for arguably a negative for the publishers)... * DRM - Having DRM done through the blockchain instead of through publishers game servers could reduce server costs, as well as help ensure that some games are playable after the publisher servers are taken down. * For some very specific games (Like Trading Card games) built around collecting/trading the blockchain is actually a perfect solution.
> If you don't understand buying a product vs buying a license to use a product that's on you. I'm talking about your invented version of "ownership" that isn't actually different in any functional sense from a buying a license. > You are wrong about copying or including parts in other recordings. If you do not own the copywriter and it's not free use you can't do it just because it's physical. On a technical level, nobody can stop you doing whatever you want locally, and legally fair use applies - which includes making things like backups. > My NFTs are not tied to any digital player. I own an NFT that is an album and I can listen to it on a number of different platforms. The only way the NFT can be enforced is via DRM, which means it must necessarily be tied to specific players/software (and the DRM itself requires central controls as the chain is public, and you cannot store a secret value i.e. symmetric key on it). If it doesn't require any special software, and is just DRM-free audio, then you really do "own" it in the same sense as a VHS. But in that case, the NFT can't enforce anything, and is functionally equivalent to buying DRM-free audio from any conventional source i.e. Bandcamp.
Check out Elastos they have Elacity which has digital rights management (DRM) where the creators/artist own and get paid for their work
Well yea lol it's a form of DRM (Digital rights management) but decentralized. How do I pass down my steam library or my Google movies. I can't, I don't own it. But if I purchased it though a publisher and not a distributor with this system I could. How games used to verify is really all it is but replace the old school serial numbers with key pairs and an NFT to verify and trade. DRM doesn't have to be bad if publishers/customers had a little more say.
That's DRM then... Which already exists, and is generally a pain in the ass
How do you imagine that would work? If they convey legal rights, that must be defined by actual legal contract/terms that are by definition external to the chain. And what happens when the NFT is transferred in a way that doesn't match legal / real world state, whether due to wallet being compromised or any other reason. And if it's supposed to do something like license you to play a song, that's just DRM with extra steps.
Just so you know, this is how DRM works today, with a device-specific key built into authorized players, but that still gets cracked, and the reward for cracking it is merely free media. What if you now told governments that if they could break a similar system, they could create all the propaganda they wanted, and it would pass every possible level of verification? Don’t even really have to break it, just have to ask a manufacturer for their keys under the guise of national security.
No it’s impossible. Someone could (and definitely would) just pay to read the whole and then post a copy for anyone to get for free. You are trying to invent DRM on the blockchain basically but there is no way to do it.
Reddit already got their money. Many seem to have issues with burn mechanisms because it brings up the very visceral image of something of value being burned. Digital supply is a different concept though than a physical supply. There is an artificial or enforced supply, artificial scarcity. Copyright and DRM create this in web2, while smart contracts create it in web3. A burn mechanism isn't to destroy something of value, but directly engages with the supply side of supply and demand in an attempt create value. It's different than the image of burning a dollar or destroying a valuable belonging where there is a physically enforced (perhaps ultimately by entropy) aspect to supply. Unlike physically burning value, ideally there is value created instead of wasted.
Lmao @ “and an NFT could give you access to it”. Explain how that would work without some kind of centralized service handling the DRM.
Because there's no point when you can just sell people new copies instead, and things like big sales or game pass already capture the lower budget market pretty effectively. Plus there's no inherit scarcity to game licenses - bits cost practically nothing to replicate, so you'd need heavy-handed DRM to make it work to boot.
Because it has no place in gaming, it just makes things worse. * Almost nobody wants real money involved in actual gameplay in the first place, doesn't matter if it's regular money or cryptocurrency. At best it just makes your game pay-to-win. * Just because people tolerate it as a black market doesn't mean they want it officially supported * Even for pure cosmetics, allowing external trade tends to be a speculative gambling shitshow (see CSGO) that most players don't want. * In most cases, it's not even a positive for developers unless implemented in such an exploitative way it borders or crosses into actual fraud / scam * The idea that NFTs "allow ownership" doesn't make sense. The server is the actual source of authority in all realistic cases, the NFT's just a token. * The idea that this would allow "resale" of games doesn't make sense either. Why allow resale when you can just sell new copies? Big sales and things like game pass do a better job capturing lower budget buyers than allowing resale. And it would just end up being another form of DRM anyways, likely even more restrictive than we have now to cover lost revenue.
tldr; Billionaire Mark Cuban criticizes OpenSea, a prominent NFT marketplace, for disabling its royalty system. Cuban argues that not collecting and paying royalties on NFT sales is a mistake that diminishes trust in the platform and harms the industry. He suggests a different approach where transactions for NFTs that pay royalties are free, and OpenSea takes a percentage of the royalty as a fee. Cuban supports royalties for creators as it allows them to continue getting paid for future sales and believes it could lower the prices of textbooks if they were turned into NFTs with built-in DRM. *This summary is auto generated by a bot and not meant to replace reading the original article. As always, DYOR. Try our free crypto chatbot at https://chat.coinfeeds.io*
> I'm baffled as to why this isn't widely adopted already. Because there's no upside for developers or platforms, and doesn't actually add that much for players either. Digital bits cost next to nothing to reproduce, they aren't genuinely scarce. Why bother with all the added complexity of royalties on resale when you can just sell the game directly each time? For players that won't pay full price, that's what big sales or things like game pass are for. Those are things you never really saw back in the physical media age, speaking as someone who's old enough to remember. Also, the only way the licenses can be enforced is through the same kind of DRM we have today, regardless of implementation. So even from a player POV, you're still looking at cumbersome DRM that locks you to a platform, and any ability to resell would be accompanied by higher base prices / more microtransaction shit / fewer sales / etc to compensate.
> It’s interesting how resale of video games completely died after games went digital Because there was no longer a physical game to "resell". Digital assets aren't scarce. Instead, you get things like game pass or massive sales that didn't/couldn't exist back when games were all physical. This also lets devs capture what used to be the "used" market - people only willing to buy at lower price points. If you force them to give that up, I guarantee you new game prices will skyrocket instead, or microtransaction hell will get worse. > something this nft structure could solve. Except you're not really solving a problem so much as inventing a new problem by creating artificial scarcity. And none of this would work without additional DRM, same as any other licensing scheme, which as an opponent of DRM isn't something I can ever support.
I was waiting for them to be used for something interesting, like legally owning a digital copy of an albulm, movie, or game with no DRM. I was never interested in the way it was used and I'm still a bit disappointed in the whole ordeal.
I'm honestly surprised that no company has released a blockchain based social media site. the concept of facebook would probably create too much traffic for too little value of what people put on there, but any content-based social media site, be it for art, music or videos, could definitely benefit from the DRM-advantages that crypto has.
Piracy, physical media, and personal backups are all vastly superior. It's not like they're storing the actual movie on-chain either, and I promise you the shelf-life of whatever shitty DRM-infested software they're providing to actually handle playback has a far shorter shelf-life than it's presence on any streaming service.
I'll ccdgh DRM 44 red xx xx n se rede d3 BM9j TV vxeh to be in cc me rrr thank j
Kind of sounds like “publishing a book on chain” is marketing from them. Realistically, this is just DRM. But, ownership is pretty much the flagship use-case of NFTs so its kind of nice that we’ll actually see what happens when used like this.
More than JPGs, NFTs essence comes from representing an asset, be it digital or otherwise, it is a proof of ownership in a decentralized ledger, that is, a blockchain. And it means it is more durable and easily verifiable than any paper stored in a forgotten folder or box of your house, or archive on a government institution. Being the owner of something in an era where everything is a subscription or rental, it is powerful. This allows you to trade your assets \*NFTs, if we are talking about digital assets from a game, we can trade without having to go to a designated market, or have our assets be without value outside of the game, or even be able to have video games and intellectual content that doesn’t need us to have internet connection for DRM, that unique asset is ours and we have the blockchain to prove it. I really believe there is much potential with NFTs and we haven’t seen their final form yet. One is confidential NFTs which are leveraged by projects that are capable of providing Confidential Smart Contracts, like Oasis, Secret, Obscuro, Enigma, etc. These Confidential NFTs or cNFTs bring to the table more sophisticated use cases, like the possibility to hide their metadata or NFT details like text, this could be used to include a hidden key to external files that contain intellectual content like music, books, etc. On a decentralized storage system like IPFS or Filecoin; this would help content creators to trade through decentralized means or alternative marketplaces using crypto. Likewise, through hiding Metadata, cNFTs are able to provide new game mechanics on blockchain games, like hiding a hero’s stats or your deck of cards. But more innovative to me, they are able to hide important personal data, have it registered on the chain, but the data is only accessible to you or to whom you decide can see it. This makes possible Data NFTs. Data NFTs can be used as Soul Bound Tokens that Users can use as Decentralized IDs, their function would be to corroborate your identity over web3 dapps and “real world” companies for KYC and AML purposes while still retaining your privacy, making possible web3 credit scores to ask for undercollateralized loans with crypto assets. Also, Data NFTs can be lent to companies that need the data for research (health, social, scientific companies), and in exchange they can reward you, and you can withdraw your data NFTs at any time you see fit, as you have ownership over them, something apparently we don’t have in web2 social networks.
> Would you pay a few cents to read them? I've been posing this question for years. Oddly, most people are strongly against pay-per-view, stuck in the same 20th century rut as the publishers - ad clicks and monthly subscription (with a preference for free) Mostly this is simply closed mindedness, inability to see innovation But partly, it's difficult to see the mathematics - what per-article price is low enough that I'm paying no more than a current monthly sub? Also, it's inconvenient to approve a payment for every Web page, so there should be a level of auto-approval. Then there's the problem of the payment being partially hidden, and the effort required to track how much you're spending Expand the idea to multimedia - if I can pay a few cents (or a fraction of a cent) for a movie or TV episode, and the total monthly is usually under (say) $10, then I can ditch my Netflix monthly sub Pay occasionally more, occasionally less, track it if you care about the pennies. Then you can pay the creator directly - no more DRM, no streaming "tech", just a simple download to watch now or later
The most consumer friendly thing you can do is have a fantastic return process and a good looking responsive storefront, which Steam has. The user experience of GOG is complete shit by comparison. Very very few people actually care about DRM.
I disagree I think Steam has a soft monopoly in the PC space mainly cuz they got in first. I mean GOG is DRM free, which is the most pro consumer thing you can do, yet people don’t want to use it. EGS charges devs like 1/3 less than Steam does, which is the most pro dev thing you can do, yet people would rather use Steam cuz that’s where everyone already built their whole library.
Check out how Mac DRM works. Lil Easter egg in there
Except it doesn't really work in practice - even now, pretty much all NFT art marketplaces collect such fees centrally. Trying to put it in the contract itself makes updating said contract impractical, there's no good way to distinguish transfer vs sale, there are ways to bypass it by setting price to 0 and sending money out-of-band, etc etc. There's also the question of what an NFT even represents in this context - which is why social media is so quick to make fun of it. NFTs provide no intrinsic rights in terms of IP/copyright/contracts/etc., even ones that claim to can only derive that from an external legal contract, not the chain itself. If it's just goodwill towards the artist, Patreon and other forms of sponsorship seem like a better fit. And if it's to act as a digital license, that's the definition of DRM with the same caveats and implications as any other DRM scheme.
Sure, you can pirate some of them, (some of them have DRM that has not been broken yet)but there is a risk of downloading a virus and it's illegal. You are suggesting a change that is benefical only to the customer and is a huge problem for the seller(publisher) and that's why it won't be implemented. Why would any game publisher want this? What's in it for them? Why would they spend resources making this feature only to lose money on it?
But they do want your information. Why would they implement it? The skin also has to be tied to your steam account anyway. Or whatever DRM system the game uses. I really don't see the use case here.
What about people with no internet, if they can't confirm their ownership, they can't play. I don't know if you're old enough to remember the hellscape that was DRM. No thanks, not everything needs blockchain interactivity.
> With decentralized video games, overly-centralized platforms are, understandably, antithetical to the ecosystem. And probably downright antagonistic to boot. You can't use NFTs for game licenses without a centralized platform. Either it's an online system that has central game servers, or if it's singleplayer/local, then enforcing the license requires the exact same kind of DRM that existing platforms already use (because it's the same problem: controlling how software runs on hardware owned by the user).
I have no idea how people can be so anti-NFT while also being so anti-digital games and DRM. I don't understand why people think a $100,000 CS:GO knife is fine as long as the data for the knife isn't stored in the form of an NFT, in which case it's an abhorrent cash grab. The two things are not related.
A CDkey is tied to the platform selling it. So for example steam. Now if steam decides to ban you or simply goes under, you lose access. You also have things like DRM which usually mean you need to be connected to the internet. ​ Now instead of a gamekey, you might have a NFT. Now that NFT can be transferred to whatever games platform you want, or perhaps even used to unlock a copy of the game you downlead right off the devs website. Not only that, but the game can be sold on the open market, and the contract can actually give the developer a piece of that resale. Additionally, the dev benefits from being able to distribute "keys" without having to rely on platforms like Steam, which as nice as they are, do take substantial amounts of money from a developers sales.
Your latter point is absolutely true of many cryptos, but many cryptos are shitcoins. As I've been saying, the fact that shitcoins are shitty doesn't mean that the technology is inherently shitty. As for blockchain vs. DRM, as I said in the original comment, I'm not sure if crypto will be the winning solution to this. Certainly there are [cogent cases why it won't be](https://www.techdirt.com/2018/10/23/why-blockchain-based-drm-has-always-been-terrible-idea/); on the other hand, there are some big names betting there might be something there (e.g., [example](https://www.ibm.com/blogs/blockchain/2021/03/helping-artists-sleep-at-night-digital-rights-management-with-blockchain/), [example](https://patents.google.com/patent/US20180115416A1/en)). My main thought on all of this is--well, regardless of what we armchair viewers may think, why the hell shouldn't they explore the idea? DRM has its pros and cons and remains polarizing; even if it does the job at present, what's wrong with considering other ways that might work better, or complement it? Since when has the existence of a solution--and an imperfect solution at that--been reason not to explore alternatives? I genuinely don't know, and don't care, if crypto ends up being that alternative, but I really don't get the attitude of some folks (especially Buttcoiners) that crypto has no right to exist and give it a shot.
One thing I don't get is, why does digital scarcity matter? In cases where you want to control access to something why not just use DRM? So far all I see is that crypto uses scarcity to try and increase how valuable something is, and a lot of the time it seems like there's no real utility to what was created making it valuable only because it's scarce. It seems backwards to me. What am I missing?
People who argue this don't have a basic understanding of the gaming industry. What you are presuming is that corporations want you to have the ability to do these things. Crypto, and blockchain, are successful because they are autonomous. As soon as you ad a corporation into the mix it changes the dynamic of the system. Presuming that your child's Pokemon cards being physically stolen is even remotely as close, or as common, to a wallet being drained is an intellectually dishonest false comparison. Steam is a shining example. They have had tradable skins since the release of TF2. There was a time when your account was hacked and they would go through the effort of providing you with item replacements. Those times are long gone. They realized it consumed too many resources, and have gone away with that over the years. Gaming companies have spent the last 20 years taking away control to profit. It's why they want they have gotten away from physical disks and forced consumers into DRM, it's why most marketplaces are shut down, etc. You are even seeing this with Reddit NFTs and Reddit shutting down anyone using their IP (or NFTs) in a way they don't see fit. They have already shut down websites associated with Avatars. What you are asking for is the opposite of what any of this is about.
> Game licenses Any kind of game licensing scheme is technologically equivalent to DRM, with the same caveats, because you're trying to control code that runs on someone's local computer. And as you point out, there is really no incentive for platforms to build this, and even if there were, it's not clear why they'd use a blockchain vs coming up with their own standard. It's also hard to see what the benefit to players is - with physical games there's an actual physical object that's changing hands, and the primary benefit of used games was making them more financially accessible. But these days that role is already better served by a combination of sales, game passes, and piracy. > Skins and items should be mintable on the blockchain. Lets say I get a rare drop, I should be able to mint and sell it to another player for cash/crypto. Almost nobody in mainstream gaming (neither players nor developers) actually wants this, whether it uses blockchain or not, because it breaks game design. If the item is anything but purely cosmetic, the game is now officially pay-to-win. This is unpopular for obvious reasons. Even for pure cosmetics, I don't think you'll find many people that look at a shitshow like CSGO trading and think "yeah, more games should have that". Sure, a black market will always exist, but it's very different if you make it officially sanctioned. It's also worth noting that this model in no way prevents a developer from simply invalidating the token at any time. They control the game servers, the chain can't magically reach in and change the code on the servers. > To combat this, similar to NFTs, there could be a trade fee implemented so that when its moved a cost is returned to the developer, say a couple cents. This could be applied to game licenses as well. People always say this about NFTs, but it's rarely actually implemented because it doesn't work as well as it sounds on paper. How do you determine a trade vs a transfer? How do you prevent people from simply setting the trade price to zero and wrapping the transaction through a separate contract? There's no way to efficiently update the contract of minted tokens if it needs to be changed or fixed. Etc etc. I've found almost no examples of people actually using this idea in practice.
Synching could be fine. But it sure needs to feel more like a web game and manage to do it smoothly, a bit like DRM.
No need to go that far. He is against decentralization if his view of DRM and how to passed to become a web standard is any indication.
There is enough DRM on Books already, no need to make them NFTs. If this means you can resell "used" digital Books it could be a good news but i doubt it.
Yes, main point being the approach to DRM, which foregoes anything centralised past the initial distribution - which crypto would need as well
>The important point is that there is a way to leak the secrets in the first place. That is already enough. It's not hard to imagine ways how to filter that data to reliably get the keys. >Again, as long as you have physical access to hardware you can do everything and there is no way you can prevent that with any DRM. I appreciate your **opinion** and I'll be sure to let you know when the testnet is available so you can prove me wrong. But thus far I have some doubts myself about some of things you are saying. >Autorun is some high level feature of the windows desktop, it has nothing to do with the disk. Autorun is a filetype; autorun.inf, it is what tells windows (or any other OS for that matter) to run something on a disk once connected. I did not emphasize autorun because you can opt out of it very easily. The real barrier as I have stated is the disk driver and firmware.
> So you would still be scooping up terabytes of useless data, even if you did get the private keys in this scenario you wouldn't be able to tell it apart from all the other junk. The important point is that there is a way to leak the secrets in the first place. That is already enough. It's not hard to imagine ways how to filter that data to reliably get the keys. > 'autorun' allows programs on external drives to be triggered the moment they are connected to a computer, so long as they aren't making changes to the computer itself they don't require permissions. I'm sorry to say, but this is a complete misconception on how any of this works. Autorun is some high level feature of the windows desktop, it has nothing to do with the disk. If I plugin a disk to my Linux system, Linux may automatically create a block device to access the data, but apart from that, nothing at all happens. A block device driver doesn't even know about the file system, it just provides read/write access to the raw device. Again, as long as you have physical access to hardware you can do everything and there is no way you can prevent that with any DRM.
> There are scripts that can filter out possible keys from memory, there is no need to dump everything. I am impressed, If you were dealing with any other kind of software this would be how you'd gain access ultimately, but here's why doing this would be an issue; On a virtual machine you have the permissions to view what's going on in the RAM, and you could setup a script to scan for something that looks like a private key. Problem: the network is constantly sending things that look like private keys i.e. verifying signatures and public keys of each internal transaction. You wouldn't be able to tell exactly which was which, The primary function of Green HYPR DRM is to prevent access, so let's say you ran this script, the moment your node goes online it joins consensus of an internal transaction, a bunch of things that *look* like private keys will swarm the RAM, your script mistakes this for the objective and prematurely creates a RAM image, This directly interacts with a file which Green HYPR assumes only it should be able to access even in RAM, so it carries out it's primary function and deletes the guarded files. I admit, I failed to properly explain that in the original post but that is what I have designed from the start, HYPR stands for "Hydra protection" because the files are split into different directories across the computer, tampering with one of these "heads" results in the deletion of the guarded files. (Just as a side note: most of the time spent designing this was just experimenting with cracking folder permissions) >An understanding of Bitcoin and create this complex thing on top of it, but at the same time be so ignorant about the basics of how computers work. I'm flattered for the compliment, but I'm not sure why you're viewing it as me saying you have to follow the permissions, I've already explained everything that would hinder you and every way you could bypass it, on top of every way HYPR would counter that. Everything about permissions which I mention I gave you a way to bypass, but like I said, the moment you change permissions that constitutes a change of the guarded files and HYPR will delete itself and the guarded files. That's really the final stop gap, so long as there is power in the drive, HYPR will execute fail-safes. Though I will admit I did not emphasize this in the original post. This dialogue is very interesting, thank you.
> the chances of dumping RAM at the exact moment a transaction signing is taking place is astronomically low So your security depends on the hope that no one will figure out a way to catch the keys if they are loaded into RAM. There are scripts that can filter out possible keys from memory, there is no need to dump everything. But we are not already from "uncrackable DRM" to "hopefully no one can catch the keys, fingers crossed" > If you mount a disk from windows in linux you still have to follow the POSIX and in this case that means HYPR owns the directory and you can't read/write from it. Only root:root can make changes to the ownership. I'm seriously puzzled how you can have an understanding of Bitcoin and create this complex thing on top of it, but at the same time be so ignorant about the basics of how computers work. There is nothing on a harddisk that forces me to do anything. If I control the computer, and in the case of Linux I control EVERYTHING, there is nothing that prevents me from reading all the data. If I want to mount a drive and tell the operating system to completely ignore all the filesystem permissions, that is the easiest thing to do.
>A kernel runs in ring 0, that isn't even the highest privileges on a PC. A hypervisor runs in ring -1 This is important but let me clarify what you're saying, this only applies to a virtual machine and not a normal computer configuration, on a normal configuration Ring 0 is the highest privilege. But what you are highlighting here is that as part of an exploit someone could run the HYPR software on a virtual machine and use higher privileges. Here's why that's not an issue: If a user is dumping memory from the RAM they would only be getting whatever was running on the RAM at the time, but let us look back at how wallets work; the private keys are not actively in use unless signing, the chances of dumping RAM at the exact moment a transaction signing is taking place is astronomically low especially given how quickly it occurs and that there is no way to read the program files to know when this is happening. If you were to run a continuous memory dump you would spend in memory whatever amount is on the RAM, this can be as low as 1.5GB or as high as 6GB depending on the computer's specs. Let's go with the lowest, let's say you manage to dump 1.5GB of information per dump, the signing happens extremely fast, you would need to be dumping the RAM every second of every day hoping that eventually you catch the system while it is signing. Signing hardly happens and you would multiply those odds by the number of nodes in the network which are randomly assigned to perform a transaction. Then multiply by the chances that the transaction in question requires a key signing i.e. account creation or funds withdrawal. So let's say worst case scenario your virtual machine node gets randomly selected for a deposit after 5 hours of it running, in this time you would have racked up 25 TB worth of pointless RAM, but that's in a scenario where you were extremely lucky, let's say it took you a day you would spend around 129TB, in a week it would be 900TB. And that's only *if* dumping RAM every second was fast enough to catch the keys, the speed could divide the odds by as little as 2 or as high as 6,000,000 (lowest access interval for DRAM is 150 nanoseconds with RAM going as fast as 10 nanoseconds). You would need industrial level hardware to even attempt that and you would still have terrible odds of catching the keys. This would be on par with trying to brute force a public key. >boot into Linux and mount that drive You bring up another interesting concept, but what allows this to happen is the POSIX extension which makes the file system interoperable across different platforms, mounting a disk does not wave the permissions on a folder, if the folder was set to admin:admin then you could pose as the admin, but that's not the case here. If you mount a disk from windows in linux you still have to follow the POSIX and in this case that means HYPR owns the directory and you can't read/write from it. Only root:root can make changes to the ownership. But as I said before, it is possible to change ownership of a directory through registries, but the moment power is connected to a drive HYPR is installed in, it will carry out fail safes. DRM is not easily circumvented.
All this assumes that you can hide the keys of a "legitemate" bot on the users computer. A kernel runs in ring 0, that isn't even the highest privileges on a PC. A hypervisor runs in ring -1 and has access to all the memory of all the virtual machines it runs. You can litterally halt the kernel and dump the full memory. And if you spend some effort you can hide the fact that you run in a virtual machine from any opersting system and DRM software that tries to detect that. And the thing with the disks is even more ridiculous. If I install your bot on a PC and then I boot into Linux and mount that drive, I can read everything. There is nothing preventing that.
> magic I would advise you to do more research into DRM and Kernels. Kernel access is the be all end all of software security. I need to emphasize that if a piece of software (HYPR or otherwise) gains kernel access you no longer own your computer, the software does. Nothing you can physically do short of flash booting the computer and erasing all data will get rid of it. Even something like removing a hard disk does not change folder permissions, the only back door as I have stated in the original post is changing registries, but DRM software continues running even when external, so long as they are connected to a computer with power they can operate and carry out failsafes. >Cracking your bot software and removing the DRM A quick rundown of "cracking"; software needs to be installed before it can be tampered with, the moment installation is triggered, HYPR gains kernel access. >or writing my own version I admit, I didn't explain the complete mechanism for securing the network, but that would've been a whole additional paper. (It's available on my medium, you can find the link on my profile). But back to your question, even if you build a bot from the source code, each bot is created with a digital signature, same as every transaction, and this d-sig is recorded, if you create a bot without a d-sig it would not be recognized to even join the network in the first place. Not to mention other features it would lack like the correct multi-sig keys. Here is how each bot is downloaded; Downloading a bot is similar to a transaction, this transaction requires a digital signature from your Bitcoin wallet, when a download is triggered, an existing bot compiles the post genesis version and appends the d-sig of the transaction, this d-sig is read each time the bot needs to join, it is like an identifying code for each bot. Now here's how you could attempt to go around it; For you to circumvent this you would need to create a legitimate bot and then reuse the d-sig on an illegitimate bot, so long as the legitimate bot is offline, but as I mentioned before this illegitimate bot would not have the correct multi-sig keys so you would only be able to do internal transactions. Such transactions require consensus to be reflected, a single bot acting out of turn results in its removal by other nodes, its balance changes wouldn't even be noticed by anyone but itself.
I'm not sure what magic you attribute to a kernel that prevents me from messing with it when I have hardware access. And that aside, what prevents me from simply cracking your bot software and removing the DRM, or writing my own version by disecting how the bot works, and then pretend to be the real thing towards all the other bots?
I understand that there are many forms of DRM and perhaps you should look into it more, early DRM software used encryption, later software used drivers with kernel access and folder permissions for the guarded files, these if used properly were/are uncrackable.
> DRM only works by obfuscation. Once the mechanism of a DRM is known, it can't prevent an attack if an attacker has access to the hardware. DRM only works by obfuscation. Once the mechanism of a DRM is known, it can't prevent an attack if an attacker has access to the hardware. So I'm not sure why you would even add something like that, it is essentially useless.
Anyone who likes this is blinded by their portfolio. This is some World Economic Forum you will own nothing and you will like it bullshit. If makita ever puts NFT DRM in their power tools I am done with them.
It is actually pretty dumb. Having DRM on tools is perhaps the most bonkers idea I have seen yet. It is just making a worse version of IMEI
Lol imagine your Wifi dies, so all your power tools stop working because they can’t do a license check. Are we now hoping for DRM on hardware?
Sounds like ass. Going to John Deere a basic circular saw with DRM. Can't wait for DeWalt tools going full subscription. Everyone wants to turn their product from Adobe creative suite to creative cloud
That it is not truly decentralized and likely could never be - consensus to make a change is not the same and being decentralized. The fact that there can be a consensus to make a change would be what confirms it is not decentralized among other reasons. More examples - a jpeg image - once the format was made anyone can make distribute alter and basically do whatever they want with the images. If the internet goes down or all governments ban jpeg images, they would still exist as long as I have a computer that I can power. People who make the standards for jpegs can even change those standards, but it won't stop me from being able to use an outdated jpeg image I already have. This would make it decentralized since no amount of consensus would be able to stop that. The internet is centralized - yes no single person controls it, but if enough people wanted to ban together to take it down or enough people stopped supporting it - it would absolutely stop and I won't be able to use it anymore. A physical copy of a old school cartridge video game and system once it has been manufactured is decentralized - it no longer is reliant on anything else to function and I can run it indefinitely and modify it if I want. New copies of video games (mostly) are no longer decentralized as they can place code in it that prevents people from using it without some authority over it if it has DRM or requires internet verification. They could be if they have a hard or digital copy that doesn't have strings attached, but that is rare nowadays. Bitcoin will likely always be centralized because it relies on blockchain and someone other than the user. If the blockchain stops being supported my bitcoin no longer functions. If someone alters the code, it could alter my bitcoin. Someone or something else is always needed for bitcoin to function, which means it can never be completely decentralized.
1. So the hosting costs would be offloaded to the game devs, who would have to handle transfer costs, CDNs and so on. Plus the costs of interacting with the blockchain itself. Besides the fact that it would be an unfair barrier of entry to indie devs, it also means that if the devs go bust, the game files become inaccessible and blockchain tokens now mean diddly squat to their "owners". Those reasons are why devs go to platform like Steam or Itch despite the fees. Also, tokens in this scenario would be nothing more than glorified game keys, and key selling marketplace already exist - they just don't allow reselling used games because it's terrible for business. 2. But same question for the game devs then. Why would they use such a system? Sure Steam takes a high fee, but they do a lot more than what a nebulous blockchain-enforced DRM would provide. Also as mentioned above, there's no chance in hell they would use a platform that allows reselling of games. Unlike physical releases, digital games do not lose their value over time. 3. You're missing the point. The entire point of blockchain is to remove centralisation, but if all the "game items" tokens point to a central entity that has control over their meaning then why bother with a blockchain at all?
I've said this in other threads on the subject... The only two compelling arguments for blockchain game tech I have seen are the following: * Gambling: Auditable smart contracts with provable/auditable odds, and decentralized wallets solves a major problem with online gambling, which is that gamblers are never sure if they can entirely trust online casinos and card houses. I actually think this is the real winner in the "gaming space", though not the type of gaming your thinking of. * DRM - I think bock chain is the solution to allowing for licensed secondary sales of digital media, you could even create a sales system where for transfer to be recognized it had to happen through a specialized smart contract so the original publisher/developer got a cut of the secondary sales... * tradeable premium currency - I don't know that this will ever happen because its intentionally designed to be a closed system for all sorts of accounting and psychological reasons... but if premium currencies were on the blockchain, then players wanting to leave the game could sell it or trade it for other premium currencies. * Collectables is where everyone focuses, and is probably the weakest argument I can think of.. even the secondary collectable card market which is only 12-13 billion (small for gaming)... tends to get ignored by companies like WoTC because they don't want any legislators to associate them with gambling. That being said I think the only type of game that could directly see benefit in the gameplay is probably trading card games... Not that you couldn't build a secondary market without blockchain, but the benefits of blockchain/nfts all fit this type of game kind of perfectly. Hearthstone is great, so is Magic Arena, but I don't know a single person who has played either game who didn't wish they could just trade cardss, even if it meant paying for them directly in some cases...
you can already do this if you buy DRM free games through GOG
But even here - where do you need the blockchain? Why not just send out a digital key, that unlocks the game? If you want, then even multi-plat. I mean, this is basically how it was done not too long ago, when games on CDs required a unique code that came with it and could also be sold on. It's a basic DRM method, that was just ditched for business reasons. Not sure why companies would basically take a step back here?
NFTs aren't limited to a profile picture They can have player stats, the inventory of a character, the proof of purchase, etc. NFTs most obvious use case to me is DRM, as much as I like to own the software I purchase.
I buy my games DRM free
But why would they go the NFT route for that when other DRM schemes are dramatically simpler to implement and would do the same thing?
They could do that with existing DRM schemes in a much simpler way. Even if they adopted that model there's prevailing reason for them to go the NFT route, it's just DRM with extra steps.
If you are to have assets that are transferable, then who hosts them? Is it in the originating company's interest to host an asset that you then use elsewhere? How do you know they will ALWAYS make them available? Hosting them on an independent platform that is not controlled or censorable means that consumers will have confidence in being able to take those assets where THEY choose to take them, using the agreed payment mechanisms in perpetuity. Yes, you COULD ask a company to host these assets, and then you are ever reliant on those assets being available only as long as that company continues to exist. An equivalent these days would be to buy DRM-restricted movies on a platform, and having spent thousands of dollars over the years on building an excellent collection of movies, the platform goes bust and you now have no collection. Secondly you are conflating cryptocurrency with cryptoassets - they are different entities, albeit both based on decentralised ledgers.
No. NFTs do not gove you any more right to the things you buy. When you die, your children can just keep using your account, no problem. It doesn't matter if it was NFTs in there or just regular purchases. If the company shuts down, your stuff is gone. If they decide to ban you, your stuff is gone. All of those things are still stored on their servers, it doesn't matter if the ownership is tokenized or not. If you want true ownership use things like GOG that have zero DRM.
>I don’t think we’d have to throw out all contract law. We’d just have to recognize that a digitally signed contract on a blockchain is a valid, legally binding contract that would be entitled to protection under the law. With some things we are partially there with e-signing. Current NFT's are nowhere close to enabling this. It would have to be a new version that forces a clickable contract. But the limits of clickable contracts also has to be over turned. There is zero legal will to do either of that. NFT enthusiasts aren't into a new system that obsoletes theirs and the law is not interest. And legal entanglement is explicitly non-transferable to non signers. Each person has to form and agreement with the original owner/creator but with clickwraps and clickwrap scopes would have to drastically increase. It's not a matter of adding a law, it's a huge shift in the basis of contract law. There are laws, guidelines, and precedent excluding how NFT's are supposed to work that would have to be over turned and they are huge ones that currently form the basis of contract. The crypto equivalent to demanding crypto stop using using a blockchain and adopt a decentralized DB to store the ledger. It's a huge change in how it works and you would need enormous amounts of money and influence to make it happen. >As an example with a game, the idea would be that anyone can buy the game and they’d get an NFT that serves as their license to use it. Ideally just having that NFT would entitle someone to the game download from anywhere (it would be launcher agnostic). See above. The game company would need to sign off each time it moves and the new customer and old one would both have to sign off. It can't work as easy as you imagine. But also, old style cd-keys already work that way. DRM laws were written to make it illegal to break how cd-keys and how other protection would work. They moved away from it because they could squeeze some more sales/reduce piracy with an authentication server instead of a cd-key. The token would function just like an authentication server. >Secondly, and this is probably a pipe dream, the NFT can be sold to someone else, allowing for a second hand market. No company wants that and there isn't enough incentive to make it happen on the business side. On the legal side it is a huge barrier. On the tech side, it could be done now but the business reasons are why it's not. NFT give us nothing. It doesn't overcome the business reasons, the legal reasons, or represent anything new with tech. >The existing game launchers all want to have their somewhat walled gardens and for multiplayer games requiring an account there’d be a bit more to do on the backend that serves the client accounts (although not impossible since access can be relinquished from the seller and granted to buyer once the NFT is traded). No reason any company wants any of that and they would have to spend to build a lot of that. And it's not a small amount of infrastructure, it'd be harder than each company making a market place of their own. So the ask would be that each company spend enough to make their own epic games or steam but it would be used to make second hand sales instead and they could get a small kick back. It's asking them to spend 100's Millions to earn tens millions or even lose potential sales. That will never happen.
Have you never heard of DRM and CD keys? How old are you? 12?
Are you even responding to my post? NFT doesn't change that - if you want EA to sell NFTs, EA will want the ability to invalidate those NFTs as needed. Buy physical. Buy DRM-free. NFTs are yet another form of DRM, not a solution for this problem.
I thought you meant "DRM" as in restricting the capability of people to access to some non-material good, as it's done to restrict playing videos in the wrong geographical zone and so forth. The anti-piracy measures essentially? Preventing reselling is a bit of a different thing but copyright law already exists so... Not sure what you're talking about regarding digital art.
Where did you get that I was talking about a custom player? DRM doesn’t automatically infer a custom player… Counterfeiting doesnt work with pixel level detection
Not meant as an offensive question, you’re around 15-20, right? I otherwise can’t understand why you would EVER want to go back to the days in which you needed custom players (physical AND digital) to play music. It was hell on earth when you bought an album on CD and your player could not handle the new DRM version, meaning you had to give it back or you could not actually play your CD from your computer and your normal, all-bells-and-whistles audio player because the damn thing would be so restricted that you would need to launch their own custom player that came on the CD. People worked REALLY hard to get away from that and going back to that is just doing the same shit all over again. You would in NO time have emule, edonkey, morpheus and what not filled with rips again (because once you play it, you can record it bit by bit and upload that somewhere. That’s also not gonna be detectable - unless you allow the NFT to monitor other processes and act on that. And with that you are literally describing how a computer virus works on its base. Absolutely no way this should be promoted.). Plus this art thing doesn’t really work. You can bake everything you want into the NFT, since it doesn’t detect me counterfeiting it, selling the original on a black market that care more about the painting than about some certificate and then selling the counterfeited one with the NFT (if I get asked why this one is fake I react shocked and say “I bought it like this!!1 must be the guy before me in the chain”). That is I solvable, because the NFT is not physical but digital.
Baking rights managed contracts into the metadata, enforcing and developing DRM with major media players and then working with the AI companies to provide solutions that respect the work of artists.
You can do the same without web3, without a blockchain and once it's been decrypted for display, there's always going to be a way to capture the image. Can already place media storage behind authentication walls that a web scraper would have to deal with. Media screening sites already fight a losing battle to block screen capture. It's networked DRM that swaps out the database from centralized like say Denuvos for video games to a public one
Where is the music stored? Is it still hosted off blockchain without any DRM?
Music nft is probably also just a link to online audio file without any DRM. Kinda useless for distributing music.
Nobody in the real gaming community wants NFTs. Ubisoft tried already and faced enormous backlash, as have others. Most people just want to play to have fun, microtransactions are already a huge complaint as it is. > not confirmed, but future digital games could be purchased and sold by gamers to gamers as well. currently there is zero opportunity to do anything with a “used” digital game besides let it take up hd space. There's no scarcity to bits, the game on your HD is just a copy. The only thing that could ever actually be scarce is the DRM license - putting it in an NFT wouldn't change that, and would still require external DRM to gatekeep access to the game. Platforms like Steam have zero incentive to allow resale especially not cross-platform, and they wanted to they could already do that. Even if you could somehow force them to, you'd likely see an end to deeply discounted sales common to digital platforms in order to recoup the money lost to artificial resale.
I think games will use nfts for stuff like avatars and crypto potentially for microtransactions. It all depends on usefulness. They won't likely add any kind of crypto tech if current systems solve problems just as well. I can actually imagine blockchain to be useable for anti cheat measures or such. Or DRM replacement which allows to sell digital copies of games.
Ah yes, Tim Berners-Lee, that guy who approved DRM for the web. I'm sure he loves decentralisation. https://www.defectivebydesign.org/blog/tim_bernerslee_approves_web_drm_w3c_member_organizations_have_two_weeks_appeal
Time for Americans to realize that buying DRM'd devices isn't supporting their freedom as consumers. Go with android if you want to transact crypto freely (as on freedom) from your phone.
In late 2020/2021, peoples were indoors, bored, and just got a stimulus check. Those were the conditions that set off the bull-run. There won’t be another bull-run. Nobody with a brain wants to touch crypto again after we saw how broken, fragile, and unsustainable it’s ecosystem. It’s not a hedge against inflation. It’s not decentralized; look how easily the whole market came crumbling down when Three Arrows Capital imploded. And it’s garbage tech. NFTs are the tech that will power insidious surveillance capitalism crap like real-life DRM. Fuck this shit. Never touching this crap again. I’d rather put my money into companies that actually produce something
Just like all the early DRM on movies and games. Failed, circumvented, and quickly made obsolete. But they kept doing it anyway.