Three Reasons Why Blockchain May Not Be the Best Solution for Online Game Payments & Protections

"Why blockchain isn’t ready for primetime" is a new VentureBeat guest post by lead Sinespace developer Adam Frisby (full disclosure, an NWN media partner), whose skepticism is significantly based on his experience helping manage virtual currency payments in Second Life (where he once ran a large community/animation brand) and other virtual worlds:

My background is developing virtual worlds similar to Second Life — MMOs where users create, build, and usually sell their virtual wares to other users. In principle, blockchain should be my holy grail, enabling user-to-user micropayments without a middleman. But it’s not that now, and it probably won’t be for a long time.

I've long been an admirer of blockchain's potential as a technology, but Adam raises some really strong points I've not considered, or seen discussed elsewhere:

Blockchain cannot be everything it aspires to be at the same time: As it stands, blockchain is caught between three competing objectives: fast, low-cost, and decentralized. It is not yet possible to make one chain that achieves all three... At high volume, a good credit card processor can settle a typical $2 transaction for somewhere around $0.10. Some of the largest online game economies manage more than a million user-to-user transactions per day, instantaneously, with no fees. And yet, I can name half a dozen startups trying to inject an expensive and slow blockchain into this very problem.

Blockchain is a customer support nightmare: For most consumers, losing a password to an online service is a mild inconvenience they’ve grown accustomed to, since typically, it’s quickly fixed by requesting an email reset, say, or talking with customer service. Blockchain wallets and their passwords, by contrast, are tied to a file on a user’s hard disk and are absolutely critical to users trying to access the blockchain. By their very nature they have no recovery mechanism.

Blockchain adds frictions to an already seamless process: Nothing about blockchain applications is easy for consumers right now...  Most public chains have settlements measured in minutes — unless you’re willing to pay high transaction fees. Compare that to the 2-10 seconds for a saved credit card transaction customers are accustomed to in the age of fast mobile interfaces and instant gratification.

Much more here. The most striking thing to me is that Adam is approaching blockchain not from a super-cool theoretical point of view (which is where my interest lies) but from the nuts-and-bolts perspective of someone who's handled virtual currency transactions from tens of thousands of consumers.

 

Comments

[Nalates Urriah]

People are still asking me, "What's a bitcoin?"

[irihapeti]

+1 Adam Frisby

[binance hacked]

you can find all information about bitcoins at bitcoin news blog

[RobbieBuford]

From a cruising altitude, a blockchain might not look that different from things you're familiar with, say Wikipedia.

With a blockchain, many people can write entries into a record of information, and a community of users can control how the record of information is amended and updated.Also you can read good site about mining news at https://www.hashingnews.com/. Likewise, Wikipedia entries are not the product of a single publisher. No one person controls the information.