How is a pension fund investing in WoW diamonds any different than a pension fund investing in a diamond mine in real life? The only difference is that in real life there is a predetermined (albeit not entirely knowable) difficulty function, whereas in WoW the company that makes the game can just decide to mint however many they want overnight. But if you can use technology to preclude the latter from happening, the suddenly there is zero difference.

Sure a better game could come out and the value of items could come down, but that isn't really any different than if people in real life decided they just liked garnets instead of diamonds or whatever. And presumably as Moore's Law slows down, winning games will stay in the front runner position for longer.

From a pension fund's perspective, you're basically just finding something that a small number of people love passionately and then hoping that as more people learn about that thing, the value of everything connected to the ecosystem increases. That doesn't really seem any different than investing in a social network like Facebook or whatever, which clearly pension funds already do (usually by allocating a small portion of their funds into VC, although sometimes directly).

"How is a pension fund investing in WoW diamonds any different than a pension fund investing in a diamond mine in real life?"

Volatility.

Since I can see it coming, the fact that real-world assets have a non-zero volatility does not mean that the level of volatility in virtual assets isn't a difference in quality and not merely quantity.

What happens to your WoW diamond's investments when the next Wow expansion brings out UltraDiamonds and the latest shiny hot BiggerNumbersThanLastTime weapons and armor can only be bought with those? Again, the fact that this occasionally happens in the real world still has nothing with the routine nature of this sort of thing in the virtual.

Only an idiot would invest in Wow diamonds. Put your money into buying stock in the company running WoW instead.

> What happens to your WoW diamond's investments when the next Wow expansion brings out UltraDiamonds and the latest shiny hot BiggerNumbersThanLastTime weapons and armor can only be bought with those?

Well that's the beauty of the blockchain. You just have a contract in place saying that weapons and armor can only get X% more powerful each year, so that way there is a fixed amount of inflation.

Even if what you said is real the game itself wouldn't actually run on the blockchain as a smart contract.

Cryptokitties is a testament to how pathetic the blockchain is as a platform for complicated games. The fact that possessing a hash representing the genome of a cat is enough to qualify as a game is laughable. I've played lots of highly simplified games that involved breeding animals and optimizing for specific traits and what cryptokitties offered was just one mechanic in an entire system consisting of dozens of interacting mechanics and MMOs like WOW go way beyond a dozen mechanics.

> Cryptokitties is a testament to how pathetic the blockchain is as a platform for complicated games.

I don't think anyone is arguing that DLT, as it currently stands, is a complete piece of shit. But that doesn't mean that no progress will be made over the next 30 years. Especially since registering and tracking virtual items is pretty much the perfect use case for DLT.

You're advocating buying shitty imaginary beanie babies as an retirement strategy.

You're too deep, there isn't any way we can convince you of the foolishness you're spouting.

But that's not how video games work. I get it, you're passionate about blockchain, but you'd make a suuppper boring video game. You need players in order for this economy to exist.

The workforce for WoW is entirely optional, and applying real world economic forces to it would be a great way to kill it. How would these items be generated in game? If it's CPU power, you're describing bitcoin, it's not player interaction, there's no in game mining required, and if there is, now you're wasting someone's time and CPU for something that's going to quickly stop being fun.

You could still tie it to player interaction, so some loose combination of player skill and time spent in game. Don't these games already try really hard to prevent botting?

They do, though it's a constant arms race.

Is the idea that the company is just doling out items? An artificial scarcity? Doesn't that make the market super untrustworthy if they could flood it at any time? You can't do traditional coin mining as that would remove the effort from the gameplay.

Yeah, I don't really think this is a hot idea but just playing devil's advocate. You could make versions of the same argument for de Beers and diamonds, but I suppose pension funds don't invest in diamonds.