Keep NFT out of FF14

[Kakure]

NFT'S are bad because they will be used to monetize the game in greedy ways.
A) A company that is greedy and doesn't care about it's users will always find a way to work them over. Don't blame the technology for bad business practices. NFT's are just digital containers. I get the lack of trust in game companies but once again this has nothing to do with the tech. You can make the slippery slope argument here but that just makes you come across as a technophobe.

NFTs are just digital containers the same way that meme is just a generic term for cultural mimicry and Woodstock is just a town in New York.

NFTs are not some promising technology that just happens to be involved with speculative bubble investing somewhere *waves hand airily* over there. Silly people handing away their money in an orgy of overheated speculative investing is the whole point. That is the only reason we are having this conversation. Were none of that taking place, no serious person thinks that the president of SE would have released a letter crowing about the potential of some technology no one even seems to be able to come up with a real use for (in the gaming space, at least).

As I said before, you are the ONLY person here talking about NFTs as value-neutral containers. Whether that is an act of bad faith or you really just don't get what everyone else is talking about, this whole kerfuffle is about gaming companies jumping on the NFT bandwagon because they see people paying obscene sums of money for NFTs of digital art or video clips and want to cash in themselves. Their frenzied efforts to make NFT gaming a real thing is not a downstream indicator of corporate greed or malintention: it IS the scam.

If we stopped televangelists from preying on vulnerable older people the way they do, they might very well find a new con. That's not a valid defense of the con in front of us and it is certainly not reassuring to all of us who are going to be impacted by it even if we ourselves recognize it for the scam it is.

NFT's are bad because they have no value or are a scam
A) one of the worst arguments. An NFT is just a digital container. It can be used to contain any digital item. From art to identity documents. The value of an NFT depends if there is a market. This is true for any goods that exists in a market. Something having a market and being subject to supply and demand does not make it a scam, just a tradeable good like everything else.

That's utter nonsense. "Markets determine value" is the Microecon 101 answer, but in the real world we have copious referents against which we can judge the value of a thing. I can say with utter certainty that used tin cans are effectively worthless. If A stoops down and picks one up and says to B "I'll trade you this used tin can for your car," I can say without hesitation that it's a bad deal because one of those things has value and the other doesn't. If B agrees to the trade, it doesn't mean that used tin can is now worth a car. It means that B is a numskull who traded a thing with value for a thing without value.

And when someone pays millions of dollars for an NFT of a tweet, we're very much in "I'll give you a used tin can for your car" territory.

The good news for anyone who just Googled "What is an NFT?" and is despairing for humanity is that the vast majority of people purchasing NFTs are speculative investors. They understand that it's a scam, but they believe their investment will appreciate and they are gambling that they can get out before the bubble bursts. Even someone who says they think that an NFT of a tweet or a clipart rock has real value is probably lying, either in service of the scam (speculators have to hype their speculative investments to new speculators, after all, or the whole thing will just collapse) or because they are laundering money.

As for the one person somewhere who both has access to half a million dollars AND thinks that an NFT of an ape sketch is worth that... I guess that's just financial Darwinism or something. Every now and again the universe gives birth to a three-legged gazelle who is sexually attracted to lions. It's disturbing to watch, but maybe NFTs are just nature's way of ensuring the orderly transfer of money away from those who are dispositionally unfit to possess money.

NFTs' will never work because SE won't release the copyright
A) If SE was interested in doing NFT's they would sit down with their lawyers and amend the EULA. NFT's would be done with their permission. Nobody has to release any copyright.

Agreed. That wasn't ever an argument against NFTs though. It was people pointing out that your framing of NFTs as a way to free us from the way FFXIV works by giving us full legal ownership over our items just... isn't how any of this actually works.

NFT's are bad because you don't own anything, the company does.
A) This is dependent on the blockchain used to create the NFT. If that NFT exists on chain and not a centralized SE server then you would have ownership once purchased. What's nuts about this argument is that people have no problem sinking $100's into mogstation that is centrally controlled. Suddenly ownership matters when it comes to NFT's. lol.

As with the above, I think what you are referring to here was a response to your argument and not an independent attack on NFTs. No one is really saying that NFTs are bad because you don't own them. They're just saying that "NFTs give you real ownership in your items" isn't a valid argument for NFTs in games.

NFT's are bad because they are bad for the environment
A) Just no, does anybody really believe this?

Others have done an admirable job on this one, but let me put this in very simple terms:

Right now, there is some amount of processing involved when you do stuff with your items in FFXIV. If each of those items also had an external certificate of dubious worth, checking and updating that certificate would require more processing than is involved now. If every item in every game were an NFT, there would be lots and LOTS and LOTS of extraneous processing.

That's not to say that everything that consumes energy is bad. But it is a pretty solid reason to keep NFTs way the hell away from gaming if there's no benefit at all to including them.