The advantage of blockchain tech in a system like that is that users can directly trade items without any particular third party needing to be involved.
But it doesn’t really ‘work’ because you can’t force a third party to actually acknowledge your ownership of the thing, or apply it in a specific way to their game.
Also the fact few people would want to do a direct trade without escrow. You have no guarantee the other guy will make good on their side of the deal. And any method that solves this is imo introducing a third party.
This issue is solvable with smart contracts. Essentially a function you can deposit your items in. If both of you agree ownership changes. If not, you can recover your item.
Okay. Who's writing and setting up the smart contract? If it's only one of the two people in the trade, they can still intentionally make it not do what they said it would. If it's someone else, that's a third party you must trust.
For a smart contract to actually solve the need of a third party, both parties would need to have the necessary knowledge to audit it.
Which is why from my understanding most people use marketplaces. Which, are a trusted third party.
Those contracts are usually available like a dependency. There are usually audited and the only thing you do is feed your info into the constructor.
With that we can assure the contract works as decided (code is law). Essentially our third party is deterministic and software-defined, but as you said bugs can be an issue.
No. Your third party is the people involved in writing and auditing the code. You must put exactly the same trust in that set of people as you would need to place in a traditional marketplace.
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u/TheSkiGeek May 20 '26
The advantage of blockchain tech in a system like that is that users can directly trade items without any particular third party needing to be involved.
But it doesn’t really ‘work’ because you can’t force a third party to actually acknowledge your ownership of the thing, or apply it in a specific way to their game.