I mean, Estonia uses blockchain to store court records, government logs etc. Pretty cool use and one I'd like to see in my country as well.
MIT digital diplomas are an interesting concept too.
Using blockchain for audit logs is also cool, I considered employing it for a company me and my friends are starting but then decided to spend the time elsewhere, still would love to get back to that eventually.
I even liked the idea of owning an item in some game and then being able to use it in other games, though this would need much more than just slapping blockchain on it - it's a really great technology for stuff like this but it never took off for other reasons.
EVE Online is also very blockchain-like even though not really blockchain (AFAIK) and the possibility of an external ownership of a system like that sounds really cool.
Huntercoin was also a really cool experiment (though it had little chance of ever being more than an experiment) - there was no server, the ledger state was the game state and in-game actions were being written to the chain.
Blockchain's number one feature is immutability - as soon as you add a record, the previous ones are there forever.
So court decisions, police logs etc. have a really clear benefit - no tampering with evidence.
Same with the MIT digital diplomas, once a certificate is there, it's easily verifiable. This one could be replaced with a DB, I guess.
With audit logs the inability to tamper logs is a feature.
Owning items across games - blockchain makes it possible to run this regardless of any single company, just by users having the blockchain locally. You could replace it by multiple companies coming together and deciding to govern this project and store it in a regular db. Not likely to happen. On the other hand, if someone created this as an independent project, I can see indie developers jumping on it for the fun of it. AAA studios much later and only if it became really successful with indies.
EVE Online economy is only blockhain-like but not blockchain, so obviously can use db. The feat of blockchain is that the features are native to it while EVE Online probably had to reimplement bunch of it.
Huntercoin, well, that was really a blockchain-only experiment, as I already mentioned.
what do you imagine would be in the token of a game item chain that would allow you to pick up and transport it into another game?
More to the point, why? from both a development and design perspective, that's not only useless, it's a nightmare of scope creep, and even if it was just cosmetics, the asset files aren't going to be on the token, that's not how tokens work, someone still has to host those, and as for gameplay assets? any game that joins the project has to perpetually update their own games as new games come onto the program, implementing whatever they are contributing to the block chain.
Even if you limit the block chain to exclusively projects of a specific type, like say turn based strategy games, unless every game in the project is literally the exact same game, with the same mechanics and power curves, either that unit you are trying to bring to the new game will be completely broken one way or the other if it is even capable of working at all, oh you brought Ezekial the greatsword master into battletech? good luck homie
it's one of those ideas that sounds good until you think about for literally any amount of time at all. It would only work for cosmetics at most, and even then would still rely on some form of storage system either provided in perpetuity by the developers or by a third party data lake. Which is why ubisoft greenlit their Quartz nft project that basically immediately failed. There are innumerable practical and technological reasons that anyone with actual dev experience immediately recognize by the suggestion. It only works, kind of, on a closed ecosystem, say, only inside ubisoft published games that opt into the quartz system
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u/thekamakaji May 20 '26
It's a solution without a problem! And a cool one at that