“I believe that the community should make a concerted effort to sway the arc of development away from artificial, unneeded scarcity only for the advantage of some investment class,” Edward Snowden said.
Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, expressed worry about how certain privileged persons or businesses in the digital environment would be able to exploit nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, in the gaming sector.
Snowden told Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood at Friday’s BlockDown DeData online conference that although he has seen potential use cases for nonfungible tokens to collect revenue for charitable reasons, he is worried about the technology “infiltrating games.” The whistleblower characterized some features of the metaverse as “awful, and vile, and sad” because they sought to profit off users’ virtual getaways.
“We have individuals attempting to [inject] a false feeling of scarcity into a post-scarcity realm,” Snowden said. “I believe that the community should make a concerted effort to sway the arc of growth away from artificial, unneeded scarcity for the advantage of some investment class.”
Wood seemed to contradict Snowden’s assertions about NFTs in gaming, comparing virtual objects inside games to musicians selling NFTs of their own songs. Snowden, on the other hand, said that gamers were not acquiring a “guaranteed product” but rather a “chance at something, without the assurance of anything,” leaving the area open to abuse.
“I have no objection to game creators controlling access to their product in the same manner they have done for decades,” Wood said. “I see NFTs as a more nimble method of limiting access to a product.”
Snowden and Wood’s views come as gaming companies seem to be casting a broader net for digital assets and non-fungible tokens acceptance. In November, Andrew Wilson, CEO of major video game developer Electronic Arts, said that NFTs and play-to-earn games represent the industry’s future. There seems to be user interest as well – on Wednesday, the NFT game Guild of Guardians reported that it had sold over $5 million worth of its native tokens ahead of its Q1 2022 debut.
Snowden has continued to give interviews and share his thoughts on Bitcoin (BTC) and the cryptocurrency industry from his exile in Russia since 2013. Before fleeing the United States, the NSA whistleblower used BTC to pay for the servers on which he leaked thousands of documents to journalists.
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