Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney spoke about one of the hottest issues in tech and gaming right now, which is digital economies, including cryptocurrency. Speaking to Fast Company, the billionaire founder of the Fortnite studio said he believes digital products will become massively popular and lucrative, reaching into the trillions of dollars, but right now the market is filled with bad actors and bad actors. scams.
“The idea of a digital economy that isn’t controlled by a single company, that’s decentralized and open to all participants, and that has incredibly low transaction fees, that’s a tremendous aspiration,” Sweeney said. . “I support the idea of universal ownership – the idea that if you were to buy an avatar in one place, you would own it in all other places where it is conceptually compatible…the domain of zero-knowledge proofs – the idea that you can verify that something happened without receiving any private details about it – this powers a number of cryptocurrencies in privacy protection while running a decentralized system, I think this will be the backbone of much of the next century in technology.”
Right now, however, Sweeney said he’s observed that the crypto market is “clustered with a lot of speculation and a lot of outright scams.” Sweeney also said he thinks companies promise more than they can reasonably deliver in the name of money.
“You know, like blockchain avatar economies for example, there’s a bunch of companies that aspire to create avatars that you have universally, but none of them that I’ve found, not one, n made an effort to drive real adoption of these avatars by any real game or ecosystem,” he said.
“They just want to build this stuff and sell avatars to people, but they’re completely useless in practice.”
Sweeney went on to say that one of the biggest issues right now is with utilities — companies are selling digital assets that don’t have much real-world use. “They show you digital assets that you can’t do anything with except say you own them. You can cryptographically prove you own them, but who cares?” he said.
Looking further into the future, Sweeney said he was optimistic that crypto would become massively successful and ubiquitous. “I strongly believe there will be a multi-trillion dollar economy around digital goods in the future,” he said.
The full interview touches on many other topics like the Metaverse; go read it here.
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