"I believe the community should be attempting to bend the arc of growth away from artificially inducing unneeded scarcity just for the benefit of some investor class," Edward Snowden remarked. On December 3, 2021, Edward Snowden, a whistleblower for the National Security Agency, expressed worry about how some privileged persons or organizations in the digital environment would be able to employ nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, in the gaming industry.
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Snowden claimed he had seen potential use cases for nonfungible tokens to collect donations for causes when speaking with Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood at Friday's BlockDown DeData online conference. Still, he is concerned about the technology "creeping into games." For attempting to profit from users' virtual escapes, the whistleblower branded certain features of the metaverse as "horrible, vile, and tragic." "Someone is attempting to [inject] a fake sense of scarcity into a post-scarcity environment," Snowden added. "I believe the community should make a concerted effort to bend the arc of growth away from artificially inducing unneeded scarcity solely for the advantage of a select group of investors."
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Wood seems to disagree with Snowden's allegations about NFTs in gaming, likening virtual artifacts within games to musicians selling NFTs of their songs. On the other hand, Snowden argued that gamers were "not paying for a promised product," but rather for a "chance at something, without the promise of something," leaving the area vulnerable to abuse. "I have no objection to game makers restricting access to their product in the same way that they have for decades," Wood added. "I see NFTs as a more flexible approach of limiting access to their product.".
The statements of Snowden and Wood come at a time when gaming companies appear to be casting a larger net for the adoption of digital assets and NFTs.