I see this kind of argument a lot. But it seems to always be missing a step when it comes to theoretical crypto innovations.<p>All the examples of "toys" he mentions here are also <i>useful</i>. That seems to be the fundamental concept of what grows.<p>Amazon was useful, you could buy rare books that were previously hard to find.<p>Ebay was useful, you could buy (and sell) niche collectibles that were previously difficult to trade.<p>Facebook could show you pictures of classmates and let you communicate with them.<p>Backrub (ie Google) could help you find information on the early poorly-indexed world wide web.<p>And so on.<p>So how are cryptokitties useful?
Yes, good points all around. I hear similar criticisms of augmented and virtual reality as being just "toys." IMHO being a "toy" that people actually want to play with is not a bad thing at all, it's an important part of the r&d and adoption lifecycle!
Big fan of CryptoKitties and CryptoCollectibles. I collect my notes at the Awesome CryptoKitties page [1] and also started a collection of (open source) tools and public domain datasets at CryptoCopycats [2]. Have fun with the blockchain. It's serious business. The future is meow :-).
[1]: <a href="https://github.com/cryptocopycats/awesome-cryptokitties" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cryptocopycats/awesome-cryptokitties</a>
[2]: <a href="https://github.com/cryptocopycats" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cryptocopycats</a>
The sky-high exchange rate of ETH seems to be largely based on the assumption that there will be a "Web 3.0" of Ethereum-based applications. Slim pickings so far...
> What makes CryptoKitties valuable? Scarcity.<p>What exactly is scarce here? The picture of the Kittie is just an image, right? Can't that be displayed anywhere by anyone?