maybe you have a game server standalone that is trusted by the decentralized network to append card modifications (NOT IDEAL).
I would go with this. The power of Hive and custom_json is that all the important data remains available to anyone to process the way they want to. As long as some critical parts of an app's code is open-sourced, everything works fine.
Centralized servers are not ideal, but it's easy to see when the owners start taking advantage of their position. Once that happens, it's also easy to "hardfork" from their database to another centralized database that is more honest.
Provided dapps are big enough to have a good community of developers interested and small enough not to have a huge barrier of entry to anyone willing to provide their own database as a service, I think this is the best solution. This is great for games particularly.
This also avoids all the requirements about minimizing the number of bytes in an NFT. Less storage will only mean a lower barrier to entry for any storage competitor, which is good, but not as critical as the situation where we try to keep storage decentralized.
Edit - I actually think that this is the best method to leverage Hive, not just for NFTs. Centralized, open-source apps, posting custom_jsons to hive for all ownership changes in the app. This, however, rules out DeFi, as it isn't secure enough. But is nice for games.
Splinterlands is worth more than Hive was a few months ago, thinking something is just a game doesn't really get you out of any of the problems stated. The root word for finance is the same as final, it has less to do with money and more to do with trust.
While I'm clearly on the decentralize everything side of the fence, the market in general doesn't share my convictions. Fortunately any are free to do as they please :)
That's a good point. But if you think long term DeFi will hold trillions of value, while gaming will not.
I am sure the metaverse will be bigger than I can understand currently, but if you take the bond, currency, equity and commondity markets, + whatever financial assets will spawn in a digital world and put them all in DeFi apps, there is no doubt that the total value will be orders of magnitude bigger than the gaming assets market.
So in the long term size does matter, and maybe the Splinterlands - Hive valuations only mean we need to buy more hive :)
Edit - Obvisouly decentralizing everything is awesome, but again, scalability is very hard as your posts show.
BTW @disregardfiat, in the very long term, do you think that very cheap computer hardware can solve all the scalability problems without more scalable software in blockchain consensus?
For example, what if it costs $1 to run a bitcoin node with 32 megabyte blocks and a 50 year history. What does that mean for a dpos chain?
I've been thinking about this recently, as with quantum computing we might have abundant resources.
I think that trust systems like these will be run by interested parties. Have a chain for your town, have a chain for a game, have a chain for your business, and lets them settle payments between themselves. Decentralization is not ever likely to be 7 billion people consensusing on 7 billion peoples worth of transactions. But running some hardware for your neighborhood, and things that you give your actual attention to would scale nicely... even now.