Magic the Gathering Online is a Great Example of Why Currencies Controlled By a Company Will Fail

I wanted to talk about a topic I found very interesting and while im not a Magic the Gathering player anymore, I still do follow the news about what goes on in the space. If you dont know, Magic the Gathering is a collectible card game that has been around since the 90s, with a ton of players and card speculators, most known for buying cards worth 10s of thousands of dollars. Were not going to be talking about the physical game today, but instead the online version and how it relates to the cryptocurrency space.

Magic the Gathering Online was actually one of the first online trading game platforms compared to the large amount of platforms you see today. Because of this, it is quite outdated looking and has a feature that no company in their right mind would institute today, the ability to redeem a full digital set for a physical one. When the platform came out, selling people on the idea of buying packs of digital only cards was a hard sell so this was how they got around it. In addition they created a market place where people can trade with eachother and use their currency to transact. Unfortunately it may legally assign a real value to these cards so banning accounts with cards in them might be illegal.

There are a few lawsuits in motion now so we wont know until they get resolved, but the greater point still remains that they can ban your account at any time they want and you lose your collection which has a real value that can be pulled and put into the system. Recently Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro, who own the game, have started a campaign to stomp out anyone from the community that they think is toxic and ban them from the game for life. This means they cant partake in any of the tournaments or event and the removal of their online card collection. However, the people they are banning range from people who are actually toxic to people who just criticize the company online. In addition they have started catering to the snowflake generation and have been banning anyone that has any varying thought on the game.

So how does this relate to cryptocurrency? With the amount of ICOs and coins that are being issued by organizations that look very similar to companies out there, there is a real potential something very similar like this could happen. If a company or someone in the company is pressured, one day they could quite literally blacklist your coins at exchanges, making them essentially valueless. Granted this would be very hard, but with the current state of crackdowns, this might be a reality. There are already blacklisted bitcoins that literally havent moved because they are stolen coins and cant actually be pulled out into fiat until some sort of anonymous feature is added. Many of these company coins are not going to bring out any anonymous features because they know it would hurt them in the future. This is the same reason why Coinbase will never add something like Monero, because they will get hit to hard by the SEC it wouldnt be worth it.

This whole idea also regards country coins as well, it doesnt matter if they are on a blockchain. As long as your coins are not fully anonymous and you can be tied to an address, things can be done to blacklist your coins. If your coins are blacklisted, they will be worth far less. Dont trust companies or anything that resembles a company pushing their own coins. They can be squeezed and if they are, they have no problem making you collateral damage. As long as they are centralized, they can be shut down without a moments notice.

-Calaber24p