[HN Gopher] "Let's Run The Experiment": about DAOs and the futur...
___________________________________________________________________
"Let's Run The Experiment": about DAOs and the future of
organizations online
Author : abecedarius
Score : 54 points
Date : 2021-11-15 17:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (adjacentpossible.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (adjacentpossible.substack.com)
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| DAO's are a good concept but still have flaws. I just don't think
| blockchain is refined enough just yet...
|
| I'm personally working on just a basic ERP system to manage
| Cooperatives (Housing, Consumer, Worker), that would reward
| people for consuming, working, volunteering, etc with 'tokens'
| good towards rev shares, maybe health benefits, and ability to
| vote for company officers, etc... It'll have everything to manage
| ecommerce shops, restaurants, grocery stores, property
| management, etc.. as 'modules', kinda like ODOO, but for managing
| employees/users/consumers it needs to get the reward system right
| and make it modular enough so each co-op (SaaS/Multi-tenant)
| could have their own rules, etc....
|
| It's for building a more democratic org, but still is centralized
| at least the DB parts, as it allows better control... I could see
| maybe rebuilding parts on the blockchain, and implementing some
| sort of crypto w/ UBI and a tax that really benefits those who
| spend more, and hold less of the crypto, but it'd need be sybil-
| proof, so would probably need some centralization for
| verification of identities.
|
| the app will also have tools for voting, w/ ranked choice and
| weighted votes (people w/ different roles can have heavier
| weights), and maybe even have settings like those 'weights' be
| voteable by the group, say the CEO is petitioning for 20:1 ratio
| for voting power, so maybe you setup the vote to allow just pick
| a numeric# from 5-20 (or some other min/max range) then the
| average is what gets picked, etc... even for voting for new
| company officers - maybe every two years a vote is triggered the
| winner has their roles and permissions automatically switched,
| and the loser has them revoked, etc...
|
| The ultimate idea is using it to create syndicated co-ops that
| maybe share some mutual aid benefits among
| users/consumers/workers of other co-ops... For e-commerce for
| example store owners could opt to include their stuff in a
| marketplace, so their products are distributed like Amazon's
| marketplace...
| clippablematt wrote:
| This sounds great, got a link? Or is it still in dev?
|
| We keep trying things with our coop, but we often just fall
| back on google sheets for everything - which everyone hates but
| it's flexible enough to do what we need and we all know how to
| use it.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| This feels like buzzword soup.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I really struggle to see how most DAOs and cryptocurrency efforts
| aren't mostly just ways to skirt around existing financial
| security laws.
|
| For example, could organizations give
| stocks/shares/tokens/choose-your-security-name to users of a
| platform in the current (US) legal environment? I don't have the
| legal background to know. Can they sell private securities to any
| user? I think no because it would go against accredited investor
| laws. Also, I think if they're selling to an open public, it
| might violate SEC laws by being a public security, not a private
| security, unless they also reported truthfully about risks, etc.,
| to the SEC.
|
| So what if the law got rid of the accredited investor
| requirement? Or got rid of the reporting requirements for public
| vs private securities?
|
| So I think one part is that companies aren't legally allowed to
| sell private shares to just any individual and if they do sell to
| any individual, they aren't legally allowed to not report to the
| SEC.
|
| I think another part is that I wonder how many companies actually
| want more cooperative/democratic style ownership. Cooperatives
| (one member, one vote) have struggled to get investment because
| of that precise equality in decision making. [edit-added] And
| also, a more equal profit-sharing may not be in the interest of
| many people wanting to become the next unicorn billionaire.
|
| So it makes me wonder how many of the orgs using DAOs are doing
| so because they want to become more equal cooperative-like orgs,
| and how many are doing so to skirt securities laws.
| evergrande wrote:
| Which is good because accredited investor laws prevent poor
| people from obtaining wealth in the same way the wealthy do.
| It's an uneven playing field.
|
| Let me give a concrete example: The first time I used Stripe
| and Uber, I immediately wanted to invest. But I couldn't
| because I wasn't wealthy nor well connected enough. If they had
| been a DAO, I could have invested $100 and paid off my student
| debt and theoretical mortgage AND probably covered losing
| investments. One winner covers many losers, which is how VCs
| play the game. That's the power of early investment.
|
| Those kind of returns are only available to the already wealthy
| under our current laws. Why should that be? By the time a
| company IPOs most of the opportunity has already been
| extracted. How many of us have wanted to invest in Stripe for
| years now? We still can't. We can only sit and watch as its
| largest growth years go by and the rich get richer. In the
| eventual IPO they'll sell their shares to us now that they've
| appreciated by orders of magnitude. These laws should be
| abolished, but I wouldn't hold one's breath. So I'm in favor of
| the cryptoeconomy being an alternative that one can opt into.
| waprin wrote:
| I understand your sentiment, but on the flip side, if you
| browse around Reddit you'll quickly see people going all in
| on random meme coins like SHIB with comments like "I'll be in
| a resort in Bali or homeless." The problem is if they lose
| their gamble, which is pretty easy considering the huge
| number of scams and pump and dumps, then when they are in
| fact homeless, it doesn't just affect them. Because then
| people will say we need to take care of the homeless with
| social programs which taxpayers and people who didn't YOLO on
| memecoins have to shoulder the burden of.
|
| You can't really have it both ways, you can't have a super
| strong social safety net for people who lose it all and a
| system where it's easy to gamble your life savings on
| incredibly unregulated markets and incentive all the scammers
| to come out of the woodwork.
|
| There's a reason IPOs are much later these days than during
| the Dotcom boom precisely because too many retail investors
| lost their shirt to pump and dumps which at scale leads to
| broader social instability.
| young_unixer wrote:
| That's right. We should get rid of the social safety net.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| > You can't really have it both ways, you can't have a
| super strong social safety net for people who lose it all
| and a system where it's easy to gamble your life savings on
| incredibly unregulated markets and incentive all the
| scammers to come out of the woodwork.
|
| I really liked this point. Then I thought about it more and
| I think the reason why we have accredited investor laws is
| because we don't actually have that strong of a social
| safety net. For example, I've often wondered how much risk
| people would be free to take if we had a UBI or government
| dividend or whatever ya wanna call it. If people had a
| guaranteed income (or guaranteed home or guaranteed other
| basic service), how much more risk would people be able to
| take? I imagine a lot.
|
| Conversely, I've worked in entrepreneurship in the US and
| in East Africa. In East Africa, I think because there's
| very little social safety net (government provided, there's
| more social safety in family networks), it can be really
| really risky to try to be an entrepreneur.
|
| All that to say that I think if, frankly, the ones who win
| the bets they place would put more money into social safety
| nets, then others could take more bets as well. I just
| think sometimes the people who win the bets they place
| think they won because they're skilled not because of
| mostly random luck and then don't contribute to government
| or non-government social safety nets, thus we make laws
| preventing the majority of people making bets that could
| drop them through the safety net that currently exists.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| The point is sort-of the official reasoning behind the
| rules as they are. People will promise they'd accept all
| consequences of their actions. But we restrict people's
| freedom to trade away their own future freedom to such a
| degree. You can sign up for the Army for 5 years, yes.
| You can't sell yourself into indentured servitude.
| Somewhere in between those two, there's a (vague) line
| we've decided to draw.
|
| Very comparable: the idea of just letting unvaccinated
| people die in hospital parking lots. Yes, they were
| stupid. Yes, they were told about as much. But no, that's
| not the sort of offense that warrants the death penalty.
| No, not even if you suspect they'd gladly let you die of
| your delayed reaction to the vaccine, if that were
| actually a thing.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Or you could have invested $1000 and then lost it all because
| it turns out the company you invested in was a naked scam.
|
| Accredited investor laws exist to protect common people from
| the endless amount of scams we see crypto have today.
|
| If you don't like the laws then petition to have them
| changed, but simply ignoring them will probably result in the
| SEC knocking on your door.
| evergrande wrote:
| "We're just protecting you" is a transparent excuse to rig
| the game. It's pulling up the ladder. If it was actually in
| the best interests of the people, you educate and give them
| tools. You don't lock them out. And you focus on preventing
| and going after the bad actors, the scammers.
| Daishiman wrote:
| > "We're just protecting you" is a transparent excuse to
| rig the game. It's pulling up the ladder.
|
| This is a truism that's not based on reality. You can
| question whether the protection is actually useful for
| the case, but there's a reason a bunch of professional
| licenses exist, and they _do_ protect people. I don 't
| want to "educate myself" to see if my doctor is competent
| to practice.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| As waprin mentioned above and I expanded on, I think yes,
| to enable people to take more risk, we provide stronger
| safety nets for them, which includes educating people and
| giving them tools. The challenge I see is that the ones
| who become rich mostly off the risks they take don't seem
| to want to invest in building those strong safety nets
| for people, to enable others to take risks that wouldn't
| be life or death, rich or homeless risks.
|
| In the absence of resources and desire to provide strong
| safety nets, such as the education and tools you describe
| above, one way is to just prevent people from doing it.
|
| I agree with you, I'd rather have more freedom to
| experiment and take risks. I also don't want people to
| fall to their physical or financial death.
|
| Actually, there's a book that kinda talks about this idea
| called Care to Dare by a former hostage negotiator named
| George Kohlrieser. I took his leadership training seminar
| and he strongly suggested that to encourage people to
| take risks, we must first build secure bases for them so
| they feel safe enough to go off and explore knowing they
| can come back home.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Care-Dare-Unleashing-Astonishing-
| Lead...
| bluecalm wrote:
| It's not in the your best interest to have access to more
| profitable but more risky investments until you have a
| lot of money available. If it isn't obvious to you just
| think of the shape of utility of money curve.
|
| More profitable but more risky is the most you can hope
| for. There is competition in private equity market so
| it's not like it's profitable unicorns for everyone who
| has access to those opportunities. If anything you should
| be able to invest in a private equity firm to begin with
| so they can balance the risk for you by investing in
| portfolio of assets and guess what - you can do just that
| as some are publicly traded!
|
| It's really not an evil plan. The regulation is just
| common sense to protect you from big risk of going
| bankrupt.
|
| There is plenty of opportunity in public market btw. Some
| examples of x20s from recent years: SHOP, AMD, TESLA.
| Some examples of very recent although smaller
| multipliers: NET (really, if you just read HN once a week
| you know they are awesome), Unity. I mean if you are so
| confident about picking Uber it shouldn't be rocket
| science to pick one of the above either.
| notahacker wrote:
| Nonsense. Venture capital, as an asset class, performs
| far worse than regular stock indices anybody can buy with
| a smartphone (Some funds do very well indeed, but others
| actually lose their LPs money). That's venture capital as
| practised by professionals that get warm introductions to
| the highest performing startups, have teams of people to
| do due diligence for them, involve themselves in hiring
| and firing the C-suite, can award themselves ridiculously
| favourable terms like liquidation preferences if the
| company's struggling and have connections at Valley
| companies awash with cash when they need to get a startup
| that'll never be profitable an exit.
|
| Joe Public needs to do _better_ than the people who
| already have more education and tools and influence than
| the average person can ever expect, just to break even on
| their startup portfolio. And let 's face it, Joe Public
| wants to "invest" whilst being so wilfully ignorant of
| basics like liquidity and adverse selection they think
| there's nothing to actually be protected from...
| AlexandrB wrote:
| It'll _still_ be an uneven playing field if you 're able to
| invest in early-stage companies. Now it will just be
| populated with well-marketed stocks for worthless companies
| that the rich will use to extract money from the gullible.
|
| With the benefit of hindsight it's easy to see how you would
| have made a killing on Uber. But what you're _not_ seeing the
| money you might have lost on Theranos, or Juicero, or WeWork,
| or any number of other hyped-up but ultimately worthless
| companies.
| LiquidSky wrote:
| >These laws should be abolished, but I wouldn't hold one's
| breath. So I'm in favor of the cryptoecomony being an
| alternative.
|
| Me too, because the "cryptoecomony" has been an endless
| series of painful lessons on exactly why we need those laws.
| And not even in new ways! Just literally the exact same kinds
| of scams and abuses that led to these laws being passed in
| the 30s.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I wasn't saying whether it was a good thing that they should
| be skirted or not, whether the laws themselves were fair or
| not. In many ways, I probably would agree more with your
| sentiment than not.
|
| I wonder if skirting the law is the best way to change the
| law, as it seems to skirt the law-making and law-following
| process. At the same time, I believe in the principles of
| civil disobedience, in openly disobeying a law and facing the
| consequences for doing so in order to shed light on the
| unfairness of the law. I guess I just don't know how much, if
| at all, I believe in the skirting of laws.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| I think academia is an interesting use case, e.g. VitaDAO.com
| and Molecule.to
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I wonder if even their methods are dancing around US
| securities laws, but I don't fully understand how
| cooperatives overlap with securities laws [0].
|
| Despite that, I like what seems to be their intention around
| cooperatively-owned research, so I'll try to follow them to
| see what comes of it. Thank you.
|
| edit: Also, maybe one of the problems is that the internet is
| global and most regulation is at most national, so even if it
| were to break US laws, does it break other national,
| regional, or local laws? Do DAOs and crypto lead to some
| larger global form of governance?
|
| [0]: https://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/securities-
| regulation/se...
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| > I really struggle to see how most DAOs and cryptocurrency
| efforts aren't mostly just ways to skirt around existing
| financial security laws.
|
| It's 99% just evading existing laws. The best example of this
| is the browser Brave which only uses a cryptocurrency so that
| they could raise money without following the accredited
| investor laws.
| hackingforfun wrote:
| A DAO can automate things currently handled by humans. There
| may need to still be some human involvement (and probably
| should be), but I'd say there can probably be less
| involvement than there is now in, for example, real estate
| transactions. It doesn't even have to be a DAO, it can just
| be a smart contract. Things like escrow can be automated.
| These things can also improve transparency assuming they are
| done on an open ledger. That could make corruption more
| visible and harder to get away with. There is more to this
| technology than just evading securities laws.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| What stops a company from currently creating a more
| automated solution for real estate transactions except for
| current laws or an inability to integrate with government?
| I think some of the tech is cool and yes can automate
| things, I just wonder if it automates these things because
| it avoids integrating with government systems, which can be
| horrible out of date at times. So maybe it's not so much
| skirting of laws, but sometimes also working around
| systems, not with a bad intention, but because things
| aren't necessarily keeping up with technological change.
|
| Also, could an open ledger make corruption more visible and
| harder to get away with? Yes, it could. Will it? I'm not so
| sure.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Any smart contract could also be implemented as a regular
| program dealing with numbers instead of cryptocoins. And
| transparency isn't a real benefit either, assuming the
| centralized server makes all transactions public.
|
| The issues crypto can solve are 1) the government/bank
| can't steal your money, 2) the government/bank can't hide
| corrupt transfers, and 3) you don't need permission from
| the government/bank to exchange cryptocoins. If the
| government/bank wasn't a bureaucratic mess it could solve
| all of these issues centrally. Decentralization is good
| because it's hard to create a central agency without it
| turning into a bureaucratic mess.
| afpx wrote:
| I believe Wyoming recently passed laws to give DAOs rights as
| corporations. I am curious if I'd be able to, say, give partial
| "ownership" or royalties to my users.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| Yeah, again, I don't know much about law in general but
| especially this stuff, just wonder whether the Wyoming treat
| DAOs as LLCs except Wyoming can take away protection if
| believing the DAO is fraudulent jives with SEC regulations
| [0]. I'm sure there will be different cities/states jumping
| on the bandwagon, as mayors are seemingly trying to be cool
| by taking bitcoin salaries. I don't know how much of it
| conflicts with current law and how much law will just change
| with the flow, a la Uber and AirBnB.
|
| [0]:https://protos.com/wyoming-dao/
| freejazz wrote:
| There is no reason why a DAO or any other organization
| cannot be an LLC or whatever other kind of business entity
| so long as it complies with the requirements thereof
| jimkleiber wrote:
| True, if they comply with the requirements. I just wonder
| if DAOs, which typically have tokens available to any
| public purchaser, would fall into a category of
| securities and therefore public securities, which would
| violate maybe not the requirements of the business entity
| but other laws.
|
| From what I understand, and I admittedly don't feel
| certain on this at all, LLCs are private entities where
| ownership can only be offered privately, not open to be
| sold on a public exchange, and many DAOs plan to sell
| their tokens on public exchanges.
|
| Again, I think laws can change and personally think we
| need more global overarching governance to deal with
| internet interactions, yet think that some of these
| things are quite incompatible/contradictory to current
| law.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| I suppose I'm asking for an "explain it to me like I'm five"
| response here, but when I read things like (from TFA):
|
| > When you have an internet service that serves hundreds of
| millions or billions of people, there is a huge asymmetry of
| power and knowledge between the service provider and individual
| users. To fix this, you'd want a system that provides a way for
| users to organize and act collectively. You'd want users to
| receive a straightforward digital representation of their
| economic and governance rights. You'd want a system that has
| unambiguous rules along with mechanisms to enforce those rules.
| And you'd want this all to be available globally and accessible
| to anyone. Sounds useful, right? Well, the system I've described
| is basically a blockchain.
|
| I think: a blockchain is an append-only distributed transaction
| ledger. But how is the system Dixon describes "basically a
| blockchain?" A blockchain has some of those properties, sure:
| it's available globally and accessible to anyone (with the
| technology to access it). It has mechanisms to enforce its rules,
| e.g., you only get to append transactions to the ledger and you
| can't modify past transactions without the tampering being
| obvious. But the "non-protocol" parts here -- providing a way for
| users to organize and act collectively, receiving a
| straightforward digital representation (?) of their economic and
| governance rights -- seem to me to be orthogonal to blockchains.
| What legally recognized rights you have in _anything_ stems from,
| well, laws -- from legally binding contracts. Those don 't need
| the blockchain. If you buy the "digital original" of your
| favorite meme for $3M, a transaction entry on a blockchain could
| be agreed to be the bill of sale -- but so could any number of
| things _off_ the blockchain. What the blockchain brings to the
| party that 's entirely new seems to be the ability to get
| ridiculous sales prices because there's currently a frenzy for
| anything NFT.
|
| And this is an issue I have with an awful lot of Let's Build It
| On The Blockchain! thinking right now: it's not that I can't see
| value in the concept of blockchains, it's that there seems to be
| a "it's good because it's on _The Blockchain!_ " frenzy around a
| lot of things that are transparently dubious (see: millions of
| NFT scams, the insistence that digital in-game assets can be
| easily transferred between games built on entirely different
| back-end systems just because blockchain, etc.).
|
| And stepping back from that, the whole "Web3" pitch is "we can
| build an entirely decentralized Internet now because BLOCKCHAIN!"
| But, again: why are blockchains critical to this idea? We already
| built a decentralized Internet before blockchains; it was called
| (checks notes) "The Internet". I get that the idea is the _new_
| blockchain-based everything can 't be centralized, but y'know,
| that's what we thought about the non-blockchain Internet a
| quarter-century ago. All the tools we had then to _not_ be
| centralized still exist _now._ The issue with centralization now
| isn 't a technological one -- which makes me pretty skeptical of
| purely technological solutions.
| casi18 wrote:
| it'll be interesting to see if constitutiondao raise enough funds
| to buy the constitution this week (one of the eleven first
| editions). i think that is an interesting example of something
| going from private ownership to being owned by a large group
| (currently 12000 members in the discord) who will then vote on
| where it goes on display etc.
|
| They started as a group last friday, so far raised $5.7m, looking
| to get to $20m by thursdays auction. I don't think any other
| process could move so quickly in a few days, from a joke to being
| taken seriously so rapdily. its memes all the way down.
|
| https://www.constitutiondao.com/
| hemloc_io wrote:
| I honestly doubt it, but I think the idea is very cool.
|
| Biggest issues faced with DAOs on ETH right now is the gas
| fees. Can't take small contributions with gas averaging around
| 100-200$
| EGreg wrote:
| Hey everyone. Greg from Intercoin here.
|
| Forget DAOs for a second, how about just putting roles and
| permissions on the blockchain? Why do I have to trust some site
| won't have a guy gain access to the centralized database and
| change everyone's roles and permissions willy nilly? What if we
| had a trusted and audited codebase (like Uniswap factory) for
| creating smart contracts which any website on the Internet could
| query through Infura or GetBlock or another gateway to popular
| blockchains? And this codebase was about membership in
| communities, roles, tickets, etc. displayed as non-transferrable
| NFTs, and so forth.
|
| I see smart contracts as enabling stuff like that. Managing
| communities. Running elections for representatives, and making
| sure you know that someone "really was" elected or appointed to a
| position. Constitutions can be expressed in this way. Direct
| democracy and delegating your votes to actual scientists when it
| comes to certain issues etc. And that is only the "base
| functionality", if you will. Here is what you can build on top of
| it: https://intercoin.org/applications
|
| For instance, last year I wrote this for CoinDesk, and since then
| we have built it: https://coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-
| defense-of-blockchai...
|
| PS: To me, one of the biggest problems in the crypto space is
| that each team roll their own smart contracts, and same goes for
| Web 2.0 startups and their app code. It's far better to have
| factories of heavily audited and battle-tested code on the
| blockchain, and produce instances from that. People would then
| make decisions about using the smart contracts based on standard
| init() parameters that can be easily documented around the web.
| The smart contracts wouldn't have an "owner", but would serve
| entire communities, with multiple businesses providing "utility"
| by accepting their "utility tokens", so the whole thing wouldn't
| be dependent on _one_ single team or business. There is so much
| we can do, we 've only scratched the surface.
|
| PPS: If you are a Solidity developer, contact me at the email
| _greg_ at-sign _intercoin.org_ , we are currently looking for
| partners to go and deploy all this to our millions of users
| worldwide by early 2022, here are the repos:
| https://github.com/Intercoin
| danschumann wrote:
| At some point, you need to do work to make money, especially when
| young. What if, however, your "job" was working for a blockchain
| instead of a company? Or a decentralized company? What if that
| blockchain turned evil? How could you stop it if no one had
| control? Everyone is just a cog.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Sorry, how are your examples different for a blockchain vs. a
| company from the point of view of a young individual employee?
| casi18 wrote:
| Lots of daos have forums and token voting where you voice
| opinion, and also have 'rage quit' functions where you can exit
| and take your share of the dao bank balance with you. They're
| also often open source so can be forked in disagreements - even
| by anonymous others (see sushi forking uniswap and taking it in
| a different direction under new branding).
|
| my experience with daos i have worked with is they are often
| closely aligned with co-op style organisational structure. the
| difference is we dont all know each other and live all over the
| world, some people are anonymous dogs jpegs and thats all i'll
| ever know about them, some people are present in their irl
| persona. but its a group of people with some shared aim in
| collective ownership, this doesnt mean there arent directors
| and roles, but often you can just start talking and
| participating and be rewarded. e.g. anyone can write a strategy
| for yearn, pass it on to the team and be rewarded
| https://twitter.com/iearnfinance/status/1459658364837896192?...
| Animats wrote:
| _It makes sense that you would cite Axie Infinity as a leading
| example of how the Web3 technologies are actually starting to
| work at scale._
|
| Huh? Axie Infinity is a Ponzi scheme. They're the people behind
| the Smooth Love Potion token. See chart for that.[1] They prey on
| poor people in the Philippines and Vietnam with a pay to play
| game that costs about US$1000 to enter.
|
| [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/
| saurik wrote:
| Yeah: and the only reason it works at all is because it is
| actually a centralized game (which then indirectly but still
| centrally mints the SLP any time they want under any rule
| set... this is absolutely a "security") that can attempt to
| prevent people automating play by doing stuff like bot
| detection. I'm a believer in crypto, and even in crypto for
| games, but trotting out Axie as an example is painful.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| It's not a surprise though as the interviewee works for a VC
| that invested in it.
| superfad wrote:
| The interviewee, Chris Dixon, never mentioned Axie though.
| It was the interviewer, Steven Johnson, that brought it up.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| As I read it the first block is Steven replying to Chris.
| Might be wrong though it's not formatted very well.
| hackingforfun wrote:
| Some people in the countries you mentioned are making more
| playing Axie than they could otherwise [1].
|
| I'm not advocating for Axie Infinity, but I think there are
| multiple sides to this.
|
| [1] https://restofworld.org/2021/axie-infinity/
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. About 1 in 700 players can make a living off of it. It's
| zero-sum, of course. Many of the losers don't know they lost
| yet, because they haven't cashed out. This is typical of a
| Ponzi scheme.
|
| The bottom already fell out of Smooth Love Token.[2] The Axie
| Infinity governance Token is down a bit after a big runup.[3]
|
| "Daily Earnings of Typical Axie Infinity Player Fall Below
| the Philippines' Minimum Wage Line".[1]
|
| [1] https://block2block.io/daily-earnings-of-typical-axie-
| infini...
|
| [2] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/
|
| [3] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/axie-infinity/
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Axie Infinity and other "NFT games" are
| centralized too, which skirts the entire purpose of using NFTs.
| They can completely change Axie stats, introduce new Axies, or
| shut-down. It's no different than selling rare pokemon or CS:GO
| knives or any game with in-app-purchases and trading. These
| aren't "distributed apps", they're centralized apps that use
| cryptocurrency.
|
| A truly decentralized crypto game is a smart contract where the
| outcome of a transaction is unknown to both parties until they
| agree to it. For example, "crypto roulette": an Etherium smart
| contract where N parties enter M coins, and then a
| (pseudo-)random-number generator decides which party gets the
| spoils.
|
| You could build off this concept with other games like "crypto
| blackjack", "crypto poker", etc. where you somehow enable user
| input and output once players enter their coins (this would
| need a timer, so if a player doesn't input in X time they are
| disqualified. I really doubt this is currently possible and I
| don't even know if it's possible at all). You could also use
| NFTs instead of coins, and replace the basic random-number
| generator with a more complex algorithm which simulates a kind
| of "battle" based on parts of the NFT hash. Kind of like a
| battle between Axies.
|
| But the fundamental point is, the entire game is a smart
| contract. There is no centralized server handling the
| transactions, and the game-maker can't "shut down" the game or
| change the rules or create an overpowered NFT. And the rules
| are visible to anyone (you can still add "cheats" but you have
| to hide them, because other players can find and use them too).
| LiquidSky wrote:
| ...we ran the experiment. It was an instantaneous, colossal
| failure that eternally discredited the concept in the most
| hilarious way possible.[1] That anyone thinks of a DAO as
| anything but a punchline is all the proof you need of the sheer
| delusion of the crypto space.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)
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