[HN Gopher] "Play-to-Earn" and Bullshit Jobs
___________________________________________________________________
"Play-to-Earn" and Bullshit Jobs
Author : paulgb
Score : 390 points
Date : 2021-12-28 19:16 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulbutler.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulbutler.org)
| soheil wrote:
| > Games that maximize property rights (as Axie Infinity wisely
| hasn't) are bound to be overrun with cheaters and bots, which in
| turn will just bring down the value of in-game assets anyway.
|
| This may happen temporarily, but a sufficiently well tested and
| bullet proof enough game should able to combat that.
|
| This is the same argument people made before BTC: it's just a
| matter of time before any decentralized currency would get hacked
| therefore we cannot have a decentralized currency.
| Animats wrote:
| Axie Infinity spokesperson: "It is a little bit dependent on
| capital inflows."
|
| Er, yes. All those players are paying about $1000 to get into the
| game and then grinding away to get Smooth Love Potion tokens.
| This is the SLP price graph.[1] Down 92% since the peak. A lot of
| suckers lost big. Many of them poor people in the Philippines,
| where Axie is big.
|
| Axie is frantically trying to obfuscate this with a second token,
| PR, claims of new revenue sources, etc. It's not working. In the
| end, it's a classic Ponzi scheme, and it collapsed after only a
| few months.
|
| [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| This is a key thing that a lot of people are missing: most (if
| not all) of the top PlayToEarn games are literally just
| disguised ponzi schemes.
|
| The only reason why their tokens have value is that you need
| those tokens to earn more tokens.
| stingrae wrote:
| This. Axie Infinity only had traction, because the earned coin
| had speculative value. The traction was from people "playing-
| to-earn" as a job. I doubt that there are that many people
| playing for the fun of it. When the token loses value, there
| isn't a reason to continue playing.
| skinnyasianboi wrote:
| I think we all agree that Axie is not a fun game. There are other
| games with millions of users that are actually fun and play to
| earn.
| netcan wrote:
| As I was reading Graeber, it's useful to imagine useless job
| economies of the past. Is a medieval abbey "useless?" Clergy?
| Servants to the clergy? How about courtiers? Courtiers' dress
| makers?
|
| These classes represented a small part of most societies in the
| past, though not always _that_ small. In any case, it 's obvious
| that whatever needs these jobs serve are cultural. Don't
| underestimate culture. Money is a cultural construct. Power.
| Politics. Macroeconomics. Etc.
|
| That's what's going on here.
| Osmose wrote:
| What's the cultural value provided by sitting on Axie and
| grinding for hours?
| netcan wrote:
| I'm not sure "value" is the correct question. Value depends
| on... values, I guess.
|
| In any case, I suspect Graeber would have advised asking
| them. The grinders in manilla. The currency buyers, traders,
| etc. Cultural reasons are hard to extract from their cultural
| context without resorting to essentialism.
|
| There are differences between a game where money comes from
| grinding, even if 3rd party and outsourced, and a pay-to-play
| currency. I suspect the people participating in that economy
| have a narrative, and that it makes some sort of internal
| sense. That's culture.
| me_again wrote:
| There are some comments from participants here: https://www
| .reddit.com/r/AxieInfinity/comments/qfe7fo/would_...
| DarylZero wrote:
| It's the same cultural value provided by a slot machine.
|
| A way to hack someone else's brain and turn them into a slave
| zombie.
|
| But I guess a lot of "real" culture is basically trying to do
| something similar: religions, corporate cults, schools, etc.
| Those are maybe only superficially less grotesque.
| zzbzq wrote:
| In the book version of his essay, one of the things he talks
| about is how most of the things people would write to him about
| being "bullshit jobs" were not his original definition of
| bullshit jobs.
|
| He gives the example of how a lot of people wrote to him about
| how useless hairdressers were, since people could just style
| their own hair. But, to Graeber, these are very much real jobs,
| because it's easy to see what was exchanged for payment (hair
| service.) Whether it was worth the money is a different
| question.
|
| Clergy, in the middle ages, wouldn't be so much a bullshit job,
| but might be a privileged caste. The servants of the clergy,
| according to Graeber, are not bullshit jobs, because like the
| hairdresser, they are doing something for someone (presumably.)
| Doing laundry or bringing tea or whatever we are imagining they
| are serving as servants.
|
| I believe in the book, he resigns to include the concept of
| "different types" of bullshit jobs, since most people seem to
| be unable to stick to his original definition.
|
| The canonical bullshit job to Graeber would be someone in a
| large administrative bureaucracy. This is tied, in his original
| essay, to examining the statistics of increase in jobs in
| different sectors, cross-referenced with data about the growth
| in the productivity of a single worker. He shows that while
| manufacturing and service jobs have remained steady,
| "administrative" jobs have increased in proportion with
| productivity, which he says demonstrates the "bullshit job" as
| purely a way of having more administrators sitting around in
| meetings while the same number of people do actual stuff.
| netcan wrote:
| So... I think a lot of people (not you) missed the fact that
| graeber writes from what I think is a traditional
| anthropological perspective, as opposed to other social
| philosophy traditions.
|
| Bullshit jobs described as such by the worker was a very big
| part of his definition. I think the definition has to drift,
| since an anthropologist won't typically want to impose a
| typology.
|
| In any case, if medieval monks themselves considered monkery
| bullshit... there are snug places in Graebers' typology for
| them. In fact, I believe an average monastery could man every
| type of bullshit job category. It would depend on whether or
| not they themselves believe in the monastic institutions...
| and I would not necessarily assume that they did.
| sktrdie wrote:
| I think the point of Graeber (RIP btw) was to highlight that
| certain jobs (the bullshit ones) are self-fulfilling promises;
| specifically jobs "that only exist because everyone else is
| spending so much of their time working in all the other ones."
| [1]
|
| What's going on here is people doing work knowing it's actual
| bullshit. Just like grinding in the game. There are entire
| sweeps of the economy dedicated to this kind of work and it's a
| huge waste.
|
| 1. https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
| xg15 wrote:
| By what definition would you consider a medieval abbey useless?
| I can't follow you.
| [deleted]
| seibelj wrote:
| I disagree entirely with the thesis of "bullshit jobs". Unless
| it's a government job or mandated by regulations, someone is
| paying for a task to be done voluntarily. Therefore it isn't
| bullshit to the payer, even if it might seem like bullshit to the
| worker. I have never stumbled on a single job that wasn't
| government-required labor that had no purpose whatsoever, and
| furthermore the laborer wasn't able to quit.
| DarylZero wrote:
| I found his bullshit jobs article to be terrible and
| unconvincing, and many of the things he said about jobs just
| inaccurate.
|
| But I think your objection is not very strong and his thesis
| can be rescued from it.
|
| > it isn't bullshit to the payer, even if it might seem like
| bullshit to the worker
|
| I think a lot of jobs really are "bullshit jobs," not because
| they have no value to the payer, but because they have negative
| value to the economy overall.
|
| For an extreme example, some people are willing to pay to have
| witnesses murdered so that they can continue committing crimes
| without legal repercussions.
|
| Or, some people are doing jobs that are purely for positional
| advantage and that are even "cancelled out" by other people in
| other companies doing another job. Advertisers seeking to take
| over market share from competing companies.
|
| Or, some extractive industries may be more beneficially halted
| because of negative externalities; but those who benefit from
| the extraction will still hire people.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Sure you can quit. But often these "bs jobs" are a form of
| scope creep so you face the thought that eventually, it may
| change.
| seibelj wrote:
| Can you provide an example of a bullshit job?
| renewiltord wrote:
| The wikipedia article has examples from David Graeber
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Here is the original publication of the essay:
| https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
|
| I have anecdotal evidence that it took financial circles
| by storm. One very well known CEO in the financial
| industry even wrote a book inspired by David Graeber a
| few years later.
| cochne wrote:
| I'm not totally convinced after looking at that. "duct
| tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed
| permanently, e.g., programmers repairing bloated code,
| airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not
| arrive;"
|
| Is duct taping code never optimal?
| jakear wrote:
| Some examples: receptionists, administrative assistances,
| quality control officers, compliance officers, and
| maintainers of bloated legacy software systems.
|
| I disagree that any of these jobs are "bullshit". I think
| the most bullshit of all the jobs on that page is that
| author's, who wastes society's time listening to him
| complain about things he has no experience with.
| xracy wrote:
| Did you read the article?
| seibelj wrote:
| Yes! However, as stated in the article, earning currency
| or items in videogames and reselling them have been
| around since the earliest days of online gaming. Plus
| these people are entrepreneurs working for themselves.
| I'm really not getting the link.
| xracy wrote:
| "In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graeber makes the case
| that a sizable chunk of the labour economy is essentially
| people performing useless work."
|
| I would treat a bullshit job as any job/living that
| requires you to do useless work. How do you define
| "useless work"?
| all2well wrote:
| Something like Axie Infinity just seems _incredibly_
| cynical. I sometimes joke that stuff like professional
| sports are just financial instruments, which only
| incidentally involve a ball of some sort. Play-to-earn
| and many crypto schemes seem to self-consciously be
| minimal veils to rope in people who otherwise wouldn't
| care about financial products.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| Because it doesn't provide any value. The game developers
| created an artificial demand by making a particular
| aspect of the game so unenjoyable that some people would
| pay others to do it. They could, instead, just offer
| people the better experience uniformly and deliver more
| value to their users.
|
| In this way, the demand and output is entirely
| artificial.
|
| The author here describes the main difference this new
| model and older games where similar economies developed
| is that this is considered a primary feature of the game
| and people are entering it for the purpose of grinding
| for cash. I remember many of the other games described
| such as RuneScape, Second Life, WoW, etc. where people
| sold in game currency or profiles, but they weren't
| advertised as economic opportunities, but as games you
| play for entertainment. VCs weren't investing in them for
| this purpose either.
| originalvichy wrote:
| Read excerpts of his book or his essays on the topic. You might
| be suprised.
| seibelj wrote:
| I read his writing, and I also read his Debt book and found
| it unimpressive and unconvincing.
| originalvichy wrote:
| If you read his book from cover to cover and found nothing
| that you would count even close to a bullshit job then
| alright I guess. You probably wouldn't get hired to
| optimize resource usage and cut down redundancies in a
| private enterprise anytime soon.
| moneywoes wrote:
| For example?
| Aunche wrote:
| I've read his essays, but not his books. Graeber does what
| every popular nonfiction writer does. He starts with a
| provocative conclusion, and cherrypicks data to support it.
| _Bullshit Jobs_ is particularly bad in this aspect.
|
| https://www.economist.com/business/2021/06/05/why-the-
| bullsh...
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| You are linking to a critique. Here is the original essay:
| https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
| beaconstudios wrote:
| So if I paid you a salary to dig a hole and fill it up again,
| ad infinitum, that job would have inherent value just because
| I'm paying you to do it?
|
| If so, welcome aboard.
| [deleted]
| MattGaiser wrote:
| My problem with the bullshit jobs thesis is the "inherent
| value." There are plenty of jobs that have little societal
| value, but provide plenty of value to the person employing
| the person.
|
| For example, plenty of jurisdictions give large tax breaks to
| farms, so it is reasonably common for developers holding land
| to turn their land into a "farm." One fellow I heard of put 6
| cows on a plot of development land and paid someone to drop
| hay off for the cows as the land had next to no grass, as it
| was under development.
|
| No real value is being generated from the cows. The output of
| 6 poorly fed and housed beef cows is well under the money
| paid to the cow carer and for the hay and for the damage
| caused by the cows to the neighbourhood when they escaped.
|
| But the developer saved 80K a year in various property tax
| after all expenses were considered.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Yeah that's bullshit though - it's a warped incentive
| caused by social systems. In a healthy social system, these
| incentives to make money doing pointless bullshit should be
| minimised. David Graeber is an anarchist, and the whole
| bullshit jobs concept is a criticism of capitalism.
| seibelj wrote:
| What company is paying to do this?
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I'll pay you to do it. I'll incorporate a company and then
| pay you through that if it feels more legit that way.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| I'm more than willing to pay tickets to watch that guy
| dig a hole perpetually and learn what a bullshit job is.
| Let's do it.
| xwdv wrote:
| Graveyards.
| vntok wrote:
| Which have you visited that dig and fill the same hole
| over and over again?
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| Just for the record, some of the examples Graeber uses
| include airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do
| not arrive, middle management, and corporate compliance
| officers.
|
| You can call these jobs "bullshit" if you rely on an
| oversimplified version of the world where perfect airlines,
| perfect employees, and automatically enforced laws exist.
| Unfortunately, that's also the exact view I often see in
| tech, where people tend to devalue work of others because its
| value does not seem to be self-explanatory in the first 60
| seconds they spend on analysis of the situation.
|
| In real life your lost baggage experience would suck without
| the person behind the airline desk, you org won't be able to
| scale without middle management, and your business would
| suffer budget cuts due to legal fines because the only proper
| way to stay legally compliant today is (surprise!) _to hire a
| compliance officer_.
|
| Good luck inventing some imaginary perfect-world systems
| where those issues do not exist and do not require extra
| staff you label as "bullshit". Any kind of system which is
| designed and managed by people _will have flaws_ and will
| require extra jobs handling these flaws. These jobs are not
| bullshit, they are valuable because they allow the system to
| exist and stay efficient.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Just for the record, some of the examples Graeber uses
| include airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags
| do not arrive, middle management, and corporate compliance
| officers.
|
| > You can call these jobs "bullshit" if you rely on an
| oversimplified version of the world where perfect airlines,
| perfect employees, and automatically enforced laws exist.
|
| You can also do so if, say, you are an anarchist who views
| capitalism as a system of exploitation and employment in
| wage labor as a modern form of slavery, which rather
| invalidates the idea of, rather than assuming the existence
| of, perfect airlines, perfect employees, or perfectly
| enforced (corporate) law.
|
| I mention this because...well, you might want to read more
| of Graeber's work (or even just more of _Bullshit Jobs_ )
| to understand why.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| David Graeber is an anarchist, his criticism of bullshit
| jobs is about sustaining the centralisation of power, not
| techbro idealism.
|
| There is no reason outside of power dynamics why airline
| desk staff need to exist to comfort disgruntled passengers,
| because the existence of disgruntled passengers who need to
| be shooed off is a consequence of the airline industry.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > is a consequence of the airline industry
|
| So then yes you are assuming that anarchism can wave a
| magic wand and make it so airlines never lose people's
| bags, or that it won't ever create any extra work to
| track down those bags.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| No, but that airlines hire essentially customer service
| reps to face the brunt of people's anger while the
| company changes nothing to prevent the problems is a
| classic corporate strategy. They exploit customers and
| neglect their responsibility and then hire some poor mug
| to get shouted at.
|
| I don't know if that's David Graeber's specific criticism
| but it is mine.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Don't assume vested interest, like techbros do. Graeber
| was an anthropologist, and the book builds on his work
| more than on his views.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I don't doubt that, but being an anarchist doesn't mean
| you can't criticise authority from an objective position.
| If anything, critiquing authority and power might lead
| you to both write this book, and take an anarchist
| position.
| orasis wrote:
| Play-to-Earn with real world earnings will never be sustainable
| given the state of the art in reinforcement learning.
|
| The RL game playing agent essentially becomes a form of NFT
| mining that no human could ever complete against.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| This reminds me of the last time I went to Vegas with my two best
| buds from college. I was a broke grad student, so I couldn't
| really do any of the entertainment stuff in the city. I also
| don't really like gambling, so I had a conundrum of how to spend
| the daylight hours, before the nightlife started up.
|
| We ended up sitting at the nickel slots, playing just enough to
| stay busy so we could flag down cocktail waitresses for comped
| drinks. If you were economical enough with your slots play, not
| selecting multiple lines or multipliers, it was a cheap way to
| drink.
|
| Pretty quickly, it occurred to me that I was doing a bullshit
| job. Why had I come to Vegas to feed a machine that wasn't even
| entertaining me? I felt like livestock.
|
| Eventually, I cracked to the peer pressure of my buddies and
| decided to play poker with them. I won about $700 as someone who
| had played maybe twice before in my life, but that's another
| story...
|
| Interestingly, one of the friends I was with was one of the first
| people I ever met to make money selling virtual goods. As a high
| school kid in 2001 or 2002 (well before the Second Life example
| the author cites in 2005), he made money selling Diablo II
| accounts he had beefed up in his spare time.
| mvkvvk wrote:
| NFT Pokemon actually sounds like a cool use of blockchain.
| However the game seems to focus more on the get rich aspect than
| the actual gameplay.
| ridiculousthrow wrote:
| api wrote:
| The problem with the bullshit jobs thesis is similar to this
| common saying in advertising: "I know I'm wasting 80% of my ad
| spend. I just don't know which 80%." The same principle likely
| applies to wages across the economy.
|
| I think it's rather obvious that a huge fraction of employment is
| worthless. The problem is determining which fraction that is.
| It's not obvious. Many jobs that look and feel like bullshit may
| have some hidden function within an organization that is
| essential (and may not even be the "primary function" of the job
| as per the job req), and many very important looking jobs may
| create little to no value. There are probably companies that
| could knock out the CEO but would have a tougher time without one
| of their office assistants, but where telling which office
| assistant this is would be almost impossible without spending
| months observing the intricate details of operations.
|
| The fact that markets are bad at optimizing out this obvious cost
| center makes me wonder if it might be "non-computable."
|
| The only way we know of to discover this is to use Darwinian
| methods, but this is incredibly destructive. Deep recessions take
| out a lot of good but not-yet-robust businesses along with the
| bad and the obsolete. The modern practice of pumping economies
| along forever and not allowing deep recessions probably leads to
| a ton of dead wood building up but it's also probably why we have
| progress in quantum computers, electric vehicles, and space
| flight among other speculative areas that would probably implode
| in a deep recession (without being specifically subsidized).
| Forest fires burn the dead wood but they also burn a shitload of
| trees, especially immature ones who don't have layers of flame
| retardant bark. Lots of old and injured animals die but so do the
| babies who can't run fast yet.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Also, many jobs are probably partially bullshit or mostly
| bullshit, but also have one critical (often undocumented)
| function wrapped into them that if eliminated, would cause
| enormous damage.
|
| Companies often barely have any idea of what employees spend
| the majority of their day doing. They are never going to catch
| all the little things.
| duxup wrote:
| It's also very "easy" to identify a BS job, especially when you
| don't know much about it.
| api wrote:
| Yup, and it gets worse when you consider that everyone is
| usually trying to make their job look important regardless of
| how important it actually is. It's likely that a deliberate
| attempt to weed out BS jobs would select for good fakers, ass
| kissers, and con artists and weed out a lot of heads-down
| productive people.
| dvt wrote:
| Play-to-earn will die a painful death, but the takeaway here
| (which this article dodges) is that players should own their in-
| game assets. This is really where blockchain comes into play.
| Diablo 3 tried to do this, but they were too early and too
| greedy. If done correctly, owning your digital items is certainly
| more preferable than not.
|
| Again, this is touched in half a paragraph, but this is the real
| revolutionary aspect of NFTs. And, paradoxically, it's nothing
| new: Steam store "items" are basically NFTs. Fortnite skins are
| basically NFTs. It's just that without a decentralized
| marketplace, you can't sell them.
| blueboo wrote:
| The article "dodges" the notion players should "own" their in-
| game items to the same extent you underplay the implications.
| consider what the article emphasises: the contradiction implied
| in a live game being rebalanced in real time, affecting "owned"
| assets.
|
| Do you really own it if the item's form, function, and even in-
| game existence persists only at the whims of a centralised
| authority--the game's administrators?
| dvt wrote:
| > Do you really own it if the item's form, function, and even
| in-game existence persists only at the whims of a centralised
| authority--the game's administrators?
|
| This happens literally _all the time_ with Magic cards, lol.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > This is really where blockchain comes into play. Diablo 3
| tried to do this, but they were too early and too greedy.
|
| Diablo 3's in-game real-money market wasn't based on a
| blockchain, and was doomed to failure for game design reasons
| alone.
|
| > And, paradoxically, it's nothing new: Steam store "items" are
| basically NFTs. Fortnite skins are basically NFTs. It's just
| that without a decentralized marketplace, you can't sell them.
|
| You can sell Steam in-game items just fine on the community
| market (https://steamcommunity.com/market/). You just can't
| cash that out to real money because Valve, quite sensibly,
| doesn't want to be classified as a money transmitter.
| soheil wrote:
| There is something really wrong about doing something that you
| know is complete garbage and yields no benefit to anyone else in
| terms of productivity. But after one level of indirection we see
| all sorts of tasks around us that people do and also benefit no
| one, for example when someone destroys a pallet of watermelons or
| fills up a swimming pool with orbeez that end up in garbage hours
| later. The person who cultivated the watermelons or the worker
| that toiled in the orbeez factory to make them saw the fruit of
| their labor yield no benefit to anyone else in terms on
| productivity. This type of task happens far too often.
|
| Only difference is, there is no masquerade in the NFT app a16z
| funded.
| exogeny wrote:
| Games that aren't fun are work. Axie, from all accounts, looks
| like work.
|
| On the flipside, there are tons of regulated games that are both
| fun and allow users to flex their niche knowledge, like FanDuel
| (sports), BigBrain (trivia), and so on.
|
| Just because Axie is a poorly designed game doesn't necessarily
| invalidated the larger point that jobs and income are changing,
| and gamification of skills is an interesting trend that is likely
| here to stay.
| duxup wrote:
| Sorry to get a bit off track:
|
| So is web3 just " blockchain related things " ?
|
| I feel like web3 as a term usage has exploded to the point that
| I'm not sure what people are talking about when they say "web3".
| beckingz wrote:
| web3 is whatever the newest startup is doing.
|
| But yes, blockchain.
| foobarian wrote:
| I feel like maybe people watched a little too much Silicon
| Valley and similar shows and some wires got crossed to make
| people think this is actually a workable mass market idea.
| IMHO.
| victorvosk wrote:
| Web3 as a concept is decentralization primarily, though it was
| invented by people championing crypto. The idea that the web
| can't be censored or controlled by gov't or large corporations.
| Everyone should be able to easily contribute and maintain web3.
| The blockchain is the "logical" place for it to live since a
| blockchain is just a distributed compute and database platform.
|
| There are several massive hurdles to overcome that non-
| technical people gloss over or flat out don't understand. Even
| if you store all the data in a distributed database, store all
| static files in distributed file systems, a single user would
| still need a single point of entry to access this network. It
| seems like a centralized DNS like system would still be needed.
|
| Even if there were multiple providers of this DNS like service,
| it would put the onus on the user to figure it out. This has
| never historically worked well for the average user. Also,
| internet access itself is still typically controlled by a few
| providers given a users area.
|
| The reality is web3 and crypto is putting too much
| responsibility on the user. Everyone uses gmail and google
| because its easy and effective and no one cares its
| centralized. iPhones are popular because they are easy and the
| average user doesn't care that Apple controls the ecosystem.
| beambot wrote:
| Generally refers to decentralized technologies that somehow
| benefit from blockchain-like data structures. For example, you
| can compost these three technologies to build a decentralized
| webserver.
|
| - Filecoin & AR Weave: decentralized file storage. Spend tokens
| to store files, earn tokens by storing others' files.
|
| - ENS (Ethereum Name Service): DNS-like system for addresses.
|
| - Smart Contracts of various sorts (e.g. Ethereum): Similar to
| perpetual AWS lambda functions. Spend tokens to publish & call
| functions; earn tokens by executing functions.
|
| The blockchain aspect is merely a way to have verifiable
| incentives without explicit trust between actors.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > you can compost these three technologies to build a
| decentralized webserver
|
| I don't know if you meant "compose" or "compost", but it
| works both ways.
| Dowwie wrote:
| Going to need to mulch more carbon-rich material and
| introduce digital worms to work through the pile
| Kiro wrote:
| > Gamers have a word, grinding, to describe repetitive tasks
| undertaken to gain some desired in-game goal, but are not fun in
| themselves.
|
| Is this actually true? The linked article doesn't say anything
| about it being fun or not. I love grinding and think it's fun in
| itself.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I agree. It's not a gamer word either. Derived from "the daily
| grind", it's just about lucrative but repetitive tasks.
| Sometimes they are fun but I also agree the connotation is that
| it is most likely boring unless specified otherwise.
| jonwalch wrote:
| Most of my gamer friends don't like grinding and usually stay
| away from "grindy" games.
| Kiro wrote:
| Just because most people don't like it doesn't make it
| intrinsically unfun. If the above definition holds true no-
| one would like it except masochists. Anyway, as a counter-
| point RuneScape has a great grind with a huge player base and
| I know a lot of people who love grinding.
| beckingz wrote:
| Certain jobs sufficiently far from the obvious value creation
| have a tendency to look useless.
|
| In many cases they are useless and could be bundled into other
| jobs, but when a job is over loaded there is efficiency to
| unbundling them. Factor in the communications synchronization
| overhead and it's no wonder that small organizations can perform
| incredible work. Large organizations have scale though.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| One of the interesting things about Graeber's typology is that
| it includes things that you wouldn't consider to be bullshit
| jobs. There's an entire category of his typology dedicated to
| jobs that _destroy_ productive output; like if a business were
| to hire lawyers to sue the pants off of competing businesses.
| They get a competitive advantage by _increasing_ everyone else
| 's compliance and legal costs.
|
| I believe this particular categorization could apply to game
| development in the context of NFT or microtransaction driven
| gameplay. The economies that these games provide are
| specifically engineered to increase user spend by targeting
| "whales". Someone being paid to play a game for someone else
| _is_ providing a valuable service; but the game doesn 't just
| exist naturally. It's designed. Building a game so that you
| _need_ to pay to skip the grind _is_ a bullshit job. And if
| that 's a bullshit job, then the people selling their Axies and
| other game resources have transitively bullshit jobs, even if
| their own job is not inherently bullshit.
| mattcwilson wrote:
| I think there's something to this comment and the one from
| zzbzq about Graeber's "canonical bullshit job." I'm also
| drawing some threads from Goedel Escher Bach.
|
| Perhaps the growth in the administrative sector is a new class
| of job, that results from scale, coordination costs, Metcalfe's
| law, and Goodhart's law.
|
| The job is to combat the diminishing returns on communication
| decay due to scale by measuring the system as a whole or in
| part and attempting to optimize that part.
|
| There is no "product" other than the change in metric selected.
| There is no external or intrinsic value other than whatever
| 2nd, 3rd, nth order effects the measurement focus has on actual
| observable inputs and outputs of the system.
|
| The job, in a GEB sense, is just a theorem that references some
| or all of the system itself, and which may not mean anything
| whatsoever outside the context of the system.
| beckingz wrote:
| Scale increasingly becomes constrained by organizational
| interfaces. At a certain point, trying to add people to an
| organization actually makes it less productive unless their
| contributions can be abstracted globally.
|
| At a certain extent, the system must become inhuman: metrics
| and interface contracts are needed to prevent overhead
| growth.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| My problem with these Play2Earn games is that it provides a dark
| motivation for kids to play them.
|
| Previously, you'd play something like Doom or Quake because you
| enjoyed it and you'd quit after an hour or two because it would
| rapidly become repetitive and boring. You knew deep down that you
| were wasting time on recreation and that you should probably do
| the things you should be doing (e.g. the dishes, reading a book,
| etc).
|
| Now, there's a small voice for players of these telling them that
| this time is productive. They're earning money and that's a noble
| goal to ourselves. Even worse are the games like League of
| Legends and WoW where there are professional scenes. It's very
| easy to deceive yourself into thinking you're just practicing
| those games in order to one day go pro.
| nightski wrote:
| I'd be careful telling people what they "should" and
| "shouldn't" be doing with their time based on your contrived
| opinions.
| frankbreetz wrote:
| Telling other people what they should and shouldn't do is the
| basis of society
| throwaheyy wrote:
| I'm fine with telling them that they shouldn't.
|
| We already went through all this with bs degrees that leave
| people in massive debt and without sufficient income to pay
| it back.
| stale2002 wrote:
| The point that the other person was making, is that if you
| are arguing that these "games" are actually a good/effective
| way of making money for kids, you are lying.
|
| That's the problem. The issue is they there could be people
| who are tricked into believing that this is an effective way
| of making money, when it is clearly not for most people.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Reading books and maintaining personal cleanliness are
| controversial activities now? In what clown world should
| anyone ever be advised to play video games instead of doing
| those things?
| Pxtl wrote:
| Pay hundreds of dollars to earn a few per day? This economy
| sounds more like Cutco more than any modern NFT thing.
| Liron wrote:
| Here's patio11's thread:
| https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1459682519360491523
|
| I was shocked to see A16z recently investing $150M in Axie
| Infinity and doubling down on their justification of play-to-earn
| as a coherent concept, as if it's not fundamentally a pyramid
| scheme. It's lowered my expectation of what passes for thought
| leadership in our industry.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Thought leadership smeadership.
|
| A16z's goal is to make money, lots of it. Shouldn't confuse its
| purpose by giving it other goals.
| laserlight wrote:
| According to Graeber, a job is bullshit when the one who does it
| thinks that the job is bullshit. By this definition, chores,
| menial tasks don't count as bullshit. I don't see any quote from
| players who call what they are doing bullshit.
| graphpapa wrote:
| I can't remember exactly but this seems like a
| mischaracterisation.
|
| I think it was termed more like "it is a bullshit job if the
| world would run just as well (or even better) if the job didn't
| exist".
|
| Still relies on self-assessment but isn't quite what you said.
| More based on some idea of "usefulness". Play to earn doesn't
| seem very useful.
| quadrangle wrote:
| You're right mainly. Self-assessment was a filter he used, it
| wasn't the definition in itself.
| laserlight wrote:
| It has been a few years since I read the book. But I recall
| very clearly that he states that the definition is very
| narrow and strict in order not to get into subjective
| arguments on whether a job is _necessary_ or _shouldn 't
| exist_. For instance, one could argue that the world would be
| better off without telemarketing, yet the argument doesn't
| make telemarketing a bullshit job. IIRC, military was another
| example from the book of such a case.
| laserlight wrote:
| To follow up with my own comment, here is the definition
| from the book:
|
| > Final Working Definition: a bullshit job is a form of
| paid employment that is so completely pointless,
| unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot
| justify its existence even though, as part of the
| conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to
| pretend that this is not the case.
| [deleted]
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Yeah this is a pyramid scheme, not a bullshit job
|
| It's as legit as someone who participates in an mlm . Its not
| bullshit
| bdr wrote:
| Slightly OT, but for the historical record:
|
| > People have made money by selling virtual goods acquired in-
| game at least as far back as Second Life in 2005.
|
| I saw it happening at least as far back as '98 in DragonRealms, a
| MUD and (when it moved off of AOL) one of the first online games
| with a monthly subscription.
| Kiro wrote:
| Yeah, I sold stuff in Ultima Online much earlier than 2005.
| Lazy research in this article.
| mosdl wrote:
| So instead of banning gold farming in their game, they just made
| it a feature and collect a %?
| brazzy wrote:
| The point seems to be that the game is _nothing but_ gold
| farming, and the only money going into the system comes from
| prospective gold farmers paying a participation fee.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| We should create a game like Axie infinity, but instead of making
| money from useless Axies you make it from writing code.
|
| And then since crypto is bad we just pay people with regular
| money instead.
|
| Also maybe have them sign a contract for working fixed hours
| and/or completing a project in X time. So you know, the project
| actually gets done.
| 58x14 wrote:
| That sounds great. I'll create a DAO to collect funds so we can
| create this game. What should we call it? How about Recursion?
| skybrian wrote:
| The next step would be for the company to automate those jobs by
| replacing the workers with npc characters who can grind for you.
|
| That would make the game "pay to win," which is presumably easier
| to implement if you do it that way to begin with.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| How is this not a Ponzi scheme?
| _jab wrote:
| The claim seems to be that the game will attract people who
| don't view the game as an income stream, but rather just as a
| game. They pay the entry fee, and then may also buy assets from
| other players, thus funding the play-to-earners.
|
| I think there's a slim chance this could be a viable business
| plan, but probably not in any socially-good way. The mobile
| games industry reaps a good chunk of its profits from "whales",
| customers who spend crazy-seeming amounts of money on games.
| Blockchain-based games may also be especially dangerous to
| young gamers who get access to a parent's credit card and rack
| up huge charges. This already happens in games like Fortnite,
| but whereas Epic Games can be pressured into giving refunds to
| parents when this happens, a blockchain offers no protection if
| the rules of the game don't allow for it.
|
| We're probably better off if it _is_ a Ponzi scheme.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| I love it.
|
| No one plays the game because it's fun now. But in the
| future, the game will be fun, and people will pay to play it.
|
| Right now, it's just crypto where you can spend your time AND
| money to get a return instead of just your money.
|
| Got it.
| [deleted]
| renewiltord wrote:
| So a Ponzi scheme works like this:
|
| * You take money from investors
|
| * You then claim that you are making money from some legitimate
| business
|
| * You return money to earlier investors by just feeding them
| the money later investors put in
|
| So who are the early investors here, what's the legitimate
| business, and how are we taking money from later investors to
| give to early investors?
|
| EDIT: Guys, it's not a zero-sum game. You can breed new axies,
| etc. By the logic espoused by everyone in the responses, the
| stock market is a ponzi scheme because later participants buy
| stock from earlier participants. This may be my fault with the
| defn lacking some things, but clearly the stock market isn't a
| ponzi scheme, so something is wrong.
| ragona wrote:
| Early investors: people who "invested" hundreds of dollars to
| play. Legitimate business: "we're a game studio." Later
| investors: newer players who see the earlier ones making
| money.
| [deleted]
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Read TFA. Your questions are all answered in it.
| foxfluff wrote:
| > So who are the early investors here
|
| "Gameplay requires the purchase of three Axies, which
| currently cost in the hundreds of US dollars each."
|
| > what's the legitimate business
|
| "By blurring the line between "player" and "worker", the game
| has effectively built a Ponzi scheme with built-in
| deniability. Sure, some users will be net gainers and other
| users will be net losers, but who am I to say the net losers
| aren't in it for the _joy of the game_? "
|
| So I guess the "legitimate business" is making the game
| interesting for people who.. enjoy it?
|
| > and how are we taking money from later investors to give to
| early investors
|
| I don't know how the in-game mechanics work but later
| investors also purchase Axies and somehow that money ends up
| in the hands of the former investors. Maybe not
| automatically, I guess it depends on what in-game actions you
| take, but given that you first have to invest before you can
| play...
| newaccount74 wrote:
| The investors are the players hoping to make money from the
| game. The players have to buy Axies to play the game.
|
| The "legitimate business" is playing the game to get more
| Axies that you can then sell.
|
| The later investors then buy Axies that the early investors
| earned by playing the game.
|
| As soon as exponential growth stops the system collapses.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| The economy is zero sum. The early investors are the people
| that bought in early and they cash out by selling to the
| later investors. The "legitimate business" claim is Axie
| itself and the claim that it can both reward investors who
| hold and rent Axies as well as pay people to play the game.
| An idea that only works if more people keep putting money in.
| To further this claim Axies developers make an awful lot of
| noise about how they are going to introduce new mechanics
| which will supposedly fix this.
| galago wrote:
| I'm not sure about this, but I think the correct term might
| be "negative sum." The winners gain less than the losers
| lost for the reasons you mentioned.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| I agree. To me its a Ponzi scheme in a gold farming disguise.
| Gold farming only works when the game is fun enough that people
| will buy gold to play with in it. In this game, everyone
| playing it is buying in for hundreds of dollars and most likely
| that is the only source of the payments that are going out.
| vsareto wrote:
| It probably is, but it's a Ponzi scheme with a potentially
| addictive lower layer in the form of a game, which is going to
| make previous ponzi scheme architects jealous.
|
| Me giving money to Bernie Madoff via wire transfer hoping for
| gains isn't really addictive. The graphics and gameplay of a
| game might be. If you happen to build a ponzi scheme into that
| game, you benefit from its addictive qualities.
|
| Keeping a healthy population of the lower levels of a ponzi
| scheme is key to keeping it going.
| lordnacho wrote:
| > I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs
| could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism
|
| But if we take Darwinian evolution as our analogy, there are
| plenty of strategies that essentially piggy back on other
| organisms. Cuckoo birds, intestinal worms, a whole coterie of
| sexual behaviors.
|
| It's also the everyday experience of just about everyone that
| they perceive certain others to not be contributing anything at
| all. The surprise is that some people are willing to admit they
| are one of those people as well. It's not hard to think of how
| this would work, either. Convince someone to hire you, and then
| don't contribute, while taking a salary. If it's hard or
| expensive to detect the non-contributor, there will be NCs in the
| organization.
| vsareto wrote:
| Capitalism has very little in common with Darwinism because of
| the nature of the rules involved. Darwinism has a lot of
| physical rules which you can't circumvent. Capitalism deals far
| more in social or soft rules which can be circumvented and give
| you an advantage if you aren't caught. And if you are caught,
| the punishment might only be a percentage of the total profits.
|
| I'm not going to stay alive because the universe forgot to
| enforce the dying part of me being mauled by a bear.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| > coterie of sexual behaviors
|
| Are you saying we can witness that in people too?
| lordnacho wrote:
| Hmm I think I meant menagerie. But yes, evolution and
| especially sexual selection creates a lot of interesting
| behaviors, and some of them a purely win-lose, and yes in
| people as well. There's a reason cheating on your partner is
| a trope of soap operas.
| boppo1 wrote:
| I hate when people refer to our regime of interest-rate
| intervention as capitalism. The primary feature of capitalism
| is price discovery, which we have intentionally given up.
|
| EDIT: If there are any economists out there who can point me in
| the direction of a primary source that elucidates the
| relationship between price discovery and interest rates in a
| way that will help me understand contemporary monetary policy
| as something other than political expediency, I would greatly
| appreciate it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > Web Two was don't be evil. Web Three is can't be evil. You bake
| it into the code that you can't be evil.
|
| Yikes. That's a philosophy that really misses the nature of evil.
| In fact, I think we're doing ourselves up for colossal failure if
| we assume we can create an unexploitable algorithm that we then
| cannot modify that can be crafted to be evil-proof.
| originalvichy wrote:
| It seems that after a few years of relative calm in the crypto
| scene (bitcoin just used to transact, mine or invest) the easier
| it got to roll-your-own-crypto the more magical ways we are
| finding uses for it. I had no idea this existed before.
| k__ wrote:
| A bit like social media points, right?
|
| Followers, likes, karma, all aren't directly worth anything. But
| it takes work to get them.
|
| I know a bunch of prominent internet people who don't make much
| money with this status, because it's not easy to monetize it
| without compromise yourself.
| badlucklottery wrote:
| Charlie Booker had a similar take back in 2013:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjGh_lE6EGY
| jayd16 wrote:
| Selling digital goods for real money is pretty well tread. What
| does web3/crypto add here?
|
| Game assets can't be used in another game. You need full support
| from the game developer. The devs could much more easily and
| cheaply sell the assets direct or support trading.
|
| If the game is distributed or has private servers or something
| that might warrant defi trades, but wouldn't gamers just hack
| their own items? If they control the server code, surely it's
| possible.
|
| Seems like a marketing gimmick at best. What am I missing?
| Calavar wrote:
| It is a marketing gimmick. Like the article says, the addition
| of NFTs is just a bunch of techno mumbo jumbo to build a facade
| of credibility and blind people to the fact that these games
| are digital Ponzi schemes.
| jonwalch wrote:
| I don't think you're missing a ton. Getting game developer buy
| in is definitely the biggest challenge.
|
| I think "GameFi" is the most compelling use case. Use your in-
| game items (NFTs) as collateral for a loan, or lend it to other
| players to use while you retain ownership. Game devs could
| build all this functionality themselves, but they get it for
| free if they don't take the walled garden approach.
| jayd16 wrote:
| You say free but they'll need to integrate with the chain for
| all transactions. Simple loot drops will need to be put on
| the chain. Seems pretty onerous compared to the normal
| implementation. Odds are they would need to duplicate all the
| functionality in game as well.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| >Games that maximize property rights (as Axie Infinity wisely
| hasn't) >are bound to be overrun with cheaters and bots, which in
| turn will >just bring down the value of in-game assets anyway.
|
| Bitcoin comes to mind as a good example. A the beginning there
| were geeks mining it on their gaming machines and buying
| expensive video cards to both play games and mine.
| Dowwie wrote:
| The next wave of exploitation in this web3 space will involve
| lending practices. Kids will pledge their digital assets as
| collateral to buy other goods on margin. Their assets will lose
| value in the market and the kids will receive margin calls to
| restore balances or forfeit everything in the game, including
| reputation.
| tduberne wrote:
| I did not read the book, but my understanding of "bullshit job"
| is a job that is useless to the entity paying for it: you could
| remove that person completely, and everything would continue to
| work. This seems very different from what is at play here: the
| game studio very carefully designed the game to attract those
| grinders, and this is how the studio makes money. The article
| clearly sees this as well, by labeling the game as a ponzi
| scheme.
| mherdeg wrote:
| Is this different from the phenomenon described at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming?
|
| Honestly it seems like a pretty great career -- you get to spend
| your time indoors, probably somewhere climate controlled with
| electricity and restrooms. This is way better than the workhouse.
|
| Whoever is buying these things as a collector is basically
| donating their wealth to others, like a kind of privatized
| welfare. If people are buying these things as a speculative
| investment, they're participating in a private lottery. That all
| seems ... fine?
| Retric wrote:
| AC costs money, in most of the world they would do without and
| have extra heat from the PC. Also, limited range of motion plus
| extremely long workweek quickly results in RSI.
| beambot wrote:
| This feels like a "let them eat cake" reply when compared to
| agrarian labor...
| Retric wrote:
| How much money people make is a separate question, but
| playing games is likely worse for the body than most forms
| agrarian labor. Excluding accidents with heavy machinery.
| beambot wrote:
| As someone who worked on a midwestern farm as a child, I
| will respectfully disagree with your assessment -- farm
| labor is significantly more harmful to your body than
| working at a computer.
| Retric wrote:
| I have also done both, computer work is only easier when
| you have a short work day. Try working a gold farmers
| 80-90 hour week and it will quickly wreck you.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| The article suggests that the game is currently only played by
| people hoping to make money. The money paid out to old players
| comes from new players.
|
| It's just a Ponzi scheme.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I wouldn't call it donating if they're grinding for it.
|
| Imagine you could go to a prison and get paid to break rocks
| all day for money whenever you want. OK, sure, the people doing
| it are doing it because they need it. But would you call the
| person running such an establishment charitable?
|
| It's just dirty, when you take out all the in between and just
| look at the ends of the process, it's basically paying poor
| people to waste their time because they need food because you
| get off on it.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Except that we end up spending a vast amount of human effort
| doing work that fundamentally doesn't need to be done. There's
| no actual economic output to paying people to break rocks.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| I guess it depends on the grind involved. Some streamers are
| paid to play games. They confess they don't always enjoy it
| or every game that people want to watch, but it seems better
| than some alternatives. And a few YouTubers I follow have
| admitted to less than stellar career prospects otherwise.
|
| Now if it's pure, unfun grind that only pushes numbers around
| in an MMO then I'd agree it's basically just outsourced
| cheating. And a net negative both because it compromises a
| social form of entertainment and doesn't produce anything
| else of tangible value.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| Exactly. One could make an argument that the work some users
| put in, once sold, result in value to the buyer, but that
| value isn't generated by the worker. The developers created
| the scheme and could deliver the value directly at no cost to
| all players, poor and wealthy, but instead chose to create
| meaningless work by making grinding opportunities.
| scatters wrote:
| I have the feeling that buyers feel they are getting more
| value if the item was "generated" by grinding than if it
| was created ab nihilo by the developers. Why, I have no
| idea.
| jbergqvist wrote:
| One could also argue that if the developers did that, the
| market value of the digital item in question would drop.
| The value that the buyer receives is grounded in the large
| time investment required to acquire the item in the game.
| Even though it is completely artificial, it makes the item
| more scarce and therefore more desirable to other players.
| I totally agree that the fact that this power is in the
| hands of the developers, though, makes these types of NFTs
| far from the decentralized digital goods they are claimed
| to be as pointed out by the author.
| nlitened wrote:
| Imagine there's a multi-billion dollar industry where some
| people record sound waves made with their vocal cords, and
| other people pay _real money_ monthly to have a chance to
| replay those waves for entertainment only.
| jayd16 wrote:
| The difference is that a game company could just sell gold
| directly. If music creation could be automated so easily
| we'd probably do that too.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Do you not understand that people find it pleasurable to
| listen to music, or what?
| bagels wrote:
| And, inexplicably, people find pleasure (or are merely
| addicted to) in digital coins in a game too.
| user-the-name wrote:
| The two are in absolutely no way whatsoever comparable,
| don't be ridiculous.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| Says who? Who are you to say that what amuses one person
| has more value than what amuses a different person?
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >Except that we end up spending a vast amount of human effort
| doing work that fundamentally doesn't need to be done.
|
| Who decides what work, "needs to be done"? I suppose you
| could argue that activities that create the necessities
| needed to survive (food, shelter, clothing), "need to be
| done", but everything else is simply a matter of choice.
| Economic output is a subjective, contrived metric.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| But there's an economic drain if you fire all the rock
| breakers, and they end up on the streets.
|
| With automation coming for most jobs, we can either live in a
| low to no work Utopia or a hypercapitalist hell. Given recent
| trends, my money is on hypercapitalist hell.
| nradov wrote:
| People keep claiming that automation is coming for most
| jobs, and yet we still don't have reliable, affordable
| robots that can do basic tasks like cooking a decent
| hamburger or stocking store shelves or snaking a plugged
| toilet. This belief in major automation advances is more
| like a religion than something grounded in hard science.
| Sure automation will gradually increase over time but it's
| going to be a long, slow grind.
| foxfluff wrote:
| This fits Graeber's thesis; "The book [..] makes the case
| that the ruling class stands to lose from the proletariat
| having extra free time on their hands"
| duskwuff wrote:
| It's different inasmuch as it's even stupider.
|
| Gold farming is, at least, based on the premise that there are
| people who are willing to pay other people money to perform
| repetitive actions in a video game for them. It's still kind of
| dumb and it has harmful effects on in-game economies, but at
| least there's some semblance of money being exchanged for goods
| and services.
|
| "Play to earn", on the other hand, is based on the premise of
| cutting out the middleman and having the game developer just
| straight-up hand players money (or something money-equivalent)
| for playing their game. How this is even supposed to work from
| an economic standpoint is a question that I've never seen
| adequately answered.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| The question is answered in TFA:
|
| > These "economic opportunities" are essentially a wealth
| transfer from new players to established ones. Gameplay
| requires the purchase of three Axies, which currently cost in
| the hundreds of US dollars each. Players who buy in treat
| this as an investment, since it's a necessary buy-in in order
| to work in the game.
|
| It sounds more like a Ponzi scheme in a Gold farming disguise
| to me.
|
| I'm very familiar with Gold farming from Eve Online, where
| selling game currency (ISK) was permitted via exchange of
| game time cards sold by the game's developer. There was
| always a secondary market for game time cards sold for real
| money and that was legal too. The reason it all worked is
| because playing the game was really fun, but required to
| grind to get ISK. People with more money than time would
| prefer to buy themselves new spaceships to get blown up in
| than grind for them.
|
| It really sounds though like Axie Infinity is not a fun game
| and _no one_ treats it as one. So it is something new.
|
| > it's hard to find any reviews on Axie Infinity as a game
| rather than as an income stream or speculative investment
| jakemal wrote:
| > It sounds more like a Ponzi scheme in a Gold farming
| disguise to me.
|
| I would agree with this if the primary income stream came
| directly from the increase in value of Axies as the game
| attracted more users. From my understanding, the income
| comes from acquiring and selling in-game currency rather
| than from the Axies themselves.
|
| Is this a bullshit job? Maybe. Ponzi scheme? I don't think
| so.
|
| If people are working this bullshit job, it means that this
| bullshit job is better than their alternatives. I'm not
| convinced the existence of these kinds of games is a net-
| negative.
| mminer237 wrote:
| The in-game currency's purpose is to breed new Axies
| though. If there wasn't increasing demand for Axies, SLP
| would be worthless.
| jakemal wrote:
| Is that the only use of the currency or just one possible
| use?
| mminer237 wrote:
| I have not played Axie Infinity, but to the best of my
| knowledge that is the only use of Smooth Love Potions.
| [deleted]
| ggm wrote:
| A reminder that the Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis at
| one point in his pre parliamentary career did extensive work on
| the economics of MMOs for valve, eve online.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| > David Graeber makes the case that a sizable chunk of the labour
| economy is essentially people performing useless work, as a sort
| of subconscious self-preservation instinct of the economic status
| quo.
|
| Isn't it unavoidable in a world with food surplus and automation?
| anm89 wrote:
| I still totally fail to understand this concept. Is there
| anything here beyond impotent whining? What are they proposing to
| do? They subjectively call it bullshit but other people choose to
| play totally free from compulsion.
|
| What should we do? Physically restrain them from playing?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| We should raise awareness that it's a scam so that reputable
| people don't fund and promote it. In particular, I hope they
| can be stopped from raising a series C, limiting their ability
| to keep the scam going once they exhaust the $150m A16z gave
| them.
| [deleted]
| victorvosk wrote:
| So many of these conversations can be broken down to the things
| you find valuable might not be the thing others find valuable and
| there is no right or wrong. You either get it or you don't. I
| have zero desire to collect model trains, but I understand some
| people do and there is probably value there in that community.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Meanwhile there are legit decentralized, fun, self hosted games
| whose hosts barely make any money to sustain their servers. But
| because they are truly decentralized, VCs won't touch them
| because they can't control them. I swear this web3 thing will die
| from lack of market fit
| xg15 wrote:
| > _We believe in a future where work and play become one._
|
| I'd like to nominate this statement as one of the most cynical
| sentences of the year.
| moneywoes wrote:
| If they can ban players fir cheating how is the game
| decentralized?
| brudgers wrote:
| For context, Graeber talking about Bullshit Jobs on BookTV:
|
| https://youtu.be/6eyaDHj5I5g
| Cypher wrote:
| I prefer it over the mobile microtransaction loot box culture of
| the last decade.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Have you played the game? Is it actually fun?
| 58x14 wrote:
| In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape
| account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to
| chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber
| in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve
| this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum.
|
| At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy
| websites that would buy and sell the in-game currency, gold
| pieces or GP. It was something like $10 to 1M GP. I could chop
| enough magic logs in about 4-6 hours to make $10.
|
| I had a breakthrough. What if I wrote a macro to record my cursor
| and clicks during my route from the 'bank' (where you can deposit
| any amount of any material) to the nearby respawning magic tree
| forest?
|
| Weeks went by and I had passive income. Runescape eventually
| introduced the Grand Exchange, a literal in-game stock market
| that allowed power users like me to sell much larger quantities
| of certain items instantly, across all Runescape servers
| (referred to as Worlds) simultaneously. This required a
| standardized pricing mechanism, like an order book, where prices
| of any item would fluctuate based on buy and sell orders.
|
| Suddenly, I now could see a +-10% change on the value of my
| digital assets, on which my passive income was built.
|
| I could go on; Runescape in fact taught me much about economics.
| What's extraordinary is selling Runescape gold led me to Bitcoin,
| and I've watched cryptocurrency for nearly a decade, seeing
| trends from a MMO propagate throughout the world. It seems human
| nature to innovate and stagnate, and the more immediate our
| collective feedback loops, the quicker these cycles are.
| M5x7wI3CmbEem10 wrote:
| how did you find btc via rs?
| danShumway wrote:
| I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of
| thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game
| is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money
| to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so
| grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated
| scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to
| do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of Runescape was
| bad; people were willing to pay $10 of real money to remove 4-6
| hours of gameplay from the game.
|
| Well frankly, that's 4-6 hours of gameplay should never have
| been in the game in the first place. Players should not feel
| bored playing your game for that long, certainly not bored
| enough to pay money to get out of it.
|
| I have no doubt that learning how to exploit these systems was
| really fun for people, because learning how to exploit systems
| and build macros and read economic signals and avoid detection
| from a company is genuinely really interesting, fascinating
| work. It's just a shame that the only way Runescape could
| (inadvertently) enable that experience for people was to make a
| crappy grind process for an even larger portion of their
| playerbase.
|
| I can't get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is
| describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories
| of this because they were playing an entirely different much
| more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that
| Runescape's designers had built and intended for the majority
| of their playerbase.
|
| And I think that perspective is worth keeping when we look at
| play-to-earn games. These are boring games, and some people are
| doing some fun economics stuff on top of them. That doesn't
| make the core gameplay any less boring though, and the fun
| economics stuff only works because a lot of other players are
| having a miserable time with the intended mechanics. I don't
| like praising a design ethos that says that a nontrivial
| portion of your players will be bored and will pay someone else
| to play the game for them.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > is it good that a game is so boring that players are
| willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?
|
| The difference between now and then is that people had to go
| to third parties; nowadays the game developer themselves will
| sell you the skip. Or a chance to gamble at a boost.
|
| Some of these mechanics are "compelling", in a very visceral
| sense - they compel people to spend time or money, in a way
| that isn't quite describable as fun. And yet creating an
| obsession and a goal and providing a way to grind or spend to
| that goal is popular.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| While I personally agree with your view that gameplay should
| always be actually fun, I think that misses the magic of
| games for a significant population of gamers.
|
| Is most of your real day-to-day life truly "fun" in a game-
| like sense? Most people would say "no", X hours in a day is a
| lot of time to be consistently having fun, yet a lot of
| people would still describe their lives as "rewarding" and
| therefore worthwhile. In fact, the harder your life is, the
| more rewarding it can be.
|
| These games aim to be "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile.
| In many ways, these types of games offer an alternative world
| and life that's more rewarding than reality. The parallels
| with real life are direct and intentional: "grinding" is like
| real work that earns you fungible profit that you can then
| trade to skip other types of work that you don't like to do.
| This is a proven loop of reward in reality and it works in
| games too, being consistently "fun" isn't the only way for a
| game to satisfy players. I can't speak to Axie Infinity which
| seems like it's not even well developed to that extent, but
| for other games in the field these grinds aren't exactly a
| failure of design, they're effective at constructing a life-
| like reward system that doesn't solely rely on "fun".
|
| Of course the elephant in the room is that this "reward" is
| artificial, hence the whole article about this being a
| bullshit job. I personally avoid these types of games
| (basically all MMOs) for this reason and I don't see how web3
| makes any of it better. But I find it hard to criticize it
| objectively. I think real life is bullshit anyway, so the
| cheap imitation of life that these games offer isn't always
| completely worse. I can see why many people willingly buy
| into it.
| redisman wrote:
| That's a very romantic view of the goals of game design. For
| a live service game the metrics to hit are mainly retention
| and monetization. Whether something is subjectively fun
| doesn't really come into the picture
| nohr wrote:
| Runescape never intended folks to hit that high a level. Two
| brothers made the game and they just kind of filled the
| endgame levels never expecting anyone to reach it. Later,
| they added more and more content to fill those later levels.
| So it also suprised them I guess.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I wouldn't think of a game like Runescape as one thing, but
| more of a collection of many things.
|
| What you pay for is the ability to skip the parts of the game
| you don't like, so you can focus on the parts of the game you
| do like. Ideally everyone would like everything you make, but
| _that_ feels more like a naive way of thinking than to worry
| about people wanting to skip parts of your game.
|
| As long as "pay to skip" doesn't become "pay to win", I'd say
| a game is probably fine, overall, if people _are_ enjoying
| substantial portions of that game, even if they 're not
| enjoying all of it.
| cardosof wrote:
| I believe this is what happens with any open world MMO.
| There's no storyline to finish, there's no ending, and game
| devs have incentives to keep players playing forever (the
| more hours a player plays, the more likely he will spend more
| money).
|
| There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content
| and/or grinding mechanics.
|
| Grinding mechanics are way, way easier to create. You can
| even reuse sprites and just change names - a lv10 tree, a
| lv50 tree, a lv100 tree. Real content is hard to do, requires
| imagination, development, testing.
|
| So most open world games will have a high grinding/content
| ratio. But, as lame as it sounds, some people do like it. I'm
| guilty of playing a RuneScape-like game for mobile (Ancients
| Reborn). Things are slow and you need hours and hours to
| raise skills but, even though it's arguably boring, I find it
| relaxing. And there's pvp and talking to fellow players to
| keep it fun. So, in the end, I agree with you it sucks to
| have a game some players pay to not play it and others have
| fun cheating it, and it's a cheap design choice, but there
| are some people find it relaxing to watch a little toon chop
| down a magic tree.
| thombat wrote:
| Now you've made me wonder: those hours I spent mesmerised
| by watching the colourful display of Windows 95 defragging
| the disc, would I have paid a monthly subscription for it?
| What if they'd added achievements, or leveling up?
| "Congratulations! Your wizard can now restructure directory
| chains!"
| jonathan-adly wrote:
| Very similar story here.. I had a few party hats in Runescape
| which made the whole NFT thing and to a lesser extent Bitcoin
| so much easier to understand.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I still don't get it. We already sold digital assets so why
| do we need NFTs or Blockchain? What does it add here?
| KarlKemp wrote:
| You need NFTs to have something to trade with your
| cryptocurrencies. And you need cryptocurrencies to trade
| NFTs.
| wyre wrote:
| NFTs are the equivalent of decentralized RS party hats.
| jonathan-adly wrote:
| Party hats served no purpose whatsoever in the game except
| as a status symbol (arguably even!). Yet, was worth a lot
| of money in the game (and a god sum in real life for a high
| schooler)
|
| Humans are emotional animals, utility is a very poor
| approximation of value.
| smolder wrote:
| A somewhat hard to erase record of which url "belongs" to
| whom. That, and it gives them the appearance of having some
| high tech magical properties that will lead to an explosion
| in value, helping to justify asking prices to the marks.
| gjs278 wrote:
| wswope wrote:
| Similar to your story, I learned how to program by writing
| Runescape botting scripts.
|
| Fast forward to today, and my hobby tech project for the past
| few months has been building a OSRS market-intel website for
| trading on the Grand Exchange. Great toy market that eliminates
| a lot of the complexity of "real-world" economics. Funny how
| outsized that damn game's influence has been on the world.
| rapind wrote:
| In my early 20s I played an MMO called Asherons Call. I
| discovered a vendor in one high level area that would sell bows
| for less than a specific vendor in a low level area would buy
| them, netting you a small margin per bow.
|
| Being a programmer I wrote a script that used two different
| teleport skills (lifestone and portal recall I think?) and a
| bit of movement and clicking based on pixel (Color) matching to
| deal with latency, tweaking it over time, and started printing
| in game money. I would come home from work to a backpack full
| of D notes (unit of currency I adapted my script to convert).
|
| Then I would sell these D notes on eBay. Did this for a few
| months. First month I made over 7k USD (I shit you not). 2nd
| month about 3.5k, maybe 1k third month, so basically the market
| collapsed and I moved on (to other fun exploits... once you've
| been bitten by the exploit bug...).
|
| In retrospect I regret it.
|
| I'm a total hypocrite saying this, but I think this sort of
| crap has ruined MMOs, and gotten far more advanced and
| efficient over the years.
|
| The fun I had in AC before I started doing this stuff is
| something I wish more people could experience, but I suspect
| has been lost.
| kbenson wrote:
| > I think this sort of crap has ruined MMOs
|
| Once you start allowing (or failing to prevent) real world
| transactions from altering the play of the game, which is
| really hard to do while still allowing any sort of item/money
| transfer between players, some subset of the player base will
| view their effort as devalued. Some other part of the player
| base will be delighted that while they don't necessarily have
| the time to put into the game, they can still get help
| progressing. There are of course the fringes of those that
| devote themselves to supporting this market or exploiting the
| market to support their power fantasies (which of course
| include flexing that power on other players).
|
| There are valid uses for that market though, such as those
| aforementioned players that don't have time but would like to
| not be stuck for inordinate amounts of time at certain power
| levels. Basically, the same reason some games have difficulty
| levels. Some people want the challenge, others just want to
| experience the game.
|
| > In retrospect I regret it.
|
| It's sort of like allowing yourself to use a cheat in a game
| the first time through. If you take away a significant
| portion of the challenge when that's one of the things you're
| there for, the game can become much less fun. Other times, it
| just becomes a game within a game where you're playing market
| trader or whatever, which is fun while money/resources are
| still scarce, but then less fun after they aren't because of
| your wealth, and then you return to the main game to find
| it's less fun too.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > and gotten far more advanced
|
| In some cases advanced is debatable . Chinese prisoners
| forced to farm wow gold...
|
| https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/chinese-
| pr...
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Yes but games now actively have to fight this or they become a
| Money transfer agent and then you have to comply with anti
| money laundering laws.
|
| I think that Bitcoin and Ethereum tie a lot of things together
| that make them weaker but are great technological achievements.
| Eventually governments will regulate them properly and the
| whole environmental impact needs at least a layer two solution.
| Kevin_S wrote:
| RS was the perfect game for me and dramatically changed my
| life. Started when I was 12, played for YEARS slowly getting
| better.
|
| Discovered staking and scamming at the duel arena. Invented a
| new scam and made bils. Made a sizeable chunk over a couple
| years (enough to pay all my bills in college and a LOT of beer
| money). Got into botting with some friends, made a little money
| doing that too.
|
| My experience with RS led me to an interest in economics, and
| I'm now an accounting PhD student about to graduate. My bro got
| into coding bots, and is now an SWE doing high level work.
|
| I love the game to pieces, and it isn't because I made money
| playing.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Discovered staking and scamming at the duel arena. Invented
| a new scam and made bils. Made a sizeable chunk over a couple
| years (enough to pay all my bills in college and a LOT of
| beer money)
|
| Do you feel any remorse or regret about scamming people out
| of thousands of dollars? I am a bit surprised that you are
| bragging about this sort of unethical\illegal behavior on an
| account directly tied to your real world identity.
| whatshisface wrote:
| RuneScape was so famous for player scams it's a miracle
| anyone was willing to open the trading window at all.
| redisman wrote:
| I traded custom scripts on a IRC channel. People would pay me
| with party hats and Santa hats which were some of the most
| ridiculously priced assets in the game.
|
| The macro client even had a captcha queue where other miners
| could earn credits by filling out the captchas other players
| were getting and then use the credits to have other people fill
| out their captcha. This way you could leave it running all
| night as long as you did your part
| originalvichy wrote:
| I wonder if we'll have politicians and political philosophers
| in the near future who will credit MMO games for awakening
| their keen eye on societal issues.
|
| MMO worlds and their economies taught many how the basics of
| our economy works. As a kid you got exposed to virtual versions
| of negative aspects of free markets that went against the
| meritocratic ethos of the game. (Especially if you were one of
| the kids not permitted to use money to buy virtual currency.)
| bserge wrote:
| tmp_anon_22 wrote:
| Nitpicks because this game was my childhood. I totally support
| your sentiment though.
|
| > It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this
| skill level
|
| * 97 logs (30 minutes)
|
| * 293 oaks (1 hr)
|
| * 714 willows (2.5 hr)
|
| * 19,246 maple (very inefficient compared to willow cutting
| rate - 60 hour). If you did yews it would be many hundreds of
| hours.
|
| About 70 hours done inefficiently.
|
| > What if I wrote a macro
|
| Macros were fine but easily detected due to the repeated
| patterns. Botting in general was the wild west in this game
| from about 2008 - ~2014. Interesting how botting numbers
| drastically inflated player counts and engagement and the
| company Jagex became a private equity darling getting bought
| and sold several times, its almost like they had an incentive
| to keep the practice going.
|
| > Economics
|
| Absolutely. I learned devops managing really inefficient gold
| farms that got free servers from the Azure promotions when
| Microsoft cloud launched.
| 58x14 wrote:
| Delightful, I very nearly stopped my stream of consciousness
| to check the numbers, I wondered if anyone else would. It
| seems many of us share nostalgia around RS.
| exdsq wrote:
| When I get really bored I create a new account for fun. I
| normally realize it's a waste of time and stop after about
| 6 hours of clicking trees or ores lol. However it's always
| cool to see it's still there and normally changes quite a
| bit every time I go back to it. Skills go to 120 nowadays
| for example!
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| You should look into the Old School Runescape game mode.
| Someone just made a really captivating series limiting
| his character to just one region of the game: https://www
| .youtube.com/watch?v=rk5XuqLrf3U&list=PLWiMc19-qa...
| wswope wrote:
| > Botting in general was the wild west in this game from
| about 2008 - ~2014.
|
| There's a weird, secret history around Runescape botting that
| I really hope gets told in full one day.
|
| Essentially, the biggest and best botting client from the
| 2008-2011 era was Powerbot, later rebranded RSBot. It was
| written and managed mostly by some CS student from the UK,
| who went by the handle Jacmob, and used some bytecode editing
| + reflection to bind game objects directly, meaning that it
| allowed full interactivity with the underlying game, rather
| than just a simple image recognition and mouse control
| framework.
|
| During this era, Jagex (makers of Runescape) made some big
| efforts to combat the botting. They started using obfuscators
| to make reverse engineering the bytecode harder, and reworked
| the handling of all String objects internally to mask them.
| There were more efforts, of varying success, but without
| fail, this one guy would have the botting client (and by
| extension, the whole botting ecosystem) back online in a week
| or so.
|
| Flash forward to 2011, and Jacmob starts teasing something
| big for his RSBot 4.0 release: a "web-walking" API that would
| allow script writers to input any two positions on the world
| map, and have the botting client find them a path there,
| navigating through buildings, portals, teleports along the
| way. This was going to be an absolute game changer - script
| writing required insane attention to detail, trial and error,
| and tedium to navigate the world map in a slightly-
| randomized/hard-to-detect way. And yet a week or so before
| the big release... boom, another big effort comes from Jagex
| to stop the injection clients: the Great Bot Nuke of 2011.
|
| This was different from the prior attempts by Jagex. Radio
| silence from Jacmob and the RSBot team, which was weird given
| the pending release. As the dust settled over the following
| weeks, it comes out that Jacmob, King of the botting
| community, has become Mod Jacmob, employee of Jagex, with
| very little fanfare both then and ever since. RSBot 4.0 was
| not to be.
|
| Jacmob left the company several years later, but led their
| efforts through 2014 to combat botting, with great success.
| There's very little information publicly available, but I
| strongly suspect he was using the obvious strategies of
| looking at probability distributions for click positioning on
| game objects and delays between certain behaviors to spot
| automation.
|
| Jagex's operations have grown much sloppier after his
| departure, but the scene has never returned to its former
| glory pre-2011. One nerdy, talented, quiet figure was
| responsible for so much of the Runescape community's
| development - and yet you'd never know it without having been
| there yourself. Quite a world we live in.
|
| (@Jacmob, if happen to read this - can I interview you pls
| <3?)
|
| Edit: this is all from memory, I'm probably bungling the
| details in quite a few places.
| stnikolauswagne wrote:
| For those interested, here is a pretty well produced video
| on the situation:
|
| https://youtu.be/4ELRFROUf64
|
| One thing that was left out in your summary is how jacmob
| was hired: Shortly after the Bot Nuke he showed up at the
| annual convention of Jagex and showed off his (still
| working) new Bot to the one of the heads of Jagex, who
| ended up hiring him.
| webinvest wrote:
| The Youtuber Colonello also has a lot of good videos on
| this topic
| wswope wrote:
| OH MY GOD. Thank you, sincerely, for the link!!
|
| I left out the hiring story because it sounds so
| apocryphal I was sure I'd made it up or was embellishing
| my memories. So much niche drama I'd completely forgotten
| about.
| paulluuk wrote:
| This is great, thanks for sharing!
| asenna wrote:
| So glad you shared this story. Runescape was my childhood
| as well. Would love to hear from Jacmob if he ever sees
| this.
| yob28 wrote:
| tfang17 wrote:
| Axie is built on Ethereum, meaning in-game assets (NFTs) are
| technically transferrable off-platform.
|
| Vitalik (creator of Ethereum) attributed one of his reasons for
| creating Ethereum to Blizzard taking away one of his in-game
| items in World of Warcraft in 2010:
|
| "I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where
| I went to school. I happily played World of Warcraft during
| 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from
| my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep,
| and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can
| bring. I soon decided to quit."
| kranke155 wrote:
| Pretty sure Axie has its own blockchain
| robryan wrote:
| No gameplay balancing by design sounds terrible. Release one
| bad overpowered item or spell and the game is forever ruined.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| The thing I really like about this article is that, at least in
| my mind, it really helped me clarify what I think of as "Bullshit
| Jobs". It's not so much "do you consider your job useless", but
| it's more along the lines of "Is your job set up to fulfill tasks
| that were, generally, _arbitrarily_ designed by some gatekeeper?
| "
|
| A great example of this is tax departments at large companies
| that look for tax avoidance strategies. On one hand, these
| strategies can save companies many millions of dollars, but on
| the other, they really produce nothing of value and are just a
| product of the complexities of a (human designed) tax system.
| Lots of regulatory compliance work also goes into this bucket. I
| wouldn't say _all_ of it, because there are definitely
| regulations that _do_ actually make companies safer /more
| transparent/etc., but anyone who has had to fill out a page after
| page after page "security questionnaire" _knows_ at least half of
| it is bullshit that nobody is going to read in the first place.
| Sometimes I 've been tempted to just add "Mickey Mouse" answers
| just to check if anyone sees it. Writing something _that nobody
| ever reads_ seems like it 's hard to believe that's anything else
| _except_ bullshit.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > On one hand, these strategies can save companies many
| millions of dollars, but on the other, they really produce
| nothing of value and are just a product of the complexities of
| a (human designed) tax system
|
| Businesses that spend less money on taxes can spend more money
| on expenses, such as payroll and higher quality materials, or
| it can allow them to sell products/services at a lower price,
| providing a competitive advantage.
| stickfigure wrote:
| After seeing the word "Ponzi" haphazardly misapplied to so many
| different things in the tech space[1], it's incredibly gratifying
| to see it used here properly!
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29698967
| paulgb wrote:
| Thanks! I share your frustration :)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26808561
| scotty79 wrote:
| Such games are online games where other players are part of the
| game challenge. Some players want to play those game so much that
| they are willing to spend insane amounts of money on this game.
| But if the only users of the game were those players the game
| wouldn't be as fun for them. So the game needs to incentivise
| players that that don't want to play it that much or at all.
|
| Most of the games manage this by offering free version of the
| game to anyone willing to play. It's not as good as the version
| paid consumers get but it's something.
|
| The game mentioned in the article went the step further, not only
| does it offer some entertainment for people for free, but pays
| them out of profits gained from the paying players.
|
| So basically gamers that earn money in that game provide
| meaningful service for paying players by working as opponents for
| them that enhace their entertainment. It's less bulshity job than
| many real ones.
| bgilroy26 wrote:
| "Growth-Dependent Economy" is a nice turn of phrase
| pezzana wrote:
| > In a crypto economy crowded with vapourware and alpha-stage
| software, Axie Infinity stands out. Not only has it amassed a
| large base of users, the in-game economy has actually provided a
| real-world income stream to working-class Filipinos impacted by
| the pandemic. Some spend hours each day playing the game, and
| then sell the in-game currency they earn to pay their real-world
| bills. That's obviously a good thing for them, but it also
| appears to be a near-Platonic example of Graeber's definition of
| a bullshit job.
|
| That part about the pandemic might be the most important thing in
| the article. Would something like this have taken off had
| pandemic restrictions not wrecked the Philippine economy?
|
| A glance at the exchange rate for the Smooth Love Potion token
| shows a vertical surge right as lockdowns started to be imposed,
| followed by a 90% crash that started in around July of this year:
|
| https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/
|
| The start of the crash coincides with the start of noticeably
| higher CPI in the US and well-known product demand shock. That
| shock must have put higher upward pressure on demand for labor in
| the developing world, making Axie less appealing.
|
| I can't help but think of this as a preview into a future world
| in which automation and economic stagnation renders ever larger
| parts of the real economy ineffective at supporting a living
| wage.
|
| This kind of bullshit job offers a wealth transfer mechanism from
| those who have it to those who don't, with financial speculation
| being the conduit. Universal Basic Income is another path.
| Revolution is a third option.
| danShumway wrote:
| Everything old is new again. You could go back and look over the
| game design discourse about pay-to-win games and
| microtransactions and see the same discussions about how these
| systems would influence players and designers. You could go back
| and look at the discussions around Facebook social games back
| when they were a big thing. And all of those arguments still hold
| up today.
|
| Play-to-earn games are the same system, just with a bit of a
| pyramid scheme glued on top so that players will think they're
| part of the grift.
|
| What players of these play-to-earn games are hoping is that the
| grind in the game is so heckin awful and unpleasant that other
| players will pay someone else in order to skip that. But I don't
| think I'm unique in saying that I personally like my games to be
| fun, and I think that maybe something is going wrong with a game
| design process when a game is so much of a chore that people are
| paying to skip the game. Imagine making a movie where people
| didn't give you money to see it, but to _stop seeing it_ :). That
| 's the play-to-earn model, making something so artificially
| unpleasant and badly designed that players believe there's value
| in making the game shorter and will literally hire someone else
| to play it for them.
|
| And this is not a new thing, you can go back to the grinding
| process in Runescape, to Cow Clickers on Facebook, it's the same
| grift over and over just in different decorative hats and with
| different little sparkly jpegs. It's always the same proposition:
| do something that's been made artificially boring and hopefully
| you or someone else will think there's value in paying someone
| real money to skip it.
|
| ----
|
| Which I guess live your truth if that's what you want out of
| games, but I personally like games that make me excited to play
| them or at least give me some kind of meaningful emotion, where I
| play them because I like feeling that emotion and because the
| gameplay is fun.
|
| Incredibly, it turns out there are designers who are somehow
| through some strange magic able to design games that are so fun
| that they don't even need to bribe players into playing them.
| Their games are so fun that people actually (get this) pay the
| designers money to be able to play them _more_ , not less. It's
| the complete inverse of the play-to-earn model where actually all
| of the players in the game enjoy what they're doing, and the game
| isn't just a platform for the company or for a subset of players
| to make a job out of extracting profit from another part of the
| playerbase's boredom, because in these games nobody in the
| playerbase is bored.
|
| If you've never tried one of these games in the "fun" genre
| before, you've got to check them out, they're really something
| else.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I'm a bit of a fan of the whole cryptocurrency thing, the early
| scope of the concept anyway, replace money, programmatic
| agreement enforcement, creating financial assets that can't be
| controlled, incentivizing things that need incentivizing and all
| that. It's interesting stuff.
|
| But this whole metaverse and play to earn is obvious nonsense.
|
| But then, if you show me a slot machine and explain it to me in
| plain English, that it pays out less than you put in, that it is
| designed to addict you, that you sit there sticking quarters in
| and pulling a handle all day, I'd laugh at you before I stuck a
| dollar in the thing. But people do. All the time. So I'm not so
| sure this nonsense is going to crash and burn, but I'm certain it
| isn't worthwhile in the least.
| nlh wrote:
| A thought exercise you should undertake if you're thinking about
| / talking about crypto/NFT/web3-related projects: If the
| financial instrument that underlies the project were to stop
| going up in value XX% per month, would you still be interested in
| the project?
|
| I do this a lot because I've made the conscious (and perhaps
| financially foolish) choice to stay away from everything
| crypto/blockchain related (for now, at least). So I have some
| perspective in being able to ask myself "Why is this
| interesting?" without any emotional-financial attachment. I do
| this little exercise every time I read about some new brain-
| twisting scheme to move money around and capture some of the
| XX%/month rise.
|
| Play-to-earn seems to fit the same mold: You can talk all you
| want about how play-to-earn is "the new new" and how it's helping
| people out of poverty and changing the dymanics of gaming and
| yadda yadda yadda. But just ask yourself: If the money music
| stopped tomorrow, would you play the game?
|
| Is there a "there" there without an underlying token that's gone
| up XX% in the last N months and everyone hopes will still go up
| XX% in the next N months?
|
| It sounds like the answer, at least when it comes to Axie
| Infinity, is no. It doesn't sound fun. It doesn't sound
| compelling. It DOES sound like an opportunity for people to
| extract money from the crypto system that's fundamentally based
| on the assumption that the crypto system will continue rising in
| value forever.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| I did a report on this game for a client a few months back --
| the amount of daily earnings a player can expect has crashed
| significantly over the past few months, and it's only gotten
| worse ever since.
|
| https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1459191090100244483
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Is there a there there without an underlying token that's
| gone up XX% in the last N months and everyone hopes will still
| go up XX% in the next N months?
|
| Alternatively, even simpler: _where is the money coming from_?
| A bunch of people playing a game are a closed system, and no
| value is created by playing the game. If the only reason why
| players are earning money from this game is because more people
| are continually buying into the game and entering that system,
| that sounds more like a pyramid scheme than anything.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Money doesn't have to come from anywhere. Sometimes new value
| is created and the money is brand new. This is how GDP grows.
|
| In the case of BTC, it's pretty clear that a huge portion of
| the market cap didn't come from anywhere. It's new capital.
| That doesn't mean it can't go to 0 and vanish overnight. But
| it does mean that play to earn games don't always need money
| coming in to pay out.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Where the money was coming from when Facebook, Google,
| Youtube, Twitter etc were really good places that were free
| to use? They all were working to "make the world a better
| place" and not making money as they were burning billions
| each year, challenging the traditional and profitable
| companies. With Amazon prices were amazing, you had unlimited
| rights and not only buying but also selling was great. Bezos
| was worth quite a much but his company never made any profit
| up until a few years back.
|
| The news business was destroyed in the process, just as the
| retail and once the establishment lost its ground the money
| began poring in. From 90's up to late 2000's the internet was
| amazing as everything was paid by people who were about to
| reap their investment back a decade later.
|
| My point is, following the money is tricky. Maybe we are at
| the verge of another change where the costs are payed by
| crypto bros who will be splitting countries and starting wars
| once they are done growing the landscape.
| [deleted]
| 542458 wrote:
| > Where the money was coming from when Facebook, Google,
| Youtube, Twitter etc were really good places that were free
| to use?
|
| I don't think this is very mysterious. It's coming from
| investors who are spending money in the expectation of
| future profits as the business scales and reaches greater
| efficiencies and increases monetization.
|
| In the case of this cryptocurrency there's no obvious point
| where these tokens suddenly become useful. People only buy
| them because somebody else will be willing to buy them
| later (which, of course, relies on ever-increasing amounts
| of money entering the system). With a stock you are at
| least theoretically anchored to real world value, since you
| can buy out a company with stocks and then liquidate the
| company's assets.
| mrtksn wrote:
| All these coins and projects have a mission statement and
| high level overview on how they think it will be useful
| in the future. It's up to you to believe them but they do
| have a proposal.
|
| The stocks are more opaque in that regard, they are
| required to publish some declaration and financial
| disclosure but explaining why you need to invest in that
| company stock often comes down to CEO's appearing in the
| press. Countless internet ventures died in the process.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| This is what people don't seem to understand about BitCoin.
| It is cashflow negative, Money has to keep coming in to keep
| the price up due to paying miners. It is totally fine if you
| think BTC is better than the USD or Gold for whatever reason.
| But Bitcoin is still cashflow negative. You have to keep
| pumping money into it to keep up its value. Where is that
| money going to come from? Is it coming from Tether? Is it
| coming from people looking to make quick money? And when BTC
| hits 1M/coin, then what? You still need more money coming in
| to keep it above 1M.
| Animats wrote:
| Bitcoin has a use case for money laundering, tax evasion,
| evading China's exchange controls, and drugs. That market
| turned out to be larger than expected.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| I must admit I don't understand why it is "cashflow
| negative". I'm not invested in any crypto, but I have
| thought about it, and my casual thoughts have come to the
| opposite conclusion. The higher the price of a
| cryptocurrency, the greater the interest in mining and
| investing. It seems like a positive feedback loop to me.
| Why is it not?
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Imagine if you had the option of buying a piece of gold
| or a piece of land with good irrigation and good soil.
| You can plant vegetables on the land and sell those
| vegetables for other people to eat. Therefor your
| investment is generating profit and "cashflow". Gold on
| the other hand just sits there, and you may want to keep
| it in a safe at a bank and the bank will charge you a fee
| for storage making it negative cashflow.
|
| The price of gold or land or BTC can go UP or Down, but
| that depends on market demand of that asset. The nice
| thing about owning the farm is that even if the value of
| land goes down you can still sell your vegetables or eat
| them to stay alive.
| WJW wrote:
| For Proof-of-Work coins, the miners need significant
| amounts of electricity. Electricity is not free, so
| maintaining the network costs a significant amount of
| money. This money is "reimbursed" to them through mining
| rewards, but since electricity companies typically can't
| be paid in cryptocurrencies the miners will need to sell
| (a part of) their mining reward to pay the power bill.
| This means that there is always a money outflow
| proportional to the hashrate, which somehow has to be
| made up from money inflows from users.
|
| A cryptocurrency without users putting in "new" money
| will slowly bleed out through electricity costs. This
| will become even more "fun" in the future as all coins
| will eventually be mined and the ginormous electricity
| bill will need to be paid through transaction fees alone.
| This is one of the main reasons Proof-of-Stake is getting
| so much research btw, since it should use way less
| electricity.
|
| (The above is true for most currencies btw, even dollars
| and euros bleed out money because they have to pay mints
| and central bankers. The difference with those is that
| there will always be demand for (say) dollars because US
| citizens MUST pay their taxes in dollars. If they don't,
| a number of measures up to and including prison can be
| taken against them. Bitcoin has no such backstop since
| nobody ever NEEDS a bitcoin to pay off someone.
| Ransomware is a rare exception)
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Is ransomware that rare an occurrence? I could see
| ransomware being the taxes of web3.
| WJW wrote:
| If ransomware ever becomes big enough to rival the
| cumulative tax bill of a nation state, you can bet that
| combating it would get a lot more priority. Spec ops
| teams raiding office buildings in foreign nations type
| priority.
|
| Countries are very protective of their cash flows.
| thelamest wrote:
| Where's the value _added_ coming from though, and how far
| are you from there? If crypto enables someone to dodge
| taxes, sell drugs, or wire remittances with less
| overhead, that's a potential value add [arguably, with
| externalities]. For how many of such activities do we
| need byzantine consensus, i.e. can they stay competitive
| in the long term with solutions built on tradfi & SQL?
| How much of these gains can be captured from sidelines
| by, essentially, exchange rate traders? Positive feedback
| loops without a sustainable value proposition will pop
| sooner or later.
| DaltonCoffee wrote:
| This negates the idea that bitcoin or it's ilk could
| replace USD.
|
| Crypto technologies are interesting to me because of their
| great potential for good (defi) and bad (dystopian black
| mirror gold farms, dyson sphere fueling crpto mine, etc).
| jonathan-adly wrote:
| > This is what people don't seem to understand about
| BitCoin. It is cashflow negative, Money has to keep coming
| in
|
| Pretty sure a sizable portion of Bitcoin holders understand
| and know that. They don't hold Bitcoin as a form of bespoke
| investment to be exchanged for money at some point in the
| future. They hold it because they believe it is sound and
| incorruptible _money_.
|
| And as long as _they_ (not any additional people!) continue
| to believe that, it will hold value.
|
| It is to be seen if they are right or wrong, but they know
| how cash flow works.
| nightski wrote:
| You aren't talking about the intrinsic value of Bitcoin.
| You are talking about it's value relative to USD. These are
| completely different things.
|
| Bitcoin has intrinsic value outside of the fiat system. It
| can be used entirely independent of fiat. Whether that will
| become common is another matter, but the value of Bitcoin
| does not have to depend solely on it's value relative to
| USD.
| WJW wrote:
| As long as miners can't pay the power company with their
| mining rewards, bitcoin can't exist outside the fiat
| system. The mining reward denominated in the currency the
| miner has to pay their electricity bill in MUST be higher
| than the electricity cost to mine the reward, otherwise
| the miners go bankrupt.
| strgcmc wrote:
| Capital-intensive industrial-scale miners might go
| bankrupt, but the origin of Bitcoin (starting from the
| whitepaper) imagined an ecosystem powered by effectively
| spare CPU cycles, where the marginal cost of electricity
| wasn't a big factor.
|
| The beauty of the design lies in the balance of the
| incentives -- if electricity is too expensive, then sure
| miners will drop out, which lowers the hashrate and thus
| the security of the ecosystem, but remember that if
| electricity is expensive for honest miners than it will
| also be expensive for attackers. And if somehow there is
| an asymmetry where attackers have access to cheaper
| electricity than other honest miners, well it's likely in
| their economic interest to simply become miners
| themselves rather than attackers...
|
| Bitcoin can easily exist at a minimal survival level that
| is effectively outside the fiat system for all practical
| intents and purposes, by leeching off free or near-zero
| cost electricity (I mean, nobody cares about the
| electricity bill for "folding@home"). In that kind of
| mode, it may not have industrial scale and you might not
| want to transact trillions of fiat-dollars worth of value
| through it, but it can easily exist.
| nightski wrote:
| From my understanding that's not exactly how Bitcoin
| mining works. It scales based on the amount of miners. So
| if the situation is as you described (value relative to
| USD tanks - which I find very unlikely due to
| inflationary nature of fiat) people would stop mining
| which would decrease the difficulty of mining causing it
| to use less electricity.
|
| There are however miners using nearly free sources of
| electricity such as flared gas wells, solar, etc... If
| Tesla accepts Bitcoin/Doge for solar panels then you may
| have a system independent of fiat.
|
| I'm just saying it's possible, not that I think it will
| necessarily happen. Like I mentioned I think BTC's value
| relative to USD will increase over time due to fiat's
| inflationary nature (Fed is targeting 2-3% inflation).
| WJW wrote:
| > people would stop mining which would decrease the
| difficulty of mining causing it to use less electricity.
|
| This is true, but then you have a bunch of costly mining
| ASICs sitting idle. The bitcoin network does not pay
| miners out of the goodness of its heart but because it
| needs a very high hash rate to defend against double
| spend attacks. Guess what those unused ASICs might be
| very effective at? A prolonged fall in mining power
| caused by a falling BTC price is a death sentence for
| bitcoin as it would lead to massive attacks by
| opportunists renting hashing power to double spend their
| coins. You can already see this in many smaller coins.
|
| > nearly free sources of electricity such as flared gas
| wells, solar, etc
|
| Those may be cheaper than regular power, but they are not
| free. Taking solar as an example, you need to invest
| capital to buy the solar panels and they have a finite
| lifespan. Cost divided by lifespan gives you the running
| cost in $/year. Similar things are true for flared gas
| wells; you still need to capture the energy somehow and
| generators are not free.
|
| > If Tesla accepts Bitcoin/Doge for solar panels then you
| may have a system independent of fiat.
|
| This just moves the problem by one degree of separation.
| Unless Tesla can buy solar panels for bitcoin, they will
| need to sell crypto for fiat to buy their inputs. This
| goes all the way down the supply chain down to the real-
| world miners who dig up the ores for the solar panels and
| even they will need to pay their taxes, which you cannot
| do in bitcoin.
|
| > I think BTC's value relative to USD will increase over
| time due to fiat's inflationary nature (Fed is targeting
| 2-3% inflation).
|
| Perhaps. I suppose that this will depend on how much the
| maintenance costs in electricity and miner ASIC
| replacement costs as a percentage of total bitcoin market
| cap per year. If these costs are higher than 2-3% per
| year, bitcoin will see a net outflow of fiat as running
| costs and can only rise in price if new users
| continuously flow in (and of course, only ~7 billion
| potential users exist).
|
| Also, it might be interesting to read up on why central
| banks universally target a low but nonzero inflation.
| There is a ton of established theory about why this is
| desirable and none of it is based on "let's screw
| taxpayers". Throwing that away will basically guarantee
| that crypto will never be very useful to pay your bills
| with.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| That's a really interesting scenario. But I'd imagine if
| double-spends became a persistent threat, they'd just
| hard fork to a slightly different hashing algorithm. That
| would brick all the pre-existing ASICs.
|
| In the 2018 bear market, BTC lost 82% of its market value
| peak-to-trough. Double spend attacks by dark ASICs didn't
| become a factor then. So most likely you'd have to see
| BTC fall by 95% or more before this became a threat.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Isn't the same true of gold?
|
| The gold supply is inflating at about the same rate as
| bitcoin right now, but has enough incoming cash flows to
| keep the priced propped up enough to maintain a $10
| trillion market cap. Obviously some of that incoming cash
| flow is for actually generative industrial use cases, but
| it's a minority,
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-
| in.... The lion's share of incoming money flow is for
| jewelry, long term savings/investment, and central bank
| holdings, and you could argue that most of the jewelry use
| case only exists because it's a good store of value, since
| we can easily make jewelry that looks as pretty for much
| cheaper than the real thing.
|
| So, since most of the cashflows into gold are just people
| holding long term with the expectation that there will
| still be people wanting to buy it for investment purposes
| in the future, and this scheme has worked incredibly well
| for 5000 years, why couldn't the same be true of bitcoin?
| mertd wrote:
| You need to pay the miners just to be able to transact
| with Bitcoin. Gold on the contrary, you can just hand it
| over to someone else.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Bitcoin is unlikely to have a 5,000 year lifespan because
| unlike gold it can be obsoleted.
| webinvest wrote:
| It's likely after some number of years, most people will
| have lost their Bitcoins and there won't be many left in
| circulation.
| nathias wrote:
| There are no closed systems, and players playing a game does
| create value. It's almost the only important aspect of
| software's value - users. Anyone can write some garbage
| software, or hire people to do it, not anyone can make things
| people will want to use.
| diarrhea wrote:
| Probably a Ponzi, not a pyramid, scheme, no?
| user-the-name wrote:
| This is the most crucial question about _everything_ crypto-
| related.
|
| Because it turns out every crypto market is a negative-sum
| game. If you invest, you are _guaranteed_ to lose on average.
| If you do happen to win, your gains are coming out of the
| pocket of someone else who lost even more.
|
| The price of the token in question doesn't enter into this at
| all. It can rise, fall, anything. It is still a negative-sum
| game, but some people have not yet realised that they lost.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >It is still a negative-sum game, but some people have not
| yet realised that they lost.
|
| And some people have not lost at all. As a lifelong poker
| player, the calculus is very much the same. A poker game
| where rake is taken out is a negative-sum game. But that
| doesn't mean that every player loses, even if they play
| forever. There will be more net losses than net wins, but
| these are not evenly distributed.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| > Because it turns out every crypto market is a negative-
| sum game.
|
| [Citation needed]
|
| You can't just hand wave and assume this to be true. If the
| world's major investors decide that crypto represents a
| store of value, then that's a positive-sum game for crypto.
| If stablecoins transacted on smart contract chains generate
| demand for Ethereum to pay for the network transaction
| fees, then that's a positive-sum game for crypto. If new
| enterprises start raising capital through DeFi and DAOs
| instead of traditional capital markets, that's a positive-
| sum game.
| Nbox9 wrote:
| > If the financial instrument that underlies the project were
| to stop going up in value XX% per month, would you still be
| interested in the project?
|
| I use this yard stick when reviewing all of my tech
| investments. Providing real value with interesting
| technological innovations is why ETH outperformed every other
| alt-coin, just like why Amazon and Google survived the dotcom
| bust. It seems fundamentally unfair to ask this question
| specifically of "crypto/NFT/web-3" when it applies equally to
| all assets and projects.
| vmception wrote:
| > A thought exercise you should undertake if you're thinking
| about / talking about crypto/NFT/web3-related projects: If the
| financial instrument that underlies the project were to stop
| going up in value XX% per month, would you still be interested
| in the project?
|
| There are hundreds of ways for that answer to be yes, and this
| is what is attracting so many builders to the space and why it
| builds so fast.
|
| Many crypto enthusiasts and the skeptics that surround them are
| looking at linear bets. Put in X capital, receive X+Y% of
| capital back, or lose X-Y%. Although very popular approach, it
| is basically the tip of the iceberg of what's going on.
|
| You can start with no capital and earn the crypto. You can earn
| lots of it. The price of what you earn can stay flat. The price
| of what you earn can decrease and you still come out ahead,
| because you are earning a lot. Not different than earning
| shares at a FAANG (or NAAAM these days?), except in crypto the
| earning is is waaaay faster than FAANG vesting periods, and
| every project has waaaay more upside without wasting decades of
| your life praying for exit liquidity at a private startup.
|
| So the basis of your question is really project dependent. If I
| found a way to earn Axie SLP, NFTs, or Axie tokens fast, I
| wouldn't care about the exchange rate of any of those (unless
| the dilution outpaced the point of earning) and I think you -
| and many others - are missing that.
|
| A lot of people stand up smart contract products that accept
| existing assets as deposit, and take a few basis points of the
| assets upon deposit or withdrawal, and thats the whole business
| model. They all do different things thats usually solving an
| interest or need for the people with the other assets.
| Completely passive income. I've even seen code that will accept
| an asset, take the cut, and immediately exchange the cut for a
| stablevalue asset, all initiated and paid for by the user that
| made the deposit.
|
| There are many non-linear earning opportunities in this space.
| Many rival what the largest tech companies offer, even if the
| exchange rates of the things earned stayed flat. So the
| calculus is pretty clear: smugly exploit yourself for an ad
| conglomerate, or directly earn and build in this other even
| faster moving economy.
| baxtr wrote:
| Is there any difference why anyone would invest in the stock
| market? Of course people asset prices to inflate. Isn't that
| the whole point of investing in anything?
| z3rgl1ng wrote:
| Actually, originally no; stocks paid dividends.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| Ethereum also pays dividends in the form of staking
| rewards.
|
| About 7% today, and most likely going to 10%+ post-merge.
| That makes the yield on Ethereum significantly higher than
| the majority of stocks in developed markets.
| joshgrib wrote:
| Agree with this reasoning - NFTs seem like they clearly have
| little to no real value and I think the people buying them
| understand that and are just doing speculation (and we know how
| that ends up). BTC/ETH are a little harder to gauge because
| they market themselves as alternative currencies rather than a
| product in-and-of-itself, but I still get the same fear that
| it's entirely based on sentiment and nothing in the real world.
| One article (or Elon tweet) could cause it all to drop
| overnight.
|
| The USD might fall the same way, but it'd be slower and would
| require real-world change to happen instead of people just
| deciding not to use something anymore, and it's so tied up in
| the global currency exchange that we'd have way bigger problems
| to worry about than "my investment account lost all it's
| money". I'm pretty risk averse so I get that other people would
| want to play that game, I'm just not much of a gambler.
|
| Ethereum seems slightly better than Bitcoin for the reasons you
| stated as well - ETH could drop to almost zero value and smart
| contracts would still be cool, but ultimately I'm into the
| tech. Feels a lot like having a lot of reddit karma to me -
| it's cool to the people that think it's cool, but doesn't mean
| much outside of that, unless you can convince someone that does
| think it's cool to take your fake assets and trade them for
| "real" assets.
| ericjang wrote:
| I agree with your point that the operative word here is "earn",
| and not "play".
|
| To play the devil's advocate: many crypto developers continue
| to build in the space (or have done it in the past) despite
| large drawdowns in token prices (denominated in USD). Would
| that constitute a sufficient signal that "there is something
| real there", distinct from the question of "is the valuation
| too high"?
| NieDzejkob wrote:
| Nah, it's just that the target audience ("investors") won't
| care about the few bucks.
| xg15 wrote:
| I'd say no.
|
| This might just as well be an "emperor's new clothes"
| situation, in which a significant number of people are either
| deluded in thinking there is something of value or heavily
| invested in making others believe so. Neither of which means
| there is actually anything "real" there.
|
| Shared delusions are a thing.
| Havoc wrote:
| >would you still be interested in the project?
|
| Sure, my fear is that my average peer won't be though. Even if
| I can see the technical merits...if all my peers are just in it
| for that quick buck this is going to end badly
| EGreg wrote:
| Did the SEC give Axie Infinity a no-action letter? How do they
| get around the securities laws thing?
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