[HN Gopher] "Play-to-Earn" and Bullshit Jobs
___________________________________________________________________
"Play-to-Earn" and Bullshit Jobs
Author : paulgb
Score : 1115 points
Date : 2021-12-28 19:16 UTC (1 days 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.
| jwmoz wrote:
| I have been shorting SLP-PERP for a couple of months now and the
| trade keeps printing.
| 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.
| JCharante wrote:
| I can't believe the buy in is $1000, it would have to be a AAAA
| game to demand that price tag, but it's not so it's just a
| disguised Ponzi scheme. The way the media have been reporting
| this as a way for Filipinos to earn income is disgusting,
| because they're tricking financially challenged people to fall
| for this Ponzi scheme by making it look legitimate with the
| media attention.
| ec109685 wrote:
| They talk about the economics here and payback time:
| https://medium.com/coinmonks/axie-infinity-a-developing-
| worl...
| chii wrote:
| Just like herbalife or many of those MLM schemes, the initial
| entry fee does sound like scam.
|
| I wonder how long it takes to earn back the initial entry
| fee?
| unnouinceput wrote:
| And let's not forget the oldest of them all, Star Citizen.
| Bet another pandemic will come and go and that game will
| still be in alpha
| Jolter wrote:
| Did SC really promise financial returns? My impression
| was it did not.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > And let's not forget the oldest of them all, Star
| Citizen.
|
| Definitely not the oldest..?
| Animats wrote:
| It works kind of like Pokemon. You need some starter Axies to
| breed and fight.[1] There are people offering "scholarships"
| where they loan you Axies to grind. This was profitable last
| summer but is now a lose for both parties.
|
| [1] https://leveldash.com/how-much-to-start-playing-axie-
| infinit...
| kingcharles wrote:
| Not just financially-challenged, but under-educated too. If
| your education was sub-par then it's easy to get tricked,
| especially with something as complex as the crypto world,
| where someone like me who had a great education, minted
| Satoshi's finest like they were water from a firehose, and
| almost 40 years of coding, still has a really hard time
| understanding the current plethora of blockchain shenanigans.
| 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.
| bncy wrote:
| Tibia was very popular in my country, I know people that are
| still playing it, but back when I was younger, like 10 years ago
| I knew a few guys that were making regular income out of it by
| selling gold coins and items. Good times, games like Tibia taught
| me something about the market and demand/supply distribution.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Do the players who earn money from the game somehow make the game
| more entertaining for other players?
|
| I had a friend who was a tennis teacher. He didn't really teach
| so much as play with other less skillful players and get paid for
| doing that. That's kind of a similar situation right?
|
| The answer depends on whether the players who get paid are
| rewarded for a service, something that other players perceive as
| having value to them. Or is it just a way by the game providers
| to lure people in to the game?
| 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.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > Is a medieval abbey "useless?" Clergy? Servants to the
| clergy? How about courtiers? Courtiers' dress makers?
|
| You're really misinformed. Monks have been producing goods like
| wine, cheese, keeping society's records for centuries, or even
| being involved in woodwork or construction work, providing
| useful services to their communities. What does it have to do
| with "bullshit jobs"? Nothing.
|
| Your comment sounds like a gratuitous provocation.
| 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.
| specialist wrote:
| Graeber's categories of bullshit jobs is useful: flunkies,
| goons, duct-tapers, box-ticker, task-master. Here's a quickly
| found source: https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/bullshit-jobs-
| david-graeber-w...
|
| > _how useless hairdressers were_
|
| Graeber's notion of "caring work" -- in contrast to "service
| work", "knowledge work", etc -- really changed my worldview
| about labor.
|
| > _canonical bullshit job to Graeber would be someone in a
| large administrative bureaucracy_
|
| My own archetype is healthcare accounting in the USA. Like
| "prescription benefits management". Hits all 5 categories of
| bullshit.
| 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.
| Aunche wrote:
| >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.
|
| I'm sure airlines do a lot behind the scenes to make sure
| they don't lose their luggage. Even if they didn't, I
| don't see why a worker co-op wouldn't have the exact same
| incentives.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Well for a start, worker coops are not commanded from the
| top down so the owners don't get to just ignore customer
| complaints, because the owners, being the workers, are
| the ones taking customer complaints. Worker coops don't
| solve the problem of the profit motive though, where
| solutions that hurt the bottom line won't be implemented.
| That's an issue with markets themselves.
|
| I'm far from an expert in this, and I'm no utopian, but I
| think it's important that we understand and identify
| where the problems in our society come from.
| 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.
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| Noise insulation in the airplane exists because it tries
| to shield passengers from the aircraft noise, which is a
| consequence of modern airplane design. Following the same
| logic, shall we call it bullshit insulation?
|
| This line of thought assumes three bold ideas:
| 1. that existing model is bad 2. that alternative
| model for airline (or any other industry) exists
| 3. that alternative model won't suffer from similar
| issues
|
| I will now quote Graeber to see what kind of arguments he
| uses to support these three ideas in his original
| infamous essay[1].
|
| Re. 1 -- author uses anecdotal evidence
| from friends who consider their jobs 'pointless':
| (talking about a friend) "*Now he's a corporate lawyer
| working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to
| admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed
| nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should
| not really exist.*" - author extrapolates this
| anecdote to other fields and people: "*it shows that most
| people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact,
| I'm not sure I've ever met a corporate lawyer who didn't
| think their job was bullshit*" - after
| establishing negative nature of these jobs on this purely
| anecdotal basis, author then proceeds to blame capitalism
| for creating them: "*<...> making up pointless jobs just
| for the sake of keeping us all working. And here,
| precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is
| precisely what is not supposed to happen*" -- he
| concludes that "*the ruling class has figured out that a
| happy and productive population with free time on their
| hands is a mortal danger.*"
|
| Re. 2 and 3: - author provides a
| hypothesis for the root cause of the issue: "*if 1% of
| the population controls most of the disposable wealth,
| what we call 'the market' reflects what they think is
| useful or important, not anybody else*"
|
| Unfortunately, no solution is discussed at all. Neither
| there is a validation for this hypothesis to be found
| anywhere.
|
| I'm sorry, but this line of logic cannot be refuted.
| Simply because there is no logic, there is an emotionally
| charged narrative supported by anecdotes and directed at
| very broad and abstract problem ("ruling class"), with no
| solution provided by author. Anarchism is _assumed_ to be
| a solution, but I hope at this point it should be
| obvious, with the level of problem analysis involved, we
| could also use a magic wand.
|
| 1 - https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
| beaconstudios wrote:
| If his actual argument is "they do it to keep us busy"
| with no further elaboration, that's just wildly
| conspiratorial and a pretty stupid argument.
|
| How I'd look at it (as a postmodernist) is like this:
| after the owning class moved all the "real" (ie, related
| to manufacturing) work overseas to places where labour is
| cheap, first world jobs have been increasingly focused on
| problems within the abstraction itself - we're not
| dealing with harvesting or processing grain or rolling
| steel, we're managers of managers of people who generate
| sales contracts for rolled steel made somewhere in China.
| Our jobs feel like bullshit because they're entirely
| removed from material production, and are generally quite
| "meta". It's a form of labour alienation, which is a
| consequence of the capitalist division of labour (as
| compared to the artisan/craft system under feudalism,
| which people in the West are often seeking to imitate
| now).
| felix318 wrote:
| You can create a job whose only function is to increase your
| cost and consequently allow you to charge more for your product
| or service. It doesn't work if you do it on your own, but it
| does work if you can get the government to force your
| competitors to do it too.
|
| If you pay close attention, you will find that most government
| regulations that affect whole industries are actually the
| result of lobbying by the industries themselves. This is
| clearly visible in finance but it happens for almost any
| industry where there are powerful players.
|
| No one wants to increase their productivity without a
| corresponding increase in revenue - this includes corporations
| as well as individuals. Bullshit jobs need to be created to
| maintain high prices in face of constant downward pressure.
| 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.
| sidcool wrote:
| TL;DR anyone? Don't have the time to read this highly voted
| article :|
| 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.
| post_from_work wrote:
| >>>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.
|
| One of my fraternity brothers paid for a vacation in Europe and
| a digital camcorder from selling Diablo characters, leveled up
| via macros, on Ebay. This was also in ~2001-2003.
| 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:
| graphenus wrote:
| It's saddening that folks say Axie is a play-to-earn pioneer.
| This genre existed for ages and is called gambling. Poker being a
| prime example of a truly successful game combining luck, fun, and
| skill. The best part -- no NFTs required.
| fleddr wrote:
| A dutch economist once estimated that about 50% of a modern
| economy is bullshit, basically just keeping each other busy.
|
| It's made possible because of the naive belief that markets
| create supply out of demand, and that this mechanism is
| ruthlessly efficient.
|
| Right now, somebody is "inventing" potato chips flavor
| #16,333,132. Nobody asked for it, but a whole bunch of people are
| involved in its creation. Next, the product is pushed, and if not
| totally disgusting, you might try it. If the push is large and
| prolonged, you may even make it a regular buy. Even more so when
| you see lots of other people eating it.
|
| Did this product meet your demand? No. Do you believe its a good
| use of labor to make this product? No. Your "demand" was
| fabricated out of aggressively pushing supply.
|
| Are the top 10 songs in the charts the songs most in demand, the
| market efficiently selecting the best songs, taking into account
| all recent music produced? No. The songs are pushed. Supply
| decides, not demand.
|
| Right now, thousands of engineers are working on the next iOS
| version, adding hundreds of new features. You'll probably use 2
| of them. You'll get all 500 features anyway, regardless of
| demand, as you will definitely buy the next iPhone.
|
| That's the 50% I'm referring to: artificially created demand that
| really is just marketing and manipulation.
|
| Another way in which markets aren't efficient is a lack of
| competition. After all, it's every market player's goal to
| basically exit the arena, not needing to fight for their
| continued existence. Several sectors have big industry players
| that effectively have no competition. The same can be true for
| businesses where locality is a unique benefit. And it applies to
| local and federal governments, whom have no competition at all.
| And there's patents, cartels and other ways to escape market
| forces.
|
| These non-competitors sustain armies of workers with bullshit
| jobs.
|
| Ultimately, our economic system doesn't care. When you have a
| paid job, nobody asks questions about whether it has meaning.
| Your government will like you and so will your family. Bullshit
| or not. We have build a system that celebrates meaningless
| consumption and meaningless work.
| 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.
| mintplant wrote:
| > People have made money by selling virtual goods acquired in-
| game at least as far back as Second Life in 2005.
|
| So I basically grew up on Second Life, back when "the Metaverse"
| was just a geek thing no one cared about. The comparison doesn't
| really work here, because the virtual items people sold on SL
| were (generally) their original creations: 3D modeled, animated,
| programmed, etc. Not simply doled out by pre-programmed in-game
| systems.
|
| Axie Infinity's economy is more like "real-world trading" on
| MMOs, but officially endorsed by the developers instead of being
| considered a game-breaking, bannable offense. In fact, the
| mention of Axie Infinity providing an income stream to people in
| developing countries who spend their time grinding also parallels
| the MMO space: you can find plenty of stories about illicit "gold
| farming" economies surrounding the major online games, going back
| decades.
|
| > Axie Infinity is novel in two ways, which are worth exploring
| separately.
|
| > - It elevated the ability to earn an income stream through the
| game to a core feature, coining play-to-earn as a new game genre.
|
| > - It uses NFTs to represent in-game items, so the economy is
| (ostensibly) decentralized.
|
| Going back to SL, the virtual economy was always a "core
| feature". We had a whole digital currency and ecosystem of first-
| and third-party exchanges and money markets where you could buy
| and sell Linden dollars for real money, with moving exchange
| rates and everything. People very much made serious income off of
| in-world business. The true novelty here is that Axie & friends
| are built on decentralized technologies, instead of having a
| company like Linden Lab managing everyone's account balances and
| virtual item ownership rights.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| come to think of it, i wonder why SL has not converted SLL to a
| cryptocurrency
| 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.
| cryptica wrote:
| > system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism
|
| What we have now is not capitalism. Capitalism requires hard
| money as a foundation. An inflationary currency whose supply
| compounds exponentially over time and which people are forced to
| use is not hard money.
|
| Bullshit jobs are made possible by inflationary money printing.
| The current crony-capitalist system is only 'Darwinian' for those
| who are far from the money printers. That's why bullshit office
| jobs exist mostly in big cities; in close proximity to the
| largest inflows of newly issued 'capital' into the economy. For
| those who are close to the inflows of new money, it's a rigged,
| easy game. No talent involved. It's a game of first in, best
| dressed. They could throw money out the window and it would come
| flying back in. In the periphery, the story is completely
| different. Look up Cantillon effect.
|
| It's easy to devise a scheme whereby you keep borrowing money
| from a bank to inflate the value of some intangible asset and
| then use that asset's growing 'value' as collateral against which
| you can keep borrowing more money and keep inflating that asset's
| 'value' ad-infinitum. You just keep taking out new, increasingly
| large loans to make repayments on the old loans. Just like the
| government does. At any point in time, this zero-sum scheme will
| always look profitable; you can keep it going so long as the
| banks allow. Banks will allow it of course, because the
| collateral 'value' keeps growing. It's only when people start
| talking about huge numbers like 'quadrillions', 'quintillions'
| and 'sextillions' that people will start to think something's not
| right. The game is all about who can feed the banks' own money
| back to them with as little resistance as possible.
|
| A major reason why Bitcoin is so valuable is that it provides
| banks with an endless supply of bodies to take out more and
| increasingly large loans and feed it back to the banks with
| interest. Bitcoin's growth in value consistently outpaces the
| growth in interest on loans used to buy that Bitcoin.
| 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.
| Exendroinient wrote:
| Jobs which don' create positive value to the world are not
| bullshit. Our western economy is mostly based on the meaningless
| consumption of stupid things. These products have to be marketed
| and pushed into clients by manufactered believe that they need to
| buy it. Other part of this are the zero-sum games. Trick people
| into buying it by introducting artifcial scarcity.
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| Thank you.
| 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.
| jonwalch wrote:
| I missed the intrinsically unfun part. Grinding is
| definitely fun for many people.
| 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.
| dmichulke wrote:
| Not sure this is the right place for the question but does anyone
| have a theory as to when the time has come to short it?
|
| Other than a general meltdown in cryptocurrencies, I mean.
| devteambravo wrote:
| Bullshit jobs? Let me tell you what a bullshit job is:
| Transcription. It's basically poor, often disabled people w/ 0
| other options doing it. For slave-wage. That's right, one of the
| best way for disabled people in America to make $$ is to spend
| hours transcribing you next Sex & the City remake at breakneck
| pace. Excuse my french, but F this. Axie sounds like a lot less
| bullshit
| mattnewton wrote:
| After that work is done though, the value of the content being
| transcribed is increased. They are solving the problem that the
| actual dialog spoken by the actors and audio cues aren't
| captured in a non-audio format yet. Axie is creating problems
| when designing the gameplay and allows people to sell solutions
| to it; they could easily just provide the "value" at the push
| of a button.
| devteambravo wrote:
| Yeah, that's the basis of my issue with it all. Value created
| by people who do not benefit from it whatsoever.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >Value created by people who do not benefit from it
| whatsoever.
|
| That's basically all work?
|
| Bakers get paid to make bread for other people's
| consumption.
|
| Mechanics get paid to fix other people's cars.
|
| Transcribers get paid to make media accessible for other
| people.
| devteambravo wrote:
| If you look into what is involved in the work, as well as
| who does it, I doubt you'd lump all those together.
| PeterisP wrote:
| That's the exact opposite of the term "bullshit jobs" which
| is about the situations where people are getting paid
| (sometimes even quite much) for doing something that does
| not create any value, where the work done is bullshit.
| JCharante wrote:
| Well it's a very valuable but underpaid job. A lot of
| college lecture VODs get transcribed and it is great for
| making it more accessible for people with hearing
| impairments.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| > gameplay designed to be dull enough that rich players will pay
| to outsource it to poor players
|
| Do I understand it correctly that the point here, and maybe the
| central point of Bullshit Jobs, is that we tend to structure our
| economies with built in inefficiencies so that tedium appears
| where there is no need for it. And the reason for this is that
| otherwise the organisation or person solving a given problem
| would immediately remove their own lifeline, their income or
| their raison d'etre?
|
| So the point of this article is point out how this happens even
| when there isn't a problem to be solved - which is reason to
| believe that it happens all around us as well in situations where
| we're "solving an actual problem".
|
| It's like a machine that endlessly inflates all pockets of human
| interaction with tedium and labels it as efficiency or "fun". A
| paper clip maximizer of sorts.
| 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?
| thephyber wrote:
| > ... I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs
| could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism.
|
| It is always worth reminding everyone that we are far from pure
| free market capitalism. There is a lot of market distortion due
| to lack of info transparency, regulatory capture, contracts which
| create inefficiency, intellectual property law, asymmetric
| application of regulation and law enforcement, etc
| 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.
| j2kun wrote:
| You'd be surprised how much VCs idolize ponzi schemes. They
| aren't even shy about it, and haven't been for years if you get
| to talking to them.
| vanusa wrote:
| Some examples would be appreciated, please.
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| Thought leadership sounds a lot like mind steering.
| merrywhether wrote:
| VCs have to put their monthly influx of FedBux somewhere!
|
| Less sarcastically: cheap money effectively lowers the cost of
| risk, thus increasing the number of risky investments made. And
| Axie seems like less of a risky investment than Yo was, at
| least.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| aniforprez wrote:
| Oh my god. That podcast with the Axie dude made me recoil with
| disgust. The way they're selling the pay-to-earn concepts
| comparing it to mobile games is absolutely vile especially when
| mobile games are equally predatory
|
| Sometimes I wish I didn't have any scruples so I could mint
| money from misery like this
| dqpb wrote:
| Play-to-earn would be a coherent concept if the playing
| produced something of value.
|
| HN is play-to-earn. Except all you earn is worthless non-
| exchangeable karma.
| eitland wrote:
| > Except all you earn is worthless non-exchangeable karma.
|
| I think you look at it the wrong way:
|
| For me that "karma" counter on the profile only roughly
| signals someones worth here: it might either be because
| they've been helping others for a long time or it might be
| because of tactical posting of a few interesting stories
| ahead if everyone else or even just grinding by trying out a
| couple of (non spam) stories a day or something.
|
| The real value of HN comes from what I have learned over the
| years, and for many others from the business opportunities
| they have found as well.
|
| Bonus: I think the only real value of those stupid internet
| points is to look at threads and see which ones are getting
| upvoted or downvoted.
|
| If they are upvoted it signals that people found them useful.
|
| If nothing happens that either means the comment was seen by
| others as correct but not very interesting or few people read
| it because discussion moved elsewhere.
|
| If they get downvoted then either they:
|
| - said something mean
|
| - was wrong
|
| - said something widely believed to be wrong
|
| - wrote in a way that made people misunderstand your
| otherwise correct explanation
|
| - you poked a wasps nest, saying something correct that
| angered many easily angered individuals.
|
| In fact I think we could (not should) remove the accumulated
| scores from profiles and not lose much of value (though I
| think many glances profiles sometimes to get a feel for who
| the person they talk to are).
| chii wrote:
| > playing produced something of value.
|
| some games manage to do this - EVE Online has a play-to-earn
| model, and those who grind to earn become gameplay elements
| for other players (the whole game is PVP non-consensually).
| meheleventyone wrote:
| EVE definitely doesn't have a play-to-earn model. It has a
| way to pay your "subscription" via the in-game currency but
| this transaction is still one way and you can't redeem the
| playtime token outside of the game for real money (without
| breaking T&Cs). The play-to-earn elements are the same as
| all MMOs, in the meta-game with gold farming which CCP
| still crack down on heavily.
| 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.
| Liron wrote:
| Yes but even an amoral organization could be expected to
| anticipate damage to their reputation when they're seen to be
| propping up a sufficiently transparent pyramid scheme, and
| decide not to cross that line. I'm still not sure they made
| the right move for their long-term interests, considering
| there's more reputational damage to come when the pyramid
| implodes. (They probably won't take financial damage though,
| as they're likely to sell near the peak.)
| chii wrote:
| you mistakenly assume that A16z has the requirement to
| maintain a reputation in the same way you personally would.
|
| Their reputation doesn't come from being moral. It comes
| from being able to make lots of money, and if this allows
| them to make lots of money, their reputation (as a VC)
| would only grow.
| 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
| firekvz wrote:
| I didnt read much of the thread but I will assume that most of
| the people here is aware of how every single NFT game is just a
| ponzi.
|
| But I've lived myself, what the author mentions as a "way to lift
| people out of poverty.", from the era before NFT or "play to
| earn" games existed.
|
| I come from Venezuela, a full 3rd world country and I was "lucky"
| to play an MMO (lineage 2) during my young days and somehow I was
| good at it, i invested so many hours on it and managed to get
| into top tier guilds and worlds 1st event, and somehow, my
| character and my items were worth thousands of dollars in the
| market, and suddenly i went from being a 14 y.o boy sitting in
| pc, to bringing more money in 1 week to my family, than my entire
| family together for 1 year.
|
| I could understand that, while all other people on the game were
| playing for fun, it became my job, a job that actually got me and
| my family out of poverty...
|
| At the time (2007) there were a lot of chinese "farmers", and
| people used to make fun of them, not only fun but the rest of the
| players were blantantly denigrating towards them, at 1st I didnt
| understand but once that I became a non-chinese farmer, I
| realized how It was a really good thing to do.
|
| Eventually I started botting, I bought more PCs and had a full
| army of bots, I kept making more and more money, and it helped me
| and my family leave the country and pretty much bought a house, a
| car and paid my family expenses for like 4 years out of lineage 2
| adena farming.
|
| Also, scripting the bots pretty much got me to learn programming
| and english, so what I am now it's pretty much the result of some
| guy from chicago offering me 20$ in paypal for an item i had in
| my inventory that i got it while killing a monster, it all
| started there, that litle forbidden transaction in an MMO,
| changed my life completely
|
| So, even tho it was like a job for me, I never saw it like a job,
| even tho it gave me a lot of money, i never got into the game as
| a way to get money, i was just a young kid trying to have some
| fun..
|
| But now, I get really sad everytime I see those ponzi NFT games,
| that only sell the idea of getting rich, and I get even more sad
| when I see tons of venezuelan youngsters fall for it, honestly,
| they are just playing with their desperation.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > I come from Venezuela, a full 3rd world
|
| Considering the Red Scare rhetoric in the West about Venezuela
| I'd say it is solidly second world.
| lou1306 wrote:
| Not really. Yugoslavia, another socialist country, was
| probably the most prominent European country that identified
| as "third-world". "Second world" was basically the Warsaw
| Pact, China and their other satellites, not just any
| socialist state.
| xuki wrote:
| That's an awesome story. While I've never lived in poverty, I
| got my first taste of making money by making bot for a FaceBook
| game in 2008 (WarBook, if anyone remembers that). I only made
| around 2,000 USD but that experience really changed my life.
| lxxpxlxxxx wrote:
| Esa era la mejor era para ese tipo de juegos, entretenidos y se
| sacaba un rialero, por aqui haciamos lo mismo, con Silkroad y
| Mu.
|
| Esos de ahorita son diferente, parece hasta macabro. Dan
| "becas" para que otros "jueguen" y ganen por ellos
| prometiendoles una parte de la ganancia, eso si, siempre y
| cuando el nft no caiga.
|
| De vez en cuando conocidos me preguntan que si es bueno entrar
| en esos juegos nft a todos les digo que ni locos se metan ahi,
| da mas plata y es mas estable sembrar.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| It seems like a bold statement to claim every NFT game is a
| ponzi. Some existing games are looking into incorporating NFTs
| to help facilitate the kind of transactions you previously
| needed paypal for. It seems a bit dismissive to hand-wave any
| games that want to incorporate the technology as not being able
| to operate sustainably.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Wild story, thanks for sharing.
| sfblah wrote:
| I'm getting tired of this Ponzi scheme stuff. Can we have some
| kind of protests to insist the Fed raise rates and put an end to
| this? I'm not a big activist by nature, but that's something I
| could get behind.
| 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.
| TheDong wrote:
| That doesn't come off as "lazy research" to me. The author
| didn't write "the earliest time this happened was 2005", but
| rather "at least as far back as ....".
|
| The author's correct in their wording, and the point was
| simply that getting real money out of games in some way is
| not novel to this new "play to earn" genre.
|
| The point of the article was to talk about Axie Infinity and
| Bullshit Jobs in the present, not to spend significant time
| on historical background.
|
| To be honest, I think using Second Life, or runescape, or
| such as an example, instead of Ultima Online or such,
| actually is better writing in that it's more likely to be
| something the audience is familiar with, or at least can
| google and read more about. In that sense, using a well known
| historical example is less lazy writing than finding the
| oldest possible thing that others are unlikely to relate to
| for a peripheral comparison which already explicitly was
| worded as "at least as early as" ("kinda old, but not
| necessarily the oldest").
| zubairq wrote:
| I think so much of life is already gaming: sports, bowling,
| football, watching sports on TV/YouTube/cable. Many of these so
| called time wasters existed outside of the digital world and
| people have already consumed a lot of time and attention for
| hundreds of years. In fact empire building and war are probably
| two of the oldest sports known to humankind
| 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.
| imtringued wrote:
| Bountysource?
| mizzao wrote:
| There was a great game in this vein (coding) that shut down due
| to lack of monetization but I feel would be perfect to relaunch
| as a crypto version, especially since playing at the top levels
| required coding: https://bot.land/
| 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?
| chii wrote:
| Since the name Second Life is taken, how about Third Life?
| jerryoftheyear wrote:
| Try the other direction, call it "First Life".
| noselfpromote wrote:
| Please don't just be sarcastic and do it. I can help you
| for free
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Isn't the other direction "Second Death"?
| 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.
| apatters wrote:
| I don't get how this is a bullshit job.
|
| Gamer #1 likes to play the game. There are some parts he likes
| more than others.
|
| Gamer #2 comes along and says, OK I will do the parts you don't
| like, and I'll sell my output to you for $XXX.
|
| Gamer #1 agrees, the transaction takes place, it is entirely
| voluntary, and both participants find the outcome to be valuable
| for them.
|
| How is this bullshit?
|
| This is pretty much the reason we have money.
|
| What sounds like bullshit to me is there is some... quasi-
| socialist I guess? value framework being imposed by some would-be
| intellectual who's totally uninvolved in the transaction, but
| thinks he knows better than the ones who are. Fuck that guy, he
| has no skin in the game.
| vaylian wrote:
| I do not know which definition is used here. But I would call
| this bullshit, because this is artificial scarcity which is
| controlled by grindy, non-constructive and typically non-fun
| work. The makers of the game could just sell the NFT directly
| instead of requiring other people to waste their time.
| zivkovicp wrote:
| I'm not familiar with the game in the article, but I think the
| author is referring to the inclusion of in-game tasks that have
| no benefit or reason to exist other than to create an
| artificial "requirement" for work of some sort.
|
| Honestly though, who cares? Even if it's a "bullshit job", you
| can perform it from the relative comfort of your home, mostly
| on your own schedule; so it's better than most BS jobs in the
| real world. In my opinion, the more opportunities afforded to
| people to earn money, the better.
| 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.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Thinking about it more and you're right. In particular
| because the Axie devs levy a tax on each transaction and
| the cost of buying the tokens from another currency in
| the first place.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| 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.
| throwawaycities wrote:
| > Gamers have a word, grinding, to describe repetitive tasks
| undertaken to gain some desired in-game goal, but are not fun in
| themselves.
|
| Before gamers used "grinding" it was in normal use for hard work.
| More commonly used as "on the grind." Looking up the origin it's
| "back to the grind" referring to returning to work from break,
| but also specific to the ancient job of a grinding grain at a
| mill.
|
| All things being equal, the thing about "crypto," as the article
| labels it, is that playing games or being a early adopter of
| technology was not historically a paid or rewarded activity.
|
| Maybe web3 is exploiting attention spans the same way as web2,
| but no matter how web2 spins it, token airdrops to web3 users are
| often 10's of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands,
| and even millions in some instances.
|
| Where business has historically been about maximizing shareholder
| value by exploiting labor, web3 is proving to maximize user value
| by directly rewarding users. In many cases it is life changing
| money for young, regular folks who would never have had a shot at
| that type of financial freedom, in fact likely would have gone in
| to debt trying to pursue their education for a better financial
| future.
| larodi wrote:
| Bullshit activities... the new drugs. Love them guys who sustain
| these mind traps. Nothing new under the sun as King Solomon said,
| but then again - do not dare claim moral superiority, u will go
| down sooner than not.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Many historical "bullshit jobs" are basically "reward to the
| metropole from colonial extraction" (how many of Graeber's
| "bullshit jobs" exist in colonized vs colonizing nations, hm?)
|
| But for this newest iteration of cryptocurrency bullshit, I'm
| gonna go with "crisis of capital accumulation".
| zeristor wrote:
| I don't mean to be too meta but this site looks amazing on my
| phone; I've not seen a website that is so clean and clear before.
| 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.
| 8note wrote:
| The defining feature of capitalism is the private ownership
| of capital. You can have whatever pricing mechanisms you like
| as long as the profits go to the owner
| 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.
| 8note wrote:
| Sounds reminiscent of when ML scientists were surprised that
| they built racist systems, assuming that their race-free math
| meant that the resulting system would also be race-free
| mrkramer wrote:
| Bullshit Jobs aka jobs that can be automated.
| iantimothy wrote:
| > Since Filipinos are the largest growth market for Axie
| Infinity, they must also be a major source of money flowing into
| the system. Instead of being a net provider of jobs and capital,
| it appears to just be redistributing the same wealth between
| Filipinos, and collecting a 4.25% cut for the service.
|
| It seems that the source of money flowing into the system are
| individuals with capital to buy the incoming producing PPE-type
| assets (i.e., Axies).
|
| Guilds pool capital to buy P2E assets and rent it out to scholars
| for a % of all income earned by the player (known as scholars in
| the current P2E nomenclature).
|
| I think there are currently two acceptable ways to earn income in
| our society: 1. Take relatively less risk, get paid a wage. Owner
| of incoming producing assets bear the risk of deploying capital
| in such a manner. 2. Take high risk. Deploy capital to acquire
| assets and pay wages to others who utilize those assets to
| produce (unguaranteed) income for you.
|
| P2E introduces a third: deploy capital to acquire assets, loan
| the assets out, and take a cut of income generated.
|
| P2E in its current form has similarities to serfdom. The owners
| of Axies (and the AXS tokens) are the lords.
| 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.
| jonwalch wrote:
| My bad, I assumed we were already talking about on chain
| games. I agree that on chain loot drops are more difficult
| to implement than the traditional way. We'll have to see
| how much gamers in the future care about their items being
| NFTs or not.
| chii wrote:
| > wouldn't gamers just hack their own items?
|
| if the game could be such that this is equivalent of proof-of-
| work, then it would be fine.
| 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.
| presentation wrote:
| I just looked up a youtube video about Axie and it seems this
| is already happening lol
|
| https://youtu.be/xKgV4V0aq7M?t=328
| 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.
| azemetre wrote:
| The point is that bullshit jobs don't contribute anything to
| society (at least my take after reading the book).
|
| If the game studio never existed not much in society would
| change, let's go even further and say all game developers never
| existed. Society wouldn't change. Now lets get rid of all the
| elementary school teachers. Would society drastically changed?
|
| One of the core points in the book is that the "more
| prestigious" and "higher pay" a job is, the likelihood of it
| being bullshit is high. While important jobs like janitor,
| barber, or a retail worker are very important and pay terribly.
|
| I'm a programmer that develops CRM software. If my company
| cease to existed the world wouldn't even shrug.
| talove wrote:
| Axie Infinity isn't interesting as a game, but as a model it is.
|
| The other day I was going through air port security. I had to
| wait 10 minutes for one of my bags to be screened a second time.
| I happened to be waiting while some type of manager was doing a
| huddle for a new shift of employees about to start.
|
| The dumb shit the manager was telling the group of 12-15 TSA
| workers was abhorrent. Just really vile statements about how to
| interact with people going through the security lines.
|
| It dawned on me that the only rationale for this completely
| useless facade of stress inducing security was simply that these
| were low-income workers who needed a job, and we're subsidizing
| it through various types of taxes.
|
| I believe Axie Infinity is dumb, but so are much bigger things
| around us that we talk much less about. However, Axie Infinity is
| a good model for a way of creating economies to support people
| who need jobs. What might help society is if, instead of time
| wasting games, and meaningless security jobs we paid people to
| learn valuable skills through a gaming like system.
| bagels wrote:
| What were the vile statements?
| slx26 wrote:
| Agree with the first part of the comment, but at the end, when
| you say:
|
| >> "what might help society is if [...] we paid people to learn
| valuable skills"
|
| We actually have plenty of very qualified people, both with
| academic titles and without them, but many of them are still
| doing jobs that don't "make society better". The problem is
| that we used tech to cut the time and labor required to do most
| things, but we haven't freed that time for people, we only keep
| distributing the benefits of those "improvements" unevenly.
|
| And the real problem is that even if you were to redistribute
| them evenly, when there's low pressure, abundance of resources
| and an environment that provides more than what you are
| consuming, any species will start having more offspring, until
| the pressure increases and you are in trouble again (kinda like
| a malthusian trap). We could only escape that limit if we were
| able to create unlimited space habitats or our population
| growth rates were slower than the time it took us to find and
| travel to new planets. Some might argue that the systems will
| self-regulate, but self-regulation only happens in high
| pressure states, and that means that a lot of people is
| suffering under them.
|
| The fact is that we don't need much, and we already have it.
| The problem to solve is _not_ to become better or faster or
| more efficient at producing and creating more. The problem to
| solve is to collectively find a compromise on how much we want
| to have and design mechanisms to keep us in that sustainable
| lane. Not sure that 's possible, but it's the only approach to
| "help society" that I really believe in.
| pydry wrote:
| The TSA was created and Afghanistan was invaded because America
| felt like it needed a proportionate response to 9/11.
|
| Locking cabin doors was sufficient to prevent it but didnt
| "feel" like nearly enough.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Afghanistan was invaded because the people in charge of it
| were tragically unwilling to turn over their unruly house
| guests and we were tragically unwilling to demand they do so
| in a contextually appropriate way. I think it is probably one
| of the biggest tragedies of foreign diplomacy in recent US
| history.
|
| In hindsight the Taliban probably could have negotiated a
| "we'd love to get rid of the terrorists but we need your
| help" deal and then just let us pump them full of military
| aid on the condition that they add the groups we want to
| their list of persecuted people. It's not like we hated them
| out of principal. These were the same guys we armed to kick
| out the Russians. Taking a page straight out of the South
| America playbook would not have been that big a stretch.
| pydry wrote:
| >Afghanistan was invaded because the people in charge of it
| were tragically unwilling to turn over their unruly house
| guests
|
| The Taliban were invaded because they refused to hand over
| bin Laden _without the US supplying evidence that he was
| guilty_.
|
| It's hard to overestimate just how much the US was baying
| for blood at that point. It's plausible that waiting for
| evidence might have meant paying a high political price.
|
| This bloodlust was later channeled into manufacturing
| consent for the invasion of Iraq.
| 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.
| PeterisP wrote:
| The original article seems to assert that there are essentially
| no non-grinder buyers (which would be a key distinction from
| the gold farming) that in this case the existing grinders are
| selling the items to the new-potential grinders who are paying
| an initial investment with the hope of recovering it by
| grinding - if that's the case, then it is essentially a classic
| pyramid scheme where you as a newcomer pay so that future
| newcomers would pay you more afterwards; which works until the
| stream of new incoming money dries up.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _Whoever is buying these things as a collector is basically
| donating their wealth to others_
|
| No, donating would be 'here, have a bunch of games resources,
| enjoy.' People who buy virtual goods are purchasing status -
| maybe purely social status Veblen goods (eg hats and other
| rare-but-fundamentally useless items) or maybe strategic status
| (eg weapons/armor that give you a combat buff in their own
| right, plus might also indicate that you're tremendously
| experienced if you earned rather than purchased it, which is
| often unknown to the other players).
|
| some years ago I got into a Roman Gladiator game that ran on
| this model, that was both fun and easy (for me, ie I happened
| to be good at it). So I ground my way to being quite a high
| level player and winning a number of fancy items, and accepting
| challenges from other players. In a well balanced game every
| item buff has some sort of weakness, eg it's vulnerable to
| particular spam attacks or regular hits from some other
| specific weapon. I had figured out most of these by grinding my
| way up, and after a while I noticed that people who had a lot
| of fancy items got _super_ abusive if they lost a combat to
| grinding techniques rather than better gear, to the point where
| multiple players started harassing my platform account rather
| than just my in-game character. There was a big inverse
| snobbery against working too hard at it; I was even accused of
| 'violating the spirit of the game' -\\(deg_o)/-
| 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.
| JCharante wrote:
| They aren't paid to play games, they are paid to interact
| with the audience and tell stories. Looking at view counts
| of clips with just stories vs clips with gameplay going on
| will show it. Also, games have been the background in
| videos or streams for a long long time, people who were on
| YouTube circa 2010 will remember the YouTubers like
| WoodysGamerTag or whiteboy7thst who played Call of Duty,
| but that's never why people watched them. It was the hook
| but people watched for their personalities.
| 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.
| xg15 wrote:
| This implies that anything that is scarce or requires
| labour to obtain automatically becomes desirable and
| rises in value.
| jmagoon wrote:
| Faux scarcity is a key concept in the crypto ecosystem.
| chii wrote:
| scarcity is a necessary, but insufficient condition for
| desirability.
| xg15 wrote:
| I think it's not even necessary. Otherwise, rights
| holders wouldn't have to put in so much effort to hold up
| the other form of artificial scarcity, DRM. Free software
| wouldn't exist.
| 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?
| user-the-name wrote:
| Says any sane person, jesus christ. Stop being
| intentionally daft, it is not the same as being clever.
| 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.
| imtringued wrote:
| There is no such problem with negative interest rates :)
| 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.
| 8note wrote:
| A huge amount of automation goes into cooking a decent
| hamburger, stocking store shelves, and snaking a toilet,
| mind you.
|
| I'm not sure id consider those basic, either. A toddler
| couldn't do any of them
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| Pay-to-earn is such a scam inflicted on the poor though.
| Imagine you've been trying to get a job for _months_ , your
| meager savings are dwindling, and a company says that to get
| the job, you need to pay them $100 to run a "background
| check". Of course, you don't get the job. but you're still
| out that money. On the _remote_ chance that you do, it 'll
| take you almost a week at minimum wage to earn back that
| money, and you're likely to have to wait 2 or 4 weeks until
| you see it (which you don't have the money for). None of this
| works from an economic standpoint, it's outright slavery!
| 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.
| quarterbackrush wrote:
| What ends up happening is the smooth love potion becomes
| used as transactional currency in Philippines besides
| being a game currency to purchase Axies. This is not
| going to be what the government wants and who knows what
| can happen next, but as you see this automatically gives
| people a way to transact digitally by using the
| underlying infrastructure without a fintech company
|
| however price of smooth love potion has been on a
| downtrend according to the chart
| https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/smooth-love-potion
|
| the hype is over, and players are mainly selling every
| tokens they earned whether from the game or through
| transaction
| JCharante wrote:
| The problem with play to earn however is that it encourages
| people to play the game to earn money instead of fun, which
| causes inflation to the point where it's not worth the time
| of a casual player to do the grindy parts of the game and
| instead just lay people who grind all day. This is why play
| to earn is terrible, gold farmers will increase currency
| faucets without increasing currency sinks, and it is
| terrible for any game with a lot of player trading.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| At least for the years I played CCP managed to create
| keep inflation under control and markets functioning
| pretty well. I think the percent of players who were
| either buying or selling ISK was fairly low, less than
| 15% is my guess but there are a lot of different ways to
| play the game so my experience may not be representative.
| [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?
| p2p_astroturf wrote:
| coldtea wrote:
| > _but when I read the book a few years back, I was skeptical
| that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs could arise from a
| system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism._
|
| Well, here's the problem: Darwinian doesn't mean evolution
| towards something specific (i.e. more efficiency).
|
| In fact, regression (in certain skills, etc.) is just as likely
| (like cockroaches, not humans, being the fittest in a certain
| environment).
|
| So, Darwinian, broadly and metaphorically speaking (like the
| author) just means more fitness for survival.
|
| And this is totally compatible with BS jobs, when it comes to the
| survival of the overal system.
|
| One specific attribute of capitalism today is also that it's
| always somebody else's money, what with public companies, and
| golden parachutes, and bailouts, and such - and the rise of
| pharaonic middle management.
| 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]
| Exendroinient wrote:
| I don't see more games utilizing that mechanic, besides some the
| awful mobile gacha's.
| 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.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Our fiat based economy is play to earn with the government that
| backs your favorite currency as overseer that can "ban" or
| penalize you. You're required to participate to gain access to
| exchangeable currency. And the platform you're using (your
| government and their economy) takes a cut in the form of taxes -
| and inflation when they're printing money.
|
| You get to choose to team with others in companies or other
| organizations, or go it alone which is much tougher.
|
| Like Axie, if you choose to work for someone you're using their
| subplatform, like Axie is a subplatform within crypto. And the
| organization you're part of has rules and quite a lot of power
| over your future as long as you're participating.
|
| In a real world org you can choose to exit and liquidate any
| equity that you're allowed to turn into cash. Same with Axie
| assets that you sell in exchange for something else - maybe a
| cryptocurrency.
|
| As with Axie, there are many bullshit jobs in the real world that
| exist for silly reasons and can easily be automated away.
|
| I think these bullshit jobs are bugs in real world economies and
| virtual economies. Sometimes they're intentional bugs that
| benefit the owners or controllers of a platform or economy.
|
| I'd caution one about conflating these anomalies with NFTs or
| crypto as a whole. Blockchain primitives have the potential to
| free the proletariat from exploitation by large corporate
| platforms. Creatives, for example, can own and profit from their
| art for centuries without an intermediary like Spotify, record
| companies, film studios or publishers keeping the lions share of
| the return. It has the potential to disintermediate banks, which
| is a huge deal, which you'll know if you've ever worked for an
| investment bank or even walked through any major financial
| district.
|
| Bullshit jobs abound. But these primitives Axie is playing with
| are not the cause. They have the potential to free us all.
| platistocrates wrote:
| The author makes the point that bullshit jobs shouldn't exist in
| capitalist systems, since they are inherently Darwinian.
|
| There is a misconception that "Darwinian" is the same as
| "efficient."
|
| Darwinian simply means "what can be sustained will be sustained
| until they can't be sustained anymore."
|
| Which is exactly why layoffs happen in economic downturns --
| those bullshit jobs just can't be sustained anymore.
| 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
| narrator wrote:
| There is such an enormous amount of slack in the system. 2% of
| the workforce is involved in agriculture, and it used to be 90%.
| What did the other 88% do with all that free time?
|
| A lot of the Web3 and game economy is just people massively
| overpaying for entertainment.
| Sebguer wrote:
| > I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs
| could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism.
|
| This takeaway is odd - especially when the entire point is that
| these bullshit jobs are a core part of capitalism, because they
| force people to buy into the system in spite of its obvious
| problems...
| echopurity wrote:
| 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.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| People can now no longer say those who wish for the games of
| decades past are wearing rose-tinted glasses when there's this
| dog shit that's actively being peddled as the future of games.
| bspammer wrote:
| Imagined meaning: work, but fun!
|
| Actual meaning: play, but boring!
| kseifried wrote:
| You mean like the people paid to wait in line for other people at
| US gov hearings?
|
| https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/13/18223836/p...
|
| Sounds awfully similar to "completing tasks contrived by a game
| designer"
| chii wrote:
| Paying for someone to stand in line for you isn't a bullshit
| job tho - it's generating value because the person paying is
| obviously otherwise occupied with a better use of their time,
| and thus can afford to pay someone else to stay in the queue.
| 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
| hypervisorxxx wrote:
| This play to earn title is a particularly annoying dig at the
| recently blown up phrase where users can play to earn Blockchain
| tokens in nft based games which has actually enabled young men in
| the Philippines to quit their jobs as taxi drivers and involved
| them in an ecosystem which otherwise has exacerbated inequalities
| and trampled on the rights of humans in their country as
| historically corrupt government has minimsed the earning
| potential of the working class not and left the upper class
| eternally skeptical of their own government.
|
| To make a dig like this and then not even acknowledge it in the
| content is exactly what I would expect from a white American who
| has no concept of how certain trends impact anyone other than
| themselves.
| chii wrote:
| The article's point was to say that these grind games are not
| actually adding economic value, because it required existing
| wealth to come into the system to pay out the grind (and the
| company sucks out some transaction fees).
|
| The game itself may possibly be fun for those that pay (instead
| of grind), but that's hard to judge.
| jollybean wrote:
| 'Play To Earn' is obviously in a different category of
| identifiable BS jobs.
|
| If Rich Worlders want to pay Poor Worlders to rank up ahead of
| time on a game for them, that's weird, but so be it.
|
| 'BS Jobs' I think is more a problem with the vast landscape of
| effete and ineffective White Collar workers.
| 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?
| 58x14 wrote:
| Others in this thread mentioned similar patterns of acquiring
| and selling virtual assets. PayPal was a common money
| transfer platform and eBay was a common marketplace (before
| they banned the sale of digital items).
|
| I stopped using PayPal for... a number of reasons, and BTC
| was a functional alternative.
| 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.
| foxyv wrote:
| This kind of grinding is probably the part I enjoy most about
| games. It's almost meditative. I usually play games to kill
| time anyways. I guess that's why I enjoyed games like FF8,
| WoW, and Maple Story.
| tomrod 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?
|
| From a business perspective, you're allowing for engagement
| despite different time valuations by player personas. The
| savvy game designer would not only encourage this, it would
| develop a way to capture a portion of the proceeds.
| dustintrex wrote:
| > _is it good that a game is so boring that players are
| willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?_
|
| If you're designing a free to play game and want to make
| money from it, this is not just good, it's a design goal --
| as long as the developer is the one making the real world
| money.
|
| Clash of Clans perfected this model over 10 years ago:
|
| https://gyrovague.com/tag/clash-of-clans/
| jrootabega wrote:
| In my experience, plenty of people will want to skip even the
| most fun game experiences to get to the farming/grinding
| endgame just to watch their numbers and loot collection
| expand.
| taurath wrote:
| It's a bit disheartening when you look at how many people
| deal with the numbness ever present in their lives by playing
| games that mete out little rewards in easily quantifiable
| bits. This is not what humans need, or, if we're honest,
| want.
| gedy wrote:
| Isn't this the same as many of us do even outside of games?
| oblio wrote:
| Yeah, but we're not in the matrix yet, so optimizing for
| real life has other beneficial side effects.
| popcube wrote:
| your game should so funny that they cannot give up it, but it
| is so boring result in they want to pay money for skipping
| it. this is business model.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > ... 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?
|
| This was addressed brilliantly in a South Park episode,
| "Freemium Isn't Free." In it, a character, Stan, blows a ton
| of money advancing a by-design boring game. The game is
| revealed to be a sham to bleed players of cash. It likens
| addicted gamers to alcoholics. This mock commercial appears
| in the ep:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_n5nbx0Z9s
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> And yet creating an obsession and a goal and providing a
| way to grind or spend to that goal is popular._
|
| Now that the veneer of such "games" is dropping away to
| reveal that they've just been casinos all along, the bright
| side is that society might finally find the gumption to
| start taking gaming addiction as seriously as gambling
| addiction.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| You mean, take it not seriously at all, and exploited by
| the government (lottery) to rip off its own citizens?
|
| Sports gambling via apps is getting huge and deregulated
| and advertised on major TV broadcast networks.
| oblio wrote:
| It depends on where you are. In many places sports
| gambling is starting to be cracked down on.
|
| Plus having a single state owned lottery is better than
| 1000 shady companies competing, and lottery revenues can
| even be used for state budgets.
| sva_ 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 things that people are willing to spend money on in games
| are usually interesting for people for the exact reason that
| those things are scarce. So it is, from my experience, all
| about showing off.
|
| Saying this as someone who exploited a lot of games and made
| some large passive income from that, "back in the days". I'd
| say 95% of -- "end-customers" (as opposed to resellers which
| you need if you move a lot,) bought stuff just to show off.
|
| So if those things were readily available and didn't require
| grinding, people wouldn't desire them. It's almost a bit of a
| paradox, I guess.
| 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.
| danShumway wrote:
| > I think that misses the magic of games for a significant
| population of gamers.
|
| I don't doubt that some people are enjoying this, and I
| think that's great; meditative games are fine. But I've
| never played a meditative game and been tempted to pay real
| money to turn it off.
|
| I think there's a little bit of wishful, optimistic
| projection about player intention that happens during these
| conversations, because if everyone playing the games felt
| the way you describe, then the monetization model wouldn't
| work.
|
| We have games that have chores in them (Animal Crossing
| springs to mind). And we have repetitive games. And we have
| MMOs where people like to grind. None of that is a failure
| of design. But what you notice is that in the best
| instances of these games where people actually like the
| grind, they pay money to play the game, not to stop playing
| it. When a player is earning $10 every 4-6 hours by
| automating chopping logs, that's a sign that some of your
| playerbase isn't enjoying what's happening to them. They're
| sending the clearest possible economic signal they can that
| the grind isn't a positive or rewarding experience for
| them.
|
| We can talk about the people who do enjoy the grind or get
| something out of it, but I feel like we're all kind of
| lying to ourselves if we say that's the primary experience
| happening with the vast majority of players. Games wouldn't
| make money from microtransactions unless a nontrivial
| portion of their playerbase thought it was valuable to skip
| gameplay. You won't make very much money giving players
| ways to skip gameplay unless you're confident that a
| nontrivial portion of your playerbase won't find that
| gameplay rewarding.
| Talanes wrote:
| >They're sending the clearest possible economic signal
| they can that the grind isn't a positive or rewarding
| experience for them.
|
| For them, personally. There's a good deal of
| microtransactions where the person spending the money
| still wants everyone else to have to grind for it. MMO's
| tend to breed a lot of prestige-seeking behavior.
| danShumway wrote:
| > There's a good deal of microtransactions where the
| person spending the money still wants everyone else to
| have to grind for it.
|
| I'm not sure that having a system that's unpleasant for a
| portion of the playerbase and letting people pay to
| pretend that they've gone through it is all that better.
|
| I've commented to the same effect elsewhere, but public
| prestige systems that can be paid to be bypassed are sort
| of self-defeating. They only work if a very small portion
| of the playerbase is cheating, which... I still don't
| think it's good design to set up gameplay incentives or
| monetization around a minority of the playerbase
| pretending to the majority of the other players that
| they've legitimately earned something.
| NickNaraghi wrote:
| > When a player is earning $10 every 4-6 hours by
| automating chopping logs, that's a sign that some of your
| playerbase isn't enjoying what's happening to them.
| They're sending the clearest possible economic signal
| they can that the grind isn't a positive or rewarding
| experience for them.
|
| Unfortunately, in the scope of Runescape, this misses the
| point in a big way. Runescape has a robust economy where
| every action can be measured in gold and experience per
| hour (when played efficiently). Someone might be buying
| magic logs for gold because cutting them down is a poor
| choice for them from an opportunity cost perspective
| (i.e. they can make more gold per hour via other
| activities their character has access to).
|
| Zooming out, the system is actually incredible if you get
| a chance to analyze it a bit more. For the hardest of the
| hardcore players, there's a resource called
| CrystalMathLabs[0] that shows exactly how much time and
| gold it costs to max your character. And the devs are
| constantly optimizing new content around these "max
| efficiency" rates.
|
| 0: https://crystalmathlabs.com/tracker/suppliescalc.php
| danShumway wrote:
| > Runescape has a robust economy where every action can
| be measured in gold and experience per hour (when played
| efficiently). Someone might be buying magic logs for gold
| because cutting them down is a poor choice for them from
| an opportunity cost perspective (i.e. they can make more
| gold per hour via other activities their character has
| access to).
|
| I don't think this holds up when real-world money enters
| the equation. I don't think this can be accurately
| descriped as player optimization or class specialization
| if people are paying real money to skip it.
|
| > they can make more gold per hour via other activities
| their character has access to
|
| If this was actually true, no real-world money would be
| entering the system, because all of the players would be
| making enough gold in-game via those other activities to
| pay for the logs. If they're being forced to spend real-
| world money, then the other activities they're engaged
| with are not giving them enough gold to sustainably fund
| themselves in-game.
|
| The problem isn't having an in-game economy, in-game
| economies are great. The problem is people paying to get
| rid of gameplay. People who do that are signaling very
| clearly that they believe there is monetary value in
| removing a section of gameplay from the game. Designers
| should pay attention to that signal.
|
| ----
|
| I don't doubt that there are people legitimately having
| fun playing Runecraft. But it can't be everyone, or else
| people would not pay $10 to remove less than a day's
| worth of grind.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| Like I mentioned earlier: it's not just about
| fun/enjoyment, it's about being rewarded by the game. In
| both real life and games, people will overcome challenges
| they don't enjoy because it is rewarding in a way that
| isn't necessarily just "fun". Eliminating a day's worth
| of grind in real life is surely very rewarding as well
| but it's very difficult and rare to do. In a game like eg
| Runescape, such an impactful and rewarding feat is rather
| achievable, it only costs $10 and almost everyone can
| afford it. If you don't have $10 to spare then you can
| achieve it with time. The grind is just a challenge to
| overcome, and that doesn't have to be fun but challenges
| are often rewarding to overcome.
| danShumway wrote:
| > such an impactful and rewarding feat is rather
| achievable, it only costs $10 and almost everyone can
| afford it.
|
| There are a ton of problems bundled up in this sentence,
| but I'm not sure I have time to unpack all of them.
|
| But this is not an attitude that I think a game designer
| should ever have. I don't think we should be building
| experiences that boil down to teaching players that
| spending money is the equivalent of overcoming a
| challenge, I think players should be extremely suspicious
| of any game or experience that has that attitude towards
| challenge. Spending money is not the same thing as
| achieving something or earning a reward, I think it's
| really bad for us to encourage that kind of equivalency
| in a player's mind.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| Well ok, that's just like your opinion, man. Like I said
| in my original comment, I avoid it personally but I find
| it hard to criticize objectively. Like so many things
| these games do, it's just a cheap imitation of real life
| where this stuff is everywhere. People can and do spend
| to overcome challenges in real life all the time while
| the proles meagerly grind away, there's so many meatspace
| mechanics like this but it takes a lot more than $10.
| Since many people will never achieve that kind of
| substantial wealth in their entire lives, these games
| offer a fake world where they can. Using fantasy worlds
| to escape the shitty reality we live in is such an old &
| boring concept.
|
| Meh, it's a free country and games like Runescape are a
| known quantity that players can choose. I would say that
| if you want to change minds then make your case, but
| clearly you don't have the time to do that.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I can't stand this kind of thing, but I do enjoy a lot of
| games that basically punish you until you develop enough
| skill to beat them. This is its own form of "grinding," I
| suppose, but one I find much more rewarding than
| essentially being rewarded for the number of hours I'm
| willing to do monotonous tasks.
| tptacek wrote:
| The distinction is that you would never pay someone to
| learn how to beat the Orphan of Kos for you; the pleasure
| is in getting your ass kicked to the point where you
| throw the controller across the room, only to pick it up
| again a couple hours later. That's exactly the experience
| these Bullshit Games _aren 't_ creating.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I don't think it's true that nobody would pay to learn
| it. A friend made significant money as a dota tutor, and
| there's whole sites full of people selling tutoring time
| https://www.superprof.com/lessons/gaming/united-states/.
| Similarly, people pay for cheats/unlocks/walkthroughs.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Metafy is a big one too. But notably people are largely
| willing to pay if the game is played competitively. For
| single-player games, not so much.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| That's true for a lot of players but the problem is that
| like any real-life skill, many players will hit a low
| ceiling of mastery in certain skills for whatever reason.
| Regardless of whether they're unwilling or unable, these
| low-skill players will not feel rewarded by the game.
| That's a problem if you're targeting a broad audience of
| players (which tends to be the most profitable strategy).
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| I used to play WOW until I realised what I was doing. I
| still remember the day I quit because I was supposed to
| show up for some massive raid and just didn't. I have not
| logged in since.
|
| The whole MMO and Freemium space is a bit grim if you ask
| me since you are essentially manipulating the feelings of
| players with no worthwhile rewards.
|
| I think this is why I have gravitated heavily to board
| games. You meet up once a week or so. Play against real
| humans. No grind. And they can help sharpen your thinking.
| Joeri wrote:
| _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._
|
| You could look at the existence of these games as a triumph
| of capitalism. We have raised productivity to such heights
| that the real world does not provide enough grind to sate
| the need for reward, so people literally invent fictional
| realities to create more opportunities for grinding your
| way to a reward.
|
| What is missing here is purpose. The reward could be more
| than just meaningless progress in the game. For example,
| why couldn't you have a game were the grind is designing
| tailored-for-one phone cases, which then get printed and
| shipped in the real world. People could be ordering an NFT-
| backed guaranteed unique phone case, and many people would
| be willing to pay real money for that.
|
| That these games have a grind that amounts to meaningless
| work disconnected to physical reality seems like a failure
| of imagination and a waste of opportunity.
| bentcorner wrote:
| > _Of course the elephant in the room is that this "reward"
| is artificial_
|
| It's only artificial in a sense that it's one level deeper
| than our current economy (and is smaller and subject to the
| whims of the developers), but in the grand scheme of the
| universe our current economy is just as artificial.
| oblio wrote:
| The real economy keeps us fed and clothed and sheltered
| and alive, so I'd call it very much real.
| jallen_dot_dev wrote:
| Grinding is boring but it's also extremely satisfying when
| you finally achieve your desired level. It feels like a real
| achievement, and it lets you show off to other players
| because they know how much time you had to spend. If it was
| also fun, it wouldn't be as impressive. In that way it's sort
| of like Proof of Work in Bitcoin. If it wasn't a total waste
| (that is, if the work itself produced something useful that
| was worth something) then it wouldn't do its job as a
| disincentive to cheat the system because you're not actually
| wasting anything by doing the work.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| > In that way it's sort of like Proof of Work in Bitcoin.
|
| It's not sort of like PoW, it is basically _exactly_ the
| same. People play games for fun, but they also play for
| status. Status, like Bitcoin, has a hard supply cap so
| there is no limit to the amount of energy that individuals
| might expend in pursuit of it.
| danShumway wrote:
| > It feels like a real achievement
|
| I've mentioned this elsewhere, but if people can pay money
| to skip something, then I don't think doing it is a
| public/social achievement. At best, it's a personal
| achievement, which could hold value for some people. But
| you're not really signaling anything publicly by going
| through a grind if someone else can pay to skip it.
|
| This is also why I'm kind of skeptical of NFT games as
| being about "earning" something in-game, or about showing
| off status. Why should anyone care about or respect someone
| for having an asset in a game that can just be bought?
| jallen_dot_dev wrote:
| You can buy your way into a prestigious school. I don't
| see how some people paying to skip the work denies the
| achievement of those who don't skip it.
| danShumway wrote:
| > You can buy your way into a prestigious school.
|
| And is that something our society encourages? Are we
| rooting for prestigious schools to offer more pay-to-
| enter mechanisms like that, do we have a contingent of
| teachers arguing that this is the future of schooling? Or
| do a lot of people get really mad about those bribery
| scandals, and do those prestigious schools actually loose
| a small amount of social prestige in the public eye
| whenever a new scandal comes out?
|
| People aren't happy with Harvard when they engage in
| nepotism, no one goes around calling that a bold new
| innovative model for college admissions.
|
| Of course, paying money or hacking your way through an
| experience doesn't rob other people of the intrinsic
| personal achievement of doing something hard, and it
| doesn't mean their experience was less meaningful. But
| common shortcuts certainly make all of these achievements
| less valuable as a _social signal_ , which is something
| that NFT-based games claim that they can provide.
|
| In your earlier comment you write:
|
| > it lets you show off to other players because they know
| how much time you had to spend
|
| But no, it doesn't, because those other players don't
| know if you legitimately got the achievement/asset, they
| have no idea how much time you spent on it. If you
| personally find it rewarding to get that asset then
| great, but in a play-to-earn game or a game with tradable
| NFT assets, most of the achievements that are publicly
| displayed by players won't have been earned, so you're
| not really socially/publicly showing off anything to
| other players unless you're also adding a text box
| underneath them saying "don't worry, I did actually earn
| this."
| jallen_dot_dev wrote:
| Ok I see your point now and I agree. If there is no way
| for others to distinguish between grinding and pay-to-win
| then social signaling ceases to be a motive and you're
| only left with personal satisfaction.
| josh2600 wrote:
| I have to say that many of my fondest memories from all kinds
| of systems; games, work, play, all of my favorite times were
| when I was finding an unscratched edge in a model. There's
| something superlative about finding a hack, a way to obtain
| something that the designer of the game did not intend. The
| feeling of "I know your game better than you do" is something
| I shall never forget.
|
| Those fleeting moments where you have a temporary advantage
| gained without malfeasance but with pure cunning and skill
| (or cleverness if we're being bold), those are the happiest
| times in my life.
|
| Finding the little edges where things just don't quite add
| up, shining a light on them, and wielding them as your own;
| that's the stuff from which real hackers are made.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| You make it sound so posh but there is other, much more
| real face to all this - breaking the game for everybody
| else. You are basically having fun at the expense of
| literally everyone else involved.
|
| Sure, you achieve it by being clever, and theoretically you
| report your finding to creators and don't abuse your
| position of power, but thats not what usually happened.
|
| Behavior like this is the core reason why I don't play
| online games of any type anymore - the idea of proper fun
| looks distantly different to this constant 'finding
| metagame' for which I have less polite names. Plus its a
| waste of life and ones talents but thats another topic.
| aww_dang wrote:
| If people care enough to exploit your game or buy items in
| your game economy, your game is a success. If it was truly
| boring, they wouldn't bother.
| syntheweave wrote:
| The reason grinding exists is also economic in nature: the
| "consumer value for money" equation is often reduced to
| maximizing hours of playtime. This has led to extremely
| padded gameplay all throughout when we compare to arcade
| games, which are premised on "operator value of time" and
| therefore always endeavor to shuttle players in and out of
| their session in a few minutes.
|
| The other day I visited the local pinball joint and the old
| EM game I was playing got stuck counting up the 3000 point
| bonus during gameplay. I cradled the ball on the right
| flipper, thinking "hmm, how interesting!" One of the staff
| came over and apoplectically remarked "If you don't continue
| play I am going to have to turn the game off", and when I did
| as instructed, showed great distress at how I had managed to
| roll over the score and accumulate two free credits, but also
| appreciated that he had gotten a bit closer to the mysterious
| issue of the game repeatedly ending up with 9 credits.
|
| I see the impact of NFTs as a pendulum swing towards "item
| value in context", which has no particular relationship to
| time or even defined scarcity, but would instead favor broad
| reusability across numerous contexts. P2E is just the early
| mimicry every new model has to go through before getting to
| the good parts, in the same way that early console games took
| a few years to start relaxing the constraints of arcades in
| earnest.
|
| I think a much more likely early candidate for interesting
| NFT gaming will be small collectable games, derived from the
| procedural arts scene. Scarcity sets individual prices within
| a collectables market, but the value of the collection as a
| whole is determined by other modes of context. There's no
| need to squeeze or stretch the gameplay loop or make it
| addictive or insert monetizing gates; every instance can be
| exactly designed to be "ideal" on its own. Instead the game
| has to cater to speculative interests, which is a whole other
| set of trade-offs and can even favor characteristic flaws.
| For some reason I have not yet seen the "pay to lose" NFT
| game, but to me it seems blindingly obvious that being able
| to lose in an interesting way will command speculative
| interest.
| [deleted]
| 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
| thih9 wrote:
| If this was 100% true for all live service games, then they
| would all resemble casino games; a lot do, but some don't.
| oblio wrote:
| Which ones don't?
| jkhdigital wrote:
| People play games for all sorts of personal reasons. "Boring"
| gameplay is apparently in demand. If you don't like that kind
| of game, don't play it. If you don't understand how anyone
| else could possibly spend time on it, then maybe you should
| open your mind and talk to some of these people to try and
| understand what is undoubtedly a much more complex phenomenon
| than you believe it to be.
| danShumway wrote:
| This is ignoring the reality that people are paying to get
| rid of this gameplay. I do understand why people like
| boring games, I've sunk my own share of time into
| therapeutic experiences like Animal Crossing, and even a
| few pure idle games. I've grinded out 100% soul collections
| in old Castlevania games. That kind of repetitive action
| and optimization can be personally rewarding and
| emotionally satisfying. And I've no doubt that some players
| of these games genuinely enjoy the minute-to-minute process
| of chopping logs.
|
| But you're just kidding yourself if you say that's the
| primary thing going on here. If people enjoyed the grind,
| they wouldn't pay to remove it. The difference between
| grinding in a game like Castlevania and grinding in a game
| like Runescape is that there's not a Castlevania real-world
| monetary _economy_ based entirely around shortening the
| game.
|
| We can't really seriously say that everyone playing
| Runescape enjoyed the grind if there was enough demand for
| gameplay automation to make botting a reliable income
| source.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| At a certain point these look less like games, and more like
| status symbols being pursued. I suspect that this explains
| much more of the economic and social aspect of things like
| Runescape more than trying to think of them like a game.
| 58x14 wrote:
| I agree with you ideologically but challenge this statement:
|
| > [that] gameplay should never have been in the game
|
| How many millions of hours of 'pointless' content are
| uploaded weekly that people watch? No one is forced to play
| this game, or to pay for it. Why should it _not_ exist? If
| game developers create something that people play, is that
| not a success from their perspective?
|
| This quickly becomes a philosophical conversation. As others
| mentioned, how much of life is the boring, grind-y parts? How
| many of us on HN find clever ways to circumvent, augment,
| automate the grind? Is it immoral to create profitable,
| addictive systems of human engagement? Does 'good' game
| design have a quantifiable definition?
| danShumway wrote:
| There is a valid conversation to be had about whether art
| needs to be edifying. However, I think we're talking about
| an entirely different level of exploitation when we talk
| about making something so unpleasant that people are
| willing to pay to get rid of it.
|
| Millions of hours of pointless content gets uploaded to
| Youtube, but if people choose to watch it, fine. That's a
| conversation about edification and people choosing to waste
| their own time. What we have here instead is a system where
| people are signaling with real money that the experience is
| unpleasant for them. We're not talking about deciding
| what's best for people against their will or forcing art to
| have emotional/intellectual value, we're talking about
| building an experience that's monetized around players
| openly signaling that they dislike what we're doing to
| them.
|
| Not that the deeper conversation you bring up about
| addiction or "junk-food" stimulation doesn't have value,
| but I think exploiting pay-to-skip mechanics is a more
| obvious form of exploitation that's just on another level
| of harmful. The comparison here isn't giving people junk
| food or hooking them on useless Youtube videos -- the
| comparison is the ads that roll in front of those videos.
| It's giving someone a meal and putting something gross in
| it, and then forcing them to pay you to remove it or to
| pick it out themselves. It's taking something that people
| want, and then breaking it or obscuring it, making it so
| cumbersome to get at that valuable core that the act of
| playing the game is no longer satisfying to the player.
| 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.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| I agree with most of this including pay-to-earn, more
| worryingly there are other types of to-earn being floated
| like learn-to-earn. It's almost like people are rushing
| headlong into dystopia and ignoring all the downsides of
| extrinsic rewards.
|
| That said a successful game like this will always have a non-
| trivial part of the player base willing to pay to skip parts
| of the game. They want the success now not later and aren't
| willing to work for it. Even if the journey is actually fun.
| Most games take this quite seriously though and work against
| gold farming and cheating as it ruins the experience they set
| out to make.
|
| Where it becomes evil is when you set out to make it horrible
| intentionally so a bigger part of the player base has to pay
| to remove it and continue playing.
| 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.
| danShumway wrote:
| It's odd that this doesn't come up in other media or other
| experiences, right? The closest analogy I can think of is
| unskippable advertising.
|
| We never have a movie series where people pay extra money
| to remove scenes. You never go to a restaurant where the
| owner forces you to eat carrots before you can have your
| main meal, even though some diners might like carrots. It's
| basically just games and advertising where we have this
| model that consumers should either be forced to endure a
| part of the experience they dislike or that they should pay
| us money to give them the stuff that they directly do like.
|
| Like, imagine if you were watching a show on Netflix, and
| you tried to skip a filler episode or fast-forward through
| a gory section, and Netflix wouldn't let you continue the
| series until you either watched that content in its
| entirety or paid them 99 cents.
| Talanes wrote:
| >We never have a movie series where people pay extra
| money to remove scenes.
|
| Star Wars fans keep asking though.
| danShumway wrote:
| :) Okay, that's a fair point. The Lucas estate/Disney
| continue to be kind of weird about this.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I don't know if it is possible to have "pay to skip" not
| become "pay to win" in an MMO.
|
| The whole point of an MMO is that your character progresses
| and gets better as they do more things in the game. If you
| are paying to skip something that makes your character
| better, your character will be better than if you didn't
| pay to skip that.
|
| If what you are skipping is not making your character
| better, you wouldn't be doing it in the first place.
|
| MMOs are be definition pay to win. You either pay with time
| or pay with money.
| syvolt wrote:
| People getting around games ToS' will always be a thing -
| since Runescape is the example being used, it is
| expressly banned to both purchase and sell gold coins.
| This is not a problem exclusive to MMOs, it's a problem
| with any game with a leveling system, currency, or items
| that are tradable between players.
|
| Examples: FIFA packs, Runescape/MMO gold, League of
| Legends accounts/boosts (names as well) , Valorant
| accounts/boosts, CS:GO items (names, accounts and boosts
| as well), Neopets items and gift boxes, Diablo 3
| boosts/accounts, and on and on...
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Then maybe it's fine to be "pay to win"? Seems like
| millions of people are enjoying their time spent, and are
| willing to spend more time to continue to win.
|
| Who are we to judge?
| Bjartr wrote:
| The presence of aggregate societal harm tends to be the
| motivator for other regulation around otherwise voluntary
| behavior such as gambling. So if that harm can be
| demonstrated then there may be a case for legislating if
| companies can offer such games and on what terms they can
| do so.
| 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.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Chess (and most competitive games/sports/simulators) has
| almost 0 content from "the devs". The rest is UGC/PVP
| challenges. Endless replay value, endless opportunities to
| practice and study for an advantage, no forced grind.
| meowface wrote:
| >There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content
| and/or grinding mechanics.
|
| You neglected what's by far the funnest and most important
| and user-retaining aspect of open world MMOs: player-to-
| player interaction - be it friendly, neutral, or hostile.
|
| The absolute most enjoyable open world MMOs I've played had
| essentially no content. Players forged their own content in
| the form of geopolitics, war, economics, and copious
| communication (propaganda and shittalking, largely). They
| felt like a completely unplanned, natural simulation of
| militaristic human societies from hundreds or thousands of
| years ago. Probably not ideal in real life, but very fun
| for a game.
|
| I'm convinced the best MMOs to come out over the next 20
| years will have very little content and very sparse
| grinding mechanics. The magic is the emergent game and
| meta-game that springs forth from the bonding and strife
| between gargantuan numbers of human agents.
| Talanes wrote:
| > I'm convinced the best MMOs to come out over the next
| 20 years will have very little content and very sparse
| grinding mechanics.
|
| Current open world survival games use grind as a main
| mechanism for driving emergent game-play and creating
| player differentiation/conflict, so I don't see it ending
| completely. Game designers have gotten much better at
| making grind that isn't actively unfun though.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| > The absolute most enjoyable open world MMOs I've played
| had essentially no content. Players forged their own
| content in the form of geopolitics, war, economics, and
| copious communication (propaganda and shittalking,
| largely). They felt like a completely unplanned, natural
| simulation of militaristic human societies from hundreds
| or thousands of years ago. Probably not ideal in real
| life, but very fun for a game.
|
| What MMO was that? This sounds like a MUSH (a kind of
| text only roleplay server which is a couterpart of the
| more combat-focused MUDs)
| ljm wrote:
| It sounds a bit like EVE Online, which is also an MMO
| where the base game is really just a foundation for
| everything else that happens.
| SubuSS wrote:
| Eve had a huge grind situation at least when I played it
| 10 odd years ago. You need to skill up, make isks, buy
| fancy ships and blow em up. I guess you could putter
| around in a tiny beginner ship - but considering there
| wasn't much dog fighting skills involved, it was lame.
| You could build a corp - again need isks.
| musicale wrote:
| > even though it's arguably boring, I find it relaxing
|
| Fishing in Final Fantasy XIV is boring yet strangely
| relaxing, and in many cases doesn't even require looking at
| the screen.
| hailwren wrote:
| There's something fundamentally satisfying to the human
| psyche about understanding a set of rules and optimizing
| actions against them. I think it hits that 'feeling
| smarter than something' nerve.
|
| We've probably lost some potentially fantastic physicists
| to MMOs.
| Natsu wrote:
| This is the hard part about "value creation." Is
| something that makes someone happier--even if others see
| that same thing as pointless waste--value?
|
| We don't all want the same things and people want things
| we don't want, but this also allows us to trade and have
| both parties come out ahead from their own perspectives.
|
| So there's always a tension between whether people should
| even be allowed to want some things or they should be
| forbidden due to being bad or wasteful in some capacity.
|
| But I do think there's a special kind of irony to be
| complaining about the BS of someone getting money for
| moving bits and pixels around in a blog post on the
| internet frequented by a bunch of people, many of whom
| move bits and pixels around for a living.
| 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!"
| Lammy wrote:
| http://progressquest.com/
| musicale wrote:
| Apparently the original idle game (according to wikipedia
| at least) although modern idle games are probably
| influenced by Cookie Clicker and others as well.
|
| I've occasionally been tempted to play Idle Champions
| which seems similar.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Idle Champions is fun but the numerical scaling on that
| game is whacky. It only takes like a month before you're
| doing 1 googol (1^100) damage and little dwarves or
| gnolls or rats or whatever drop a similar amount of gold.
| They say it's to differentiate effectively between linear
| and exponential scaling, but the end result is just
| whacky.
|
| It's the only game I've ever played where your damage
| output is most effectively measured by the size of its
| exponent
| joombaga wrote:
| I'm pretty into the idle/incremental game concept, though
| they're rarely implemented to my taste.
|
| It's difficult to quantify what makes a good one, but my
| favorite is Universal Paperclips.
|
| https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
| bncy wrote:
| Man, this is great, I've just wasted 30 minutes playing
| this.
| esoterae wrote:
| The old #idlerpg was fun, in a historic sense (reading
| the log). I wonder when that got written. Anybody
| remember? Google doesn't.
| nradov wrote:
| I've seen people watching mesmerized as a Roomba vacuumed
| the floor. A time saving device indeed!
| alchemism wrote:
| Don't forget to prep the floors before every run!
| oblio wrote:
| Prep the floors?
| varsketiz wrote:
| Floors need to be tidy for the robots to do their work
| (no clothes on the ground). There might be places that
| are difficult for the robot to clean without help -
| chairs might need to be put out of their way. In my home
| I put a plank to make a step smaller, if I don't, it
| can't go to the bathroom.
| animal531 wrote:
| I once defragged a drive multiple times, which promptly
| killed it, so I'm not sure how turning it into a game
| would have turned out.
| exikyut wrote:
| Hmm, that's a pretty powerful proof-of-work mechanic
| you've got there. "DefragCoin", anyone? Now we just need
| a way to achieve unilateral consensus about whether a
| given HDD is dead...
|
| (/s)
| danShumway wrote:
| > 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.
|
| To be clear, I don't think _that_ part is lame at all. That
| part is great. I 'm all for relaxing repetitive games.
|
| But I don't think that is what happens for all of the
| players in a game with pay-to-skip mechanics, and I think
| when we talk about the positive aspects of a game like
| Runescape, we're kind of engaging in a little bit of
| wishful thinking about how universal that experience was
| for all of its players. If a game is genuinely optimizing
| for creating a relaxing repetitive experience, then it (and
| 3rd parties around it) probably shouldn't also be
| monetizing getting rid of that experience.
|
| Runescape grinding in theory was a relaxing, great
| experience for some people. I'm very happy for those
| people, but in practice, enough people obviously hated the
| grind enough that they were paying for bots. I am less
| concerned about the people who genuinely enjoyed chopping
| down trees, and more concerned about the obvious subset of
| players who were somehow feeling trapped by the game into
| spending real-world money to avoid something that was
| obviously unpleasant for them.
|
| Willing theraputic, relaxing, repetitive grind is great.
| Hard to monetize with microtransactions though, and when I
| look at the play-to-earn model more broadly, that model
| literally doesn't work if people enjoy the grind. The only
| way the money comes into the game is the grind _isn 't_
| theraputic or relaxing, a nontrivial chunk of the
| playerbase has to hate that process or else nobody makes
| money.
|
| The healthy, relaxing, kind of best-case scenario grind you
| describe is the opposite of what a play-to-earn game
| designer wants; those designers have a strong incentive not
| to allow their games to have enjoyable grinding, because
| the whole point is that they expect the majority of their
| players to pay money buying resources from other players.
| That monetization model only works if people aren't
| enjoying the grind.
| bredren wrote:
| >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.
|
| Reuse of content in new context doesn't have to be a boring
| clone.
|
| Disney would regularly reuse animations of characters
| between animated films to save money. It did not
| necessarily take away from the wrapping content's best
| moments or overall entertainment value.
|
| For example dancing reveries and other sequences in Robin
| Hood used rotoscoping heavily. [1]
|
| There's no doubt the reuse was cheap but in some ways that
| allowed the designers to focus on new characters and
| scenes.
|
| [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/disney-reuses-
| animation-2015...
| Beldin wrote:
| > _There 's only two ways to keep players playing: new
| content and/or grinding mechanics._
|
| I'd argue that PvP is a third option. Though that does
| impose its own requirements to do justice and ensure
| longevity.
| 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.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Yeah. It's for those don't wanna buy drugs.
| wyre wrote:
| NFTs are the equivalent of decentralized RS party hats.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Except instead of a fixed (or decreasing as people slowly
| accidentally lose or leave the game with them in their
| bank) amount anyone can make a new (ugly as hell) party
| hat any time.
|
| Oh and the party hat could just disappear leaving you
| with a receipt saying you own... something no one can see
| any more.
| 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:
| Arubis wrote:
| If you haven't already read it (or, heck, even if you have), I
| _strongly_ suspect you'd have a blast with Neal Stephenson's
| _REAMDE_: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde
| 58x14 wrote:
| Wow, thanks for the recommendation, I've added it to my
| reading list!
| 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...
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Here's a story about The Sims Online I posted a few years ago,
| in which I described making a maze solving bot to quickly and
| automatically generate millions of Simoleons, and an ad-hoc
| solution to the delivery problem:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730181
|
| I wrote a bot for The Sims Online that manufactured Simoleons,
| then repurposed it to catalog and describe objects in the game
| for you with a speech synthesizer. TSO had some ham-fisted
| money making multi player games that forced players to interact
| with each other in exchange for Simoleons.
|
| One of them was a maze solving game for two players, where one
| player is lost in the maze and can see the local walls around
| them, and the other player can see an overall map of the maze
| without the player's position, and has to guide them around and
| figure out where they are and how to guide them out by asking
| them what they see and telling them which direction to move.
|
| That required a lot of work for two people to do manually, so
| there was a big reward, but it was trivial and fun to solve
| mazes programmatically! (Plus it made cool bleeping and kaching
| sounds as it solved the mazes and printed money!)
|
| I would run two TSO clients at the same time, logged into
| different accounts in different windows. The bot attached to
| both of them, then screen scraped pixels and injected events to
| repeatedly solve mazes by moving the player around until it
| identified where they were, solving for the shortest path, and
| bringing them straight home quickly by machine-gun clicking on
| the arrow buttons.
|
| My housemate had a good eBay reputation, so as an experiment,
| we tried selling Simoleons on eBay for real currency via
| PayPal.
|
| I could generate arbitrarily huge amount of virtual currency
| quite quickly. The bottleneck was selling it, and the problem
| was customer service.
|
| The problem was that many of the customers were pouty
| temperamental 15-year-olds using their parent's eBay accounts,
| who would give scathing eBay reviews if their order wasn't
| delivered instantly, or they suffered some imagined slight.
|
| And the other problem was that TSO just wasn't designed to make
| it easy to transfer large amounts of Simoleons from player to
| player.
|
| You couldn't just "wire" somebody an arbitrary amount of cash
| via in-game email -- you had to show up on their lot and meet
| them at a specific real time, and suspiciously hand it over to
| them $1000 at a time.
|
| There was another better way to transfer cash more efficiently
| than handing it over grand by grand, and that was with tip
| jars: You could fill a tip jar with $5000 using the pie menu
| with a couple of mouse clicks, and then the user could empty it
| the same way.
|
| So when I had to deliver our first million Simoleons, I came up
| with a system where I'd go to the lot of the customer and meet
| them, then ask them to line up a bunch of tip jars in a row. I
| would then use bot macros to fill each tip jar one by one with
| $5000, while the customer would quickly empty them as I filled
| them up, and then we'd go back to the beginning of the row and
| start all over again, until we'd transferred the entire million
| Simoleons, in only 200 $5000 hand=>jar=>hand transactions
| instead of 1000 $1000 hand=>hand transactions.
|
| One time when we were making a big delivery of cash, running
| the gauntlet of tip jars in our customer's living room (which I
| admit looked pretty fishy), and their housemate came home, saw
| what was happening, and wisely sussed up the situation that
| there was some kind of deal going down, that she wanted in on.
|
| So she put her own tip jar down at the end of her housemate's
| row of tip jars, and I blithely deposited $5000 into her tip
| jar several times, which she immediately snapped up.
|
| When I realized what happened, instead of contracting The Sims
| Mafia to do a hit on her, I congratulated her for her loose
| morals and ingenuity. It was such a great hack, and I totally
| fell for it, and had more Simoleons than I knew what to do with
| anyway. It's all about good customer service!
|
| It was a fun experiment, but other bots and offshore farmers
| were starting to work the system too, and customer service and
| delivery problems made it not worth continuing.
|
| So the unemployed Sims bot wouldn't feel bored, I retrained it
| into a more practical assistive utility called "Simplifier",
| which knew how to recognize and navigate the Sims user
| interface to show, scroll through, and enumerate all the many
| items, wallpapers, floor tiles, etc, in the catalog.
|
| Simplifier demo starts at 3:15:
| https://youtu.be/Imu1v3GecB8?t=3m15s
|
| It took snapshots of the icons, and read the text off the
| screen to capture the title, price and description (it was all
| in a bitmap Comic Sans font, so it was easy for a bot to
| recognize, if not for your eyes to read), and made a searchable
| illustrated database of all your built-in and downloaded
| content.
|
| Simplifier addressed the problem that many players would
| download thousands of objects from web sites, or make their own
| custom objects with tools like Transmogrifier and RugOMatic
| (shown earlier in the demo video), but it was impossible to
| search or keep track of them through The Sims interface.
|
| And it was useful for Sims web site publishers to make
| illustrated catalogs of their own objects.
|
| You could also operate it in manual mode, where you press and
| hold on an icon in the catalog, and it reads the object
| description to you with a speech synthesizer.
|
| That was useful for kids learning to read, old farts with bad
| eyesight, and snobby designers who hate Comic Sans, who would
| enjoy having the object descriptions read to them.
|
| Schneier on Security: Virtual Mafia in Online Worlds:
|
| https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/virtual_mafia...
|
| Randy Farmer and Bryce Glass: Building Web Reputation Systems:
| The Dollhouse Mafia, or "Don't Display Negative Karma"
|
| http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2009/10/the_dollhouse...
| 58x14 wrote:
| Surprised to see you're downvoted. I found this intriguing,
| and mirrors many of my experiences with the logistics of
| selling virtual goods.
| dools wrote:
| Seems like it taught you a lot about finance, which is
| different from economics.
| 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.
| jallen_dot_dev wrote:
| > It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this
| [woodcutting] level, we're talking several hundred hours
| minimum.
|
| _[laughs in agility]_
|
| Anyway I agree with Runescape teaching some real world skills.
| Runescape (and some other multiplayer games) also taught me
| about scams and I think trained me to be skeptical whenever
| something seems too good to be true. For a really basic
| example, that opportunity to double your BTC that Elon Musk is
| always offering his followers is literally the gp doubling
| scam, the most common Runescape scam from 2 decades ago.
| oblio wrote:
| > For a really basic example, that opportunity to double your
| BTC that Elon Musk is always offering his followers is
| literally the gp doubling scam, the most common Runescape
| scam from 2 decades ago.
|
| Isn't this kind of thing illegal with real assets?
| 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.
| [deleted]
| 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 . You would get a captcha if
| you did the same thing for too long
| 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.)
| mikhmha wrote:
| I wonder the same. Played MMOs growing up. Got scolded a lot
| for wasting time on video games.
|
| But I look back now and realize a lot of my foundational
| knowledge on economics, programming, networking, teamwork,
| came from MMORPGS. They are social games where you deal with
| people - and that is a valuable experience.
|
| Unfortunately modern MMO's are very asocial games and I don't
| think much can be learned from them.
| 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.
| alexchantavy wrote:
| Macros are what got me into programming. I wanna write a blog
| on it if no one else has done it yet but you had different
| tiers of it in between 2005-2007:
|
| AutoRune: top-tier -- This was the absolute best RuneScape
| classic bot but you had to pay $15 a month for an auth code
| to use it, which is extremely expensive for a school-aged
| kid. One of its killer features was that you could run the
| game in headless mode with no graphics so your PC would not
| be overloaded due to running too many expensive Java applet
| graphics processes.
|
| If I recall correctly it had its own intuitive scripting
| language. Some of these scripts were extremely coordinated:
| you could have several accounts mine ore, another account
| transfer it, and another account to manage smithing it in an
| orchestrated fashion.
|
| If you were into player-versus-player, RS Classic had this
| unintended concept of "having catch" on someone based on your
| player ID on the server. Essentially if your player ID on the
| server was lower than your opponent's, then in a fight it
| would be significantly easier to chase them until they were
| dead. Catching a player took some well timed clicks and
| coordination. AutoRune (and the other bots I'll talk about)
| exposed this player ID to you so you could log out and in
| until you received a player ID that was sufficiently
| advantageous enough for you.
|
| Even more scary was that it had an autocatcher that made it
| effectively impossible for another player to escape you in
| PVP so that you didn't need to learn the proper catching
| technique.
|
| There were also free to use but less powerful bots like IT-
| bot (scriptable with Java) and Runebot (IIRC only allowed you
| to autotrain).
|
| Fatigue and CAPTCHAs defeated by crowd sourcing with
| Sleepwalker -- To deter bots, RuneScape implemented a concept
| called "fatigue" where your character would supposedly get
| tired after harvesting items or gaining a certain number of
| experience points and you would be forced to use your
| sleeping bag to rest. When you rested, you would have to
| solve a CAPTCHA to wake up. I am still amazed with the level
| of coordination that happened here: someone built a tool
| called SleepWalker where you would write CAPTCHAs for other
| people and gain points. Each point you wrote for someone else
| became a word that you were allowed to have someone complete
| a CAPTCHA for you. You were also able to pay money to avoid
| writing CAPTCHAs yourself, and Sleepwalker was smart enough
| to integrate with whatever bot you were using. Eventually the
| more sophisticated bots like AutoRune and IT-bot implemented
| their own OCR so SleepWalker became something only used by
| people who couldn't afford OCR, but I'm still amazed by the
| community coordination here.
|
| Now, these bots interacted with the RuneScape world by
| sending server side commands so you would never need to
| actually click on anything in the world to watch your
| character do things. The problem here is that these methods
| were comparatively easy to detect so Jagex would periodically
| ban players caught cheating. This is where SCAR comes in.
|
| SCAR = Shit Compared to AutoRune -- SCAR was a less
| sophisticated but extremely effective botting tool that
| relied only on clicking colors. You wrote scripts in Pascal
| (of all things!) to do the tasks you wanted like mine ore or
| kill chickens and it did this by clicking predefined pixel
| colors with the timings you specified. To do it properly, it
| calibrated your in-game compass to align properly so the
| pixel clicking would work. It also implemented its own timing
| and color jitter so that the simulated clicks would appear to
| be from a human and not a bot. There were also scripts that
| would handle cases where a mod would message you and ask if
| you were a bot and it would respond with 'noope im not a bot,
| gtg bye!'.
|
| All the characters I automated with the API-based bots ended
| up banned, but I'm pretty sure the one that I used SCAR on
| never got banned. The clicking approach became extensible
| when RS Classic became RS2, and I'm sure AutoRune continued
| into the future too but this is where I became too busy with
| school to keep up with all this.
|
| Anyway, RuneScape automation is near and dear to my heart and
| got me started in CS so I love talking about this haha.
| temprs wrote:
| The ecosystem around SCAR was really impressive, and with
| just enough drama to keep everyone interested as well.
| Basic color clicking in SCAR was a concept but not enough
| to make really sophisticated bots or to keep up with
| attempts at detecting repeated behavior. The mods caught on
| to exact pixel finding, abrupt mouse movements, and other
| stuff that a typical SCAR script would generate. The
| botting community developed the SCAR Resource Library (SRL)
| to generalize common operations in a way that would be
| undetectable (findObject, moveMouse, etc.), all with a
| sufficient amount randomness baked in. With this library
| you could write some _very impressive_ bots even though it
| all boiled down to pixel finding and clicking at some
| level. Over time there was some disagreement over the
| development of SCAR (it was closed source and had a single
| developer), and the SRL community rebranded to SRL Resource
| Library (SRL) as the first attempt to move away from SCAR
| as the only home for this pixel-finding-based library of
| advanced botting functionality. Some maintainers of SRL
| then introduced there own client as an open source
| alternative to SCAR called Simba.
|
| I have had a 10 year career now developing software for the
| biggest companies on the planet, but to this day a lot of
| the most complex and robust code I've ever written was as a
| teenager in SCAR. Good memories. Would love to see some
| wiki history of this written up somewhere.
| 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!
| tiltrus wrote:
| There was also a lot of other history outside of Jacmob...
|
| There was iBot by Ruler Eric who got sued in Florida court
| by Jagex, with Jagex winning. iBot started of as a color
| bot, then eventually completely transformed into byte code
| editing.
|
| Before Powerbot/RSBot, there was Arga, and before that,
| Aryan. IIRC Arga was the first bytecode editing bot, and
| Aryan was just a modified RuneScape client.
|
| There was also a C++ Chinese bot used amongst all the
| Chinese farmers during the Arga days IIRC. This bot
| apparently working at the packet level (this is what
| AutoRune did back in the RSC days) and had super low
| resource usage. However had access to this bot definitely
| had a huge leg up to any other offerings.
|
| Scar always existed, the forums exploded with activity
| inbetween the bot nukes (Aryan dying, etc.). I also
| remember SRL, and the horrible Pascal that came with it.
| All the random event solvers (e.g. magic box weren't open
| source -- they were hidden behind a compiled DLL that
| shipped with SRL).
|
| Weird history, but I'm still in contact with a lot of
| people from the scene I've met 10+ years later.
| kingcharles wrote:
| The key to a lot of bots isn't making them smart so they
| can grind all day - that is usually the easy bit - but
| making them dumb so they look like humans.
|
| When I wrote a bot to grind Star Wars Galaxies for me I
| coded a ton of mistakes into it so it would click on the
| wrong buttons, miss the buttons completely, just generally
| do daft stuff. It looked human. Except for the fact it was
| grinding 24x7. I guess they never checked for that.
| cevn wrote:
| I think I was banned during that wave in 2011 and only just
| recently got back into RS.
|
| Back in the day I couldn't be bothered to gather the
| resources myself.
|
| Now I'm the bot, but somehow I'm (sometimes) happier
| fishing sharks than being IRL...
| 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.
| andrepd wrote:
| >Absolutely. I learned devops managing really inefficient
| gold farms that got free servers from the Azure promotions
| when Microsoft cloud launched.
|
| I mined cpuminer cryptocoins on azure free servers about this
| time. I got banned fast but still made a few 100s of dollars
| (which is basically a million to a 16 or 17 year old like
| me).
| mancerayder wrote:
| Anyone interested in some nostalgia?
|
| Long ago there was an MMO called Ultima Online. At one point
| gold on there reached the point that it was more expensive than
| the Italian lira. This was in a kooky time in 1999 when
| everything was at a peak. Here's the old article.
|
| The NYT just wasn't having it.
|
| _THE WAY WE LIVE NOW THE NEW ECONOMY Money for Nothing A new
| breed of Internet profiteers is spinning virtual gold into hard
| currency. By JOHN COOK
|
| Fixer-upper w/moat: The real market for imaginary property in
| Ultima is booming. enjamin Schriefer and Michael Gmeinwieser
| make money the new-fashioned way: they sell stuff that doesn't
| exist. And their customers, who pay them in cold, hard cash,
| don't mind one bit._
|
| https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/magazine...
| almost_usual wrote:
| I remember castles in Ultima Online going for thousands of
| dollars around then on eBay. I think an 800pt Grandmaster
| build character went for a couple hundred dollars to $1k
| depending on the skill set.
|
| I knew someone at the time who bought a brand new sports car
| with all the money they made off Ultima Online.
|
| I honestly miss the game, had a blast playing it back in the
| day.
| 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
| tfang17 wrote:
| Incorrect
| robryan wrote:
| No gameplay balancing by design sounds terrible. Release one
| bad overpowered item or spell and the game is forever ruined.
| tfang17 wrote:
| Valid criticism.
| rideontime wrote:
| Axie has banned the assets of players who have violated the
| TOS, so apparently they aren't decentralized enough to prevent
| Vitalik's origin story from reoccurring. Or is your point that
| those assets could be used in another game? Why would anybody
| do that?
| tfang17 wrote:
| Axie may not be the end all be all, just a start towards a
| new future of digital ownership.
| 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.
| np- wrote:
| > "Is your job set up to fulfill tasks that were, generally,
| arbitrarily designed by some gatekeeper?"
|
| But isn't this basically every job that doesn't directly
| support a human need (like food, clothing, shelter)? Just
| arbitrarily working to meet some other human's desires?
| imgabe wrote:
| I don't know of any arbitrary tasks set up by gatekeepers. I
| mean, people don't just sit around and think up stupid tasks
| for fun. These jobs usually arise something like this:
|
| In order to process request X, we need pieces of information
| A, B, C, D. Users frequently send in incomplete information.
| So we have to hire someone to check that all the required
| information is provided and accurate.
|
| Yeah, it's kind of bullshit because it wouldn't be needed if
| people just did the right thing, but people are people, and
| they don't. In some cases it can be replaced with a web form
| with proper validation, but sometimes the information is
| something you can't verify with Javascript (like checking for
| a valid driver's license or something), so you need a human.
| So it goes.
| agentdrtran wrote:
| Meeting a desire is not a bullshit job, depending on the
| desire. One example in the book is a receptionist. Some
| places need receptionists to answer phones or receive
| packages, but one receptionist was hired at a firm that
| didn't need her to do any work - but a competing firm in the
| same building had one, so they wanted one too. Meeting your
| desire for nice hair, even a desire for a butler to pick up
| your laundry or whatever, is still meeting a need, but it's
| less superfluous than "I need you to sit there because
| someone else has someone who does something similar)
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I'm not arguing that it's about meetings some other human's
| _desires_. Indeed, jobs that give real pleasure or sense of
| accomplishment to other people (actors, massage therapists,
| yoga teachers, personal trainers, artists, language coaches,
| yada yada) I find incredibly valuable.
|
| I'm talking about when someone, specifically a _gatekeeper_ ,
| creates what is basically a little tedious maze for you to
| run, _not_ for their own pleasure, not even for someone else
| 's pleasure, but often just to justify their own job, usually
| in a "CYA" fashion.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I just had to produce 10 separate "deliverables" for a single-
| server internal use web site that is already archived and read-
| only.
|
| Test plans, migration plans, operations guides, etc...
|
| Most will never be read by another human being. They exist only
| because they "have to".
|
| It's soul-crushing "work".
| solatic wrote:
| I'm not a communist, but I recognize that one of the economic
| arguments for the State owning the means of production is that
| there's no longer any need for such jobs on a per-organization
| level. Why engage in tax-avoidance when the sum total of
| corporate profits belongs to the State anyway? Why answer per-
| client security questionnaires when the State audits and
| polices your security before certifying the company, so that it
| can continue to play a part in the State-managed economy? Why
| employ marketers and salespeople when the State guarantees
| demand? Etcetera.
|
| Of course, in the real world, we understand that theoretical
| economic efficiency isn't quite as attainable as the real
| efficiency that is made possible with price signalling. Demand
| is a fickle and complex beast that eludes the best intentions
| of the best central planners. But, as contrasted to that
| theoretical efficiency, a price-signalled economy involves some
| waste and costs. This is fine / acceptable as long as we
| appreciate that it permits a larger system that is better than
| the alternative.
| 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 and
| land, or it can allow them to sell products/services at a lower
| price, providing a competitive advantage.
|
| But they are a product of a human designed tax system, which
| may or may not be bullshit. There is no single clear, correct
| way to implement taxes.
| imtringued wrote:
| The most boring tax system is a landvalue tax and nothing
| else.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Tax avoidance just moves the tax burden around, it doesn't
| create value.
|
| Tax collection and tax compliance does create value, but
| spending time specifically figuring out how to pay as little
| taxes as possible creates no value. It see likely that some
| level of bullshit jobs are an unavoidable side-effects of
| value producing activities. The interesting part of the idea
| comes from thinking about how we can structure those value
| producing activities to minimize the bullshit side-effects
| and thus increase economic efficiency.
|
| Taxes are an area with a lot of low hanging fruit,
| unfortunately Intuit and other tax prep companies spend a lot
| of money lobbying to maximizing the bullshit jobs side
| effects of taxation because it makes them more money.
| chii wrote:
| > Tax avoidance just moves the tax burden around, it
| doesn't create value.
|
| only if you believe that taxes paid is automatic value
| added to society.
|
| > pay as little taxes as possible creates no value
|
| it doesn't create value, it retains value for those who
| created it.
| imtringued wrote:
| It is almost automatic value added to land values.
| specialist wrote:
| Do banks create value?
|
| Governmental spending is a loan (to society) repaid thru
| taxes.
|
| Call taxes an interest payment if that makes you feel
| better.
| ikr678 wrote:
| Avoiding taxes and utilising tax minimisation strategies
| keeps value with you, but it also distorts your
| consumption in other ways. EG you are incentivised in the
| US to purchase more housing (via mortgage interest
| deduction) than you might want or need.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Mortgage interest deduction is not utilized much anymore
| since standard deduction was increased in the 2017 tax
| changes. You have to itemize to get it, and only 11% of
| tax filers itemized in 2019.
|
| There is a statistics page that shows this on its.gov,
| but I am on mobile and it is too much work to find it.
| DarylZero wrote:
| You should think of it this way. The reasons that tax
| policies are complex are that the government uses tax
| incentives both as a "carrot" to control people; and also
| to buy political support from interest groups who
| benefit.
|
| The tax compliance and tax avoidance jobs should be
| understood to be part of one of these schemes. Either
| they're low-level enforcers in the government's heavy-
| handed tax-based system of control; or else they're co-
| conspirators in the influence-buying grift.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Those are some of the reasons taxes are complicated, but
| not all of them. In the US the tax compliance industry
| has directly lobbied to keep the tax system as complex as
| possible so they can keep extracting rent for doing
| bullshit work.
|
| The "influence-buying grift" jobs are usually classed as
| bullshit anyways, so that source of the complexity
| doesn't change the assessment.
|
| There are potentially valid policy goals served by
| various tax incentives, but it is still worth considering
| if there are different tax incentives or other regulatory
| approaches that would create fewer bullshit jobs. With
| the political problems of raising taxes, government often
| choose to offload the costs of policy goals onto the
| public via creating bullshit jobs that cost more overall
| but avoid the need for tax increases.
| shkkmo wrote:
| If you don't believe that government has any value, then
| there isn't much to discuss with you as your views on the
| topic are extremely fringe and we likely won't agree on
| much.
|
| If you do believe that government can create value, then
| it easily follows that paying / collecting taxes can
| create value. There is no need to assume that taxes
| always provide value or that all parts of government
| create value (since that would also be a extremely fringe
| view.)
|
| > it doesn't create value, it retains value for those who
| created it.
|
| Yes, at the cost of higher taxes on others who created
| value or a reduced revenue for the government.
|
| If you believe the goverent needs less revenue, then
| lower taxes. The "bullshit jobs" are created when you
| have a complex set of rules and loopholes that incentives
| wasting manpower to find ways to dodge paying taxes. We
| would be better off just having lower tax rates and less
| effort wasted dodging taxes.
| rank0 wrote:
| I disagree here. Instead of calling it "tax avoidance"
| let's just talk about reducing your tax burden as much as
| possible. This is the prudent move for any individual or
| tax paying entity.
|
| Taking advantage of your roth, 401k, homestead exemption,
| writing off losses, etc... absolutely provides value to the
| tax payer. The value is literally more money for the tax
| payer who can now further participate in the economy.
|
| The accounting industry employs loads of people. Is that
| not "value?"
| lmm wrote:
| > Taking advantage of your roth, 401k, homestead
| exemption, writing off losses, etc... absolutely provides
| value to the tax payer. The value is literally more money
| for the tax payer who can now further participate in the
| economy.
|
| But it's zero-sum - every dollar they gained was a dollar
| taken out of the public purse. And worse, hours of human
| labour were spent on this moving around rather than
| something productive.
|
| Tax benefits are (notionally) intended to be positive
| sum, but that can only happen to the extent that they
| change actual behaviour. If I put more into a pension
| fund because it's tax-advantaged, that's (theoretically)
| win-win - I get more to spend in the long term, the
| government reduces the risk of having to support a
| penniless future me. Similarly if I buy a bicycle through
| the cycle to work scheme, that (on average) reduces the
| government's medical costs. But claiming a tax writeoff
| for something I was doing already is zero-sum, and
| changing my corporate structure so that it pays less tax
| while doing economically equivalent things is likely to
| be negative-sum (because the new structure will likely
| have (marginally) lower real-world productivity -
| otherwise I'd be doing it that way already).
|
| > The accounting industry employs loads of people. Is
| that not "value?"
|
| No, quite the opposite - it's taking those people away
| from things that are real-world productive. Sometimes the
| costs of accounting might be outweighed by the benefits
| (e.g. giving companies information they need to make
| business judgements, or exposing fraud earlier). But
| often they're not.
| rank0 wrote:
| I guess we just have a fundamental disagreement.
|
| I argue that the increase in savings and therefore money
| spent participating in the economy is inherently
| valueable.
|
| In addition companies are less likely to fail, and can
| continue to generate value. Individuals have a bigger
| safety net and can be more productive for society. You
| already touched on the fact that government has reduced
| burden for social services.
|
| Government tax revenue can be poorly allocated and
| wasteful.
|
| The accountants provide a valuable service navigating the
| complex tax laws. This allows me to outsource the work
| and spend more time being "productive" for society.
|
| A great example is Tesla. They may not have survived
| without the billions in tax credits they received. Lots
| of people believe they generate tremendous value for
| society.
| lmm wrote:
| > I argue that the increase in savings and therefore
| money spent participating in the economy is inherently
| valueable.
|
| > In addition companies are less likely to fail, and can
| continue to generate value. Individuals have a bigger
| safety net and can be more productive for society. You
| already touched on the fact that government has reduced
| burden for social services.
|
| It's zero-sum though - you've increased individuals'
| savings but reduced public funds (which can be spent in
| the economy through e.g. public infrastructure, and/or
| used to provide a safety net, probably in a more
| efficient way since the risks are pooled).
|
| > Government tax revenue can be poorly allocated and
| wasteful.
|
| Sure. So can individual or corporate wealth. Even if you
| think the tax rate is too high, the most efficient
| solution would be to change the tax rate, not add a bunch
| of loopholes.
|
| > The accountants provide a valuable service navigating
| the complex tax laws.
|
| The argument is that that complexity is largely bullshit.
|
| > A great example is Tesla. They may not have survived
| without the billions in tax credits they received. Lots
| of people believe they generate tremendous value for
| society.
|
| Corporate tax avoidance means the government has less
| money from which to offer that kind of targeted tax
| credit.
| rank0 wrote:
| I appreciate the discourse but I think we're going in
| circles. On a slightly related point, you should check
| out CPG grey's video "rules for rulers". That video
| helped me understand why our tax codes are so complicated
| in the states.
|
| My (unprofessional) opinion is that the messy tax
| structure is there by design, and not the result of
| incompetence or oversight.
|
| I think there are plenty of far more "BS" jobs out there
| than book keepers. Companies wouldn't be able to function
| without them.
| shkkmo wrote:
| You seem to have entirely missed the point.
|
| > let's just talk about reducing your tax burden as much
| as possible
|
| For the purposes of the discussion, it is irrelevant if
| the overall tax burden should be raised or lowered. Given
| any target level of tax burden, it is inefficient to meet
| that tax burden by requiring large amounts of regulatory
| compliance by tax payers. If you can make tax rules
| simpler and easier to comply with, then you reduce the
| amount of bullshit work.
|
| > The accounting industry employs loads of people. Is
| that not "value"?
|
| Some of it is, some of it isn't. Simply providing jobs
| alone doesn't always produce value. If so, we could
| always grow the economy by paying people to dig holes and
| fill them back in.
| rank0 wrote:
| The world is more complicated than you're letting on.
| Democracies have complicated tax codes to incentivize
| certain behavior and also as a political tool.
| Legislators need to use tax incentives to ensure their
| base continues supporting them, and to win over new
| supporters.
|
| Before you say "that's messed up! Legislators shouldn't
| do that!" Think for a second how anyone would possibly
| win an election and retain their power without that tool.
| I guarantee you couldn't do it.
|
| I'm all for simplifying our tax code but it's not as
| simple as "this is all BS and those who make the rules
| are dumb."
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Legislators need to use tax incentives to ensure their
| base continues supporting them, and to win over new
| supporters.
|
| If it's legislators serving the interests of their
| constituents directly and thus get re-elected, that is
| one thing. However often legislators make these decisions
| to serve corporate lobbyists (such as Intuit's) and are
| working against the interests of their constituents so
| they can raise money from corporate doners to get
| reelected. This is why the IRS has been prevented from
| offering any sane method of filing personal taxes and
| wastes unmeasured amounts of tax payer time, effort and
| money every year.
|
| > it's not as simple as "this is all BS and those who
| make the rules are dumb."
|
| I didn't say that at all. Optimal taxation strategies are
| hard, but we haven't really tried to fix taxation in
| decades, meanwhile the length of the tax code has
| ballooned to several times what it used to be.
| specialist wrote:
| > _Businesses that spend less money on taxes can spend more
| money on expenses..._
|
| Does that actually happen? Small businesses, sure. My
| cousin's restaurant directly ploughs that money back into the
| business.
|
| But it seems large corporations mostly do executive bonuses
| and stock buybacks.
|
| I guess my pendant comes down to my objection over treating
| all "business" as the same, morally and economically. As
| though megacorps are same as my cousin's restaurant, my
| uncle's farm.
|
| Whereas I favor excessive generosity for small and young
| businesses (and farmers), anything less than levying repeated
| radical cashectomies against large firms is a moral disaster
| and economic selfown.
| anticristi wrote:
| Fuck! I didn't know about play-to-earn.
|
| At this point, I'm starting to think our species had a good run,
| but it's time to replace it with a more evolved one. And just
| like dinosaurs were wiped by a global catastrofe and left room
| for mamels, it's time for homo sapiens to leave room for a new
| species.
|
| The silver lining? We don't really need to do anything, just
| watch for our self-made catastrophie to unfold.
|
| Popcorn anyone?
| mempko wrote:
| I highly recommend people read David Graeber's latest book,
| published after his death called The Dawn of Everything.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Some random thoughts
|
| - bullshit jobs is a term for jobs that have not yet been
| automated. Jeff Bezos pays a Uber driver to turn a steering wheel
| until the robot can, and he pays a Amazon Project Manager to make
| graphs until the Perl Script can.
|
| - such jobs don't exist because the "elite" are scared of
| proletariat, they exist because organisations are badly designed
| hurriedly put together and really hard to dismantle.
|
| - it's usually simple to spot the people at work who are solid
| contributors and those who bullshit. But it's amazingly hard to
| demonstrate it sufficiently for firing people.
|
| - But imposter syndrome means that if there is not a open
| transparent process to code the under performers, everyone
| becomes afraid, destroying the organisation anyway.
|
| - it's hard to fire unproductive people, in short. In fact it's
| probably easier to build a new company and not hire them.
|
| - this is usually done via Schumpeter- but if a company could be
| programmed, designed to have fewer people, it can be shutdown
| more easily and replaced?
| crotho wrote:
| An uber driver is not a bullshit job as defined by Graeber (and
| most certainly NOT a term to define a job that has not yet been
| automated). It's a shit job, but not a bullshit job. Short of
| reading the book, this is a good primer:
| https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
| globular-toast wrote:
| Those are menial jobs, not bullshit jobs.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > bullshit jobs is a term for jobs that have not yet been
| automated
|
| This is not what the term is intended to mean. "Uber Driver"
| (or taxi driver) is a job that performs a necessary function
| but one that may not necessarily need to be done by a human.
|
| A bullshit job is one that does not really need to be done, one
| that provides no value to society at large and exists because
| of zero-sum games, ego, tradition, etc...
|
| I don't agree with all the jobs Graeber described with this
| label, but it is a very useful concept.
| oldsecondhand wrote:
| By this definition being a soldier is a bullshit job, because
| the only reason it's needed is because other countries have
| soldiers as well (i.e. zero sum). But I don't think most
| people would agree that it can be done away with. Zero sum
| games are just an unavoidable part of life.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Zero sum games may not be completely avoidable, but that
| absolutely doesn't meam that the amount of economic
| activity wasted on zero sum games can't be reduced.
|
| For example, I think the amount of money spent on nuclear
| weapons programs globally could be reuced significantly
| with no harm to the world.
| Hjfrf wrote:
| Bullshit job from the OP is something more like high frequency
| trading or SEO.
|
| There's not really a service that makes people happy, or a good
| being created.
|
| It's just shuffling money around in a way that's net-negative
| for society.
| dqpb wrote:
| > bullshit jobs is a term for jobs that have not yet been
| automated
|
| Bullshit jobs are jobs that do not produce value
| hooande wrote:
| Your assumptions about the term "bullshit jobs", as mentioned
| in the article, are completely wrong.
|
| You should read about Graeber's work, it's interesting
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I have read parts of his book all the way through ...
|
| Let's look at two examples I remember - Dog walkers
| (washers?) and corporate lawyers.
|
| As I understand it Bullshit jobs are those that exist to
| serve the elite who otherwise "should" do the work themselves
| (dog washers), or jobs that have no labour-force power and so
| cannot improve their lot through collective action (which can
| range from air traffic control to uber drivers and ... dog
| washers). Finally there is some kind of self-aware bullshit
| job that is the corporate lawyer.
|
| There are two issues at play here - a moral judgement and a
| power judgement.
|
| The moral judgement is aimed at dog walkers (or washers?).
| This is a job that "should" not exist - people should take
| care of their own pets. Well maybe. They also have a power
| issue - who has heard of a dog walker strike?
|
| The dog walker fills a space in the ecosystem - mother nature
| has so many examples of non intuitive niches that we should
| not leap to claim this one is bad.
|
| Corporate lawyer - this is more likely a bullshit job - it
| exists because humans created the law, so it exists as the
| very definition of government regulation and interference.
|
| But most of the bullshit about it is not legal, but the
| tournament set up to go from newbie lawyer to partner which
| drives a lot of the soul destroying ness, simply to clear the
| field. And yes it is soul destroying to have to justify the
| unjustifiable- something i suspect corporate lawyers spend a
| lot of time doing.
|
| But that is again a moral judgement- yes it is bad that
| corporations break the law and people in bullshit jobs have
| to help them get away with it. But that is a different
| failure of regulation.
|
| I think his view is extremely negative - that these jobs were
| created / kept around to serve the implied result rather than
| an underlying failure. The airline baggage example is a good
| one. Getting millions of pieces of luggage to the right place
| at the right time is fundamentally hard - and claiming that
| the solution is to "fix it" then get rid of stewardesses of
| whatever is disingenuous.
|
| It's not impossible to remove bullshit jobs - automation
| promises to remove many, which is I guess Graber point and
| mine. My view is that the jobs continue to exist not because
| the elites deem it nice to have flunkies (I mean they do but
| they employ those directly) it that fixing the ecosystem that
| supports these bullshit jobs takes a long time to fix. It is
| likely that smaller new companies will simply not hire to
| bullshit poisitions. But given that Amazon has now reached
| what 1M employees I suspect some bullshit has slipped in
| there.
|
| Plus there seems to be a confluence in your comment between
| HFT and bullshit jobs. I am sure there are socially net
| negative or socially net neutral jobs (HFT is arguably
| positive but whatever), but that's different to bullshit jobs
| (as I understand it)
|
| A job that is net negative has always been a problem - is the
| guy making Drones in a factory knowing they will be sold to
| evil regimes a net negative? It may be but I don't think that
| sits as a bullshit job.
|
| So there is a difference between jobs that are "created"
| simply to give the middle class something to do (Graber view,
| not mine), jobs that exist because they have not been
| automated yet (my view, maybe Grabers) and jobs that are
| socially net negative (this depends on your politics as to
| what is net negative)
|
| In short the psychological harm of bullshit jobs depends much
| more on the employees perception of its value than some
| objective measure. Especially as that objective measure is so
| hard to come by.
|
| In short - net negative jobs are not bullshit because
| choosing the externality is hard / social decision (ie the
| boss of shell is unlikely to have a bullshit job, even if it
| is net negative)
|
| And bullshit jobs are rarely created just to lord it over
| people - the truly elite just hire someone to loo after their
| dogs / horses. The sub-elite get it created as part of the
| market.
|
| Edit: running out of time - this is an interesting area but I
| have reached th limit for a comment
| 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
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _In spite of being presented as the future of work by some
| venture capitalists, the incentives just don't make sense. Floors
| don't have to be swept in the metaverse unless they're designed
| to need sweeping._
|
| They make perfect sense. You probably can't _be_ a King or Queen
| in the real world, but for a modest outlay you can play one in
| the virtual world. The product being sold is not the fun of
| clicking around doing pointless things in a Monarchy Simulator,
| but the emotional satisfaction of bossing a small army of other
| people around. Within the game, you can be the sun around whom
| others revolve.
| Zaskoda wrote:
| I have gone down the play-to-earn rabbit hole in an unexpected
| way.
|
| In 2017 I started learning about Ethereum. Once I understood it
| as a virtual machine, the idea hit me that one could build a
| game. About that time, CryptoKitties hit and became an example of
| what could be built. Shortly late, a tutorial called
| CryptoZombies helped teach "a way" to build crypto collectable
| style games on distributed virtual machines like Ethereum.
|
| Like many people, I went through the tutorial and I started
| working on my own game. A big difference between myself and many
| others is that many others only slightly deviated from the
| CryptoKitties formula. The inspiration for my game, Orbiter 8,
| came from an old BBS game, so I deviated a lot.
|
| I worked on Orbiter 8 for a couple of years and released two
| demos before I bothered with ERC20/ERC721 interfaces. The game
| concept has an in-game currency and ownable assets so I created
| interfaces making those things tradable outside of the game. This
| was sort of a no-brainer. By using ERC721, I can use open markets
| like OpenSea to trade my game assets as NFTs. By using ERC20 I
| can put the in-game currency on SushiSwap and let the public
| trade the currency as they wish.
|
| I didn't intend to, but having done those things now means I am
| building a Play To Earn game. That is, of course, assuming my
| game assets and in-game currency actually have value and a value
| higher than the cost of creation. But for all intents and
| purposes, the emerging model is a pretty decent Play2Earn model.
|
| Most games are about progression. You typically "grind" in any
| game to acquire better items and stats. The only step to make any
| of these games P2E is to allow those things to be traded on open
| markets. So if you build a game natively on one of these
| networks, P2E is an extremely natural emergence.
| shkkmo wrote:
| P2E F2P and P2W are more loose buckets than categories with
| hard and fast distinctions.
|
| I don't think that P2E is inherently bad. Indeed, the history
| of RMT in games that try to prohibit it (WoW, Eve, etc) shows
| that P2E is a mechanic that is hard to avoid in certain types
| of grindy mmo games.
|
| What makes Axies a pyramid scheme is not the incorporation of
| P2E mechanics directly into the game, but that the game
| requires players to "buy-in" to the economy to start playing
| and tries to incentivize that initial purchase by promising
| later earning capacity.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I didn't intend to, but having done those things now means I
| am building a Play To Earn game. That is, of course, assuming
| my game assets and in-game currency actually have value and a
| value higher than the cost of creation.
|
| Other than speculators hoping to flip them to someone else,
| what would give them that value?
|
| Like most crypto games, the value would inherently have to come
| from new players putting more money into the system to cash out
| old players. It works as long as hype exists and the users
| curve continues upward, but it crashes immediately as that
| stops and everyone wants to extract whatever value they can.
| aahortwwy wrote:
| Paying to skip the grind in a game is a pretty common thing.
| As a commenter in another thread mentioned, this has been
| happening since Diablo II at least. If a game has content
| that is gated by tens or hundreds of hours of grinding some
| people will happily pay to experience that content
| immediately. Historically this has been viewed as dubious
| behavior - especially in MMOs - but it's becoming more
| normal.
|
| EVE Online, for a time, had a monthly subscription. It also
| had an in-game item called "PLEX" which could be purchased
| using real money and then used as a substitute for the
| monthly subscription. Because it was an in-game item PLEX
| could be bought and sold on the in-game marketplace. I
| happily bought a few PLEX with real money and sold them in-
| game so that I could purchase the ships I wanted without
| having to spend hours "earning" in-game money. On the other
| hand, I knew people who had set up efficient in-game money-
| making schemes that let them avoid paying _anything_ to play
| - each month they 'd just exchange some small fraction of
| their enormous in-game wealth for a PLEX token purchased by a
| person like me. It was an interesting system, I don't know
| what their monetization looks like now.
|
| Point being, I think there can be a value to these things
| outside of speculation. That said, I have a fairly dim view
| of most of the crypto-enabled games that I've come across.
| From the start, the developers have always seemed more
| interested in enriching themselves at the cost of their
| players than they have in making enjoyable games.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > It was an interesting system, I don't know what their
| monetization looks like now.
|
| It works more or less the same, but now with an expanded
| F2P option that provides access to only early ships /
| skills (and some other limits). The PLEX is now used to pay
| for an account to have full access to the game for a month.
| JCharante wrote:
| Well really it's that you pay for Skill Points now,
| because a subscription is almost free if you extract and
| sell the skill points earned.
|
| Allowing RMT would ruin the economy because as a small
| guy I can generate $1050 in profit per month if you
| convert 500 Plex to cash at $20, although the black
| market rate is closer to $7. If I could generate real
| money then I would play more than 1 hour a day, I would
| probably quadruple my industrial operation and then
| everything is massively inflated in price locking out
| casual players from the gameplay they want, and the
| margins on a lot of items would decrease meaning you have
| to make up for it in volume, except a casual player isn't
| going to be running 30 accounts.
| 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.
| balaji1 wrote:
| Who else immediately ordered the book on Amazon? Lol
|
| Bullshit Jobs: A Theory https://www.amazon.com/dp/0141983477
|
| The first review is lit. Quoting:
|
| """ Manifesto for the Professional Class Reviewed in the United
| States on May 15, 2018 This review was written at the desk of a
| salaried office job, where I am paid $65,000/yr to do virtually
| nothing important, so I mostly sit in my chair and listen to
| podcasts and audiobooks all day. I do this until enough
| executives and managers above me are gone that I can feel
| comfortable sneaking out. With my income from this sit, I then
| outsource all my chores to a slew of below living wage 21st
| Century gig economy employees--Uber drivers, food delivery, meal
| kits, laundry.
|
| Having been one of these low paid wage laborers several years
| ago, it seems like a cruel joke. The higher paying job I find,
| the less I actually have to work. The higher ranking the
| position, the less the job is about doing things and contributing
| to society.
|
| Is this a blessing or immoral sin? Yes. But it turns out, I'm not
| alone.
|
| This is an entertaining book of anecdotes and statistics on what
| turns out to be a common phenomena. It is one of the most
| refreshing reads that a college-educated conscious working
| professional can have in their library. Put down every other
| garbage business book that supposedly empowers you. You don't
| need to practice mindfulness, or rules for life, or launch a lean
| startup. Breathe in and breathe out, your job is unnecessary and
| so are most of the other jobs!
|
| Admitting this is the first step of us all solving the collective
| problem. """
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| rStar wrote:
| jsemrau wrote:
| Though provoking article. The main problem that play-to-earn
| games have is that they need to rely on external cash-inflows to
| reward the players. This makes them very close to Ponzi schemes
| or Casino's. If the moral product is to earn a livable wage in
| Web3, that is not the way.
| bgilroy26 wrote:
| "Growth-Dependent Economy" is a nice turn of phrase
| [deleted]
| corxi wrote:
| Just another propaganda spreader... keep reading these kind of
| books whilst we build a new economy
| 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.
| 8note wrote:
| There is a good way of grinding, but I think it should really
| be called practice.
|
| At the end, your in game character is just as good as it was at
| the start, but you're better at using it
| 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.
| qeternity wrote:
| > replace money
|
| Uh what?
|
| > programmatic agreement enforcement
|
| If writing logic were this easy, we wouldn't need the court
| system.
|
| > creating financial assets that can't be controlled
|
| I'm quite libertarian but again, not sure this is a feature.
|
| > incentivizing things that need incentivizing and all that
|
| Otherwise broadly known as a "marketplace"
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Well the idea behind bitcoin and what not is to use it as
| money. You might not think it fits the bill but that's the
| idea, and I think it's a good idea, whether or not execution
| in it's current state is sufficient.
|
| We have a court system primarily because it was the most
| efficient way before. It is older than computers, it exists
| because there was no other way, not because writing logic is
| hard, although it is. But there's a trade off, if we assume
| you can never write logic to handle laws then you accept that
| you will always create a position of power from which law can
| be abused.
|
| Why isn't it a feature?
|
| Yeah, a marketplace.
| 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
| dmingod666 wrote:
| That's pretty impressive. What do you know what caused the
| May 2021 spike? what is your feel of how 'sustainable' the
| whole eco-system of this game is..
| larsiusprime wrote:
| The May Spike: they migrated off of Ethereum and on to
| their own private blockchain, Ronin, on April 28th, which
| massively lowered transaction costs and increased
| transaction speeds. You see this pattern a lot with
| blockchain games, they migrate off Ethereum onto a proof-
| of-stake L2 or even L1 and you get a surge.
|
| Sustainability: The entire eco-system is not sustainable at
| all. The game's revenue model is dependent not on the size
| of the user base but on the _pace_ of user growth. The
| majority of their players are "scholars" and are being
| paid to play the game. They've effectively turned their
| users into liabilities rather than assets, and Axies
| themselves and SLP are caught in an inflationary spiral.
|
| If you look at official communications the founders
| themselves have essentially written off the existing "1.0"
| version of the game and are promising people that the land-
| based gameplay and "Battles v2" are going to fix
| everything.
|
| We analyzed the major issues with their future plans here:
| https://naavik.co/business-breakdowns/axie-
| infinity/#whats-n...
|
| There's several problems with Battles v2:
|
| - Their stated plan (as of the report) is to feed more
| users into the crypto version of the game, which doesn't
| fix the unsustainable treadmill
|
| - Their original plan was to get Battles v2 onto iOS,
| Android, and Steam, but many of those platforms have
| cracked down on Crypto games lately and Axie could have a
| hard time getting approved for release in App stores
|
| There's even more problems with land-based gameplay:
|
| - There is a finite amount of land
|
| - Land grants resource bonuses and the ability to deploy
| user-generated minigames
|
| - If you don't have land you will have to pay a landlord to
| access its benefits
|
| - Land goes for extremely high prices (and will thus have
| very high rents)
|
| This is an extremely puzzling model for a User Generated
| Content platform. Land speculators will buy all the land
| and charge rent to the people who actually want to create
| value. There is no limitation to the number of "slots"
| available for publishing on Steam or app stores. Given that
| I have to make an experience that will _only_ run on Axie
| 's platform, why would I invest the time to do that just to
| pay rent to a virtual middle-man for the privilege of
| creating value for Sky Mavis?
|
| Basically, they're headed for a land shortage / housing
| crisis, which is something we've also observed in the 30
| year history of MMO's. Anytime you have a game with true
| "land like assets" you get these shortages and perverse
| incentives, with scalpers hoarding productive assets they
| can use as leverage, and it leads to a sort of recession.
| It has eerie parallels to the real-world housing crisis
| we're living through right now!
|
| https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/digital-real-
| estate-a...
|
| Sky Mavis could realize this and try to change things so
| that there's a lot of communal land available, or just make
| more land on demand, or any number of other things. But
| they're caught in a trap. They promised all these land
| investors that new land wouldn't be created and that land
| would be this excellent investment that lets them collect
| value from all the people building on Axie in the future,
| kind of like snapping up domain names in the early days of
| the internet. So, Sky Mavis has to choose between opening
| the doors for landless peasants, or protecting the land
| values of landed aristocrats. Either choice will cause
| problems for them.
| 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.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Fiat is created by banks - by originating loans. A bank
| does not actually need to _have_ that money to create the
| loan - it is not transferred from somewhere else, it is
| just that the bank 's balance sheet expands. There are
| rules on how much a bank is allowed to create, as you might
| imagine.
|
| The BTC system does _not_ create money - you can follow the
| creation of a coin system to its eventual destruction and
| discover that exactly the same amount of fiat went into it
| as came out (less mining). In fact, at any moment in time,
| the same also holds! If you buy $100 of BTC, somebody
| somewhere has just sold $100 BTC. No money is ever created
| or destroyed. Of course (if you were a lunatic), you could
| get a loan to buy BTC, and so money would be created, but
| by the banking system, not BTC, and it would go straight to
| whoever you bought BTC from.
|
| As soon as people decide they don't want to put money in,
| then no money can come out. You will know this because the
| 'price' of BTC will be zero.
| oreally wrote:
| > You will know this because the 'price' of BTC will be
| zero.
|
| To be exact in this scenario, the 'price' of BTC will
| still be the price of the last trade in cryto exchanges.
| The trading volume however, will be 0, and there will no
| demand on the bid/ask. Hence you're stuck with BTC you
| can't offload.
| [deleted]
| syspec wrote:
| I completely agree with you, but I'm wondering if you
| could help me debate the counter argument: "The same is
| true of stocks, if people decide to stop putting money
| in, no money comes out"
|
| It comes up whenever I make a point similar to yours
| above, and I haven't had a good answer for it
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| Right. So exactly the same is true of stocks when it
| comes to trading existing stock. The key difference is
| the creation of stock - IPOs. The company uses that money
| they get from the IPO and invests it into the business,
| which results in profits, which they give out as
| dividends. There's no such mechanism in cryptocurrency.
|
| Unfortunately the other side has a good response to this
| - if the dollar value of buybacks+dividends exceeds the
| dollar value of IPO's, then you end up with the same
| problem that Bitcoin is in, where it's a net loss system.
| That seems to be the case[0]. This is not a well known
| fact.
|
| Ultimately this comes down to the fact that we don't have
| a stable velocity of dollars, and an unstable velocity
| that results in more dollars chasing less more goods
| produces speculative bubbles that must eventually crash
| and create recessions.
|
| All investments, including all currency, whether it be
| stocks or gold or bitcoin or dollars, is inherently
| valueless. The only time you can calculate the value is
| when you actually are extracting utility. You can then
| work back from that to determine who produced that value.
|
| [0, Figure 5/Figure 8]:
| https://www.yardeni.com/pub/buybackdiv.pdf
| imtringued wrote:
| Regarding stable velocity. If we had negative interest we
| would have it. Then all that monetary expansion nonsense
| could be over and we could get on with our lives without
| cursing some evil businessmen for being morally
| reprehensible so we have a scapegoat.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| I don't know what the natural interest rate such as to
| get a stable velocity, and it would not be static but
| would change with changes in the economy, but I don't
| think it would be negative unless we were already deep
| within a recession.
|
| And do be so quick, there's always another issue to
| simplify! Can we get base 12? Can we get a carbon tax? A
| land value tax? Voting reform? I can go on all day
| here...
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Stocks represent a share of a productive asset - the
| (presumably successful) underlying business. That
| business includes capital goods and other assets having
| intrinsic value themselves, and also the value created by
| organising them together. The profits can be distributed
| as dividends, or used to grow the asset (buy more
| machines or whatever).
|
| Of course speculation muddies the waters, but you can see
| how important annual accounts etc are - to ensure the
| business really has the value it is being ascribed.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Your description of banks is correct. Your description of
| BTC is wrong. You're missing an important fact. The price
| of BTC can, and does, change. When it changes, the market
| value of all BTC changes. If the value of all BTC goes
| up, new value (not money) has been created.
|
| Also, lots of people take loans to buy BTC. This is
| called "leverage".
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Ah but a change in the price of BTC does not in fact
| create any value - it just means that that $100 now
| corresponds to less BTC. You can profit from that
| fluctuation, by being on the right side of the cash
| exchange at two separate points in time. Somebody else
| will be on the wrong side of that exchange (well, in
| aggregate anyway - there will be many somebodies on
| either side) and will suffer a corresponding loss.
|
| Since BTC is intrinsically worthless, any 'price' that
| might be ascribed to it is meaningless (aside from the
| profit/loss action described above).
| mgraczyk wrote:
| The same (incorrect) reasoning applies to literally
| anything you don't physically use including USD,
| equities, gold, land, etc.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| USD is useful because you can pay taxes with it, equities
| represent an income stream as dividends from a
| (presumably) successful business, gold can make jewellery
| etc, land can be rented out.
|
| Even the supposed utility of BTC - as a money transfer
| mechanism - does not require the price to be anything
| other that not zero.
| imtringued wrote:
| If I have all the ice cream in the world and it spoils in
| a week because I cannot eat all of it then it is not that
| wrong to say that its utility to me is zero.
|
| By the way his argument is that any absolute value
| ascribed to a currency is arbitrary or rather that there
| is no correct number.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| more that BTC is of course _not_ a currency, because it
| is not backed by a state entity. I can 't pay taxes with
| it.
| 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.
| lmm 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.
|
| But they were visibly creating value. Seeing what my
| friends are up to and organising parties together is
| pleasant. Being able to find what you want on the internet
| in 1 second rather than 30 minutes is an obvious
| improvement to your life. So even if they weren't
| profitable in the short term, you could see that there was
| legitimate money to be made.
| [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.
| simonw 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.
|
| The thing I like about Dogecoin is that it's at least
| honest: it's not selling itself as anything more than a
| token with a price that will go up if more people buy it.
| 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.
| Valakas_ wrote:
| It must be safe to do tax evasion, money laundering, and
| drugs with a system that is transparent and traceable
| till the beginning of its existence.
| newsclues wrote:
| It's safe to launder money through banks too. And people
| do.
| toyg wrote:
| But it's infinitely pseudonymous, and can be easily piped
| into more obscure systems.
| Jerrrry wrote:
| This is the only correct answer.
| digitailor wrote:
| Mr Nagle, last month the new mayor of New York asked to
| be paid initially in bitcoin. He was an NYPD officer for
| 22 years. Yet you have been incessant with your public
| campaign on HN to equate digital assets with crime. As a
| well respected elder around here, can you please explain
| why you keep doing this?
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/eric-adams-mayor-paycheck-
| bitco...
| kibwen wrote:
| If your argument hinges on the premise that being either
| a police officer or a politician makes someone either a
| paragon of morality or wholly incapable of committing
| crimes, then I'm afraid I have some bad news for you.
| digitailor wrote:
| My argument hinges upon the fact that Mr Nagle has been
| waging a FUD campaign for some time without much contest
| here, through leveraging his reputation. It's become
| tiresome, very few LEO support his concerns at this
| point, yet he continues unchallenged. It's mostly
| cherrypicking and well below the quality of his other
| posts.
|
| All of us who've been around enough know what FUD
| campaigns look like on well-managed Internet forums. I am
| middle-aged and find this worthy of countering as it
| appears obsessive. Younger technologists are constantly
| having their efforts defamed needlessly on this leading
| technology forum with nothing being added to the
| conversation.
| Talanes wrote:
| >as it appears obsessive
|
| Do you see the irony here?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| acdha wrote:
| > Younger technologists are constantly having their
| efforts defamed needlessly on this leading technology
| forum with nothing being added to the conversation.
|
| Speaking of nothing being added to the conversation, it's
| somewhat conspicuous that you are attacking the source
| rather than engaging with the argument. His criticisms
| are valid and shared by many technologists of all ages
| and skill levels, surely you can explain why they're
| mistaken -- for example, you could point to extensive use
| of Bitcoin in a legitimate non-speculative economy.
| You've been promoting it for many years, surely you must
| have examples?
| digitailor wrote:
| Indeed I have, appearing later in this thread due to how
| it became organized by moderation. Digital assets aided
| in stopping a predatory crime this year. If this kind of
| usage doesn't satisfy as a rebuttal to a negative parent
| post containing no supporting information, you may want
| to examine the fact that this entire thread is meant to
| explore some technologist's fear-based need to publicly
| associate digital assets with crime alone, in this forum
| especially. Emotionally-driven posts meant specifically
| to steam-roll any and all positive discussion by simply
| shouting "But Crime!"
|
| Tracking the making of negative generalized statements
| using FUD techniques is something I have been involved in
| algorithmically tracking professionally and am countering
| not in the pursuit of karma or sycophantic agreement but
| simple public commons maintenance. (The data was often
| used to identify FUD campaigns of short sellers in
| finance forums and resulting sentiment analysis feeds are
| available via subscription through financial data
| providers.) These comments never mention the continual
| reigning supremacy of the US dollar for crime, ever, and
| never provide any evidence that bitcoin has a higher
| crime usage ratio than the dollar with less
| prosecutability. This is because law enforcement
| generally haven't advanced that position while enforcing
| and in earlier posts I've explained my extensive
| experience in detail as to how and why they haven't.
| There has been no direct engagement with this factual
| information.
|
| In my view some on this forum are intent on spreading
| classical FUD on the subject and countering FUD is an
| occupation for some. After a decade of particularly
| questionable behavior coming from the technology sector
| involving unfathomable amounts of US dollars, we run the
| risk of portraying an image of incumbent ideological
| corruption instead of supporting meaningful technological
| discussion. This slide has been happening for years IMO
| and it saddens me. Younger technologists have
| considerably less opportunity than we did, not more, and
| the frontier is much smaller. Ruthless negativism doesn't
| serve them.
| acdha wrote:
| > Digital assets aided in stopping a predatory crime this
| year.
|
| I saw you make that claim but that's too vague to
| evaluate whereas what Nagle described has been well
| covered for many years and even the Bitcoin salespeople
| rarely argue that it's commonplace. Even with the extra
| two paragraphs you added later there's no way to know
| what this meant, what fraction of the total Bitcoin usage
| it accounted for, etc.
|
| > These comments never mention the continual reigning
| supremacy of the US dollar for crime, ever, and never
| provide any evidence that bitcoin has a higher crime
| usage ratio than the dollar with less prosecutability.
|
| This is incorrect, and the need for the counterfactual
| narrative is telling: this comes up frequently and it's
| usually mentioned in the context of the larger economy.
| Nobody says that the U.S. dollar isn't used by criminals
| but it's trivially easy to show enormous amounts of real,
| non-criminal economic activity -- nobody thinks, say,
| drug cartels are tiny but there's no serious argument
| that they're anywhere near a majority of the legal
| economy. If you want to address this claim, try
| highlighting examples of real economic activity using
| Bitcoin -- real businesses which are not selling Bitcoin.
| If USD (or just Visa/Mastercard, Paypal, etc.) activity
| suddenly halted, a ton of people would be unable to
| engage in their daily business -- can you provide any
| examples of similar Bitcoin dependencies?
|
| > Younger technologists have considerably less
| opportunity than we did, not more, and the frontier is
| much smaller. Ruthless negativism doesn't serve them.
|
| I agree that the landscape isn't as good as it used to be
| but I don't think it's helpful to steer people into false
| hopes, either. Bitcoin has an inherent conflict of
| interest built-in since all of the people who've poured
| money into it for the last decade will have to write that
| off if they can't find buyers. That lack of utility is
| the real problem and calling it FUD won't solve it.
| digitailor wrote:
| I agree with most of your points. If something as real-
| life meaningful as the stopping of a predatory crime does
| not satisfy you as a legitimate usage example against
| people claiming there is essentially none, I'm at a loss
| and am unsure of what we're actually discussing.
|
| As you may imagine, it's impossible for me to provide the
| 1,000 page+ documentation trail of an in-progress federal
| investigation here in order to refute a comment. I
| understand that my sincerity may be questioned and
| there's nothing I can do about that.
| syspec wrote:
| That's a political publicity stunt, and does not counter
| any of the points made by the parent
| digitailor wrote:
| Help me understand. Are you saying that former LEO are
| well-served from a PR standpoint by attaching themselves
| to the "points" you're holding are clearly evidenced by
| the parent post?
| syspec wrote:
| Yes, especially the ones that become politicians.
| digitailor wrote:
| OK, I think I get it better. I'm not disagreeing and
| sincerely appreciate the cynicism, but you're saying the
| guy who ran on a relatively classic tough-on-crime
| platform is also appealing to some kind of criminal
| subclass of NYC voter who prefers bitcoin to cash for
| their locally committed crimes and also appreciates
| tough-on-crime platforms for everything else?
|
| Perhaps... or maybe the reputation for crime that some
| people are intent on projecting onto bitcoin is not
| particularly accurate to the realities of currencies used
| most frequently in the commission of criminal activity.
| [deleted]
| coffeecat wrote:
| The parent post argues that cryptocurrency is most
| useful, in practice, for illegal activities. It does not
| argue that this is how it's perceived by the general
| public, by the NYC municipal government, or by Eric
| Adams. The perception is that it's a sexy new technology
| of the future, whereas the reality is that it's mostly a
| playground for "investors", fraudsters, and criminals.
| digitailor wrote:
| I understand your point of view, but you haven't even
| attempted to qualify it.
|
| I can tell you that I helped stop a predatory crime that
| was being committed using US dollars this year, partially
| by using digital assets defensively. Defamatory general
| statements about the target and digital assets had been
| made in the past in this case, and it backfired on the
| perpetrators- horribly, in the federal jurisdiction.
|
| Could you take a moment to consider why unqualified
| generalizations like yours could concern some? In the
| past, the perpetrators had attempted to capitalize on the
| perception you are asserting as reality. The possibility
| of resultant ankle bracelets or worse for them is high,
| due generally to record keeping and time stamps.
|
| The reality of this technology is that it solved the
| technical problems associated with Internet native asset
| classes. The rest is editorializing.
| digitailor wrote:
| (To help qualify my perspective and insistence... I was
| involved in stopping a long term predatory crime this
| year where digital assets were used to help _protect the
| victim_ against _perpetrators using dollars._ As you
| might imagine, having clear records of transactions is
| likely to be more helpful to the targets than the
| perpetrators in these cases.)
| toyg wrote:
| You can use local heavies to protect yourself from
| bullies. That doesn't mean those heavies won't commit
| crimes in their spare time.
| digitailor wrote:
| To be clear, I'm talking about the bookkeeping element of
| an in-progress federal investigation involving theft of
| corporate equity and corporate tax fraud. The target was
| legally disabled.
| fastball wrote:
| Now that Monero exists, not really.
| jmagoon wrote:
| The only coin that's actually stable, because it's the
| only one that has any actual purpose.
| imtringued wrote:
| Yeah speculation would ruin the black market.
| prepend wrote:
| Interesting it's like meta money laundering. It allows
| regular folks to make money off the illegal economy.
|
| In some ways this was the extra profits banks made off
| illegal activities but that was largely held within the
| bank, not available to normies.
| oblio wrote:
| Is it regular folks, though? I imagine it's mostly big
| whales who are probably also doing shady stuff, too.
| We're talking about people doing money laundering, so
| financially savvy.
|
| Few outside people get rich off the mafia.
| ctchocula wrote:
| Gold has a usecase for jewelry, manufacturing
| electronics, dentistry and glassmaking. Yet not even the
| sum of these applications can justify its market cap of
| $11.73T, so the difference must come from speculation. I
| suspect the same is true for Bitcoin.
| acdha wrote:
| The difference is that gold has useful applications which
| act as a floor for pricing and moderate fluctuations.
| Gold bugs can still lose their shirts speculating but a
| normal buyer knows the value will never be zero.
|
| Bitcoin is in contrast a pure fiat currency with very
| weak backing. Nobody has a need for it which can't be
| satisfied at least as well by alternatives and it
| requires a very expensive always-on network to perform
| transactions. The floor is zero and liquidity is a very
| real concern.
| mannanj wrote:
| >Nobody has a need for it which can't be satisfied at
| least as well by alternatives
|
| Have you ever tried to send more than $5k, $10k or $20k
| before? You basically can't with your bank without having
| to go through a bunch of hurdles or time delays. I can
| easily do that with bitcoin.
|
| Legit, real need for it that can't be satisfied with
| alternatives.
|
| In addition the bank is often closed on weekends, and
| doesn't service you into the night. My bank site "shuts
| down" at night. Sorry, but my ability to use my money
| isn't limiting by your waking hours.
| acdha wrote:
| I have, actually, and it wasn't hard. It did require a
| out-of-band confirmation which I considered a good thing
| since I rarely make transactions that large and never in
| a case which can't wait until the next business day.
|
| That is, of course, the flip side of that convenience: if
| you ever make a mistake with your Bitcoin wallet, it's
| gone with no recourse. Good luck!
| mannanj wrote:
| And how do I send money to pay a bill with pre-existing
| systems?
|
| Pay a third party like Venmo, Square, etc a fee, or use
| my banks (also horribly designed and bad UX system) to
| send the money slower than watching paint dry. I'd rather
| pay the Bitcoin Miners that fee than a third party or
| even by bank.
| acdha wrote:
| > And how do I send money to pay a bill with pre-existing
| systems? > > Pay a third party like Venmo, Square, etc a
| fee, or use my banks (also horribly designed and bad UX
| system) to send the money slower than watching paint dry.
| I'd rather pay the Bitcoin Miners that fee than a third
| party or even by bank.
|
| Don't forget giving them cash or a check, or a credit
| card, as billions of people do every day. Fees are a fair
| point but that's purely a cost and timeliness question:
| Bitcoin historically has been slower and more expensive
| but it certainly could be useful as a competitor to
| horrible companies like Paypal if it can keep the costs
| down and transaction times low, not to mention scaling
| the system by 7+ orders of magnitude.
|
| The catch, of course, is that this is not the path to
| world domination which features prominently in the sales
| pitch. That caps the maximum value at the percentage
| Visa, Paypal, etc. charge and if Bitcoin ever matured
| into serious competition, the credit card companies have
| plenty of margin to cut.
| 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.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| Your gold analogy might actually help me make my point.
| When the California gold rush was happening people went
| nuts trying to mine for it. Eventually the mining slowed,
| presumably because the cost to mine it started to exceed
| the value of it. Bitcoin claims to be this way (you may
| have known this; I had to look it up), stating that
| mining will halt at 21 million Bitcoins. But didn't
| Bitcoin already fork in the past? And won't there always
| be a new cryptocurrency to fall in love with? Unlike
| gold, when Bitcoin mining wanes someone can just invent
| "gold plus" with a few keystrokes and then here we go
| again. The feedback loop may not be confined to a single
| cryptocurrency but I still don't understand how it will
| ever end.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Yes, I agree, this can go on forever. "DeFi", "web3", and
| then something else
| jkhdigital wrote:
| > Imagine if you had the option of buying a piece of gold
| or a piece of land with good irrigation and good soil.
|
| Why imagine? Both of these things can be purchased in the
| real world. And yet we see that some people purchase
| farmland, and others purchase bars of gold. Why is that?
|
| Turns out, people called economists have been pondering
| such questions for hundreds of years and have developed
| quite sophisticated and nuanced theories about how humans
| create, assign, and transact value.
|
| Anyways, thanks for the lesson on "cashflow" but you
| might want to pick up an economics textbook, you might
| learn something.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| You may want to look up how often these "quite
| sophisticated and nuanced theories" are accurate.
|
| https://www.economist.com/economic-and-financial-
| indicators/...
| 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).
| post_from_work wrote:
| Someone building a Dyson Sphere just to power a crypto
| mining rig is an awesome concept for a short story or
| sci-fi RPG adventure (such as Traveller).
| 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.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Is this Peter Pan? If you just believe in the power of
| BTC it will never go down in value?
| contravariant wrote:
| I don't think Bitcoin is doing particularly well as a
| currency, but can you name one currency that will not go
| down in value if people stop believing in it?
| che_shirecat wrote:
| that's a strawman of the parent comment's argument. and
| yes, if enough people believe something, it takes on real
| significance. e.g. enough people believe in the full
| faith and credit of the US Gov that backs their printed
| paper with numbers on it, so it takes on real
| significance.
| shazzdeeds wrote:
| This is addressed in the original white paper. In a world
| where BTC is valued at 1M USD/coin you'd also expect a
| decent amount of day to day usage. Miners could still make
| decent profits based on transaction fees just from
| confirming blocks even once the Coinbase rewards stop. I'm
| not saying that's currently the case, but that is the
| design. Also if miners are making a profit off let's say
| $40k/coin and the price goes down to 30, yet there's still
| a profit for some miners, how exactly does that become
| unsustainable?
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Miners could make a profit at $1/coin. The issue is that
| profit comes from somewhere. And that somewhere is new
| money being put into BTC. Hence, BTC is negative
| cashflow.
| shazzdeeds wrote:
| Profit comes when their operating costs are less than the
| take home from any transaction fees and Coinbase rewards
| they've collected in the same period. It's not a direct
| function of liquidity entering the system. It's true that
| rising prices from new cash flow means more profit for
| miners, but that doesn't imply the opposite. The price
| could stay constant for the next 100 years and miners
| that have found a way to remain profitable within that
| price point would be fine.
| petmon wrote:
| Miners have real expenses: electricity, depreciation,
| etc. Miners also generarte revenue, $45 million per day
| is a reasonable estimate [1]. This revenue is extracted
| from the Bitcoin system through both transaction fees and
| inflation (creating new Bitcoins), but these are sold in
| portion to pay real expenses, with presumably some
| profit.
|
| We can estimate 300k transactions per day, which implies
| about $150 revenue per transaction. Miner revenue is your
| cost: it is what they extract from the Bitcoin system.
|
| One Bitcoin transaction costs on the order of $150. It's
| really expensive.
|
| 1: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/miners-revenue
| gitfan86 wrote:
| If the price stays constant for 100 years where is the
| money coming from to pay for those NVIDIA cards that the
| miners are using?
| hwy50 wrote:
| Help me here. All databases are negative cashflow. They
| only 'cost', don't generate 'revenue' by themselves. This
| is true of ACH mechanism to transfer funds from one bank
| account to another. Does that make USD negative cashflow?
| Does the cost of maintaining this ACH system affect the
| price of USD v/s GBP?
|
| The value provided by a database such as BTC is that it
| provides a record of 'who owns what at what point of time
| in history'. I can argue separately about why the
| 'immutability' of this database itself is a value created
| by Bitcoin, for which holders can be willing to pay
| premium for.
|
| Miners earn profit if Operating Costs > $ value of
| (Transaction Fees + BTC mined). Over a long enough
| timeline, Fees + BTC mined will ~~ operating costs of the
| rig. If not, more miners will continue to see economic
| opportunity, and keep joining the miner pool till that
| equation is balanced.
|
| The other source of BTC value going up need not be more
| demand for it, let's say over next 12 months. The ~6%
| inflation could show up there too.
|
| What am I missing?
| imtringued wrote:
| The energy waste is designed to go up as each individual
| Bitcoin goes up in value.
| hooande wrote:
| is the day to day usage of bitcoin currently increasing
| in proportion to coin price? it seems entirely possible
| that the price could get very high solely as a
| speculative investment. in which case, you would still
| need additional investment money coming in
| ninkendo wrote:
| > In a world where BTC is valued at 1M USD/coin you'd
| also expect a decent amount of day to day usage.
|
| Citation needed.
|
| (I don't see why this should be true at all. If anything
| I'd intuitively think the opposite: If gold were $1MM/oz
| I don't think people would be using it to buy
| groceries... Unless you're directly talking about
| hyperinflation where $1MM isn't worth a loaf of bread any
| more.)
| 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.
| imtringued wrote:
| Money doesn't have an intrinsic value. Money is just an
| accounting system, it is a balance sheet. People used
| physical gold as tokens or entries in that balance sheet.
|
| Ultimately you are depending on another human who is
| actually doing work. This is why the credit theory of
| money is so appealing.
|
| Money has value indirectly because someone obligated
| himself to give you value equal to the money created.
| When you add up debts and credits then you end up with
| nothing because money is just an agreement and not a
| commodity.
| nightski wrote:
| I don't think it is a meaningful distinction. Money
| itself might not have value, but the miners and nodes are
| providing value by ensuring the integrity and security of
| the blockchain.
|
| But more to the point, when I said "intrinsic value" I
| meant value relative to goods/services. Where as when I
| used "extrinsic value" I meant relative to other "money"
| such as fiat. Maybe it was a poor choice of words.
| 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.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| I can't pay my hydro bills with shares of a private
| company either or japanese yen either, it doesn't mean
| those things have no intrinsic value.
| mertd wrote:
| The difference is that you can pay someone with JPY and
| that's the whole transaction. When you pay someone in
| BTC, you also have to pay the power company with
| something. The system is an inherently leaky bucket.
| q-big wrote:
| > When you pay someone in BTC, you also have to pay the
| power company with something. The system is an inherently
| leaky bucket.
|
| The same holds for, say, transactions in US dollars.
| Here, you also pay your bank or your credit card company.
| mertd wrote:
| That's not a fundamental property of fiat money. There is
| no fee for exchanging cash.
| nightski wrote:
| The "fee" for fiat is inflation. Your money is regularly
| losing value even if you do not transact it. Not to
| mention cash transactions as you describe are on the
| decline and do not represent the majority of transactions
| that happen in the U.S.
|
| I'm not saying this is a bad thing by any means, in some
| ways it is a good thing. Just stating that it exists.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Does cash just grow on trees? No, it is printed by a
| government that employs thousands of agents who have to
| make sure that no one is counterfeiting those bills. The
| fact that I can hand someone a $20 and walk away with my
| bag of groceries is the tip of a massive iceberg of
| regulatory and enforcement mechanisms.
| endisneigh wrote:
| no one said that. you're paying in some fiat, right?
| 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.
| post_from_work wrote:
| >>> 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.
|
| Unless more countries follow El Salvador's example, and
| accept cryptocurrencies as legal tender. If El Salvador
| hadn't banned metals mining in 2017, you could the guys
| digging up ores with BTC today.
| [deleted]
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Bitcoin itself does not because its low transaction speed
| makes it unusable for real world applications. Second,
| why use something in a financial transaction whose value
| can fluctuate 10-20% a day? That's not a stable currency.
|
| So for all intents and purposes, Bitcoin is an unstable
| investment product.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > Bitcoin has intrinsic value outside of the fiat system.
|
| Not really, because even though the number of Bitcoins is
| limited, the number of cryptocurrencies is not. In any
| application that uses Bitcoin, you can substitute
| Litecoin, Dogecoin, or most other altcoins/shitcoins in
| existence, and there would be zero difference.
|
| In fact, Bitcoin's only advantage over those coins is
| _extrinsic_ --it has more longevity, better brand
| recognition, and a lot of large players interested in
| making it seem (relatively) legitimate.
|
| Contrast this to when people talk about gold having an
| intrinsic value, as you can't just replace gold with
| silver or copper when e.g. manufacturing electronics.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| > even though the number of Bitcoins is limited, the
| number of cryptocurrencies is not.
|
| There will only ever be a single dominant SHA-2 PoW
| cryptocurrency, because mining power can be expended on
| only a single chain. Doesn't matter how many new genesis
| blocks are minted, this is a natural monopoly and Bitcoin
| clearly is the monopolist.
| c0nducktr wrote:
| Bitcoin being the "dominant" cryptocurrency doesn't seem
| to change any of the parent commenters points, right?
| Those regarding intrinsic vs extrinsic value?
| toomanydoubts wrote:
| How is that different at all from fiat currencies? Every
| electronic transaction you make, like credit card or money
| transfers, has fees. Central banks have to keep pumping
| money into the economy so we can have the same nominal
| amount of cash in the system(albeit with lower value,
| because inflation).
|
| So, my question is, is fiat currency cashflow positive?
| How?
| imtringued wrote:
| We devalue currency by 2% per year so people have an
| incentive to work = keep pumping. That work creates goods
| and services in the process.
|
| The problem with Bitcoin is that if it goes up in value
| the additional time spent mining is ultimately a waste of
| time.
| toomanydoubts wrote:
| I live brazil and earn in BRL. In the USD/BRL pair, the
| dollar price keeps increasing when you look at the
| historical data. Does that mean that holding USD is
| enough and investing these dollars to make more dollars
| is ultimately a waste of time?
| gitfan86 wrote:
| No money doesn't have positive cashflow, that is why it
| is a stupid investment.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Just about every project is cashflow negative. Most
| projects start Worthing $0 and rises to another number
| later on
| 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.
| Geee wrote:
| It's way more expensive to store and transport gold than
| bitcoin, although it depends on the amount. You also have
| to price in the protection provided by local authorities
| that protect your property, in addition to your own
| security measures.
| anonporridge wrote:
| You need men with guns to move gold between banks, which
| themselves are protected by men with guns.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Bitcoin is unlikely to have a 5,000 year lifespan because
| unlike gold it can be obsoleted.
| Valakas_ wrote:
| !remindme 100 years
| anonporridge wrote:
| Gold has already been obsoleted by fiat money because
| it's too expensive and slow to transact with in the
| modern world.
|
| Bitcoin won't necessarily have the same problem, because
| it's an information protocol. Protocols can be updated
| and improved. Even if the main chain ossifies and can't
| be improved, bitcoin tokens are already being moved to
| alternative blockchains (sidechains) via 2 way pegs.
| 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.
| crabmusket wrote:
| I think that would be a very amusing outcome. the rate of
| accidents can't be held at 0 so the supply of Bitcoin can
| only decrease in the long term.
|
| However, is there any reason the network couldn't decide
| to, say, subdivide Satoshis even further to allow the
| remaining supply to become more tradeable? If the changes
| are slow enough over time it doesn't seem like there's a
| limit to how far that could go.
| wyager wrote:
| > Money has to keep coming in to keep the price up due to
| paying miners
|
| This is incoherent. It's hard to refute this because it's
| not even on the right page.
|
| Demand for Bitcoin comes from demand for money (to
| transact, to store wealth, etc.).
|
| It sounds like you're trying to model it using some idea of
| how equity pricing works - is that accurate?
| gitfan86 wrote:
| All assets ( BTC, Stocks, Gold ) are priced on supply and
| demand. If demand goes down for BTC the price will go
| down.
|
| It doesn't matter if the fed prints money or not BTC
| needs a constant infusion of new investment to keep the
| price up. Unlike a company with positive cash flow who
| could buyback shares and never get any new investors and
| still keep the price up.
| wyager wrote:
| > If demand goes down for BTC the price will go down.
|
| Indeed. What may be missing from your model is that
| demand for BTC comes not just from people buying it, but
| from people holding it.
|
| > BTC needs a constant infusion of new investment to keep
| the price up.
|
| No it doesn't. Why do you say this? Where the market
| clears has essentially nothing to do with "new
| investment".
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Stop and think about what you are saying. If everyone in
| the world stopped buying TVs and instead held onto their
| current TVs the demand for TVs would go to zero. What
| would the market price of TVs be when there is zero
| demand?
|
| How do you think BTC miners pay for the graphics cards
| and electricity? NVIDIA doesn't take BTC as a form of
| payment. So money is constantly leaving the BTC network
| to pay for electricity and graphics cards. The only way
| that happens is if money is also coming into the BTC
| network
| 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.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| > There are no closed systems
|
| This single fact destroys most arguments about almost
| anything, but _especially_ in economics
| 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.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Yeah, that's gambler thinking.
|
| In reality, you're going to lose money.
| oblio wrote:
| That's a pyramid scheme and/or gambling. You're relying
| on many marks to lose money to make money.
|
| There's a reason we regulate or ban that.
| 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.
| user-the-name wrote:
| What major investors decide has no bearing on it.
| Mathematically, it is now, has always been, and will
| always remain a negative-sum game. This cannot change, it
| is part of what bitcoin is and how it functions
| economically.
|
| It is a negative-sum game, no matter how hard you wished
| it were not.
| imtringued wrote:
| If crypto is a store of value and its value goes up who
| exactly is working longer hours to create that additional
| value?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| It's not just a closed system, it's zero sum. It's only
| possible to cash out for a profit if there are more people
| willing to buy in.
|
| Some of the anti-bitcoin crowd tried to make the term
| "Nakomoto Scheme" a thing, and clearly failed. The basic idea
| is that things like Axie Infinity have _some_ of the aspects
| of a ponzi scheme, without the central organization and
| coordination that makes an actual ponzi scheme illegal. While
| there isn 't a central operator paying out old investors with
| new investors money, anyone currently invested can only cash
| out if new people join. This begins to look a bit like a
| decentralized ponzi, with everyone currently invested in it
| motivated to evangelize it and convert new people in order to
| ensure the fresh supply of new buyers to keep the price up
| and/or let them cash out.
| gexla wrote:
| If the game were actually fun, there could be money coming in
| from players who value the fun more than making money. Axie
| may have an element to this, but I hear it's not fun. The
| term for these players is "whales." They are willing to spend
| a lot for fast progression and domination. A game which pays
| Filipinos may have money coming in from a well-off player in
| China. There could be schemes where whales hire Filipinos to
| grind for loot and gold. However, it's hard to see a
| situation where a game could pay for development and support
| thousands of grinders. It would be interesting to see how big
| the MMORPG grinding economy is. That might give us an idea of
| how many people these games might support.
| imtringued wrote:
| One day a trillionaire will build a blockchain game built
| around proof of humanity. You will have to spend 1 hour
| solving a problem that can only be solved by humans but
| verified by a machine to earn $4 an hour. World hunger
| solved :)
| 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.
| jsemrau wrote:
| What finclout does differently here is that there is a clearly
| defined regulated external incoming stream from Proof of Stake
| treasuries. That avoids that the project needs to rely on a
| scammy "need to purchase" and in addition with more people
| overall reward volume increases as well.
| 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.
| baxtr wrote:
| Ok, fair. But that was when again? How is this relevant
| today, when people hate crypto and think stocks are ok?
| 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.
| seoaeu wrote:
| Stocks pay out their dividends in fiat currency, not
| additional shares.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| The analogy would work if Ethereum staking rewards were
| inflationary. But post-EIP 1559, there's a zero-to-
| negative net issuance of Ethereum on an ongoing basis.
| After the merge, the entirety of that (plus MEV bribery)
| goes to stakers/validators.
|
| In this sense, Ethereum's yields are more like a stock
| buyback than a stock dividend. To transact on-chain, end-
| users and traders have to pay ETH to validators. To
| acquire ETH they have to bid on it using fiat. ETH
| issuance to stakers isn't inflationary, because its
| counter-balanced by end-user demand to transact on-chain.
|
| Just the same, as a stock buyback doesn't involve any
| direct payout of fiat currency to existing shareholders.
| But it takes the revenue generated by the underlying
| company, and translates that into a deflationary bid to
| the stock.
| 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.
| ThomPete wrote:
| But Web3/Crypto/NFT is so much more than the financial
| incentives. It's much more about culture, belonging, tribalism
| (the good version) and the endless opportunity space of what I
| would call a resource. Digital assets that behave as if they
| are physical.
|
| I have been involved in crypto since the beginning and the
| least interesting things for me is about the value. It's just a
| savings account. All the fun stuff is what we build on top of
| that.
| birracerveza wrote:
| I hope web3/crypto/NFTs are what will finally make us realize
| that money is essentially meaningless, so that we can forget
| the concept of monetary value altogether in the long term.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| If the SP500 stopped going up in value would you still be
| interested in the project?
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Yes. The stocks in the SP500 sometimes go down in value,
| sometimes in the aggregate for a long time. Individually some
| of them go down forever.
|
| If a stock goes down in value and it still pays a dividend it
| becomes more valuable for this. Setting that aside all stocks
| have a not very senior claim on assets. As the stock goes
| down sometimes it is worth less than the assets it has a
| claim to. At that point its better to buy up a controlling
| interest and sell the assets. Thats what private equity does.
| So yes I am interested when the value goes down.
| imtringued wrote:
| I would expect it to pay dividends or do stockbuybacks until
| no more shares are publicly traded.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Surely you see how hypocritical and ponzi that is.
| zeven7 wrote:
| I know that there were many people who stayed interested
| through 4 years of bear market
| 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?
| rideontime wrote:
| By ignoring it until the government catches up, like every
| other startup does with regulations which should preclude their
| "disruptive" business model.
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