[HN Gopher] "Play-to-Earn" and Bullshit Jobs ___________________________________________________________________ "Play-to-Earn" and Bullshit Jobs Author : paulgb Score : 390 points Date : 2021-12-28 19:16 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (paulbutler.org) (TXT) w3m dump (paulbutler.org) | soheil wrote: | > Games that maximize property rights (as Axie Infinity wisely | hasn't) are bound to be overrun with cheaters and bots, which in | turn will just bring down the value of in-game assets anyway. | | This may happen temporarily, but a sufficiently well tested and | bullet proof enough game should able to combat that. | | This is the same argument people made before BTC: it's just a | matter of time before any decentralized currency would get hacked | therefore we cannot have a decentralized currency. | Animats wrote: | Axie Infinity spokesperson: "It is a little bit dependent on | capital inflows." | | Er, yes. All those players are paying about $1000 to get into the | game and then grinding away to get Smooth Love Potion tokens. | This is the SLP price graph.[1] Down 92% since the peak. A lot of | suckers lost big. Many of them poor people in the Philippines, | where Axie is big. | | Axie is frantically trying to obfuscate this with a second token, | PR, claims of new revenue sources, etc. It's not working. In the | end, it's a classic Ponzi scheme, and it collapsed after only a | few months. | | [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/ | lalaland1125 wrote: | This is a key thing that a lot of people are missing: most (if | not all) of the top PlayToEarn games are literally just | disguised ponzi schemes. | | The only reason why their tokens have value is that you need | those tokens to earn more tokens. | stingrae wrote: | This. Axie Infinity only had traction, because the earned coin | had speculative value. The traction was from people "playing- | to-earn" as a job. I doubt that there are that many people | playing for the fun of it. When the token loses value, there | isn't a reason to continue playing. | skinnyasianboi wrote: | I think we all agree that Axie is not a fun game. There are other | games with millions of users that are actually fun and play to | earn. | netcan wrote: | As I was reading Graeber, it's useful to imagine useless job | economies of the past. Is a medieval abbey "useless?" Clergy? | Servants to the clergy? How about courtiers? Courtiers' dress | makers? | | These classes represented a small part of most societies in the | past, though not always _that_ small. In any case, it 's obvious | that whatever needs these jobs serve are cultural. Don't | underestimate culture. Money is a cultural construct. Power. | Politics. Macroeconomics. Etc. | | That's what's going on here. | Osmose wrote: | What's the cultural value provided by sitting on Axie and | grinding for hours? | netcan wrote: | I'm not sure "value" is the correct question. Value depends | on... values, I guess. | | In any case, I suspect Graeber would have advised asking | them. The grinders in manilla. The currency buyers, traders, | etc. Cultural reasons are hard to extract from their cultural | context without resorting to essentialism. | | There are differences between a game where money comes from | grinding, even if 3rd party and outsourced, and a pay-to-play | currency. I suspect the people participating in that economy | have a narrative, and that it makes some sort of internal | sense. That's culture. | me_again wrote: | There are some comments from participants here: https://www | .reddit.com/r/AxieInfinity/comments/qfe7fo/would_... | DarylZero wrote: | It's the same cultural value provided by a slot machine. | | A way to hack someone else's brain and turn them into a slave | zombie. | | But I guess a lot of "real" culture is basically trying to do | something similar: religions, corporate cults, schools, etc. | Those are maybe only superficially less grotesque. | zzbzq wrote: | In the book version of his essay, one of the things he talks | about is how most of the things people would write to him about | being "bullshit jobs" were not his original definition of | bullshit jobs. | | He gives the example of how a lot of people wrote to him about | how useless hairdressers were, since people could just style | their own hair. But, to Graeber, these are very much real jobs, | because it's easy to see what was exchanged for payment (hair | service.) Whether it was worth the money is a different | question. | | Clergy, in the middle ages, wouldn't be so much a bullshit job, | but might be a privileged caste. The servants of the clergy, | according to Graeber, are not bullshit jobs, because like the | hairdresser, they are doing something for someone (presumably.) | Doing laundry or bringing tea or whatever we are imagining they | are serving as servants. | | I believe in the book, he resigns to include the concept of | "different types" of bullshit jobs, since most people seem to | be unable to stick to his original definition. | | The canonical bullshit job to Graeber would be someone in a | large administrative bureaucracy. This is tied, in his original | essay, to examining the statistics of increase in jobs in | different sectors, cross-referenced with data about the growth | in the productivity of a single worker. He shows that while | manufacturing and service jobs have remained steady, | "administrative" jobs have increased in proportion with | productivity, which he says demonstrates the "bullshit job" as | purely a way of having more administrators sitting around in | meetings while the same number of people do actual stuff. | netcan wrote: | So... I think a lot of people (not you) missed the fact that | graeber writes from what I think is a traditional | anthropological perspective, as opposed to other social | philosophy traditions. | | Bullshit jobs described as such by the worker was a very big | part of his definition. I think the definition has to drift, | since an anthropologist won't typically want to impose a | typology. | | In any case, if medieval monks themselves considered monkery | bullshit... there are snug places in Graebers' typology for | them. In fact, I believe an average monastery could man every | type of bullshit job category. It would depend on whether or | not they themselves believe in the monastic institutions... | and I would not necessarily assume that they did. | sktrdie wrote: | I think the point of Graeber (RIP btw) was to highlight that | certain jobs (the bullshit ones) are self-fulfilling promises; | specifically jobs "that only exist because everyone else is | spending so much of their time working in all the other ones." | [1] | | What's going on here is people doing work knowing it's actual | bullshit. Just like grinding in the game. There are entire | sweeps of the economy dedicated to this kind of work and it's a | huge waste. | | 1. https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ | xg15 wrote: | By what definition would you consider a medieval abbey useless? | I can't follow you. | [deleted] | seibelj wrote: | I disagree entirely with the thesis of "bullshit jobs". Unless | it's a government job or mandated by regulations, someone is | paying for a task to be done voluntarily. Therefore it isn't | bullshit to the payer, even if it might seem like bullshit to the | worker. I have never stumbled on a single job that wasn't | government-required labor that had no purpose whatsoever, and | furthermore the laborer wasn't able to quit. | DarylZero wrote: | I found his bullshit jobs article to be terrible and | unconvincing, and many of the things he said about jobs just | inaccurate. | | But I think your objection is not very strong and his thesis | can be rescued from it. | | > it isn't bullshit to the payer, even if it might seem like | bullshit to the worker | | I think a lot of jobs really are "bullshit jobs," not because | they have no value to the payer, but because they have negative | value to the economy overall. | | For an extreme example, some people are willing to pay to have | witnesses murdered so that they can continue committing crimes | without legal repercussions. | | Or, some people are doing jobs that are purely for positional | advantage and that are even "cancelled out" by other people in | other companies doing another job. Advertisers seeking to take | over market share from competing companies. | | Or, some extractive industries may be more beneficially halted | because of negative externalities; but those who benefit from | the extraction will still hire people. | withinboredom wrote: | Sure you can quit. But often these "bs jobs" are a form of | scope creep so you face the thought that eventually, it may | change. | seibelj wrote: | Can you provide an example of a bullshit job? | renewiltord wrote: | The wikipedia article has examples from David Graeber | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs | sam_lowry_ wrote: | Here is the original publication of the essay: | https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ | | I have anecdotal evidence that it took financial circles | by storm. One very well known CEO in the financial | industry even wrote a book inspired by David Graeber a | few years later. | cochne wrote: | I'm not totally convinced after looking at that. "duct | tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed | permanently, e.g., programmers repairing bloated code, | airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not | arrive;" | | Is duct taping code never optimal? | jakear wrote: | Some examples: receptionists, administrative assistances, | quality control officers, compliance officers, and | maintainers of bloated legacy software systems. | | I disagree that any of these jobs are "bullshit". I think | the most bullshit of all the jobs on that page is that | author's, who wastes society's time listening to him | complain about things he has no experience with. | xracy wrote: | Did you read the article? | seibelj wrote: | Yes! However, as stated in the article, earning currency | or items in videogames and reselling them have been | around since the earliest days of online gaming. Plus | these people are entrepreneurs working for themselves. | I'm really not getting the link. | xracy wrote: | "In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, David Graeber makes the case | that a sizable chunk of the labour economy is essentially | people performing useless work." | | I would treat a bullshit job as any job/living that | requires you to do useless work. How do you define | "useless work"? | all2well wrote: | Something like Axie Infinity just seems _incredibly_ | cynical. I sometimes joke that stuff like professional | sports are just financial instruments, which only | incidentally involve a ball of some sort. Play-to-earn | and many crypto schemes seem to self-consciously be | minimal veils to rope in people who otherwise wouldn't | care about financial products. | ViViDboarder wrote: | Because it doesn't provide any value. The game developers | created an artificial demand by making a particular | aspect of the game so unenjoyable that some people would | pay others to do it. They could, instead, just offer | people the better experience uniformly and deliver more | value to their users. | | In this way, the demand and output is entirely | artificial. | | The author here describes the main difference this new | model and older games where similar economies developed | is that this is considered a primary feature of the game | and people are entering it for the purpose of grinding | for cash. I remember many of the other games described | such as RuneScape, Second Life, WoW, etc. where people | sold in game currency or profiles, but they weren't | advertised as economic opportunities, but as games you | play for entertainment. VCs weren't investing in them for | this purpose either. | originalvichy wrote: | Read excerpts of his book or his essays on the topic. You might | be suprised. | seibelj wrote: | I read his writing, and I also read his Debt book and found | it unimpressive and unconvincing. | originalvichy wrote: | If you read his book from cover to cover and found nothing | that you would count even close to a bullshit job then | alright I guess. You probably wouldn't get hired to | optimize resource usage and cut down redundancies in a | private enterprise anytime soon. | moneywoes wrote: | For example? | Aunche wrote: | I've read his essays, but not his books. Graeber does what | every popular nonfiction writer does. He starts with a | provocative conclusion, and cherrypicks data to support it. | _Bullshit Jobs_ is particularly bad in this aspect. | | https://www.economist.com/business/2021/06/05/why-the- | bullsh... | sam_lowry_ wrote: | You are linking to a critique. Here is the original essay: | https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/ | beaconstudios wrote: | So if I paid you a salary to dig a hole and fill it up again, | ad infinitum, that job would have inherent value just because | I'm paying you to do it? | | If so, welcome aboard. | [deleted] | MattGaiser wrote: | My problem with the bullshit jobs thesis is the "inherent | value." There are plenty of jobs that have little societal | value, but provide plenty of value to the person employing | the person. | | For example, plenty of jurisdictions give large tax breaks to | farms, so it is reasonably common for developers holding land | to turn their land into a "farm." One fellow I heard of put 6 | cows on a plot of development land and paid someone to drop | hay off for the cows as the land had next to no grass, as it | was under development. | | No real value is being generated from the cows. The output of | 6 poorly fed and housed beef cows is well under the money | paid to the cow carer and for the hay and for the damage | caused by the cows to the neighbourhood when they escaped. | | But the developer saved 80K a year in various property tax | after all expenses were considered. | beaconstudios wrote: | Yeah that's bullshit though - it's a warped incentive | caused by social systems. In a healthy social system, these | incentives to make money doing pointless bullshit should be | minimised. David Graeber is an anarchist, and the whole | bullshit jobs concept is a criticism of capitalism. | seibelj wrote: | What company is paying to do this? | beaconstudios wrote: | I'll pay you to do it. I'll incorporate a company and then | pay you through that if it feels more legit that way. | pietrovismara wrote: | I'm more than willing to pay tickets to watch that guy | dig a hole perpetually and learn what a bullshit job is. | Let's do it. | xwdv wrote: | Graveyards. | vntok wrote: | Which have you visited that dig and fill the same hole | over and over again? | smugglerFlynn wrote: | Just for the record, some of the examples Graeber uses | include airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do | not arrive, middle management, and corporate compliance | officers. | | You can call these jobs "bullshit" if you rely on an | oversimplified version of the world where perfect airlines, | perfect employees, and automatically enforced laws exist. | Unfortunately, that's also the exact view I often see in | tech, where people tend to devalue work of others because its | value does not seem to be self-explanatory in the first 60 | seconds they spend on analysis of the situation. | | In real life your lost baggage experience would suck without | the person behind the airline desk, you org won't be able to | scale without middle management, and your business would | suffer budget cuts due to legal fines because the only proper | way to stay legally compliant today is (surprise!) _to hire a | compliance officer_. | | Good luck inventing some imaginary perfect-world systems | where those issues do not exist and do not require extra | staff you label as "bullshit". Any kind of system which is | designed and managed by people _will have flaws_ and will | require extra jobs handling these flaws. These jobs are not | bullshit, they are valuable because they allow the system to | exist and stay efficient. | dragonwriter wrote: | > Just for the record, some of the examples Graeber uses | include airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags | do not arrive, middle management, and corporate compliance | officers. | | > You can call these jobs "bullshit" if you rely on an | oversimplified version of the world where perfect airlines, | perfect employees, and automatically enforced laws exist. | | You can also do so if, say, you are an anarchist who views | capitalism as a system of exploitation and employment in | wage labor as a modern form of slavery, which rather | invalidates the idea of, rather than assuming the existence | of, perfect airlines, perfect employees, or perfectly | enforced (corporate) law. | | I mention this because...well, you might want to read more | of Graeber's work (or even just more of _Bullshit Jobs_ ) | to understand why. | beaconstudios wrote: | David Graeber is an anarchist, his criticism of bullshit | jobs is about sustaining the centralisation of power, not | techbro idealism. | | There is no reason outside of power dynamics why airline | desk staff need to exist to comfort disgruntled passengers, | because the existence of disgruntled passengers who need to | be shooed off is a consequence of the airline industry. | stale2002 wrote: | > is a consequence of the airline industry | | So then yes you are assuming that anarchism can wave a | magic wand and make it so airlines never lose people's | bags, or that it won't ever create any extra work to | track down those bags. | beaconstudios wrote: | No, but that airlines hire essentially customer service | reps to face the brunt of people's anger while the | company changes nothing to prevent the problems is a | classic corporate strategy. They exploit customers and | neglect their responsibility and then hire some poor mug | to get shouted at. | | I don't know if that's David Graeber's specific criticism | but it is mine. | sam_lowry_ wrote: | Don't assume vested interest, like techbros do. Graeber | was an anthropologist, and the book builds on his work | more than on his views. | beaconstudios wrote: | I don't doubt that, but being an anarchist doesn't mean | you can't criticise authority from an objective position. | If anything, critiquing authority and power might lead | you to both write this book, and take an anarchist | position. | orasis wrote: | Play-to-Earn with real world earnings will never be sustainable | given the state of the art in reinforcement learning. | | The RL game playing agent essentially becomes a form of NFT | mining that no human could ever complete against. | acjohnson55 wrote: | This reminds me of the last time I went to Vegas with my two best | buds from college. I was a broke grad student, so I couldn't | really do any of the entertainment stuff in the city. I also | don't really like gambling, so I had a conundrum of how to spend | the daylight hours, before the nightlife started up. | | We ended up sitting at the nickel slots, playing just enough to | stay busy so we could flag down cocktail waitresses for comped | drinks. If you were economical enough with your slots play, not | selecting multiple lines or multipliers, it was a cheap way to | drink. | | Pretty quickly, it occurred to me that I was doing a bullshit | job. Why had I come to Vegas to feed a machine that wasn't even | entertaining me? I felt like livestock. | | Eventually, I cracked to the peer pressure of my buddies and | decided to play poker with them. I won about $700 as someone who | had played maybe twice before in my life, but that's another | story... | | Interestingly, one of the friends I was with was one of the first | people I ever met to make money selling virtual goods. As a high | school kid in 2001 or 2002 (well before the Second Life example | the author cites in 2005), he made money selling Diablo II | accounts he had beefed up in his spare time. | mvkvvk wrote: | NFT Pokemon actually sounds like a cool use of blockchain. | However the game seems to focus more on the get rich aspect than | the actual gameplay. | ridiculousthrow wrote: | api wrote: | The problem with the bullshit jobs thesis is similar to this | common saying in advertising: "I know I'm wasting 80% of my ad | spend. I just don't know which 80%." The same principle likely | applies to wages across the economy. | | I think it's rather obvious that a huge fraction of employment is | worthless. The problem is determining which fraction that is. | It's not obvious. Many jobs that look and feel like bullshit may | have some hidden function within an organization that is | essential (and may not even be the "primary function" of the job | as per the job req), and many very important looking jobs may | create little to no value. There are probably companies that | could knock out the CEO but would have a tougher time without one | of their office assistants, but where telling which office | assistant this is would be almost impossible without spending | months observing the intricate details of operations. | | The fact that markets are bad at optimizing out this obvious cost | center makes me wonder if it might be "non-computable." | | The only way we know of to discover this is to use Darwinian | methods, but this is incredibly destructive. Deep recessions take | out a lot of good but not-yet-robust businesses along with the | bad and the obsolete. The modern practice of pumping economies | along forever and not allowing deep recessions probably leads to | a ton of dead wood building up but it's also probably why we have | progress in quantum computers, electric vehicles, and space | flight among other speculative areas that would probably implode | in a deep recession (without being specifically subsidized). | Forest fires burn the dead wood but they also burn a shitload of | trees, especially immature ones who don't have layers of flame | retardant bark. Lots of old and injured animals die but so do the | babies who can't run fast yet. | MattGaiser wrote: | Also, many jobs are probably partially bullshit or mostly | bullshit, but also have one critical (often undocumented) | function wrapped into them that if eliminated, would cause | enormous damage. | | Companies often barely have any idea of what employees spend | the majority of their day doing. They are never going to catch | all the little things. | duxup wrote: | It's also very "easy" to identify a BS job, especially when you | don't know much about it. | api wrote: | Yup, and it gets worse when you consider that everyone is | usually trying to make their job look important regardless of | how important it actually is. It's likely that a deliberate | attempt to weed out BS jobs would select for good fakers, ass | kissers, and con artists and weed out a lot of heads-down | productive people. | dvt wrote: | Play-to-earn will die a painful death, but the takeaway here | (which this article dodges) is that players should own their in- | game assets. This is really where blockchain comes into play. | Diablo 3 tried to do this, but they were too early and too | greedy. If done correctly, owning your digital items is certainly | more preferable than not. | | Again, this is touched in half a paragraph, but this is the real | revolutionary aspect of NFTs. And, paradoxically, it's nothing | new: Steam store "items" are basically NFTs. Fortnite skins are | basically NFTs. It's just that without a decentralized | marketplace, you can't sell them. | blueboo wrote: | The article "dodges" the notion players should "own" their in- | game items to the same extent you underplay the implications. | consider what the article emphasises: the contradiction implied | in a live game being rebalanced in real time, affecting "owned" | assets. | | Do you really own it if the item's form, function, and even in- | game existence persists only at the whims of a centralised | authority--the game's administrators? | dvt wrote: | > Do you really own it if the item's form, function, and even | in-game existence persists only at the whims of a centralised | authority--the game's administrators? | | This happens literally _all the time_ with Magic cards, lol. | duskwuff wrote: | > This is really where blockchain comes into play. Diablo 3 | tried to do this, but they were too early and too greedy. | | Diablo 3's in-game real-money market wasn't based on a | blockchain, and was doomed to failure for game design reasons | alone. | | > And, paradoxically, it's nothing new: Steam store "items" are | basically NFTs. Fortnite skins are basically NFTs. It's just | that without a decentralized marketplace, you can't sell them. | | You can sell Steam in-game items just fine on the community | market (https://steamcommunity.com/market/). You just can't | cash that out to real money because Valve, quite sensibly, | doesn't want to be classified as a money transmitter. | soheil wrote: | There is something really wrong about doing something that you | know is complete garbage and yields no benefit to anyone else in | terms of productivity. But after one level of indirection we see | all sorts of tasks around us that people do and also benefit no | one, for example when someone destroys a pallet of watermelons or | fills up a swimming pool with orbeez that end up in garbage hours | later. The person who cultivated the watermelons or the worker | that toiled in the orbeez factory to make them saw the fruit of | their labor yield no benefit to anyone else in terms on | productivity. This type of task happens far too often. | | Only difference is, there is no masquerade in the NFT app a16z | funded. | exogeny wrote: | Games that aren't fun are work. Axie, from all accounts, looks | like work. | | On the flipside, there are tons of regulated games that are both | fun and allow users to flex their niche knowledge, like FanDuel | (sports), BigBrain (trivia), and so on. | | Just because Axie is a poorly designed game doesn't necessarily | invalidated the larger point that jobs and income are changing, | and gamification of skills is an interesting trend that is likely | here to stay. | duxup wrote: | Sorry to get a bit off track: | | So is web3 just " blockchain related things " ? | | I feel like web3 as a term usage has exploded to the point that | I'm not sure what people are talking about when they say "web3". | beckingz wrote: | web3 is whatever the newest startup is doing. | | But yes, blockchain. | foobarian wrote: | I feel like maybe people watched a little too much Silicon | Valley and similar shows and some wires got crossed to make | people think this is actually a workable mass market idea. | IMHO. | victorvosk wrote: | Web3 as a concept is decentralization primarily, though it was | invented by people championing crypto. The idea that the web | can't be censored or controlled by gov't or large corporations. | Everyone should be able to easily contribute and maintain web3. | The blockchain is the "logical" place for it to live since a | blockchain is just a distributed compute and database platform. | | There are several massive hurdles to overcome that non- | technical people gloss over or flat out don't understand. Even | if you store all the data in a distributed database, store all | static files in distributed file systems, a single user would | still need a single point of entry to access this network. It | seems like a centralized DNS like system would still be needed. | | Even if there were multiple providers of this DNS like service, | it would put the onus on the user to figure it out. This has | never historically worked well for the average user. Also, | internet access itself is still typically controlled by a few | providers given a users area. | | The reality is web3 and crypto is putting too much | responsibility on the user. Everyone uses gmail and google | because its easy and effective and no one cares its | centralized. iPhones are popular because they are easy and the | average user doesn't care that Apple controls the ecosystem. | beambot wrote: | Generally refers to decentralized technologies that somehow | benefit from blockchain-like data structures. For example, you | can compost these three technologies to build a decentralized | webserver. | | - Filecoin & AR Weave: decentralized file storage. Spend tokens | to store files, earn tokens by storing others' files. | | - ENS (Ethereum Name Service): DNS-like system for addresses. | | - Smart Contracts of various sorts (e.g. Ethereum): Similar to | perpetual AWS lambda functions. Spend tokens to publish & call | functions; earn tokens by executing functions. | | The blockchain aspect is merely a way to have verifiable | incentives without explicit trust between actors. | sokoloff wrote: | > you can compost these three technologies to build a | decentralized webserver | | I don't know if you meant "compose" or "compost", but it | works both ways. | Dowwie wrote: | Going to need to mulch more carbon-rich material and | introduce digital worms to work through the pile | Kiro wrote: | > Gamers have a word, grinding, to describe repetitive tasks | undertaken to gain some desired in-game goal, but are not fun in | themselves. | | Is this actually true? The linked article doesn't say anything | about it being fun or not. I love grinding and think it's fun in | itself. | jayd16 wrote: | I agree. It's not a gamer word either. Derived from "the daily | grind", it's just about lucrative but repetitive tasks. | Sometimes they are fun but I also agree the connotation is that | it is most likely boring unless specified otherwise. | jonwalch wrote: | Most of my gamer friends don't like grinding and usually stay | away from "grindy" games. | Kiro wrote: | Just because most people don't like it doesn't make it | intrinsically unfun. If the above definition holds true no- | one would like it except masochists. Anyway, as a counter- | point RuneScape has a great grind with a huge player base and | I know a lot of people who love grinding. | beckingz wrote: | Certain jobs sufficiently far from the obvious value creation | have a tendency to look useless. | | In many cases they are useless and could be bundled into other | jobs, but when a job is over loaded there is efficiency to | unbundling them. Factor in the communications synchronization | overhead and it's no wonder that small organizations can perform | incredible work. Large organizations have scale though. | kmeisthax wrote: | One of the interesting things about Graeber's typology is that | it includes things that you wouldn't consider to be bullshit | jobs. There's an entire category of his typology dedicated to | jobs that _destroy_ productive output; like if a business were | to hire lawyers to sue the pants off of competing businesses. | They get a competitive advantage by _increasing_ everyone else | 's compliance and legal costs. | | I believe this particular categorization could apply to game | development in the context of NFT or microtransaction driven | gameplay. The economies that these games provide are | specifically engineered to increase user spend by targeting | "whales". Someone being paid to play a game for someone else | _is_ providing a valuable service; but the game doesn 't just | exist naturally. It's designed. Building a game so that you | _need_ to pay to skip the grind _is_ a bullshit job. And if | that 's a bullshit job, then the people selling their Axies and | other game resources have transitively bullshit jobs, even if | their own job is not inherently bullshit. | mattcwilson wrote: | I think there's something to this comment and the one from | zzbzq about Graeber's "canonical bullshit job." I'm also | drawing some threads from Goedel Escher Bach. | | Perhaps the growth in the administrative sector is a new class | of job, that results from scale, coordination costs, Metcalfe's | law, and Goodhart's law. | | The job is to combat the diminishing returns on communication | decay due to scale by measuring the system as a whole or in | part and attempting to optimize that part. | | There is no "product" other than the change in metric selected. | There is no external or intrinsic value other than whatever | 2nd, 3rd, nth order effects the measurement focus has on actual | observable inputs and outputs of the system. | | The job, in a GEB sense, is just a theorem that references some | or all of the system itself, and which may not mean anything | whatsoever outside the context of the system. | beckingz wrote: | Scale increasingly becomes constrained by organizational | interfaces. At a certain point, trying to add people to an | organization actually makes it less productive unless their | contributions can be abstracted globally. | | At a certain extent, the system must become inhuman: metrics | and interface contracts are needed to prevent overhead | growth. | jimbob45 wrote: | My problem with these Play2Earn games is that it provides a dark | motivation for kids to play them. | | Previously, you'd play something like Doom or Quake because you | enjoyed it and you'd quit after an hour or two because it would | rapidly become repetitive and boring. You knew deep down that you | were wasting time on recreation and that you should probably do | the things you should be doing (e.g. the dishes, reading a book, | etc). | | Now, there's a small voice for players of these telling them that | this time is productive. They're earning money and that's a noble | goal to ourselves. Even worse are the games like League of | Legends and WoW where there are professional scenes. It's very | easy to deceive yourself into thinking you're just practicing | those games in order to one day go pro. | nightski wrote: | I'd be careful telling people what they "should" and | "shouldn't" be doing with their time based on your contrived | opinions. | frankbreetz wrote: | Telling other people what they should and shouldn't do is the | basis of society | throwaheyy wrote: | I'm fine with telling them that they shouldn't. | | We already went through all this with bs degrees that leave | people in massive debt and without sufficient income to pay | it back. | stale2002 wrote: | The point that the other person was making, is that if you | are arguing that these "games" are actually a good/effective | way of making money for kids, you are lying. | | That's the problem. The issue is they there could be people | who are tricked into believing that this is an effective way | of making money, when it is clearly not for most people. | jimbob45 wrote: | Reading books and maintaining personal cleanliness are | controversial activities now? In what clown world should | anyone ever be advised to play video games instead of doing | those things? | Pxtl wrote: | Pay hundreds of dollars to earn a few per day? This economy | sounds more like Cutco more than any modern NFT thing. | Liron wrote: | Here's patio11's thread: | https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1459682519360491523 | | I was shocked to see A16z recently investing $150M in Axie | Infinity and doubling down on their justification of play-to-earn | as a coherent concept, as if it's not fundamentally a pyramid | scheme. It's lowered my expectation of what passes for thought | leadership in our industry. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | Thought leadership smeadership. | | A16z's goal is to make money, lots of it. Shouldn't confuse its | purpose by giving it other goals. | laserlight wrote: | According to Graeber, a job is bullshit when the one who does it | thinks that the job is bullshit. By this definition, chores, | menial tasks don't count as bullshit. I don't see any quote from | players who call what they are doing bullshit. | graphpapa wrote: | I can't remember exactly but this seems like a | mischaracterisation. | | I think it was termed more like "it is a bullshit job if the | world would run just as well (or even better) if the job didn't | exist". | | Still relies on self-assessment but isn't quite what you said. | More based on some idea of "usefulness". Play to earn doesn't | seem very useful. | quadrangle wrote: | You're right mainly. Self-assessment was a filter he used, it | wasn't the definition in itself. | laserlight wrote: | It has been a few years since I read the book. But I recall | very clearly that he states that the definition is very | narrow and strict in order not to get into subjective | arguments on whether a job is _necessary_ or _shouldn 't | exist_. For instance, one could argue that the world would be | better off without telemarketing, yet the argument doesn't | make telemarketing a bullshit job. IIRC, military was another | example from the book of such a case. | laserlight wrote: | To follow up with my own comment, here is the definition | from the book: | | > Final Working Definition: a bullshit job is a form of | paid employment that is so completely pointless, | unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot | justify its existence even though, as part of the | conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to | pretend that this is not the case. | [deleted] | cblconfederate wrote: | Yeah this is a pyramid scheme, not a bullshit job | | It's as legit as someone who participates in an mlm . Its not | bullshit | bdr wrote: | Slightly OT, but for the historical record: | | > People have made money by selling virtual goods acquired in- | game at least as far back as Second Life in 2005. | | I saw it happening at least as far back as '98 in DragonRealms, a | MUD and (when it moved off of AOL) one of the first online games | with a monthly subscription. | Kiro wrote: | Yeah, I sold stuff in Ultima Online much earlier than 2005. | Lazy research in this article. | mosdl wrote: | So instead of banning gold farming in their game, they just made | it a feature and collect a %? | brazzy wrote: | The point seems to be that the game is _nothing but_ gold | farming, and the only money going into the system comes from | prospective gold farmers paying a participation fee. | armchairhacker wrote: | We should create a game like Axie infinity, but instead of making | money from useless Axies you make it from writing code. | | And then since crypto is bad we just pay people with regular | money instead. | | Also maybe have them sign a contract for working fixed hours | and/or completing a project in X time. So you know, the project | actually gets done. | 58x14 wrote: | That sounds great. I'll create a DAO to collect funds so we can | create this game. What should we call it? How about Recursion? | skybrian wrote: | The next step would be for the company to automate those jobs by | replacing the workers with npc characters who can grind for you. | | That would make the game "pay to win," which is presumably easier | to implement if you do it that way to begin with. | HWR_14 wrote: | How is this not a Ponzi scheme? | _jab wrote: | The claim seems to be that the game will attract people who | don't view the game as an income stream, but rather just as a | game. They pay the entry fee, and then may also buy assets from | other players, thus funding the play-to-earners. | | I think there's a slim chance this could be a viable business | plan, but probably not in any socially-good way. The mobile | games industry reaps a good chunk of its profits from "whales", | customers who spend crazy-seeming amounts of money on games. | Blockchain-based games may also be especially dangerous to | young gamers who get access to a parent's credit card and rack | up huge charges. This already happens in games like Fortnite, | but whereas Epic Games can be pressured into giving refunds to | parents when this happens, a blockchain offers no protection if | the rules of the game don't allow for it. | | We're probably better off if it _is_ a Ponzi scheme. | onlyrealcuzzo wrote: | I love it. | | No one plays the game because it's fun now. But in the | future, the game will be fun, and people will pay to play it. | | Right now, it's just crypto where you can spend your time AND | money to get a return instead of just your money. | | Got it. | [deleted] | renewiltord wrote: | So a Ponzi scheme works like this: | | * You take money from investors | | * You then claim that you are making money from some legitimate | business | | * You return money to earlier investors by just feeding them | the money later investors put in | | So who are the early investors here, what's the legitimate | business, and how are we taking money from later investors to | give to early investors? | | EDIT: Guys, it's not a zero-sum game. You can breed new axies, | etc. By the logic espoused by everyone in the responses, the | stock market is a ponzi scheme because later participants buy | stock from earlier participants. This may be my fault with the | defn lacking some things, but clearly the stock market isn't a | ponzi scheme, so something is wrong. | ragona wrote: | Early investors: people who "invested" hundreds of dollars to | play. Legitimate business: "we're a game studio." Later | investors: newer players who see the earlier ones making | money. | [deleted] | jeremyjh wrote: | Read TFA. Your questions are all answered in it. | foxfluff wrote: | > So who are the early investors here | | "Gameplay requires the purchase of three Axies, which | currently cost in the hundreds of US dollars each." | | > what's the legitimate business | | "By blurring the line between "player" and "worker", the game | has effectively built a Ponzi scheme with built-in | deniability. Sure, some users will be net gainers and other | users will be net losers, but who am I to say the net losers | aren't in it for the _joy of the game_? " | | So I guess the "legitimate business" is making the game | interesting for people who.. enjoy it? | | > and how are we taking money from later investors to give to | early investors | | I don't know how the in-game mechanics work but later | investors also purchase Axies and somehow that money ends up | in the hands of the former investors. Maybe not | automatically, I guess it depends on what in-game actions you | take, but given that you first have to invest before you can | play... | newaccount74 wrote: | The investors are the players hoping to make money from the | game. The players have to buy Axies to play the game. | | The "legitimate business" is playing the game to get more | Axies that you can then sell. | | The later investors then buy Axies that the early investors | earned by playing the game. | | As soon as exponential growth stops the system collapses. | meheleventyone wrote: | The economy is zero sum. The early investors are the people | that bought in early and they cash out by selling to the | later investors. The "legitimate business" claim is Axie | itself and the claim that it can both reward investors who | hold and rent Axies as well as pay people to play the game. | An idea that only works if more people keep putting money in. | To further this claim Axies developers make an awful lot of | noise about how they are going to introduce new mechanics | which will supposedly fix this. | galago wrote: | I'm not sure about this, but I think the correct term might | be "negative sum." The winners gain less than the losers | lost for the reasons you mentioned. | jeremyjh wrote: | I agree. To me its a Ponzi scheme in a gold farming disguise. | Gold farming only works when the game is fun enough that people | will buy gold to play with in it. In this game, everyone | playing it is buying in for hundreds of dollars and most likely | that is the only source of the payments that are going out. | vsareto wrote: | It probably is, but it's a Ponzi scheme with a potentially | addictive lower layer in the form of a game, which is going to | make previous ponzi scheme architects jealous. | | Me giving money to Bernie Madoff via wire transfer hoping for | gains isn't really addictive. The graphics and gameplay of a | game might be. If you happen to build a ponzi scheme into that | game, you benefit from its addictive qualities. | | Keeping a healthy population of the lower levels of a ponzi | scheme is key to keeping it going. | lordnacho wrote: | > I was skeptical that any mechanism to create bullshit jobs | could arise from a system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism | | But if we take Darwinian evolution as our analogy, there are | plenty of strategies that essentially piggy back on other | organisms. Cuckoo birds, intestinal worms, a whole coterie of | sexual behaviors. | | It's also the everyday experience of just about everyone that | they perceive certain others to not be contributing anything at | all. The surprise is that some people are willing to admit they | are one of those people as well. It's not hard to think of how | this would work, either. Convince someone to hire you, and then | don't contribute, while taking a salary. If it's hard or | expensive to detect the non-contributor, there will be NCs in the | organization. | vsareto wrote: | Capitalism has very little in common with Darwinism because of | the nature of the rules involved. Darwinism has a lot of | physical rules which you can't circumvent. Capitalism deals far | more in social or soft rules which can be circumvented and give | you an advantage if you aren't caught. And if you are caught, | the punishment might only be a percentage of the total profits. | | I'm not going to stay alive because the universe forgot to | enforce the dying part of me being mauled by a bear. | sam_lowry_ wrote: | > coterie of sexual behaviors | | Are you saying we can witness that in people too? | lordnacho wrote: | Hmm I think I meant menagerie. But yes, evolution and | especially sexual selection creates a lot of interesting | behaviors, and some of them a purely win-lose, and yes in | people as well. There's a reason cheating on your partner is | a trope of soap operas. | boppo1 wrote: | I hate when people refer to our regime of interest-rate | intervention as capitalism. The primary feature of capitalism | is price discovery, which we have intentionally given up. | | EDIT: If there are any economists out there who can point me in | the direction of a primary source that elucidates the | relationship between price discovery and interest rates in a | way that will help me understand contemporary monetary policy | as something other than political expediency, I would greatly | appreciate it. | shadowgovt wrote: | > Web Two was don't be evil. Web Three is can't be evil. You bake | it into the code that you can't be evil. | | Yikes. That's a philosophy that really misses the nature of evil. | In fact, I think we're doing ourselves up for colossal failure if | we assume we can create an unexploitable algorithm that we then | cannot modify that can be crafted to be evil-proof. | originalvichy wrote: | It seems that after a few years of relative calm in the crypto | scene (bitcoin just used to transact, mine or invest) the easier | it got to roll-your-own-crypto the more magical ways we are | finding uses for it. I had no idea this existed before. | k__ wrote: | A bit like social media points, right? | | Followers, likes, karma, all aren't directly worth anything. But | it takes work to get them. | | I know a bunch of prominent internet people who don't make much | money with this status, because it's not easy to monetize it | without compromise yourself. | badlucklottery wrote: | Charlie Booker had a similar take back in 2013: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjGh_lE6EGY | jayd16 wrote: | Selling digital goods for real money is pretty well tread. What | does web3/crypto add here? | | Game assets can't be used in another game. You need full support | from the game developer. The devs could much more easily and | cheaply sell the assets direct or support trading. | | If the game is distributed or has private servers or something | that might warrant defi trades, but wouldn't gamers just hack | their own items? If they control the server code, surely it's | possible. | | Seems like a marketing gimmick at best. What am I missing? | Calavar wrote: | It is a marketing gimmick. Like the article says, the addition | of NFTs is just a bunch of techno mumbo jumbo to build a facade | of credibility and blind people to the fact that these games | are digital Ponzi schemes. | jonwalch wrote: | I don't think you're missing a ton. Getting game developer buy | in is definitely the biggest challenge. | | I think "GameFi" is the most compelling use case. Use your in- | game items (NFTs) as collateral for a loan, or lend it to other | players to use while you retain ownership. Game devs could | build all this functionality themselves, but they get it for | free if they don't take the walled garden approach. | jayd16 wrote: | You say free but they'll need to integrate with the chain for | all transactions. Simple loot drops will need to be put on | the chain. Seems pretty onerous compared to the normal | implementation. Odds are they would need to duplicate all the | functionality in game as well. | sam_lowry_ wrote: | >Games that maximize property rights (as Axie Infinity wisely | hasn't) >are bound to be overrun with cheaters and bots, which in | turn will >just bring down the value of in-game assets anyway. | | Bitcoin comes to mind as a good example. A the beginning there | were geeks mining it on their gaming machines and buying | expensive video cards to both play games and mine. | Dowwie wrote: | The next wave of exploitation in this web3 space will involve | lending practices. Kids will pledge their digital assets as | collateral to buy other goods on margin. Their assets will lose | value in the market and the kids will receive margin calls to | restore balances or forfeit everything in the game, including | reputation. | tduberne wrote: | I did not read the book, but my understanding of "bullshit job" | is a job that is useless to the entity paying for it: you could | remove that person completely, and everything would continue to | work. This seems very different from what is at play here: the | game studio very carefully designed the game to attract those | grinders, and this is how the studio makes money. The article | clearly sees this as well, by labeling the game as a ponzi | scheme. | mherdeg wrote: | Is this different from the phenomenon described at | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming? | | Honestly it seems like a pretty great career -- you get to spend | your time indoors, probably somewhere climate controlled with | electricity and restrooms. This is way better than the workhouse. | | Whoever is buying these things as a collector is basically | donating their wealth to others, like a kind of privatized | welfare. If people are buying these things as a speculative | investment, they're participating in a private lottery. That all | seems ... fine? | Retric wrote: | AC costs money, in most of the world they would do without and | have extra heat from the PC. Also, limited range of motion plus | extremely long workweek quickly results in RSI. | beambot wrote: | This feels like a "let them eat cake" reply when compared to | agrarian labor... | Retric wrote: | How much money people make is a separate question, but | playing games is likely worse for the body than most forms | agrarian labor. Excluding accidents with heavy machinery. | beambot wrote: | As someone who worked on a midwestern farm as a child, I | will respectfully disagree with your assessment -- farm | labor is significantly more harmful to your body than | working at a computer. | Retric wrote: | I have also done both, computer work is only easier when | you have a short work day. Try working a gold farmers | 80-90 hour week and it will quickly wreck you. | newaccount74 wrote: | The article suggests that the game is currently only played by | people hoping to make money. The money paid out to old players | comes from new players. | | It's just a Ponzi scheme. | betwixthewires wrote: | I wouldn't call it donating if they're grinding for it. | | Imagine you could go to a prison and get paid to break rocks | all day for money whenever you want. OK, sure, the people doing | it are doing it because they need it. But would you call the | person running such an establishment charitable? | | It's just dirty, when you take out all the in between and just | look at the ends of the process, it's basically paying poor | people to waste their time because they need food because you | get off on it. | advisedwang wrote: | Except that we end up spending a vast amount of human effort | doing work that fundamentally doesn't need to be done. There's | no actual economic output to paying people to break rocks. | paulryanrogers wrote: | I guess it depends on the grind involved. Some streamers are | paid to play games. They confess they don't always enjoy it | or every game that people want to watch, but it seems better | than some alternatives. And a few YouTubers I follow have | admitted to less than stellar career prospects otherwise. | | Now if it's pure, unfun grind that only pushes numbers around | in an MMO then I'd agree it's basically just outsourced | cheating. And a net negative both because it compromises a | social form of entertainment and doesn't produce anything | else of tangible value. | ViViDboarder wrote: | Exactly. One could make an argument that the work some users | put in, once sold, result in value to the buyer, but that | value isn't generated by the worker. The developers created | the scheme and could deliver the value directly at no cost to | all players, poor and wealthy, but instead chose to create | meaningless work by making grinding opportunities. | scatters wrote: | I have the feeling that buyers feel they are getting more | value if the item was "generated" by grinding than if it | was created ab nihilo by the developers. Why, I have no | idea. | jbergqvist wrote: | One could also argue that if the developers did that, the | market value of the digital item in question would drop. | The value that the buyer receives is grounded in the large | time investment required to acquire the item in the game. | Even though it is completely artificial, it makes the item | more scarce and therefore more desirable to other players. | I totally agree that the fact that this power is in the | hands of the developers, though, makes these types of NFTs | far from the decentralized digital goods they are claimed | to be as pointed out by the author. | nlitened wrote: | Imagine there's a multi-billion dollar industry where some | people record sound waves made with their vocal cords, and | other people pay _real money_ monthly to have a chance to | replay those waves for entertainment only. | jayd16 wrote: | The difference is that a game company could just sell gold | directly. If music creation could be automated so easily | we'd probably do that too. | user-the-name wrote: | Do you not understand that people find it pleasurable to | listen to music, or what? | bagels wrote: | And, inexplicably, people find pleasure (or are merely | addicted to) in digital coins in a game too. | user-the-name wrote: | The two are in absolutely no way whatsoever comparable, | don't be ridiculous. | StanislavPetrov wrote: | Says who? Who are you to say that what amuses one person | has more value than what amuses a different person? | StanislavPetrov wrote: | >Except that we end up spending a vast amount of human effort | doing work that fundamentally doesn't need to be done. | | Who decides what work, "needs to be done"? I suppose you | could argue that activities that create the necessities | needed to survive (food, shelter, clothing), "need to be | done", but everything else is simply a matter of choice. | Economic output is a subjective, contrived metric. | 999900000999 wrote: | But there's an economic drain if you fire all the rock | breakers, and they end up on the streets. | | With automation coming for most jobs, we can either live in a | low to no work Utopia or a hypercapitalist hell. Given recent | trends, my money is on hypercapitalist hell. | nradov wrote: | People keep claiming that automation is coming for most | jobs, and yet we still don't have reliable, affordable | robots that can do basic tasks like cooking a decent | hamburger or stocking store shelves or snaking a plugged | toilet. This belief in major automation advances is more | like a religion than something grounded in hard science. | Sure automation will gradually increase over time but it's | going to be a long, slow grind. | foxfluff wrote: | This fits Graeber's thesis; "The book [..] makes the case | that the ruling class stands to lose from the proletariat | having extra free time on their hands" | duskwuff wrote: | It's different inasmuch as it's even stupider. | | Gold farming is, at least, based on the premise that there are | people who are willing to pay other people money to perform | repetitive actions in a video game for them. It's still kind of | dumb and it has harmful effects on in-game economies, but at | least there's some semblance of money being exchanged for goods | and services. | | "Play to earn", on the other hand, is based on the premise of | cutting out the middleman and having the game developer just | straight-up hand players money (or something money-equivalent) | for playing their game. How this is even supposed to work from | an economic standpoint is a question that I've never seen | adequately answered. | jeremyjh wrote: | The question is answered in TFA: | | > These "economic opportunities" are essentially a wealth | transfer from new players to established ones. Gameplay | requires the purchase of three Axies, which currently cost in | the hundreds of US dollars each. Players who buy in treat | this as an investment, since it's a necessary buy-in in order | to work in the game. | | It sounds more like a Ponzi scheme in a Gold farming disguise | to me. | | I'm very familiar with Gold farming from Eve Online, where | selling game currency (ISK) was permitted via exchange of | game time cards sold by the game's developer. There was | always a secondary market for game time cards sold for real | money and that was legal too. The reason it all worked is | because playing the game was really fun, but required to | grind to get ISK. People with more money than time would | prefer to buy themselves new spaceships to get blown up in | than grind for them. | | It really sounds though like Axie Infinity is not a fun game | and _no one_ treats it as one. So it is something new. | | > it's hard to find any reviews on Axie Infinity as a game | rather than as an income stream or speculative investment | jakemal wrote: | > It sounds more like a Ponzi scheme in a Gold farming | disguise to me. | | I would agree with this if the primary income stream came | directly from the increase in value of Axies as the game | attracted more users. From my understanding, the income | comes from acquiring and selling in-game currency rather | than from the Axies themselves. | | Is this a bullshit job? Maybe. Ponzi scheme? I don't think | so. | | If people are working this bullshit job, it means that this | bullshit job is better than their alternatives. I'm not | convinced the existence of these kinds of games is a net- | negative. | mminer237 wrote: | The in-game currency's purpose is to breed new Axies | though. If there wasn't increasing demand for Axies, SLP | would be worthless. | jakemal wrote: | Is that the only use of the currency or just one possible | use? | mminer237 wrote: | I have not played Axie Infinity, but to the best of my | knowledge that is the only use of Smooth Love Potions. | [deleted] | ggm wrote: | A reminder that the Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis at | one point in his pre parliamentary career did extensive work on | the economics of MMOs for valve, eve online. | TeeMassive wrote: | > David Graeber makes the case that a sizable chunk of the labour | economy is essentially people performing useless work, as a sort | of subconscious self-preservation instinct of the economic status | quo. | | Isn't it unavoidable in a world with food surplus and automation? | anm89 wrote: | I still totally fail to understand this concept. Is there | anything here beyond impotent whining? What are they proposing to | do? They subjectively call it bullshit but other people choose to | play totally free from compulsion. | | What should we do? Physically restrain them from playing? | SpicyLemonZest wrote: | We should raise awareness that it's a scam so that reputable | people don't fund and promote it. In particular, I hope they | can be stopped from raising a series C, limiting their ability | to keep the scam going once they exhaust the $150m A16z gave | them. | [deleted] | victorvosk wrote: | So many of these conversations can be broken down to the things | you find valuable might not be the thing others find valuable and | there is no right or wrong. You either get it or you don't. I | have zero desire to collect model trains, but I understand some | people do and there is probably value there in that community. | cblconfederate wrote: | Meanwhile there are legit decentralized, fun, self hosted games | whose hosts barely make any money to sustain their servers. But | because they are truly decentralized, VCs won't touch them | because they can't control them. I swear this web3 thing will die | from lack of market fit | xg15 wrote: | > _We believe in a future where work and play become one._ | | I'd like to nominate this statement as one of the most cynical | sentences of the year. | moneywoes wrote: | If they can ban players fir cheating how is the game | decentralized? | brudgers wrote: | For context, Graeber talking about Bullshit Jobs on BookTV: | | https://youtu.be/6eyaDHj5I5g | Cypher wrote: | I prefer it over the mobile microtransaction loot box culture of | the last decade. | jeremyjh wrote: | Have you played the game? Is it actually fun? | 58x14 wrote: | In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape | account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to | chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber | in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve | this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. | | At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy | websites that would buy and sell the in-game currency, gold | pieces or GP. It was something like $10 to 1M GP. I could chop | enough magic logs in about 4-6 hours to make $10. | | I had a breakthrough. What if I wrote a macro to record my cursor | and clicks during my route from the 'bank' (where you can deposit | any amount of any material) to the nearby respawning magic tree | forest? | | Weeks went by and I had passive income. Runescape eventually | introduced the Grand Exchange, a literal in-game stock market | that allowed power users like me to sell much larger quantities | of certain items instantly, across all Runescape servers | (referred to as Worlds) simultaneously. This required a | standardized pricing mechanism, like an order book, where prices | of any item would fluctuate based on buy and sell orders. | | Suddenly, I now could see a +-10% change on the value of my | digital assets, on which my passive income was built. | | I could go on; Runescape in fact taught me much about economics. | What's extraordinary is selling Runescape gold led me to Bitcoin, | and I've watched cryptocurrency for nearly a decade, seeing | trends from a MMO propagate throughout the world. It seems human | nature to innovate and stagnate, and the more immediate our | collective feedback loops, the quicker these cycles are. | M5x7wI3CmbEem10 wrote: | how did you find btc via rs? | danShumway wrote: | I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of | thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game | is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money | to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so | grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated | scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to | do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of Runescape was | bad; people were willing to pay $10 of real money to remove 4-6 | hours of gameplay from the game. | | Well frankly, that's 4-6 hours of gameplay should never have | been in the game in the first place. Players should not feel | bored playing your game for that long, certainly not bored | enough to pay money to get out of it. | | I have no doubt that learning how to exploit these systems was | really fun for people, because learning how to exploit systems | and build macros and read economic signals and avoid detection | from a company is genuinely really interesting, fascinating | work. It's just a shame that the only way Runescape could | (inadvertently) enable that experience for people was to make a | crappy grind process for an even larger portion of their | playerbase. | | I can't get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is | describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories | of this because they were playing an entirely different much | more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that | Runescape's designers had built and intended for the majority | of their playerbase. | | And I think that perspective is worth keeping when we look at | play-to-earn games. These are boring games, and some people are | doing some fun economics stuff on top of them. That doesn't | make the core gameplay any less boring though, and the fun | economics stuff only works because a lot of other players are | having a miserable time with the intended mechanics. I don't | like praising a design ethos that says that a nontrivial | portion of your players will be bored and will pay someone else | to play the game for them. | pjc50 wrote: | > is it good that a game is so boring that players are | willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? | | The difference between now and then is that people had to go | to third parties; nowadays the game developer themselves will | sell you the skip. Or a chance to gamble at a boost. | | Some of these mechanics are "compelling", in a very visceral | sense - they compel people to spend time or money, in a way | that isn't quite describable as fun. And yet creating an | obsession and a goal and providing a way to grind or spend to | that goal is popular. | themacguffinman wrote: | While I personally agree with your view that gameplay should | always be actually fun, I think that misses the magic of | games for a significant population of gamers. | | Is most of your real day-to-day life truly "fun" in a game- | like sense? Most people would say "no", X hours in a day is a | lot of time to be consistently having fun, yet a lot of | people would still describe their lives as "rewarding" and | therefore worthwhile. In fact, the harder your life is, the | more rewarding it can be. | | These games aim to be "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile. | In many ways, these types of games offer an alternative world | and life that's more rewarding than reality. The parallels | with real life are direct and intentional: "grinding" is like | real work that earns you fungible profit that you can then | trade to skip other types of work that you don't like to do. | This is a proven loop of reward in reality and it works in | games too, being consistently "fun" isn't the only way for a | game to satisfy players. I can't speak to Axie Infinity which | seems like it's not even well developed to that extent, but | for other games in the field these grinds aren't exactly a | failure of design, they're effective at constructing a life- | like reward system that doesn't solely rely on "fun". | | Of course the elephant in the room is that this "reward" is | artificial, hence the whole article about this being a | bullshit job. I personally avoid these types of games | (basically all MMOs) for this reason and I don't see how web3 | makes any of it better. But I find it hard to criticize it | objectively. I think real life is bullshit anyway, so the | cheap imitation of life that these games offer isn't always | completely worse. I can see why many people willingly buy | into it. | redisman wrote: | That's a very romantic view of the goals of game design. For | a live service game the metrics to hit are mainly retention | and monetization. Whether something is subjectively fun | doesn't really come into the picture | nohr wrote: | Runescape never intended folks to hit that high a level. Two | brothers made the game and they just kind of filled the | endgame levels never expecting anyone to reach it. Later, | they added more and more content to fill those later levels. | So it also suprised them I guess. | TameAntelope wrote: | I wouldn't think of a game like Runescape as one thing, but | more of a collection of many things. | | What you pay for is the ability to skip the parts of the game | you don't like, so you can focus on the parts of the game you | do like. Ideally everyone would like everything you make, but | _that_ feels more like a naive way of thinking than to worry | about people wanting to skip parts of your game. | | As long as "pay to skip" doesn't become "pay to win", I'd say | a game is probably fine, overall, if people _are_ enjoying | substantial portions of that game, even if they 're not | enjoying all of it. | cardosof wrote: | I believe this is what happens with any open world MMO. | There's no storyline to finish, there's no ending, and game | devs have incentives to keep players playing forever (the | more hours a player plays, the more likely he will spend more | money). | | There's only two ways to keep players playing: new content | and/or grinding mechanics. | | Grinding mechanics are way, way easier to create. You can | even reuse sprites and just change names - a lv10 tree, a | lv50 tree, a lv100 tree. Real content is hard to do, requires | imagination, development, testing. | | So most open world games will have a high grinding/content | ratio. But, as lame as it sounds, some people do like it. I'm | guilty of playing a RuneScape-like game for mobile (Ancients | Reborn). Things are slow and you need hours and hours to | raise skills but, even though it's arguably boring, I find it | relaxing. And there's pvp and talking to fellow players to | keep it fun. So, in the end, I agree with you it sucks to | have a game some players pay to not play it and others have | fun cheating it, and it's a cheap design choice, but there | are some people find it relaxing to watch a little toon chop | down a magic tree. | thombat wrote: | Now you've made me wonder: those hours I spent mesmerised | by watching the colourful display of Windows 95 defragging | the disc, would I have paid a monthly subscription for it? | What if they'd added achievements, or leveling up? | "Congratulations! Your wizard can now restructure directory | chains!" | jonathan-adly wrote: | Very similar story here.. I had a few party hats in Runescape | which made the whole NFT thing and to a lesser extent Bitcoin | so much easier to understand. | jayd16 wrote: | I still don't get it. We already sold digital assets so why | do we need NFTs or Blockchain? What does it add here? | KarlKemp wrote: | You need NFTs to have something to trade with your | cryptocurrencies. And you need cryptocurrencies to trade | NFTs. | wyre wrote: | NFTs are the equivalent of decentralized RS party hats. | jonathan-adly wrote: | Party hats served no purpose whatsoever in the game except | as a status symbol (arguably even!). Yet, was worth a lot | of money in the game (and a god sum in real life for a high | schooler) | | Humans are emotional animals, utility is a very poor | approximation of value. | smolder wrote: | A somewhat hard to erase record of which url "belongs" to | whom. That, and it gives them the appearance of having some | high tech magical properties that will lead to an explosion | in value, helping to justify asking prices to the marks. | gjs278 wrote: | wswope wrote: | Similar to your story, I learned how to program by writing | Runescape botting scripts. | | Fast forward to today, and my hobby tech project for the past | few months has been building a OSRS market-intel website for | trading on the Grand Exchange. Great toy market that eliminates | a lot of the complexity of "real-world" economics. Funny how | outsized that damn game's influence has been on the world. | rapind wrote: | In my early 20s I played an MMO called Asherons Call. I | discovered a vendor in one high level area that would sell bows | for less than a specific vendor in a low level area would buy | them, netting you a small margin per bow. | | Being a programmer I wrote a script that used two different | teleport skills (lifestone and portal recall I think?) and a | bit of movement and clicking based on pixel (Color) matching to | deal with latency, tweaking it over time, and started printing | in game money. I would come home from work to a backpack full | of D notes (unit of currency I adapted my script to convert). | | Then I would sell these D notes on eBay. Did this for a few | months. First month I made over 7k USD (I shit you not). 2nd | month about 3.5k, maybe 1k third month, so basically the market | collapsed and I moved on (to other fun exploits... once you've | been bitten by the exploit bug...). | | In retrospect I regret it. | | I'm a total hypocrite saying this, but I think this sort of | crap has ruined MMOs, and gotten far more advanced and | efficient over the years. | | The fun I had in AC before I started doing this stuff is | something I wish more people could experience, but I suspect | has been lost. | kbenson wrote: | > I think this sort of crap has ruined MMOs | | Once you start allowing (or failing to prevent) real world | transactions from altering the play of the game, which is | really hard to do while still allowing any sort of item/money | transfer between players, some subset of the player base will | view their effort as devalued. Some other part of the player | base will be delighted that while they don't necessarily have | the time to put into the game, they can still get help | progressing. There are of course the fringes of those that | devote themselves to supporting this market or exploiting the | market to support their power fantasies (which of course | include flexing that power on other players). | | There are valid uses for that market though, such as those | aforementioned players that don't have time but would like to | not be stuck for inordinate amounts of time at certain power | levels. Basically, the same reason some games have difficulty | levels. Some people want the challenge, others just want to | experience the game. | | > In retrospect I regret it. | | It's sort of like allowing yourself to use a cheat in a game | the first time through. If you take away a significant | portion of the challenge when that's one of the things you're | there for, the game can become much less fun. Other times, it | just becomes a game within a game where you're playing market | trader or whatever, which is fun while money/resources are | still scarce, but then less fun after they aren't because of | your wealth, and then you return to the main game to find | it's less fun too. | maerF0x0 wrote: | > and gotten far more advanced | | In some cases advanced is debatable . Chinese prisoners | forced to farm wow gold... | | https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/chinese- | pr... | zitterbewegung wrote: | Yes but games now actively have to fight this or they become a | Money transfer agent and then you have to comply with anti | money laundering laws. | | I think that Bitcoin and Ethereum tie a lot of things together | that make them weaker but are great technological achievements. | Eventually governments will regulate them properly and the | whole environmental impact needs at least a layer two solution. | Kevin_S wrote: | RS was the perfect game for me and dramatically changed my | life. Started when I was 12, played for YEARS slowly getting | better. | | Discovered staking and scamming at the duel arena. Invented a | new scam and made bils. Made a sizeable chunk over a couple | years (enough to pay all my bills in college and a LOT of beer | money). Got into botting with some friends, made a little money | doing that too. | | My experience with RS led me to an interest in economics, and | I'm now an accounting PhD student about to graduate. My bro got | into coding bots, and is now an SWE doing high level work. | | I love the game to pieces, and it isn't because I made money | playing. | shkkmo wrote: | > Discovered staking and scamming at the duel arena. Invented | a new scam and made bils. Made a sizeable chunk over a couple | years (enough to pay all my bills in college and a LOT of | beer money) | | Do you feel any remorse or regret about scamming people out | of thousands of dollars? I am a bit surprised that you are | bragging about this sort of unethical\illegal behavior on an | account directly tied to your real world identity. | whatshisface wrote: | RuneScape was so famous for player scams it's a miracle | anyone was willing to open the trading window at all. | redisman wrote: | I traded custom scripts on a IRC channel. People would pay me | with party hats and Santa hats which were some of the most | ridiculously priced assets in the game. | | The macro client even had a captcha queue where other miners | could earn credits by filling out the captchas other players | were getting and then use the credits to have other people fill | out their captcha. This way you could leave it running all | night as long as you did your part | originalvichy wrote: | I wonder if we'll have politicians and political philosophers | in the near future who will credit MMO games for awakening | their keen eye on societal issues. | | MMO worlds and their economies taught many how the basics of | our economy works. As a kid you got exposed to virtual versions | of negative aspects of free markets that went against the | meritocratic ethos of the game. (Especially if you were one of | the kids not permitted to use money to buy virtual currency.) | bserge wrote: | tmp_anon_22 wrote: | Nitpicks because this game was my childhood. I totally support | your sentiment though. | | > It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this | skill level | | * 97 logs (30 minutes) | | * 293 oaks (1 hr) | | * 714 willows (2.5 hr) | | * 19,246 maple (very inefficient compared to willow cutting | rate - 60 hour). If you did yews it would be many hundreds of | hours. | | About 70 hours done inefficiently. | | > What if I wrote a macro | | Macros were fine but easily detected due to the repeated | patterns. Botting in general was the wild west in this game | from about 2008 - ~2014. Interesting how botting numbers | drastically inflated player counts and engagement and the | company Jagex became a private equity darling getting bought | and sold several times, its almost like they had an incentive | to keep the practice going. | | > Economics | | Absolutely. I learned devops managing really inefficient gold | farms that got free servers from the Azure promotions when | Microsoft cloud launched. | 58x14 wrote: | Delightful, I very nearly stopped my stream of consciousness | to check the numbers, I wondered if anyone else would. It | seems many of us share nostalgia around RS. | exdsq wrote: | When I get really bored I create a new account for fun. I | normally realize it's a waste of time and stop after about | 6 hours of clicking trees or ores lol. However it's always | cool to see it's still there and normally changes quite a | bit every time I go back to it. Skills go to 120 nowadays | for example! | PascLeRasc wrote: | You should look into the Old School Runescape game mode. | Someone just made a really captivating series limiting | his character to just one region of the game: https://www | .youtube.com/watch?v=rk5XuqLrf3U&list=PLWiMc19-qa... | wswope wrote: | > Botting in general was the wild west in this game from | about 2008 - ~2014. | | There's a weird, secret history around Runescape botting that | I really hope gets told in full one day. | | Essentially, the biggest and best botting client from the | 2008-2011 era was Powerbot, later rebranded RSBot. It was | written and managed mostly by some CS student from the UK, | who went by the handle Jacmob, and used some bytecode editing | + reflection to bind game objects directly, meaning that it | allowed full interactivity with the underlying game, rather | than just a simple image recognition and mouse control | framework. | | During this era, Jagex (makers of Runescape) made some big | efforts to combat the botting. They started using obfuscators | to make reverse engineering the bytecode harder, and reworked | the handling of all String objects internally to mask them. | There were more efforts, of varying success, but without | fail, this one guy would have the botting client (and by | extension, the whole botting ecosystem) back online in a week | or so. | | Flash forward to 2011, and Jacmob starts teasing something | big for his RSBot 4.0 release: a "web-walking" API that would | allow script writers to input any two positions on the world | map, and have the botting client find them a path there, | navigating through buildings, portals, teleports along the | way. This was going to be an absolute game changer - script | writing required insane attention to detail, trial and error, | and tedium to navigate the world map in a slightly- | randomized/hard-to-detect way. And yet a week or so before | the big release... boom, another big effort comes from Jagex | to stop the injection clients: the Great Bot Nuke of 2011. | | This was different from the prior attempts by Jagex. Radio | silence from Jacmob and the RSBot team, which was weird given | the pending release. As the dust settled over the following | weeks, it comes out that Jacmob, King of the botting | community, has become Mod Jacmob, employee of Jagex, with | very little fanfare both then and ever since. RSBot 4.0 was | not to be. | | Jacmob left the company several years later, but led their | efforts through 2014 to combat botting, with great success. | There's very little information publicly available, but I | strongly suspect he was using the obvious strategies of | looking at probability distributions for click positioning on | game objects and delays between certain behaviors to spot | automation. | | Jagex's operations have grown much sloppier after his | departure, but the scene has never returned to its former | glory pre-2011. One nerdy, talented, quiet figure was | responsible for so much of the Runescape community's | development - and yet you'd never know it without having been | there yourself. Quite a world we live in. | | (@Jacmob, if happen to read this - can I interview you pls | <3?) | | Edit: this is all from memory, I'm probably bungling the | details in quite a few places. | stnikolauswagne wrote: | For those interested, here is a pretty well produced video | on the situation: | | https://youtu.be/4ELRFROUf64 | | One thing that was left out in your summary is how jacmob | was hired: Shortly after the Bot Nuke he showed up at the | annual convention of Jagex and showed off his (still | working) new Bot to the one of the heads of Jagex, who | ended up hiring him. | webinvest wrote: | The Youtuber Colonello also has a lot of good videos on | this topic | wswope wrote: | OH MY GOD. Thank you, sincerely, for the link!! | | I left out the hiring story because it sounds so | apocryphal I was sure I'd made it up or was embellishing | my memories. So much niche drama I'd completely forgotten | about. | paulluuk wrote: | This is great, thanks for sharing! | asenna wrote: | So glad you shared this story. Runescape was my childhood | as well. Would love to hear from Jacmob if he ever sees | this. | yob28 wrote: | tfang17 wrote: | Axie is built on Ethereum, meaning in-game assets (NFTs) are | technically transferrable off-platform. | | Vitalik (creator of Ethereum) attributed one of his reasons for | creating Ethereum to Blizzard taking away one of his in-game | items in World of Warcraft in 2010: | | "I was born in 1994 in Russia and moved to Canada in 2000, where | I went to school. I happily played World of Warcraft during | 2007-2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from | my beloved warlock's Siphon Life spell. I cried myself to sleep, | and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can | bring. I soon decided to quit." | kranke155 wrote: | Pretty sure Axie has its own blockchain | robryan wrote: | No gameplay balancing by design sounds terrible. Release one | bad overpowered item or spell and the game is forever ruined. | hn_throwaway_99 wrote: | The thing I really like about this article is that, at least in | my mind, it really helped me clarify what I think of as "Bullshit | Jobs". It's not so much "do you consider your job useless", but | it's more along the lines of "Is your job set up to fulfill tasks | that were, generally, _arbitrarily_ designed by some gatekeeper? | " | | A great example of this is tax departments at large companies | that look for tax avoidance strategies. On one hand, these | strategies can save companies many millions of dollars, but on | the other, they really produce nothing of value and are just a | product of the complexities of a (human designed) tax system. | Lots of regulatory compliance work also goes into this bucket. I | wouldn't say _all_ of it, because there are definitely | regulations that _do_ actually make companies safer /more | transparent/etc., but anyone who has had to fill out a page after | page after page "security questionnaire" _knows_ at least half of | it is bullshit that nobody is going to read in the first place. | Sometimes I 've been tempted to just add "Mickey Mouse" answers | just to check if anyone sees it. Writing something _that nobody | ever reads_ seems like it 's hard to believe that's anything else | _except_ bullshit. | lotsofpulp wrote: | > On one hand, these strategies can save companies many | millions of dollars, but on the other, they really produce | nothing of value and are just a product of the complexities of | a (human designed) tax system | | Businesses that spend less money on taxes can spend more money | on expenses, such as payroll and higher quality materials, or | it can allow them to sell products/services at a lower price, | providing a competitive advantage. | stickfigure wrote: | After seeing the word "Ponzi" haphazardly misapplied to so many | different things in the tech space[1], it's incredibly gratifying | to see it used here properly! | | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29698967 | paulgb wrote: | Thanks! I share your frustration :) | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26808561 | scotty79 wrote: | Such games are online games where other players are part of the | game challenge. Some players want to play those game so much that | they are willing to spend insane amounts of money on this game. | But if the only users of the game were those players the game | wouldn't be as fun for them. So the game needs to incentivise | players that that don't want to play it that much or at all. | | Most of the games manage this by offering free version of the | game to anyone willing to play. It's not as good as the version | paid consumers get but it's something. | | The game mentioned in the article went the step further, not only | does it offer some entertainment for people for free, but pays | them out of profits gained from the paying players. | | So basically gamers that earn money in that game provide | meaningful service for paying players by working as opponents for | them that enhace their entertainment. It's less bulshity job than | many real ones. | bgilroy26 wrote: | "Growth-Dependent Economy" is a nice turn of phrase | pezzana wrote: | > In a crypto economy crowded with vapourware and alpha-stage | software, Axie Infinity stands out. Not only has it amassed a | large base of users, the in-game economy has actually provided a | real-world income stream to working-class Filipinos impacted by | the pandemic. Some spend hours each day playing the game, and | then sell the in-game currency they earn to pay their real-world | bills. That's obviously a good thing for them, but it also | appears to be a near-Platonic example of Graeber's definition of | a bullshit job. | | That part about the pandemic might be the most important thing in | the article. Would something like this have taken off had | pandemic restrictions not wrecked the Philippine economy? | | A glance at the exchange rate for the Smooth Love Potion token | shows a vertical surge right as lockdowns started to be imposed, | followed by a 90% crash that started in around July of this year: | | https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/smooth-love-potion/ | | The start of the crash coincides with the start of noticeably | higher CPI in the US and well-known product demand shock. That | shock must have put higher upward pressure on demand for labor in | the developing world, making Axie less appealing. | | I can't help but think of this as a preview into a future world | in which automation and economic stagnation renders ever larger | parts of the real economy ineffective at supporting a living | wage. | | This kind of bullshit job offers a wealth transfer mechanism from | those who have it to those who don't, with financial speculation | being the conduit. Universal Basic Income is another path. | Revolution is a third option. | danShumway wrote: | Everything old is new again. You could go back and look over the | game design discourse about pay-to-win games and | microtransactions and see the same discussions about how these | systems would influence players and designers. You could go back | and look at the discussions around Facebook social games back | when they were a big thing. And all of those arguments still hold | up today. | | Play-to-earn games are the same system, just with a bit of a | pyramid scheme glued on top so that players will think they're | part of the grift. | | What players of these play-to-earn games are hoping is that the | grind in the game is so heckin awful and unpleasant that other | players will pay someone else in order to skip that. But I don't | think I'm unique in saying that I personally like my games to be | fun, and I think that maybe something is going wrong with a game | design process when a game is so much of a chore that people are | paying to skip the game. Imagine making a movie where people | didn't give you money to see it, but to _stop seeing it_ :). That | 's the play-to-earn model, making something so artificially | unpleasant and badly designed that players believe there's value | in making the game shorter and will literally hire someone else | to play it for them. | | And this is not a new thing, you can go back to the grinding | process in Runescape, to Cow Clickers on Facebook, it's the same | grift over and over just in different decorative hats and with | different little sparkly jpegs. It's always the same proposition: | do something that's been made artificially boring and hopefully | you or someone else will think there's value in paying someone | real money to skip it. | | ---- | | Which I guess live your truth if that's what you want out of | games, but I personally like games that make me excited to play | them or at least give me some kind of meaningful emotion, where I | play them because I like feeling that emotion and because the | gameplay is fun. | | Incredibly, it turns out there are designers who are somehow | through some strange magic able to design games that are so fun | that they don't even need to bribe players into playing them. | Their games are so fun that people actually (get this) pay the | designers money to be able to play them _more_ , not less. It's | the complete inverse of the play-to-earn model where actually all | of the players in the game enjoy what they're doing, and the game | isn't just a platform for the company or for a subset of players | to make a job out of extracting profit from another part of the | playerbase's boredom, because in these games nobody in the | playerbase is bored. | | If you've never tried one of these games in the "fun" genre | before, you've got to check them out, they're really something | else. | betwixthewires wrote: | I'm a bit of a fan of the whole cryptocurrency thing, the early | scope of the concept anyway, replace money, programmatic | agreement enforcement, creating financial assets that can't be | controlled, incentivizing things that need incentivizing and all | that. It's interesting stuff. | | But this whole metaverse and play to earn is obvious nonsense. | | But then, if you show me a slot machine and explain it to me in | plain English, that it pays out less than you put in, that it is | designed to addict you, that you sit there sticking quarters in | and pulling a handle all day, I'd laugh at you before I stuck a | dollar in the thing. But people do. All the time. So I'm not so | sure this nonsense is going to crash and burn, but I'm certain it | isn't worthwhile in the least. | nlh wrote: | A thought exercise you should undertake if you're thinking about | / talking about crypto/NFT/web3-related projects: If the | financial instrument that underlies the project were to stop | going up in value XX% per month, would you still be interested in | the project? | | I do this a lot because I've made the conscious (and perhaps | financially foolish) choice to stay away from everything | crypto/blockchain related (for now, at least). So I have some | perspective in being able to ask myself "Why is this | interesting?" without any emotional-financial attachment. I do | this little exercise every time I read about some new brain- | twisting scheme to move money around and capture some of the | XX%/month rise. | | Play-to-earn seems to fit the same mold: You can talk all you | want about how play-to-earn is "the new new" and how it's helping | people out of poverty and changing the dymanics of gaming and | yadda yadda yadda. But just ask yourself: If the money music | stopped tomorrow, would you play the game? | | Is there a "there" there without an underlying token that's gone | up XX% in the last N months and everyone hopes will still go up | XX% in the next N months? | | It sounds like the answer, at least when it comes to Axie | Infinity, is no. It doesn't sound fun. It doesn't sound | compelling. It DOES sound like an opportunity for people to | extract money from the crypto system that's fundamentally based | on the assumption that the crypto system will continue rising in | value forever. | larsiusprime wrote: | I did a report on this game for a client a few months back -- | the amount of daily earnings a player can expect has crashed | significantly over the past few months, and it's only gotten | worse ever since. | | https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1459191090100244483 | duskwuff wrote: | > Is there a there there without an underlying token that's | gone up XX% in the last N months and everyone hopes will still | go up XX% in the next N months? | | Alternatively, even simpler: _where is the money coming from_? | A bunch of people playing a game are a closed system, and no | value is created by playing the game. If the only reason why | players are earning money from this game is because more people | are continually buying into the game and entering that system, | that sounds more like a pyramid scheme than anything. | mgraczyk wrote: | Money doesn't have to come from anywhere. Sometimes new value | is created and the money is brand new. This is how GDP grows. | | In the case of BTC, it's pretty clear that a huge portion of | the market cap didn't come from anywhere. It's new capital. | That doesn't mean it can't go to 0 and vanish overnight. But | it does mean that play to earn games don't always need money | coming in to pay out. | mrtksn wrote: | Where the money was coming from when Facebook, Google, | Youtube, Twitter etc were really good places that were free | to use? They all were working to "make the world a better | place" and not making money as they were burning billions | each year, challenging the traditional and profitable | companies. With Amazon prices were amazing, you had unlimited | rights and not only buying but also selling was great. Bezos | was worth quite a much but his company never made any profit | up until a few years back. | | The news business was destroyed in the process, just as the | retail and once the establishment lost its ground the money | began poring in. From 90's up to late 2000's the internet was | amazing as everything was paid by people who were about to | reap their investment back a decade later. | | My point is, following the money is tricky. Maybe we are at | the verge of another change where the costs are payed by | crypto bros who will be splitting countries and starting wars | once they are done growing the landscape. | [deleted] | 542458 wrote: | > Where the money was coming from when Facebook, Google, | Youtube, Twitter etc were really good places that were free | to use? | | I don't think this is very mysterious. It's coming from | investors who are spending money in the expectation of | future profits as the business scales and reaches greater | efficiencies and increases monetization. | | In the case of this cryptocurrency there's no obvious point | where these tokens suddenly become useful. People only buy | them because somebody else will be willing to buy them | later (which, of course, relies on ever-increasing amounts | of money entering the system). With a stock you are at | least theoretically anchored to real world value, since you | can buy out a company with stocks and then liquidate the | company's assets. | mrtksn wrote: | All these coins and projects have a mission statement and | high level overview on how they think it will be useful | in the future. It's up to you to believe them but they do | have a proposal. | | The stocks are more opaque in that regard, they are | required to publish some declaration and financial | disclosure but explaining why you need to invest in that | company stock often comes down to CEO's appearing in the | press. Countless internet ventures died in the process. | gitfan86 wrote: | This is what people don't seem to understand about BitCoin. | It is cashflow negative, Money has to keep coming in to keep | the price up due to paying miners. It is totally fine if you | think BTC is better than the USD or Gold for whatever reason. | But Bitcoin is still cashflow negative. You have to keep | pumping money into it to keep up its value. Where is that | money going to come from? Is it coming from Tether? Is it | coming from people looking to make quick money? And when BTC | hits 1M/coin, then what? You still need more money coming in | to keep it above 1M. | Animats wrote: | Bitcoin has a use case for money laundering, tax evasion, | evading China's exchange controls, and drugs. That market | turned out to be larger than expected. | MetaWhirledPeas wrote: | I must admit I don't understand why it is "cashflow | negative". I'm not invested in any crypto, but I have | thought about it, and my casual thoughts have come to the | opposite conclusion. The higher the price of a | cryptocurrency, the greater the interest in mining and | investing. It seems like a positive feedback loop to me. | Why is it not? | gitfan86 wrote: | Imagine if you had the option of buying a piece of gold | or a piece of land with good irrigation and good soil. | You can plant vegetables on the land and sell those | vegetables for other people to eat. Therefor your | investment is generating profit and "cashflow". Gold on | the other hand just sits there, and you may want to keep | it in a safe at a bank and the bank will charge you a fee | for storage making it negative cashflow. | | The price of gold or land or BTC can go UP or Down, but | that depends on market demand of that asset. The nice | thing about owning the farm is that even if the value of | land goes down you can still sell your vegetables or eat | them to stay alive. | WJW wrote: | For Proof-of-Work coins, the miners need significant | amounts of electricity. Electricity is not free, so | maintaining the network costs a significant amount of | money. This money is "reimbursed" to them through mining | rewards, but since electricity companies typically can't | be paid in cryptocurrencies the miners will need to sell | (a part of) their mining reward to pay the power bill. | This means that there is always a money outflow | proportional to the hashrate, which somehow has to be | made up from money inflows from users. | | A cryptocurrency without users putting in "new" money | will slowly bleed out through electricity costs. This | will become even more "fun" in the future as all coins | will eventually be mined and the ginormous electricity | bill will need to be paid through transaction fees alone. | This is one of the main reasons Proof-of-Stake is getting | so much research btw, since it should use way less | electricity. | | (The above is true for most currencies btw, even dollars | and euros bleed out money because they have to pay mints | and central bankers. The difference with those is that | there will always be demand for (say) dollars because US | citizens MUST pay their taxes in dollars. If they don't, | a number of measures up to and including prison can be | taken against them. Bitcoin has no such backstop since | nobody ever NEEDS a bitcoin to pay off someone. | Ransomware is a rare exception) | freeone3000 wrote: | Is ransomware that rare an occurrence? I could see | ransomware being the taxes of web3. | WJW wrote: | If ransomware ever becomes big enough to rival the | cumulative tax bill of a nation state, you can bet that | combating it would get a lot more priority. Spec ops | teams raiding office buildings in foreign nations type | priority. | | Countries are very protective of their cash flows. | thelamest wrote: | Where's the value _added_ coming from though, and how far | are you from there? If crypto enables someone to dodge | taxes, sell drugs, or wire remittances with less | overhead, that's a potential value add [arguably, with | externalities]. For how many of such activities do we | need byzantine consensus, i.e. can they stay competitive | in the long term with solutions built on tradfi & SQL? | How much of these gains can be captured from sidelines | by, essentially, exchange rate traders? Positive feedback | loops without a sustainable value proposition will pop | sooner or later. | DaltonCoffee wrote: | This negates the idea that bitcoin or it's ilk could | replace USD. | | Crypto technologies are interesting to me because of their | great potential for good (defi) and bad (dystopian black | mirror gold farms, dyson sphere fueling crpto mine, etc). | jonathan-adly wrote: | > This is what people don't seem to understand about | BitCoin. It is cashflow negative, Money has to keep coming | in | | Pretty sure a sizable portion of Bitcoin holders understand | and know that. They don't hold Bitcoin as a form of bespoke | investment to be exchanged for money at some point in the | future. They hold it because they believe it is sound and | incorruptible _money_. | | And as long as _they_ (not any additional people!) continue | to believe that, it will hold value. | | It is to be seen if they are right or wrong, but they know | how cash flow works. | nightski wrote: | You aren't talking about the intrinsic value of Bitcoin. | You are talking about it's value relative to USD. These are | completely different things. | | Bitcoin has intrinsic value outside of the fiat system. It | can be used entirely independent of fiat. Whether that will | become common is another matter, but the value of Bitcoin | does not have to depend solely on it's value relative to | USD. | WJW wrote: | As long as miners can't pay the power company with their | mining rewards, bitcoin can't exist outside the fiat | system. The mining reward denominated in the currency the | miner has to pay their electricity bill in MUST be higher | than the electricity cost to mine the reward, otherwise | the miners go bankrupt. | strgcmc wrote: | Capital-intensive industrial-scale miners might go | bankrupt, but the origin of Bitcoin (starting from the | whitepaper) imagined an ecosystem powered by effectively | spare CPU cycles, where the marginal cost of electricity | wasn't a big factor. | | The beauty of the design lies in the balance of the | incentives -- if electricity is too expensive, then sure | miners will drop out, which lowers the hashrate and thus | the security of the ecosystem, but remember that if | electricity is expensive for honest miners than it will | also be expensive for attackers. And if somehow there is | an asymmetry where attackers have access to cheaper | electricity than other honest miners, well it's likely in | their economic interest to simply become miners | themselves rather than attackers... | | Bitcoin can easily exist at a minimal survival level that | is effectively outside the fiat system for all practical | intents and purposes, by leeching off free or near-zero | cost electricity (I mean, nobody cares about the | electricity bill for "folding@home"). In that kind of | mode, it may not have industrial scale and you might not | want to transact trillions of fiat-dollars worth of value | through it, but it can easily exist. | nightski wrote: | From my understanding that's not exactly how Bitcoin | mining works. It scales based on the amount of miners. So | if the situation is as you described (value relative to | USD tanks - which I find very unlikely due to | inflationary nature of fiat) people would stop mining | which would decrease the difficulty of mining causing it | to use less electricity. | | There are however miners using nearly free sources of | electricity such as flared gas wells, solar, etc... If | Tesla accepts Bitcoin/Doge for solar panels then you may | have a system independent of fiat. | | I'm just saying it's possible, not that I think it will | necessarily happen. Like I mentioned I think BTC's value | relative to USD will increase over time due to fiat's | inflationary nature (Fed is targeting 2-3% inflation). | WJW wrote: | > people would stop mining which would decrease the | difficulty of mining causing it to use less electricity. | | This is true, but then you have a bunch of costly mining | ASICs sitting idle. The bitcoin network does not pay | miners out of the goodness of its heart but because it | needs a very high hash rate to defend against double | spend attacks. Guess what those unused ASICs might be | very effective at? A prolonged fall in mining power | caused by a falling BTC price is a death sentence for | bitcoin as it would lead to massive attacks by | opportunists renting hashing power to double spend their | coins. You can already see this in many smaller coins. | | > nearly free sources of electricity such as flared gas | wells, solar, etc | | Those may be cheaper than regular power, but they are not | free. Taking solar as an example, you need to invest | capital to buy the solar panels and they have a finite | lifespan. Cost divided by lifespan gives you the running | cost in $/year. Similar things are true for flared gas | wells; you still need to capture the energy somehow and | generators are not free. | | > If Tesla accepts Bitcoin/Doge for solar panels then you | may have a system independent of fiat. | | This just moves the problem by one degree of separation. | Unless Tesla can buy solar panels for bitcoin, they will | need to sell crypto for fiat to buy their inputs. This | goes all the way down the supply chain down to the real- | world miners who dig up the ores for the solar panels and | even they will need to pay their taxes, which you cannot | do in bitcoin. | | > I think BTC's value relative to USD will increase over | time due to fiat's inflationary nature (Fed is targeting | 2-3% inflation). | | Perhaps. I suppose that this will depend on how much the | maintenance costs in electricity and miner ASIC | replacement costs as a percentage of total bitcoin market | cap per year. If these costs are higher than 2-3% per | year, bitcoin will see a net outflow of fiat as running | costs and can only rise in price if new users | continuously flow in (and of course, only ~7 billion | potential users exist). | | Also, it might be interesting to read up on why central | banks universally target a low but nonzero inflation. | There is a ton of established theory about why this is | desirable and none of it is based on "let's screw | taxpayers". Throwing that away will basically guarantee | that crypto will never be very useful to pay your bills | with. | dcolkitt wrote: | That's a really interesting scenario. But I'd imagine if | double-spends became a persistent threat, they'd just | hard fork to a slightly different hashing algorithm. That | would brick all the pre-existing ASICs. | | In the 2018 bear market, BTC lost 82% of its market value | peak-to-trough. Double spend attacks by dark ASICs didn't | become a factor then. So most likely you'd have to see | BTC fall by 95% or more before this became a threat. | anonporridge wrote: | Isn't the same true of gold? | | The gold supply is inflating at about the same rate as | bitcoin right now, but has enough incoming cash flows to | keep the priced propped up enough to maintain a $10 | trillion market cap. Obviously some of that incoming cash | flow is for actually generative industrial use cases, but | it's a minority, | https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by- | in.... The lion's share of incoming money flow is for | jewelry, long term savings/investment, and central bank | holdings, and you could argue that most of the jewelry use | case only exists because it's a good store of value, since | we can easily make jewelry that looks as pretty for much | cheaper than the real thing. | | So, since most of the cashflows into gold are just people | holding long term with the expectation that there will | still be people wanting to buy it for investment purposes | in the future, and this scheme has worked incredibly well | for 5000 years, why couldn't the same be true of bitcoin? | mertd wrote: | You need to pay the miners just to be able to transact | with Bitcoin. Gold on the contrary, you can just hand it | over to someone else. | whatshisface wrote: | Bitcoin is unlikely to have a 5,000 year lifespan because | unlike gold it can be obsoleted. | webinvest wrote: | It's likely after some number of years, most people will | have lost their Bitcoins and there won't be many left in | circulation. | nathias wrote: | There are no closed systems, and players playing a game does | create value. It's almost the only important aspect of | software's value - users. Anyone can write some garbage | software, or hire people to do it, not anyone can make things | people will want to use. | diarrhea wrote: | Probably a Ponzi, not a pyramid, scheme, no? | user-the-name wrote: | This is the most crucial question about _everything_ crypto- | related. | | Because it turns out every crypto market is a negative-sum | game. If you invest, you are _guaranteed_ to lose on average. | If you do happen to win, your gains are coming out of the | pocket of someone else who lost even more. | | The price of the token in question doesn't enter into this at | all. It can rise, fall, anything. It is still a negative-sum | game, but some people have not yet realised that they lost. | StanislavPetrov wrote: | >It is still a negative-sum game, but some people have not | yet realised that they lost. | | And some people have not lost at all. As a lifelong poker | player, the calculus is very much the same. A poker game | where rake is taken out is a negative-sum game. But that | doesn't mean that every player loses, even if they play | forever. There will be more net losses than net wins, but | these are not evenly distributed. | dcolkitt wrote: | > Because it turns out every crypto market is a negative- | sum game. | | [Citation needed] | | You can't just hand wave and assume this to be true. If the | world's major investors decide that crypto represents a | store of value, then that's a positive-sum game for crypto. | If stablecoins transacted on smart contract chains generate | demand for Ethereum to pay for the network transaction | fees, then that's a positive-sum game for crypto. If new | enterprises start raising capital through DeFi and DAOs | instead of traditional capital markets, that's a positive- | sum game. | Nbox9 wrote: | > If the financial instrument that underlies the project were | to stop going up in value XX% per month, would you still be | interested in the project? | | I use this yard stick when reviewing all of my tech | investments. Providing real value with interesting | technological innovations is why ETH outperformed every other | alt-coin, just like why Amazon and Google survived the dotcom | bust. It seems fundamentally unfair to ask this question | specifically of "crypto/NFT/web-3" when it applies equally to | all assets and projects. | vmception wrote: | > A thought exercise you should undertake if you're thinking | about / talking about crypto/NFT/web3-related projects: If the | financial instrument that underlies the project were to stop | going up in value XX% per month, would you still be interested | in the project? | | There are hundreds of ways for that answer to be yes, and this | is what is attracting so many builders to the space and why it | builds so fast. | | Many crypto enthusiasts and the skeptics that surround them are | looking at linear bets. Put in X capital, receive X+Y% of | capital back, or lose X-Y%. Although very popular approach, it | is basically the tip of the iceberg of what's going on. | | You can start with no capital and earn the crypto. You can earn | lots of it. The price of what you earn can stay flat. The price | of what you earn can decrease and you still come out ahead, | because you are earning a lot. Not different than earning | shares at a FAANG (or NAAAM these days?), except in crypto the | earning is is waaaay faster than FAANG vesting periods, and | every project has waaaay more upside without wasting decades of | your life praying for exit liquidity at a private startup. | | So the basis of your question is really project dependent. If I | found a way to earn Axie SLP, NFTs, or Axie tokens fast, I | wouldn't care about the exchange rate of any of those (unless | the dilution outpaced the point of earning) and I think you - | and many others - are missing that. | | A lot of people stand up smart contract products that accept | existing assets as deposit, and take a few basis points of the | assets upon deposit or withdrawal, and thats the whole business | model. They all do different things thats usually solving an | interest or need for the people with the other assets. | Completely passive income. I've even seen code that will accept | an asset, take the cut, and immediately exchange the cut for a | stablevalue asset, all initiated and paid for by the user that | made the deposit. | | There are many non-linear earning opportunities in this space. | Many rival what the largest tech companies offer, even if the | exchange rates of the things earned stayed flat. So the | calculus is pretty clear: smugly exploit yourself for an ad | conglomerate, or directly earn and build in this other even | faster moving economy. | baxtr wrote: | Is there any difference why anyone would invest in the stock | market? Of course people asset prices to inflate. Isn't that | the whole point of investing in anything? | z3rgl1ng wrote: | Actually, originally no; stocks paid dividends. | dcolkitt wrote: | Ethereum also pays dividends in the form of staking | rewards. | | About 7% today, and most likely going to 10%+ post-merge. | That makes the yield on Ethereum significantly higher than | the majority of stocks in developed markets. | joshgrib wrote: | Agree with this reasoning - NFTs seem like they clearly have | little to no real value and I think the people buying them | understand that and are just doing speculation (and we know how | that ends up). BTC/ETH are a little harder to gauge because | they market themselves as alternative currencies rather than a | product in-and-of-itself, but I still get the same fear that | it's entirely based on sentiment and nothing in the real world. | One article (or Elon tweet) could cause it all to drop | overnight. | | The USD might fall the same way, but it'd be slower and would | require real-world change to happen instead of people just | deciding not to use something anymore, and it's so tied up in | the global currency exchange that we'd have way bigger problems | to worry about than "my investment account lost all it's | money". I'm pretty risk averse so I get that other people would | want to play that game, I'm just not much of a gambler. | | Ethereum seems slightly better than Bitcoin for the reasons you | stated as well - ETH could drop to almost zero value and smart | contracts would still be cool, but ultimately I'm into the | tech. Feels a lot like having a lot of reddit karma to me - | it's cool to the people that think it's cool, but doesn't mean | much outside of that, unless you can convince someone that does | think it's cool to take your fake assets and trade them for | "real" assets. | ericjang wrote: | I agree with your point that the operative word here is "earn", | and not "play". | | To play the devil's advocate: many crypto developers continue | to build in the space (or have done it in the past) despite | large drawdowns in token prices (denominated in USD). Would | that constitute a sufficient signal that "there is something | real there", distinct from the question of "is the valuation | too high"? | NieDzejkob wrote: | Nah, it's just that the target audience ("investors") won't | care about the few bucks. | xg15 wrote: | I'd say no. | | This might just as well be an "emperor's new clothes" | situation, in which a significant number of people are either | deluded in thinking there is something of value or heavily | invested in making others believe so. Neither of which means | there is actually anything "real" there. | | Shared delusions are a thing. | Havoc wrote: | >would you still be interested in the project? | | Sure, my fear is that my average peer won't be though. Even if | I can see the technical merits...if all my peers are just in it | for that quick buck this is going to end badly | EGreg wrote: | Did the SEC give Axie Infinity a no-action letter? How do they | get around the securities laws thing? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-12-28 23:00 UTC)