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Civil’s tokenomics has left its journalists wondering where their salary is

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Re: Civil’s tokenomics has left its journalists wondering where their salary is

#11

Post by decentralised »

timoth3y wrote: post #7
chrisco255 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ETH itself, OMG, QTUM, BAT, Augur, etc. Although "successful" is a bit difficult to determine. Did these projects ship? Yes. Will they be successful in the long run? Who knows? That's like picking winners in startup land...there's going to be a lot of strikeouts and a few home runs.

ETH is used only within the blockchain ecosystem. Its greatest utility has been enabling ICOs. OMG and BAT are both interesting proof of concepts, but they are not really operating at any kind of scale. I don't see how they can transition to a stable and growing company. I love the idea of Augur, but they have something like 50 daily users, and that's not a sustainable business. Perhaps my original comment was a bit…

ETH is used outside of the blockchain ecosystem: https://www.coindesk.com/united-nations-sends-aid-to-10000-s....

BAT has the Brave browser as its adoption mechanism. Personally it's my favourite browser for some months now both on desktop and mobile.

OMG is from a company (OmiseGo) who operate a payment network in SE Asia. They are quite big and the adoption of OMG by their traditional service is planned as part of the Plasma project.

Re: Civil’s tokenomics has left its journalists wondering where their salary is

#13

Post by decentralised »

timoth3y wrote: post #3

A far bigger story would be an ICO-backed company that did not leave all their backers wondering where their money is. Aside from the startups selling tools and services to the crypto ecosystem itself, does anyone know of an ICO-backed project that has turned into a successful company?

The vast majority of ICOs so far have not been scams. It might seem counterintuitive because we hear about the SEC closing down on a few projects but if you look past the headline you'll see that most of the cases brought to justice so far where for complete scams that didn't even have a working token model or a business model.

I'm not saying that having an ICO will make your company a success, in fact as far as I can see the average survival rate for blockchain startups is in line with any other startup, bootstrapped or IPO'd

Re: Civil’s tokenomics has left its journalists wondering where their salary is

#14

Post by wyattpeak »

lkdjjdjjjdskjd wrote: post #10

"the maybe-we’ll-all-get-rich piece" It also implies that maybe you won't get rich. So these journalists didn't get rich. They made a gamble and lost. End of story.

There is a world of difference between gambling and being defrauded.

I have little idea what will happen here, I don't know any more about the story than presented in the article, but an awful lot of securities sellers have gone to prison despite their customers being aware in theory that their investments might fail. If there's any merit to the claims, this is certainly not the end of the story.

Re: Civil’s tokenomics has left its journalists wondering where their salary is

#15

Post by tokyodude »

The zigzag podcast was one of the things supposedly going to be funded by Civil. 90% of it was about if Civil was going to work and all the issues they were running into. It was supposed to but help fund them and also be the way people would influence the topics. I stopped listening to it before Civil failed its ICO so I have no idea what their plans are now.

https://zigzagpod.com/

Re: Civil’s tokenomics has left its journalists wondering where their salary is

#16

Post by lkdjjdjjjdskjd »

wyattpeak wrote: post #14
lkdjjdjjjdskjd wrote: post #10

"the maybe-we’ll-all-get-rich piece" It also implies that maybe you won't get rich. So these journalists didn't get rich. They made a gamble and lost. End of story.

There is a world of difference between gambling and being defrauded. I have little idea what will happen here, I don't know any more about the story than presented in the article, but an awful lot of securities sellers have gone to prison despite their customers being aware in theory that their investments might fail. If there's any merit to the claims, this is certainly not the end of the story.

The actual wording at least in the article is "maybe get rich". That doesn't sound like fraud to me. Fraud would have been to claim "you'll certainly get rich".

Journalists must have known they are gambling if they don#t receive real money for their work. If not, they were incredibly naive and perhaps have learned a valuable lesson. Namely, don't rely on empty promises.

The article mentions stock options. Stock options also don't always pan out. It rather feels as if these journalists feel entitled somehow to their riches, as they have seen their brothers in tech receive. But they forget to think about the people in tech who toiled in startups that failed and who also received nothing.

Re: Civil’s tokenomics has left its journalists wondering where their salary is

#17

Post by lobotryas »

lozenge wrote: post #12

How on earth do they find so many journalists willing to be paid on a promise? I get the psychology of chucking some money on cryptos, but actually working every day for something that isn't money less so.

Same way you find engineers who’ll take RSUs and work for your startup by accepting less pay for a possible future where those RSUs are worth anything.

Re: Civil’s tokenomics has left its journalists wondering where their salary is

#18

Post by decentralised »

spacecowboy17 wrote: post #2

I read the Civil white paper linked from the article hoping to see a description of a new business model for journalists and publishers but only found how they will use CVL tokens to vote on who is in the whitelist. Can someone please explain how/why readers would pay for the content? That's the important part, isn't it?

I think I can explain the Civil proposition but I'm not associated with the project or Consensys so I may be incorrect / plain wrong.

It starts with a Token, a Token Curated Registry and micro-payments / paywalls..

The token has a double purpose: - Allows token holders to vote on which news sources should be in the Civil registry (ie, the trustworthy news sources). - Allows token holders to pay for content using micro-payments to access articles (ie, think Brave browser and Metamask enabled paywalls)

The token curated registry is basically a whitelist of news sources/ agencies / newsrooms that are trusted by the token holder community + this organisation dubbed the "Civil Council" (veteran news and media people associated with the project) consider to be trustworthy in their reporting / fact checking etc.

The plan seems to be for people who consume media to pay for content deemed to be of high quality by accessing the traditional sites / platforms (ie, unlike FB the plan is not to make a profit by aggregating other people's work in your own platform) with a type of "paywall" that requires a payment in civ tokens.

Hope this helps, but if anyone wants to discuss the cryptoeconomics of TCRs and how this primitive can improve the signal/noise ratio in polling or voting systems... let me know :-)

Re: Civil’s tokenomics has left its journalists wondering where their salary is

#19

Post by timoth3y »

decentralised wrote: post #11
timoth3y wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ETH is used only within the blockchain ecosystem. Its greatest utility has been enabling ICOs. OMG and BAT are both interesting proof of concepts, but they are not really operating at any kind of scale. I don't see how they can transition to a stable and growing company. I love the idea of Augur, but they have something like 50 daily users, and that's not a sustainable business. Perhaps my original comment was a bit…

ETH is used outside of the blockchain ecosystem: https://www.coindesk.com/united-nations-sends-aid-to-10000-s... . BAT has the Brave browser as its adoption mechanism. Personally it's my favourite browser for some months now both on desktop and mobile. OMG is from a company (OmiseGo) who operate a payment network in SE Asia. They are quite big and the adoption of OMG by their traditional service is planned as part of…

The ETH example you mention was a PoC. It did not generate revenue and is not a business. Don't get me wrong. I think it's great, and it might be technically very impressive, but it's not generating money. It's not a business.

Omise is interesting in that they clearly have a product and users. They were one of the first ICOs to put a valuation of the tokens at over $1B. Do you have any idea what kind of transaction volume they are handling? I've never seen any numbers.

Augur is technically interesting as well, but earlier this year Coindesk noted they have a valuation that amounts to $4.8 million per active user, which seems to me to be unsustainable.

https://www.coindesk.com/where-have-all-the-augur-users-gone

Re: Civil’s tokenomics has left its journalists wondering where their salary is

#20

Post by benj111 »

lkdjjdjjjdskjd wrote: post #16
wyattpeak wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a world of difference between gambling and being defrauded. I have little idea what will happen here, I don't know any more about the story than presented in the article, but an awful lot of securities sellers have gone to prison despite their customers being aware in theory that their investments might fail. If there's any merit to the claims, this is certainly not the end of the story.

The actual wording at least in the article is "maybe get rich". That doesn't sound like fraud to me. Fraud would have been to claim "you'll certainly get rich". Journalists must have known they are gambling if they don#t receive real money for their work. If not, they were incredibly naive and perhaps have learned a valuable lesson. Namely, don't rely on empty promises. The article mentions stock options. Stock optio…

It can still be fraud, even if its 'maybe get rich'.

If they misrepresent the risks, if they issue more tokens than what they said, that's all fraud.

"you may get back less than you put in" isn't carte blanche to fleece the investors.

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