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

niemanlab.org

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

#31
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.

Yeah, but having worked in tech for almost twenty years, and being completely forthright, I could probably count on one hand the number of people that ended up on the street making any gamble like that. The older I get, the more I think we really take a lot of things in our industry for granted. I mean the kind of salary people would scoff at is still two or three times what most Americans make.

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

#32
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 ca…

Literally the opposite is true: https://cointelegraph.com/news/new-study-says-80-percent-of-...

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

#33
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure - but what indication is there that they made false promises?

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

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> ETH is used outside of the blockchain ecosystem This claim seems a stretch. How can you not require the basic elements of a "blockchain ecosystem" to be in place in order to actually exchange vouchers based on ETH for food? >> by giving [refugees] cryptocurrency-based vouchers that could be redeemed in participating markets. Can anyone explain what value was specifically added to this project by basing these vouch…

The problem is moving money into war zones in a way that is immune to theft and abuse.

The vouchers are 100% digital and unique.

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

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

Literally the opposite is true: https://cointelegraph.com/news/new-study-says-80-percent-of-...

Ok we have a problem here: The one study you mention from the "ICO advisory firm Statis Group" does not the truth make. Just because an article that matches your own bias...

There have been thousands of ICOs around the world and companies such as Statis use FUD and lies to scare customers away from competitors. I'm involved in the space as you can probably tell and I assure you this isn't even the most underhanded tactic I've seen so far.

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

#36
post #29

I'm confused. The journalists have been paid their tokens, so theres already tokens in circulation, why does it require civil to make a sale? Surely that's worse from the journalists point of view because it increases supply of the tokens. Surely it is also worse for readers. I want to support journalists by buying their tokens, not support Civil by buying theirs. But that just brings up more questions. The flow of t…

The journalists were promised massive gains in token value, repeatedly and specifically, from the article I read. They were told this would be achieved with a public sale, ICO-style, which didn't happen. The journos were relying on that to pay them.

When the public sale and hype didn't happen, they were out of pocket.

I presume yes, that you use the tokens to pay for articles, and also that there is a speculative market in the tokens, like with other cryptocurrencies - i.e. it's all a gamble.

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

#37

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 micr…

Thanks!

"""with a type of "paywall" that requires a payment in civ tokens""" In my opinion this is the most important part. Why would the Civil paywall work better than a non cryptocurrency based paywall?

Especially, if they want to accept regular payments as well?

They seem to be focusing on the wrong problem - how to govern a registry of news sources. While the real problem is how to get readers to pay for content.

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

#38

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?

FWIW, I still have close to no idea what DLT/Crypto/Decentralization/etc. even is, or rather is for. Assuming the tech actually has wings we won't really understand the how and why until certain use cases come to dominate. Even then, it can be difficult. After Western Union was founded (19th century), people would walk into WU offices to send money over the telegraph line and say things like, "Where can I see the lit…

Why send them tokens and not real money? Especially if one has to spend real money to get the tokens in the first place...

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

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> ETH is used outside of the blockchain ecosystem This claim seems a stretch. How can you not require the basic elements of a "blockchain ecosystem" to be in place in order to actually exchange vouchers based on ETH for food? >> by giving [refugees] cryptocurrency-based vouchers that could be redeemed in participating markets. Can anyone explain what value was specifically added to this project by basing these vouch…

The problem is moving money into war zones in a way that is immune to theft and abuse. The vouchers are 100% digital and unique.

I thought the vouchers were going to people living in refugee camps? Presumably along with "100% digital vouchers", you need to ship out any required infrastructure, stuff like iris scanners and computers. Are these computers and iris scanners also immune to theft and abuse? They sound amazing :)

Does the system require a working power grid?

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

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 micr…

Thanks! """with a type of "paywall" that requires a payment in civ tokens""" In my opinion this is the most important part. Why would the Civil paywall work better than a non cryptocurrency based paywall? Especially, if they want to accept regular payments as well? They seem to be focusing on the wrong problem - how to govern a registry of news sources. While the real problem is how to get readers to pay for content.

My pleasure!

I think the idea is that people feel that news sources can't be trusted in general so don't want to pay for access to a "news" article in particular. The idea of the registry is then to represent social validation by a community incentivised by their own selfish best interests (ie the token would appreciate hence they can resell for a profit...) to be accurate and judicious about their curation efforts.

The paywall tech could be something like what SpankChain is doing for cams, for instance. Technically it's an interface that allows token holders to sign a message to access a content URI by placing the tokens in a state-channel contract. If the consumer does "enter" the site, the tokens are deduced, otherwise they remain available for future use. Users should be able to pay with fiat but behind the scenes the balance would still be kept in tokens for the payment infrastructure to remain trustless.

(caveat: I'm speculating on a solution that doesn't exist yet and I'm not involved in building)

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