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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

#71

Post by davidgerard »

timoth3y wrote: post #19
decentralised wrote: post #11

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…

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 v…

> 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.

It's not even technically impressive. They're literally using Ethereum as the backend database so the guy running it can say "Blockchain!!" a lot, 'cos he's a hodler. I tracked down the details: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2017/11/26/the-world-fo...

The programme does great work! But nothing whatsoever about it is Good News for "blockchain", except for PR purposes.

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

#72

Post by davidgerard »

decentralised wrote: post #53
logifail wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone else just suggested that we ought not to "let perfect get in the way of improvement". The way this discussion is going I can't help but think of Ernesto Sirolli's talk[0] To put it another way, are the refugees themselves demanding "incorruptible and unfalsifiable", or are they actually just hungry? [0] https://www.ted.com/talks/ernesto_sirolli_want_to_help_someo...

The refugees just want to go back home and be with their loved ones. The demand for a unfalsifiable and incorruptible digital record comes from the NGOs and government organisations who want to make sure their funds are being used to feed the needy not the insurgents that often get into the camps. I have only a partial view of what life is like in one such camp. What I'm told and have seen to some extent is that peop…

This is false - the demand comes from the project lead being an ETH hodler who wanted to shove a "blockchain" in there somehow, even though it makes literally no technical sense: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2017/11/26/the-world-fo...

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

#73

Post by davidgerard »

kbenson wrote: post #9
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…

> my point was after a few years of hype about how the blockchain was going to revolutionize everything, and billions of dollars of investment, we should have at least a few real-world use cases. Something beyond the PoC stage. Perhaps the wild claims and shoot-for-the-stars plans prevented most the blockchain startups from capitalizing on where the easy money was (and usually is), enterprise sales. IBM sells blockch…

> IBM sells blockchain solutions. I bet they've made some money doing so (at worst because they could probably sell digital toilet paper and make a profit off enterprise contracts before they phase it out).

Conference gossip is that this is not the case, and they're experiencing internal pressure to show a production system - any production system - and then to show one that makes back some of the money they've ploughed into this.

e.g. IBM's systems for Walmart and Maersk are completely centralised, but the back-end database is Hyperledger, so they're being trumpeted as "GOOD NEWS FOR BLOCKCHAIN" - the correct perspective is "with sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine", and boy are IBM strapping Porky to a rocket.

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

#74

Post by decentralised »

sparkzilla wrote: post #70
decentralised wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the voting mechanism and game theory. Starting with the game theory: If the TCR shows a specific bias (ie: political inclination) or some form of censorship, less people will want to own the token because the "fairness" promise is broken and that should reduce the token price. If the curated items (newsrooms in this case) have low adoption (few people use tokens to purchase viewing rights) then the tokens…

I don't think the voting mechanism is the problem. The problem is the humans who vote. For example, let's say that Civil attracts 10 publications to its platform, all of which are liberal leaning (which seems to be the case). So, when a conservative newsroom wants to join, what do you think will happen? The Civil Constitution [1] has no guarantee of freedom of speech. Instead they say they are "committed to the ethic…

What I think will happen is that voters are incentivised to make good on the promise of the platform. If they reject a conservative site based on anything dubious then the whole effort will lose credibility.

Don't forget that some form of voting is necessary for the token holders to have a say in the governance of the business. That's one of the premise of blockchain native businesses, the decentralisation of equity and power.

The voting and incentive mechanisms are the cryptoeconomic properties of the project and what I can discuss intelligently. The Civil constitution is out of my scope but I trust the incentives are there to allow high quality media to enter the list regardless of political bias.

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

#75

Post by decentralised »

davidgerard wrote: post #72
decentralised wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The refugees just want to go back home and be with their loved ones. The demand for a unfalsifiable and incorruptible digital record comes from the NGOs and government organisations who want to make sure their funds are being used to feed the needy not the insurgents that often get into the camps. I have only a partial view of what life is like in one such camp. What I'm told and have seen to some extent is that peop…

This is false - the demand comes from the project lead being an ETH hodler who wanted to shove a "blockchain" in there somehow, even though it makes literally no technical sense: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2017/11/26/the-world-fo...

It's entirely possible you miss the point of it being a PoC network which is why it only has "one client" and the fact that it helped real people.

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

#76

Post by wyattpeak »

lkdjjdjjjdskjd wrote: post #63
wyattpeak wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The direct claim of Jay Cassano. "Civil repeatedly promised the tokens would be worth at least 75 cents. I have the documents to prove it." Once again, no idea if this is true. But suggesting there's no indication is disingenuous.

But unless it is written down in contract? I don't know - why would anybody take the token "because it will be worth at least 75 cents", instead of 75 cents? I find it hard to imagine how to spin such a scheme, in an age of ICOs and crypto hype, without people being aware of the risks? I still think it is like startup options: people have to learn that if they want to earn x, they should put it into the contract, and…

You're shifting the goalposts, so I'm not going to discuss it further. You asked where it was indicated, I told you.

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

#77

Post by sparkzilla »

decentralised wrote: post #74
sparkzilla wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the voting mechanism is the problem. The problem is the humans who vote. For example, let's say that Civil attracts 10 publications to its platform, all of which are liberal leaning (which seems to be the case). So, when a conservative newsroom wants to join, what do you think will happen? The Civil Constitution [1] has no guarantee of freedom of speech. Instead they say they are "committed to the ethic…

What I think will happen is that voters are incentivised to make good on the promise of the platform. If they reject a conservative site based on anything dubious then the whole effort will lose credibility. Don't forget that some form of voting is necessary for the token holders to have a say in the governance of the business. That's one of the premise of blockchain native businesses, the decentralisation of equity…

>If they reject a conservative site based on anything dubious then the whole effort will lose credibility.

That's not determined. They may well gain credibility by rejecting alternative views.

>Don't forget that some form of voting is necessary for the token holders to have a say in the governance of the business.

Bitcoin doesn't have any governance, and it seems to work fine. Adding governance layers just seems to lead to more problems.

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

#78

Post by lobotryas »

fapjacks wrote: post #31
lobotryas wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ending up on the street? That’s probably rare. Screwing up their future earning potential and savings requiring years to recover both? That’s pretty common.

Also please don’t cheapen engineering jobs. Salaries would he lower if COL was lower in the biggest tech sectors (NYC, SF, Seattle). It would also be lower if engineering work was easy, but turns out plenty of people are either not interested or unable to hack it.

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

#79

Post by celdon25 »

timoth3y wrote: post #22
celdon25 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that as if the projects are all run by greedy grubby fraudsters. While that is often the case, there are plenty out there who are working day and night on a bare bones income, to keep their projects alive through the market crash. Sometimes, that involves pivoting from a head-in-the-clouds decentralized pipe dream in favor of a viable business, even with customers from outside the industry. Yes, even they are…

> You say that as if the projects are all run by greedy grubby fraudsters I think you are reading in something that is not there. I have several friends who have run successful ICOs and they all sincerely believe in their vision and all are working very hard. However, the fact that yet another an ICO-backed token economy has not developed as pitched is not really news. My point was that it would be news if a token ec…

Fair enough, I can agree with that. Hopefully 2019 will bring such news.

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

#80

Post by PeterisP »

benj111 wrote: 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 have been paid their tokens" - have they? As far as I understand from the article, the journalists have not received any tokens, as the creation and distribution of the tokens was to be done after the initial sale, which failed, so the creation of these tokens was postponed, so they have been promised a set number of tokens that don't exist yet.
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