In Praise of Ponzis
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In Praise of Ponzis
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Re: In Praise of Ponzis
#2> The viewers who watched [Gangnam Style] earned nothing, even though many of them contributed and were critical to the video's ultimate success. What if there was a way to incentivize people upfront to contribute to such a success? What if there was a way to let everyone who contributed earn a piece of the rewards?
What if we stopped trying to monetise every single action from every single person every single day?
People used their free time to see a video, liked it, and shared it. Their contribution had an impact because it was free. If you change the equation so that sharing videos is remunerated, you (or your bots) will share any turd hoping to hit gold. You’ll actively make online culture worse by making the signal (content worth sharing) indistinguishable from the noise.
Re: In Praise of Ponzis
#3> This means people were willing to pay a 10,000% premium in order to buy shares in a project that no longer has a purpose. And it wasn'y just a handful of people — a whole liquid market emerged. Yesterday, nearly two weeks after the failed option, the daily trading volume in $PEOPLE tokens was over $70,000,000. Why would anyone pay to buy a token that no longer has a purpose?
The fact that we can't distinguish self-trading from legitimate interest is a problem with crypto. There's no possible way to know why and the author's theory that it's "investors believing in the story" is no more or less plausible than my theory that the liquidity is 100% fake and is just a core group of people generating volume between their own wallets.
Re: In Praise of Ponzis
#4> The viewers who watched [Gangnam Style] earned nothing, even though many of them contributed and were critical to the video's ultimate success. What if there was a way to incentivize people upfront to contribute to such a success? What if there was a way to let everyone who contributed earn a piece of the rewards? What if we stopped trying to monetise every single action from every single person every single day? P…
You could also punish people who vote for unpopular content. Similar to how captchas work, if you vote in the minority, you could be assumed to be a 'bot'. This would also require some kind of ML to account for your interests, so you would be compared against others with similar interests.
Re: In Praise of Ponzis
#5> The viewers who watched [Gangnam Style] earned nothing, even though many of them contributed and were critical to the video's ultimate success. What if there was a way to incentivize people upfront to contribute to such a success? What if there was a way to let everyone who contributed earn a piece of the rewards? What if we stopped trying to monetise every single action from every single person every single day? P…
> What if we stopped trying to monetise every single action from every single person every single day?
But it is already monetized, we just don't get the profit.
Re: In Praise of Ponzis
#6> The viewers who watched [Gangnam Style] earned nothing, even though many of them contributed and were critical to the video's ultimate success. What if there was a way to incentivize people upfront to contribute to such a success? What if there was a way to let everyone who contributed earn a piece of the rewards? What if we stopped trying to monetise every single action from every single person every single day? P…
> What if we stopped trying to monetise every single action from every single person every single day?
Commoditization of labour (and of pretty much everything else TBH) is one of the founding pillars of the capitalism that survived pretty much unchanged from its inception to the modern days, so you proposition is a non-starter. You see, if you prohibit to monetise something that curbs the free entrepreneurial spirit and so inevitably lowers the efficiency and growth of the economy as a whole: if something can be done for profit, it should be done for profit and that will only improve the resource allocation and in the end, the wealth distribution too.
Re: In Praise of Ponzis
#7> This means people were willing to pay a 10,000% premium in order to buy shares in a project that no longer has a purpose. And it wasn'y just a handful of people — a whole liquid market emerged. Yesterday, nearly two weeks after the failed option, the daily trading volume in $PEOPLE tokens was over $70,000,000. Why would anyone pay to buy a token that no longer has a purpose? The fact that we can't distinguish self-…
Does it really have to be self-trading though? Back in the poloniex days we traded a ton of shitcoin even though they were legitimately just Litecoin forks, they had no real value, no real use cases, but we traded them nonetheless because at the time some small popularity gain could make a dead coin valuable anyway and you could end up 100% in 24 hours for no reason other than some small time celebrity tweeting about it.
At the end of the day it was just speculation and it was fun.
Re: In Praise of Ponzis
#8If it is profitable it's not a ponzi, the basic feature of a ponzi is that there is no actual profit and the shareholders just take money from each other, or rather pay with liquidity if the ponzi is ongoing. But there actually is a profit to be made and it is made every day by centralized publishers, I welcome any model that would replace the current one, especially if it makes it better for the user.
Re: In Praise of Ponzis
#9> "Nonsense," you might say. "At the end of the day, you need to sell something; narratives are not enough." But aren't they? Another difference between the old world and ours is that we no longer sell things. In the past, the content was used to sell stuff: Executives from manufacturing companies got their TV channel buddies to produce Soap Operas in order to sell more soap. But today, content is not used to sell anything beyond itself. Everything is content, including your actions and behaviors. Why give them away for free?
To the extent that this is true - and quite possibly it is to some extent - it's pretty stark. This is the logic of the paperclip maximiser.
It's also a magnifier for socially destabilizing groupthink, because the important thing becomes not some grounded "fundamentals" but "what will everyone else think about this".
> But today, content is not used to sell anything beyond itself
Ah yes, the problem with Baudrillard is that he didn't monetize the simulacrum. Not ambitious enough.
Re: In Praise of Ponzis
#10> The viewers who watched [Gangnam Style] earned nothing, even though many of them contributed and were critical to the video's ultimate success. What if there was a way to incentivize people upfront to contribute to such a success? What if there was a way to let everyone who contributed earn a piece of the rewards? What if we stopped trying to monetise every single action from every single person every single day? P…
You could also punish people who vote for unpopular content. Similar to how captchas work, if you vote in the minority, you could be assumed to be a 'bot'. This would also require some kind of ML to account for your interests, so you would be compared against others with similar interests.
There is enough conformity without adding additional punishments for liking something majority dont like.