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In Praise of Ponzis

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Re: In Praise of Ponzis

#11

Post by nathias »

vlovich123 wrote: post #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-…

The upside is that it doesn't matter if its just one guy trading with himself, what matters is liquidity and you can't fake that (except if you are the owner of centralized exchanges, but those are terrible anyway).

Re: In Praise of Ponzis

#12

Post by pjc50 »

latexr wrote: post #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? P…

> You’ll actively make online culture worse by making the signal (content worth sharing)

The implicit argument these people make is what you might call the financial-postmodernist one: all content is worthless and meaningless, except for its exchange-value.

Re: In Praise of Ponzis

#13

Post by meheleventyone »

nathias wrote: post #5
latexr wrote: post #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? 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.

I thought the idea was to have less middlemen?

Re: In Praise of Ponzis

#15

Post by recursive »

jderick wrote: post #4
latexr wrote: post #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? 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.

Assuming this is not sarcasm, this is probably the worst idea I've heard all month. If I were the king, I'd give less weight to people that vote in utterly conventional ways.

Re: In Praise of Ponzis

#16

Post by tabtab »

nathias wrote: post #8

If 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.

Those early in try to time it so they can liquidize and run before it collapses. They are hoping to earn a big profit by timing their exit.

Re: In Praise of Ponzis

#18

Post by nathias »

meheleventyone wrote: post #13
nathias wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I thought the idea was to have less middlemen?

No, its that there is no middlemen, but the function that the middlemen were doing gets done and now the profit he was making can go to the users and creators.

Re: In Praise of Ponzis

#19

Post by ethanbond »

belval wrote: post #7
vlovich123 wrote: post #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-…

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…

No, you’re right. It can be either self-trading or just unregulated gambling.

Re: In Praise of Ponzis

#20

Post by aww_dang »

We are living in interesting times. Customers openly admit they prefer speculation over content.

From my view, this is all downstream from our monetary environment. If central banks can print trillions, why shouldn't private actors value and issue monopoly money? From there it descends into different preferences, variations and subgeneres of the same theme. Choose a token or NFT you identify with. Maybe you'd prefer something a bit more self ironic? Buy a "Yacht Club" NFT and maybe your lambo dreams will come true?

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