Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 700 posts

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#171

Post by WJW »

nightski wrote: post #162
gitfan86 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what people don't seem to understand about BitCoin. It is cashflow negative, Money has to keep coming in to keep the price up due to paying miners. It is totally fine if you think BTC is better than the USD or Gold for whatever reason. But Bitcoin is still cashflow negative. You have to keep pumping money into it to keep up its value. Where is that money going to come from? Is it coming from Tether? Is it com…

You aren't talking about the intrinsic value of Bitcoin. You are talking about it's value relative to USD. These are completely different things. Bitcoin has intrinsic value outside of the fiat system. It can be used entirely independent of fiat. Whether that will become common is another matter, but the value of Bitcoin does not have to depend solely on it's value relative to USD.

As long as miners can't pay the power company with their mining rewards, bitcoin can't exist outside the fiat system. The mining reward denominated in the currency the miner has to pay their electricity bill in MUST be higher than the electricity cost to mine the reward, otherwise the miners go bankrupt.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#172

Post by galago »

meheleventyone wrote: post #82
renewiltord wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a Ponzi scheme works like this: * You take money from investors * You then claim that you are making money from some legitimate business * You return money to earlier investors by just feeding them the money later investors put in So who are the early investors here, what's the legitimate business, and how are we taking money from later investors to give to early investors? EDIT: Guys, it's not a zero-sum game. Yo…

The economy is zero sum. The early investors are the people that bought in early and they cash out by selling to the later investors. The “legitimate business” claim is Axie itself and the claim that it can both reward investors who hold and rent Axies as well as pay people to play the game. An idea that only works if more people keep putting money in. To further this claim Axies developers make an awful lot of noise…

I'm not sure about this, but I think the correct term might be "negative sum." The winners gain less than the losers lost for the reasons you mentioned.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#173

Post by quadrangle »

graphpapa wrote: post #159
laserlight wrote: post #100

According to Graeber, a job is bullshit when the one who does it thinks that the job is bullshit. By this definition, chores, menial tasks don’t count as bullshit. I don’t see any quote from players who call what they are doing bullshit.

I can’t remember exactly but this seems like a mischaracterisation. I think it was termed more like “it is a bullshit job if the world would run just as well (or even better) if the job didn’t exist”. Still relies on self-assessment but isn’t quite what you said. More based on some idea of “usefulness”. Play to earn doesn’t seem very useful.

You're right mainly. Self-assessment was a filter he used, it wasn't the definition in itself.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#174

Post by soheil »

There is something really wrong about doing something that you know is complete garbage and yields no benefit to anyone else in terms of productivity. But after one level of indirection we see all sorts of tasks around us that people do and also benefit no one, for example when someone destroys a pallet of watermelons or fills up a swimming pool with orbeez that end up in garbage hours later. The person who cultivated the watermelons or the worker that toiled in the orbeez factory to make them saw the fruit of their labor yield no benefit to anyone else in terms on productivity. This type of task happens far too often.

Only difference is, there is no masquerade in the NFT app a16z funded.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#175

Post by freeone3000 »

WJW wrote: post #163
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must admit I don't understand why it is "cashflow negative". I'm not invested in any crypto, but I have thought about it, and my casual thoughts have come to the opposite conclusion. The higher the price of a cryptocurrency, the greater the interest in mining and investing. It seems like a positive feedback loop to me. Why is it not?

For Proof-of-Work coins, the miners need significant amounts of electricity. Electricity is not free, so maintaining the network costs a significant amount of money. This money is "reimbursed" to them through mining rewards, but since electricity companies typically can't be paid in cryptocurrencies the miners will need to sell (a part of) their mining reward to pay the power bill. This means that there is always a m…

Is ransomware that rare an occurrence? I could see ransomware being the taxes of web3.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#176

Post by KarlKemp »

jayd16 wrote: post #161
jonathan-adly wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very similar story here.. I had a few party hats in Runescape which made the whole NFT thing and to a lesser extent Bitcoin so much easier to understand.

I still don't get it. We already sold digital assets so why do we need NFTs or Blockchain? What does it add here?

You need NFTs to have something to trade with your cryptocurrencies. And you need cryptocurrencies to trade NFTs.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#177

Post by stale2002 »

nightski wrote: post #23
jimbob45 wrote: post #9

My problem with these Play2Earn games is that it provides a dark motivation for kids to play them. Previously, you'd play something like Doom or Quake because you enjoyed it and you'd quit after an hour or two because it would rapidly become repetitive and boring. You knew deep down that you were wasting time on recreation and that you should probably do the things you should be doing (e.g. the dishes, reading a book…

I'd be careful telling people what they "should" and "shouldn't" be doing with their time based on your contrived opinions.

The point that the other person was making, is that if you are arguing that these "games" are actually a good/effective way of making money for kids, you are lying.

That's the problem. The issue is they there could be people who are tricked into believing that this is an effective way of making money, when it is clearly not for most people.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#178

Post by Nbox9 »

nlh wrote: post #38

A thought exercise you should undertake if you're thinking about / talking about crypto/NFT/web3-related projects: If the financial instrument that underlies the project were to stop going up in value XX% per month, would you still be interested in the project? I do this a lot because I've made the conscious (and perhaps financially foolish) choice to stay away from everything crypto/blockchain related (for now, at l…

> If the financial instrument that underlies the project were to stop going up in value XX% per month, would you still be interested in the project?

I use this yard stick when reviewing all of my tech investments. Providing real value with interesting technological innovations is why ETH outperformed every other alt-coin, just like why Amazon and Google survived the dotcom bust. It seems fundamentally unfair to ask this question specifically of “crypto/NFT/web-3” when it applies equally to all assets and projects.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#179

Post by wyre »

jayd16 wrote: post #161
jonathan-adly wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very similar story here.. I had a few party hats in Runescape which made the whole NFT thing and to a lesser extent Bitcoin so much easier to understand.

I still don't get it. We already sold digital assets so why do we need NFTs or Blockchain? What does it add here?

NFTs are the equivalent of decentralized RS party hats.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#180

Post by nightski »

WJW wrote: post #171
nightski wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't talking about the intrinsic value of Bitcoin. You are talking about it's value relative to USD. These are completely different things. Bitcoin has intrinsic value outside of the fiat system. It can be used entirely independent of fiat. Whether that will become common is another matter, but the value of Bitcoin does not have to depend solely on it's value relative to USD.

As long as miners can't pay the power company with their mining rewards, bitcoin can't exist outside the fiat system. The mining reward denominated in the currency the miner has to pay their electricity bill in MUST be higher than the electricity cost to mine the reward, otherwise the miners go bankrupt.

From my understanding that's not exactly how Bitcoin mining works. It scales based on the amount of miners. So if the situation is as you described (value relative to USD tanks - which I find very unlikely due to inflationary nature of fiat) people would stop mining which would decrease the difficulty of mining causing it to use less electricity.

There are however miners using nearly free sources of electricity such as flared gas wells, solar, etc... If Tesla accepts Bitcoin/Doge for solar panels then you may have a system independent of fiat.

I'm just saying it's possible, not that I think it will necessarily happen. Like I mentioned I think BTC's value relative to USD will increase over time due to fiat's inflationary nature (Fed is targeting 2-3% inflation).

Post reply on HN