“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

What's going on here is people doing work knowing it's actual bullshit. Just like grinding in the game. There are entire sweeps of the economy dedicated to this kind of work and it's a huge waste.

1. https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/

I don’t think this is very mysterious. It’s coming from investors who are spending money in the expectation of future profits as the business scales and reaches greater efficiencies and increases monetization.

In the case of this cryptocurrency there’s no obvious point where these tokens suddenly become useful. People only buy them because somebody else will be willing to buy them later (which, of course, relies on ever-increasing amounts of money entering the system). With a stock you are at least theoretically anchored to real world value, since you can buy out a company with stocks and then liquidate the company’s assets.

This may happen temporarily, but a sufficiently well tested and bullet proof enough game should able to combat that.

This is the same argument people made before BTC: it's just a matter of time before any decentralized currency would get hacked therefore we cannot have a decentralized currency.

We ended up sitting at the nickel slots, playing just enough to stay busy so we could flag down cocktail waitresses for comped drinks. If you were economical enough with your slots play, not selecting multiple lines or multipliers, it was a cheap way to drink.

Pretty quickly, it occurred to me that I was doing a bullshit job. Why had I come to Vegas to feed a machine that wasn't even entertaining me? I felt like livestock.

Eventually, I cracked to the peer pressure of my buddies and decided to play poker with them. I won about $700 as someone who had played maybe twice before in my life, but that's another story...

Interestingly, one of the friends I was with was one of the first people I ever met to make money selling virtual goods. As a high school kid in 2001 or 2002 (well before the Second Life example the author cites in 2005), he made money selling Diablo II accounts he had beefed up in his spare time.

The beauty of the design lies in the balance of the incentives -- if electricity is too expensive, then sure miners will drop out, which lowers the hashrate and thus the security of the ecosystem, but remember that if electricity is expensive for honest miners than it will also be expensive for attackers. And if somehow there is an asymmetry where attackers have access to cheaper electricity than other honest miners, well it's likely in their economic interest to simply become miners themselves rather than attackers...

Bitcoin can easily exist at a minimal survival level that is effectively outside the fiat system for all practical intents and purposes, by leeching off free or near-zero cost electricity (I mean, nobody cares about the electricity bill for "folding@home"). In that kind of mode, it may not have industrial scale and you might not want to transact trillions of fiat-dollars worth of value through it, but it can easily exist.