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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

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Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#201

Post by laserlight »

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.

It has been a few years since I read the book. But I recall very clearly that he states that the definition is very narrow and strict in order not to get into subjective arguments on whether a job is necessary or shouldn't exist. For instance, one could argue that the world would be better off without telemarketing, yet the argument doesn't make telemarketing a bullshit job. IIRC, military was another example from the book of such a case.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#202

Post by jonwalch »

jayd16 wrote: post #183

Selling digital goods for real money is pretty well tread. What does web3/crypto add here? Game assets can't be used in another game. You need full support from the game developer. The devs could much more easily and cheaply sell the assets direct or support trading. If the game is distributed or has private servers or something that might warrant defi trades, but wouldn't gamers just hack their own items? If they co…

I don't think you're missing a ton. Getting game developer buy in is definitely the biggest challenge.

I think "GameFi" is the most compelling use case. Use your in-game items (NFTs) as collateral for a loan, or lend it to other players to use while you retain ownership. Game devs could build all this functionality themselves, but they get it for free if they don't take the walled garden approach.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#203

Post by mrtksn »

542458 wrote: post #193
mrtksn wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where the money was coming from when Facebook, Google, Youtube, Twitter etc were really good places that were free to use? They all were working to "make the world a better place" and not making money as they were burning billions each year, challenging the traditional and profitable companies. With Amazon prices were amazing, you had unlimited rights and not only buying but also selling was great. Bezos was worth qu…

> Where the money was coming from when Facebook, Google, Youtube, Twitter etc were really good places that were free to use? 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 sudden…

All these coins and projects have a mission statement and high level overview on how they think it will be useful in the future. It's up to you to believe them but they do have a proposal.

The stocks are more opaque in that regard, they are required to publish some declaration and financial disclosure but explaining why you need to invest in that company stock often comes down to CEO's appearing in the press. Countless internet ventures died in the process.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#204

Post by StanislavPetrov »

user-the-name wrote: post #112
duskwuff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there a there there without an underlying token that's gone up XX% in the last N months and everyone hopes will still go up XX% in the next N months? Alternatively, even simpler: where is the money coming from ? A bunch of people playing a game are a closed system, and no value is created by playing the game. If the only reason why players are earning money from this game is because more people are continually b…

This is the most crucial question about everything crypto-related. Because it turns out every crypto market is a negative-sum game. If you invest, you are guaranteed to lose on average. If you do happen to win, your gains are coming out of the pocket of someone else who lost even more. The price of the token in question doesn't enter into this at all. It can rise, fall, anything. It is still a negative-sum game, but…

>It is still a negative-sum game, but some people have not yet realised that they lost.

And some people have not lost at all. As a lifelong poker player, the calculus is very much the same. A poker game where rake is taken out is a negative-sum game. But that doesn't mean that every player loses, even if they play forever. There will be more net losses than net wins, but these are not evenly distributed.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#205

Post by baxtr »

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…

Is there any difference why anyone would invest in the stock market? Of course people asset prices to inflate. Isn’t that the whole point of investing in anything?

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#206

Post by Dowwie »

The next wave of exploitation in this web3 space will involve lending practices. Kids will pledge their digital assets as collateral to buy other goods on margin. Their assets will lose value in the market and the kids will receive margin calls to restore balances or forfeit everything in the game, including reputation.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#207

Post by tduberne »

I did not read the book, but my understanding of "bullshit job" is a job that is useless to the entity paying for it: you could remove that person completely, and everything would continue to work. This seems very different from what is at play here: the game studio very carefully designed the game to attract those grinders, and this is how the studio makes money. The article clearly sees this as well, by labeling the game as a ponzi scheme.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#208

Post by laserlight »

laserlight wrote: post #201
graphpapa wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has been a few years since I read the book. But I recall very clearly that he states that the definition is very narrow and strict in order not to get into subjective arguments on whether a job is necessary or shouldn't exist . For instance, one could argue that the world would be better off without telemarketing, yet the argument doesn't make telemarketing a bullshit job. IIRC, military was another example from t…

To follow up with my own comment, here is the definition from the book:

> Final Working Definition: a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#210

Post by WJW »

nightski wrote: post #180
WJW wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> people would stop mining which would decrease the difficulty of mining causing it to use less electricity.

This is true, but then you have a bunch of costly mining ASICs sitting idle. The bitcoin network does not pay miners out of the goodness of its heart but because it needs a very high hash rate to defend against double spend attacks. Guess what those unused ASICs might be very effective at? A prolonged fall in mining power caused by a falling BTC price is a death sentence for bitcoin as it would lead to massive attacks by opportunists renting hashing power to double spend their coins. You can already see this in many smaller coins.

> nearly free sources of electricity such as flared gas wells, solar, etc

Those may be cheaper than regular power, but they are not free. Taking solar as an example, you need to invest capital to buy the solar panels and they have a finite lifespan. Cost divided by lifespan gives you the running cost in $/year. Similar things are true for flared gas wells; you still need to capture the energy somehow and generators are not free.

> If Tesla accepts Bitcoin/Doge for solar panels then you may have a system independent of fiat.

This just moves the problem by one degree of separation. Unless Tesla can buy solar panels for bitcoin, they will need to sell crypto for fiat to buy their inputs. This goes all the way down the supply chain down to the real-world miners who dig up the ores for the solar panels and even they will need to pay their taxes, which you cannot do in bitcoin.

> I think BTC's value relative to USD will increase over time due to fiat's inflationary nature (Fed is targeting 2-3% inflation).

Perhaps. I suppose that this will depend on how much the maintenance costs in electricity and miner ASIC replacement costs as a percentage of total bitcoin market cap per year. If these costs are higher than 2-3% per year, bitcoin will see a net outflow of fiat as running costs and can only rise in price if new users continuously flow in (and of course, only ~7 billion potential users exist).

Also, it might be interesting to read up on why central banks universally target a low but nonzero inflation. There is a ton of established theory about why this is desirable and none of it is based on "let's screw taxpayers". Throwing that away will basically guarantee that crypto will never be very useful to pay your bills with.

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