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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

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Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#251

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

anm89 wrote: post #233

I still totally fail to understand this concept. Is there anything here beyond impotent whining? What are they proposing to do? They subjectively call it bullshit but other people choose to play totally free from compulsion. What should we do? Physically restrain them from playing?

We should raise awareness that it's a scam so that reputable people don't fund and promote it. In particular, I hope they can be stopped from raising a series C, limiting their ability to keep the scam going once they exhaust the $150m A16z gave them.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#252

Post by skybrian »

The next step would be for the company to automate those jobs by replacing the workers with npc characters who can grind for you.

That would make the game "pay to win," which is presumably easier to implement if you do it that way to begin with.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#253

Post by shkkmo »

Kevin_S wrote: post #115
58x14 wrote: post #32

In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in…

RS was the perfect game for me and dramatically changed my life. Started when I was 12, played for YEARS slowly getting better. Discovered staking and scamming at the duel arena. Invented a new scam and made bils. Made a sizeable chunk over a couple years (enough to pay all my bills in college and a LOT of beer money). Got into botting with some friends, made a little money doing that too. My experience with RS led m…

> Discovered staking and scamming at the duel arena. Invented a new scam and made bils. Made a sizeable chunk over a couple years (enough to pay all my bills in college and a LOT of beer money)

Do you feel any remorse or regret about scamming people out of thousands of dollars? I am a bit surprised that you are bragging about this sort of unethical\illegal behavior on an account directly tied to your real world identity.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#254

Post by vmception »

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…

> 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?

There are hundreds of ways for that answer to be yes, and this is what is attracting so many builders to the space and why it builds so fast.

Many crypto enthusiasts and the skeptics that surround them are looking at linear bets. Put in X capital, receive X+Y% of capital back, or lose X-Y%. Although very popular approach, it is basically the tip of the iceberg of what's going on.

You can start with no capital and earn the crypto. You can earn lots of it. The price of what you earn can stay flat. The price of what you earn can decrease and you still come out ahead, because you are earning a lot. Not different than earning shares at a FAANG (or NAAAM these days?), except in crypto the earning is is waaaay faster than FAANG vesting periods, and every project has waaaay more upside without wasting decades of your life praying for exit liquidity at a private startup.

So the basis of your question is really project dependent. If I found a way to earn Axie SLP, NFTs, or Axie tokens fast, I wouldn't care about the exchange rate of any of those (unless the dilution outpaced the point of earning) and I think you - and many others - are missing that.

A lot of people stand up smart contract products that accept existing assets as deposit, and take a few basis points of the assets upon deposit or withdrawal, and thats the whole business model. They all do different things thats usually solving an interest or need for the people with the other assets. Completely passive income. I've even seen code that will accept an asset, take the cut, and immediately exchange the cut for a stablevalue asset, all initiated and paid for by the user that made the deposit.

There are many non-linear earning opportunities in this space. Many rival what the largest tech companies offer, even if the exchange rates of the things earned stayed flat. So the calculus is pretty clear: smugly exploit yourself for an ad conglomerate, or directly earn and build in this other even faster moving economy.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#255

Post by dcolkitt »

WJW wrote: post #210
nightski wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's a really interesting scenario. But I'd imagine if double-spends became a persistent threat, they'd just hard fork to a slightly different hashing algorithm. That would brick all the pre-existing ASICs.

In the 2018 bear market, BTC lost 82% of its market value peak-to-trough. Double spend attacks by dark ASICs didn't become a factor then. So most likely you'd have to see BTC fall by 95% or more before this became a threat.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#256

Post by mertd »

anonporridge wrote: post #142
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…

Isn't the same true of gold? The gold supply is inflating at about the same rate as bitcoin right now, but has enough incoming cash flows to keep the priced propped up enough to maintain a $10 trillion market cap. Obviously some of that incoming cash flow is for actually generative industrial use cases, but it's a minority, https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in... . The lion's share of incoming…

You need to pay the miners just to be able to transact with Bitcoin. Gold on the contrary, you can just hand it over to someone else.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#257

Post by wswope »

stnikolauswagne wrote: post #194
wswope wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Botting in general was the wild west in this game from about 2008 - ~2014. There’s a weird, secret history around Runescape botting that I really hope gets told in full one day. Essentially, the biggest and best botting client from the 2008-2011 era was Powerbot, later rebranded RSBot. It was written and managed mostly by some CS student from the UK, who went by the handle Jacmob, and used some bytecode editing + r…

For those interested, here is a pretty well produced video on the situation: https://youtu.be/4ELRFROUf64 One thing that was left out in your summary is how jacmob was hired: Shortly after the Bot Nuke he showed up at the annual convention of Jagex and showed off his (still working) new Bot to the one of the heads of Jagex, who ended up hiring him.

OH MY GOD. Thank you, sincerely, for the link!!

I left out the hiring story because it sounds so apocryphal I was sure I’d made it up or was embellishing my memories. So much niche drama I’d completely forgotten about.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#258

Post by webinvest »

whatshisface wrote: post #166
anonporridge wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the same true of gold? The gold supply is inflating at about the same rate as bitcoin right now, but has enough incoming cash flows to keep the priced propped up enough to maintain a $10 trillion market cap. Obviously some of that incoming cash flow is for actually generative industrial use cases, but it's a minority, https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in... . The lion's share of incoming…

Bitcoin is unlikely to have a 5,000 year lifespan because unlike gold it can be obsoleted.

It’s likely after some number of years, most people will have lost their Bitcoins and there won’t be many left in circulation.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#259

Post by dcolkitt »

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…

> Because it turns out every crypto market is a negative-sum game.

[Citation needed]

You can't just hand wave and assume this to be true. If the world's major investors decide that crypto represents a store of value, then that's a positive-sum game for crypto. If stablecoins transacted on smart contract chains generate demand for Ethereum to pay for the network transaction fees, then that's a positive-sum game for crypto. If new enterprises start raising capital through DeFi and DAOs instead of traditional capital markets, that's a positive-sum game.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#260

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

The thing I really like about this article is that, at least in my mind, it really helped me clarify what I think of as "Bullshit Jobs". It's not so much "do you consider your job useless", but it's more along the lines of "Is your job set up to fulfill tasks that were, generally, arbitrarily designed by some gatekeeper?"

A great example of this is tax departments at large companies that look for tax avoidance strategies. On one hand, these strategies can save companies many millions of dollars, but on the other, they really produce nothing of value and are just a product of the complexities of a (human designed) tax system. Lots of regulatory compliance work also goes into this bucket. I wouldn't say all of it, because there are definitely regulations that do actually make companies safer/more transparent/etc., but anyone who has had to fill out a page after page after page "security questionnaire" knows at least half of it is bullshit that nobody is going to read in the first place. Sometimes I've been tempted to just add "Mickey Mouse" answers just to check if anyone sees it. Writing something that nobody ever reads seems like it's hard to believe that's anything else except bullshit.

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