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“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

paulbutler.org

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Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#351

Post by post_from_work »

DaltonCoffee wrote: post #132
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…

This negates the idea that bitcoin or it's ilk could replace USD. Crypto technologies are interesting to me because of their great potential for good (defi) and bad (dystopian black mirror gold farms, dyson sphere fueling crpto mine, etc).

Someone building a Dyson Sphere just to power a crypto mining rig is an awesome concept for a short story or sci-fi RPG adventure (such as Traveller).

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#352

Post by themacguffinman »

emodendroket wrote: post #304
themacguffinman wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I personally agree with your view that gameplay should always be actually fun, I think that misses the magic of games for a significant population of gamers. Is most of your real day-to-day life truly "fun" in a game-like sense? Most people would say "no", X hours in a day is a lot of time to be consistently having fun, yet a lot of people would still describe their lives as "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile…

I can't stand this kind of thing, but I do enjoy a lot of games that basically punish you until you develop enough skill to beat them. This is its own form of "grinding," I suppose, but one I find much more rewarding than essentially being rewarded for the number of hours I'm willing to do monotonous tasks.

That's true for a lot of players but the problem is that like any real-life skill, many players will hit a low ceiling of mastery in certain skills for whatever reason. Regardless of whether they're unwilling or unable, these low-skill players will not feel rewarded by the game. That's a problem if you're targeting a broad audience of players (which tends to be the most profitable strategy).

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#353

Post by dustintrex »

danShumway wrote: post #170
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…

I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of…

> is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it?

If you're designing a free to play game and want to make money from it, this is not just good, it's a design goal -- as long as the developer is the one making the real world money.

Clash of Clans perfected this model over 10 years ago:

https://gyrovague.com/tag/clash-of-clans/

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#354

Post by contravariant »

gitfan86 wrote: post #272
jonathan-adly wrote: post #133

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 Pretty sure a sizable portion of Bitcoin holders understand and know that. They don't hold Bitcoin as a form of bespoke investment to be exchanged for money at some point in the future. They hold it because they believe it is sound and incorruptible money . And as long as they (not any additional people!…

Is this Peter Pan? If you just believe in the power of BTC it will never go down in value?

I don't think Bitcoin is doing particularly well as a currency, but can you name one currency that will not go down in value if people stop believing in it?

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#355

Post by dcolkitt »

seoaeu wrote: post #318
dcolkitt wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethereum also pays dividends in the form of staking rewards. About 7% today, and most likely going to 10%+ post-merge. That makes the yield on Ethereum significantly higher than the majority of stocks in developed markets.

Stocks pay out their dividends in fiat currency, not additional shares.

The analogy would work if Ethereum staking rewards were inflationary. But post-EIP 1559, there's a zero-to-negative net issuance of Ethereum on an ongoing basis. After the merge, the entirety of that (plus MEV bribery) goes to stakers/validators.

In this sense, Ethereum's yields are more like a stock buyback than a stock dividend. To transact on-chain, end-users and traders have to pay ETH to validators. To acquire ETH they have to bid on it using fiat. ETH issuance to stakers isn't inflationary, because its counter-balanced by end-user demand to transact on-chain.

Just the same, as a stock buyback doesn't involve any direct payout of fiat currency to existing shareholders. But it takes the revenue generated by the underlying company, and translates that into a deflationary bid to the stock.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#356

Post by jiggawatts »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #260

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 strate…

I just had to produce 10 separate “deliverables” for a single-server internal use web site that is already archived and read-only.

Test plans, migration plans, operations guides, etc…

Most will never be read by another human being. They exist only because they “have to”.

It’s soul-crushing “work”.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#357

Post by post_from_work »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #197

This reminds me of the last time I went to Vegas with my two best buds from college. I was a broke grad student, so I couldn't really do any of the entertainment stuff in the city. I also don't really like gambling, so I had a conundrum of how to spend the daylight hours, before the nightlife started up. We ended up sitting at the nickel slots, playing just enough to stay busy so we could flag down cocktail waitresse…

>>>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.

One of my fraternity brothers paid for a vacation in Europe and a digital camcorder from selling Diablo characters, leveled up via macros, on Ebay. This was also in ~2001-2003.

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#358

Post by crotho »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #348

Some random thoughts - bullshit jobs is a term for jobs that have not yet been automated. Jeff Bezos pays a Uber driver to turn a steering wheel until the robot can, and he pays a Amazon Project Manager to make graphs until the Perl Script can. - such jobs don't exist because the "elite" are scared of proletariat, they exist because organisations are badly designed hurriedly put together and really hard to dismantle.…

An uber driver is not a bullshit job as defined by Graeber (and most certainly NOT a term to define a job that has not yet been automated). It's a shit job, but not a bullshit job. Short of reading the book, this is a good primer: https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#359

Post by wyager »

gitfan86 wrote: post #331
wyager wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Money has to keep coming in to keep the price up due to paying miners This is incoherent. It's hard to refute this because it's not even on the right page. Demand for Bitcoin comes from demand for money (to transact, to store wealth, etc.). It sounds like you're trying to model it using some idea of how equity pricing works - is that accurate?

All assets ( BTC, Stocks, Gold ) are priced on supply and demand. If demand goes down for BTC the price will go down. It doesn't matter if the fed prints money or not BTC needs a constant infusion of new investment to keep the price up. Unlike a company with positive cash flow who could buyback shares and never get any new investors and still keep the price up.

> If demand goes down for BTC the price will go down.

Indeed. What may be missing from your model is that demand for BTC comes not just from people buying it, but from people holding it.

> BTC needs a constant infusion of new investment to keep the price up.

No it doesn't. Why do you say this? Where the market clears has essentially nothing to do with "new investment".

Re: “Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

#360

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

themacguffinman wrote: post #247
danShumway wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of…

While I personally agree with your view that gameplay should always be actually fun, I think that misses the magic of games for a significant population of gamers. Is most of your real day-to-day life truly "fun" in a game-like sense? Most people would say "no", X hours in a day is a lot of time to be consistently having fun, yet a lot of people would still describe their lives as "rewarding" and therefore worthwhile…

I used to play WOW until I realised what I was doing. I still remember the day I quit because I was supposed to show up for some massive raid and just didn’t. I have not logged in since.

The whole MMO and Freemium space is a bit grim if you ask me since you are essentially manipulating the feelings of players with no worthwhile rewards.

I think this is why I have gravitated heavily to board games. You meet up once a week or so. Play against real humans. No grind. And they can help sharpen your thinking.

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