“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs

You seem to have entirely missed the point.

> let’s just talk about reducing your tax burden as much as possible

For the purposes of the discussion, it is irrelevant if the overall tax burden should be raised or lowered. Given any target level of tax burden, it is inefficient to meet that tax burden by requiring large amounts of regulatory compliance by tax payers. If you can make tax rules simpler and easier to comply with, then you reduce the amount of bullshit work.

> The accounting industry employs loads of people. Is that not “value"?

Some of it is, some of it isn't. Simply providing jobs alone doesn't always produce value. If so, we could always grow the economy by paying people to dig holes and fill them back in.

Idle Champions is fun but the numerical scaling on that game is whacky. It only takes like a month before you're doing 1 googol (1^100) damage and little dwarves or gnolls or rats or whatever drop a similar amount of gold. They say it's to differentiate effectively between linear and exponential scaling, but the end result is just whacky.

It's the only game I've ever played where your damage output is most effectively measured by the size of its exponent

> system as inherently Darwinian as capitalism

What we have now is not capitalism. Capitalism requires hard money as a foundation. An inflationary currency whose supply compounds exponentially over time and which people are forced to use is not hard money.

Bullshit jobs are made possible by inflationary money printing. The current crony-capitalist system is only 'Darwinian' for those who are far from the money printers. That's why bullshit office jobs exist mostly in big cities; in close proximity to the largest inflows of newly issued 'capital' into the economy. For those who are close to the inflows of new money, it's a rigged, easy game. No talent involved. It's a game of first in, best dressed. They could throw money out the window and it would come flying back in. In the periphery, the story is completely different. Look up Cantillon effect.

It's easy to devise a scheme whereby you keep borrowing money from a bank to inflate the value of some intangible asset and then use that asset's growing 'value' as collateral against which you can keep borrowing more money and keep inflating that asset's 'value' ad-infinitum. You just keep taking out new, increasingly large loans to make repayments on the old loans. Just like the government does. At any point in time, this zero-sum scheme will always look profitable; you can keep it going so long as the banks allow. Banks will allow it of course, because the collateral 'value' keeps growing. It's only when people start talking about huge numbers like 'quadrillions', 'quintillions' and 'sextillions' that people will start to think something's not right. The game is all about who can feed the banks' own money back to them with as little resistance as possible.

A major reason why Bitcoin is so valuable is that it provides banks with an endless supply of bodies to take out more and increasingly large loans and feed it back to the banks with interest. Bitcoin's growth in value consistently outpaces the growth in interest on loans used to buy that Bitcoin.

The May Spike: they migrated off of Ethereum and on to their own private blockchain, Ronin, on April 28th, which massively lowered transaction costs and increased transaction speeds. You see this pattern a lot with blockchain games, they migrate off Ethereum onto a proof-of-stake L2 or even L1 and you get a surge.

Sustainability: The entire eco-system is not sustainable at all. The game's revenue model is dependent not on the size of the user base but on the pace of user growth. The majority of their players are "scholars" and are being paid to play the game. They've effectively turned their users into liabilities rather than assets, and Axies themselves and SLP are caught in an inflationary spiral.

If you look at official communications the founders themselves have essentially written off the existing "1.0" version of the game and are promising people that the land-based gameplay and "Battles v2" are going to fix everything.

We analyzed the major issues with their future plans here: https://naavik.co/business-breakdowns/axie-infinity/#whats-n...

There's several problems with Battles v2:

- Their stated plan (as of the report) is to feed more users into the crypto version of the game, which doesn't fix the unsustainable treadmill

- Their original plan was to get Battles v2 onto iOS, Android, and Steam, but many of those platforms have cracked down on Crypto games lately and Axie could have a hard time getting approved for release in App stores

There's even more problems with land-based gameplay:

- There is a finite amount of land

- Land grants resource bonuses and the ability to deploy user-generated minigames

- If you don't have land you will have to pay a landlord to access its benefits

- Land goes for extremely high prices (and will thus have very high rents)

This is an extremely puzzling model for a User Generated Content platform. Land speculators will buy all the land and charge rent to the people who actually want to create value. There is no limitation to the number of "slots" available for publishing on Steam or app stores. Given that I have to make an experience that will only run on Axie's platform, why would I invest the time to do that just to pay rent to a virtual middle-man for the privilege of creating value for Sky Mavis?

Basically, they're headed for a land shortage / housing crisis, which is something we've also observed in the 30 year history of MMO's. Anytime you have a game with true "land like assets" you get these shortages and perverse incentives, with scalpers hoarding productive assets they can use as leverage, and it leads to a sort of recession. It has eerie parallels to the real-world housing crisis we're living through right now!

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/digital-real-estate-a...

Sky Mavis could realize this and try to change things so that there's a lot of communal land available, or just make more land on demand, or any number of other things. But they're caught in a trap. They promised all these land investors that new land wouldn't be created and that land would be this excellent investment that lets them collect value from all the people building on Axie in the future, kind of like snapping up domain names in the early days of the internet. So, Sky Mavis has to choose between opening the doors for landless peasants, or protecting the land values of landed aristocrats. Either choice will cause problems for them.

To be clear, I'm talking about the bookkeeping element of an in-progress federal investigation involving theft of corporate equity and corporate tax fraud. The target was legally disabled.