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The $100M Deal for Kickstarter to use Blockchain

fortune.com

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Re: The $100M Deal for Kickstarter to use Blockchain

#71

Post by rsynnott »

samatman wrote: post #70
rsynnott wrote: post #5

> The blockchain plan seemed impossible—and that would soon prove to be the case. As is tradition. (Did any company _ever_ launch anything borderline successful with The Almighty Blockchain(TM) that wasn't just some sort of token?)

The purpose of a blockchain is digital scarcity. If the application doesn't need digital scarcity, it doesn't need a blockchain. So yes, if you exclude the use case for a blockchain, there aren't a lot of blockchain use cases left. But what have you actually accomplished by structuring the question this way?

At one time, it was extremely fashionable to say "use a blockchain for [random thing]", and much VC funding was ploughed into it. As far as I can see, it all came to naught.

Re: The $100M Deal for Kickstarter to use Blockchain

#72

Post by mecredis »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #52

Kickstarter was and will always be beholden to their credit card processors and a painful lesson in picking one’s payment provider carefully. It’s your payment processors fraud risk department which dictates which products and services you offer not your own team. This decision is a 100% dictated by pigeonholing themselves here and losing out to gofundme. After Philips caused a stink about LifX[1], it was the threat…

You’re making a lot of assumptions about what was happening behind the scenes with a payment processor agreement you weren’t privy to. Kickstarter was always and devoutly uninterested in medical fundraising, so missing out on GoFundMe’s growth was a feature, not a bug.

Re: The $100M Deal for Kickstarter to use Blockchain

#73

Post by paulgerhardt »

mecredis wrote: post #72
paulgerhardt wrote: post #52

Kickstarter was and will always be beholden to their credit card processors and a painful lesson in picking one’s payment provider carefully. It’s your payment processors fraud risk department which dictates which products and services you offer not your own team. This decision is a 100% dictated by pigeonholing themselves here and losing out to gofundme. After Philips caused a stink about LifX[1], it was the threat…

You’re making a lot of assumptions about what was happening behind the scenes with a payment processor agreement you weren’t privy to. Kickstarter was always and devoutly uninterested in medical fundraising, so missing out on GoFundMe’s growth was a feature, not a bug.

I’m referring to the period between 2010 and 2013. I suspect we were both privy to a lot of conversations we can’t share here. I am familiar with those processor conversations. GoFundMe didn’t pivot to primarily medical fundraising until later.

But as this is all ancient history why did Kickstarter walk back their anti-tech / anti-hardware position? At the time it felt like they really wanted to double down on artistic creators.

Re: The $100M Deal for Kickstarter to use Blockchain

#74

Post by bmer »

nicwolff wrote: post #48
bmer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although, even Patreon has this issue, since there is no hard requirement to be showing your work regularly; just more of an expectation due to the design of the system. Part of this seems to be due to the reality of creative work: you need to be willing to fund failures as much as successes, or you'll end up getting more-of-the-same rather than something new. E.g. existing creators with well-established patron bases…

Most Patreons also offer per-episode payment, which zeroes out the risk that you'll pay a non-producing creator anything at all.

That also helps to zero out the probability you'll be paying someone who takes a "craftsperson's approach" to their work, versus a "production-line approach".

Neither is bad. The production-line approach is good at producing something defined by a fixed specification, reliably. Predictability in quantity produced and product quality are both important.

The craftsperson's approach is good at producing things where each thing is an incremental improvement over the last. Predictability in quantity produced is usually an anti-goal, as it is best left as another project (probably another craftperson's project). Predictability of quality produced is often sacrificed on purpose in order to get out of a local optima and better explore a larger landscape. So, while quality improves in the long term, it may not in the short term.

Patronage, historically, was aware of this. It did not demand, it trusted. It was intensely aware of the imperfection in humans, and it is questionable to what extent it considered genius as a truth, rather than merely a helpful myth (helpful only after the person was long dead, and not actually in the production of new creative works, but rather in keeping up the market value of previously created works, in order to help fund new ones).

Patreon, on the other hand, lacks such nuance.

Re: The $100M Deal for Kickstarter to use Blockchain

#75

Post by hanniabu »

rsynnott wrote: post #57
hanniabu wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farcaster

Does anyone... use this? Is there even a clear description of what it _is_ anywhere? It looks like it's probably an alternative to ActivityPub or that Bluesky thing, but the descriptions all seem very... hype-y. In any event, I'm not sure that I'd call this successful, precisely. Might be in the future, who knows, can't on a cursory look find anything concrete about usership. But isn't now. (Also, personally I would…

I know many that migrate to this from twitter

It's a protocol. There's frontends like warpcast that emulate twitter and flink which emulates reddit

Re: The $100M Deal for Kickstarter to use Blockchain

#76

Post by nicholasbraker »

rsynnott wrote: post #5

> The blockchain plan seemed impossible—and that would soon prove to be the case. As is tradition. (Did any company _ever_ launch anything borderline successful with The Almighty Blockchain(TM) that wasn't just some sort of token?)

Quant does. But next to that, anything blockchain is rife with scams and solutions searching for a problem..

Re: The $100M Deal for Kickstarter to use Blockchain

#77

Post by lelanthran »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #52

Kickstarter was and will always be beholden to their credit card processors and a painful lesson in picking one’s payment provider carefully. It’s your payment processors fraud risk department which dictates which products and services you offer not your own team. This decision is a 100% dictated by pigeonholing themselves here and losing out to gofundme. After Philips caused a stink about LifX[1], it was the threat…

> They would later walk back that decision but not before we launched our own open source competitor that went on to do $100m,

What does that mean? $100m revenue in a financial year? $100m since inception?

TBH, at those numbers you are self-sufficient and there are no upsides to taking VC money, only downsides.

Re: The $100M Deal for Kickstarter to use Blockchain

#78

Post by antifa »

lostmsu wrote: post #58
the__alchemist wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are historically many scams associated with both, so it's a fair analogy. My recollection was that Kickstarter was a mix, and Indiegogo was 90%+ scams.

There's a different level of association though. It is nearly impossible to see if Kickstarter project will flop or not and if you will see your money back ever. In crypto you can at least make reasonable judgement based on technology merits. All good projects are 100% transparent and developed in the open.

Kickstarter had a reputation for fun creative projects that people wanted to exist. And many failed due to poor management, planning, etc..

"Crypto" has a reputation for recreating things nobody wanted but "on the blockchain", projects that costs hundreds or thousands of dollars for almost no value proposition beyond "it's a great investment! Trust me!" The few that weren't rugpulls were still asset flips or ponzi schemes or otherwise still negative-value-added over their non-blochain competitors.

Re: The $100M Deal for Kickstarter to use Blockchain

#79

Post by paulgerhardt »

lelanthran wrote: post #77
paulgerhardt wrote: post #52

Kickstarter was and will always be beholden to their credit card processors and a painful lesson in picking one’s payment provider carefully. It’s your payment processors fraud risk department which dictates which products and services you offer not your own team. This decision is a 100% dictated by pigeonholing themselves here and losing out to gofundme. After Philips caused a stink about LifX[1], it was the threat…

> They would later walk back that decision but not before we launched our own open source competitor that went on to do $100m, What does that mean? $100m revenue in a financial year? $100m since inception? TBH, at those numbers you are self-sufficient and there are no upsides to taking VC money, only downsides.

It was an open source crowdfunding platform that raised $100m collectively for projects that used it.

Ie Lockitron raised $2.2m in presales with it. Tile raised $2.6m in presales with it. And so on.

Unlike Kickstarter it did not take a 8-10% fee of funds raised. It was not a primary business for us. Just something we casually maintained because we coincidentally had a bunch of payment processors in our YC batch that year so spinning it up was less than a weekend’s worth of work given our connections.

I am pretty indifferent now but at the time I was infuriated that Kickstarter drew an arbitrary line between a creative and a founder. It simultaneously marketed itself as the democratic fundraising platform for artists and was perfectly opaque (and self-contradictory) on which projects they would gatekeep from their platform once they started getting heat from places like NPR.

At the time I took a hardline approach that the way to do good was to give people access to tools not restrict them from a platform. Enough time has passed that I see that’s a bit reductive.

Re: The $100M Deal for Kickstarter to use Blockchain

#80

Post by k33n »

allannienhuis wrote: post #43
k33n wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a generator of wealth, it has been very reliable.

I think it's worse than that - as far as I can see it's only moves wealth from one pocket to another. Usually many pockets to few pockets. I've not heard of how it's increasing labor efficiency or enabling completely new capabilities for anyone, with maybe a few minor exceptions. So its really a pretty successful parasite.

Bitcoin has produced nothing but returns for long-term holders.
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