Even with the critical slant of applies to the gameplay of these “games” this article still ultimately neglects to describe the biggest problem with the “play to earn” aspect, which is that it fundamentally doesn’t work.
The article describes the notional highs and lows of these tokens, but overlooks the fact that trading volume is far more important than a hypothetical trade price.
If one person buys one of these utterly useless tokens for 10 cents, that sets the price at 10 cents. But if I then try to cash out a thousand dollars of that same token, I’m probably not going to get a thousand dollars, because that requires there to be someone on the other side of great trade who thinks its actually worth putting a thousand dollars into this otherwise useless token.
To make matters worse, crypto prices are generally set by crypto trades. What I mean by that is that the person who bought one token for ten cents, actually didn’t. They traded fifty BLOB tokens, notionally worth ten cents. What can you do with BLOB tokens? Nothing, they’re worthless, they were made for a game that doesn’t even exist anymore. The guy who owned those fifty BLOB tokens got them by trading a bunch of POOP tokens for them. Those are from a DAO that has since collapsed, they’re worthless too. He bought those POOP tokens with a fraction of a DOGE coin, which he got from selling an airdropped Bad Monkey NFT that he was lucky enough to get one time (and even luckier to sell before the rug pull).
See the problem? It’s all people trading Monopoly dollars for Game of Life dollars and arguing over the exchange rate. At no point did a real US dollar enter this process. So when you try to sell your BLOB tokens for real US dollars, no one is buying. The notion that people in developing nations will make a lining playing these games is a complete fantasy.
The big problem is that it trivially easy to make new tokens, and give them the appearance of a market with fake liquidity. I know people think Smart Contracts are a real innovation, but 99.999999% of the time they are just used to make more crappy tokens.
Crypto advocates say it’s security comes from the network effect of all the nodes working on extending the blockchain, but that security is of little value if it enables scams on higher layers.
Yup. Smart contracts aren’t even contracts, and they certainly aren’t smart.
An algorithm is, by its nature, dumb. It does the thing it’s programmed to do, without any hesitation. It doesn’t stop to consider the situation or ask relevant questions. This is a terrible idea for a system that facilitates trades, because all someone has to do, to use the example you cited, is wash trade a newly minted token back and forth a few times to set a price, and then find a smart contract that’s happy to spew out some amount of a token you want, at the price you just set, like a busted slot machine.
At no point did a real US dollar enter this process.
Yes, but something something fiat currency.
Does anyone remember the TreeLoot.com MoneyTree? It existed from 1998-2004 and looked like this:
I’m all in favor of going back to the old internet, but… not this.
How did that work (or not) exactly? What was the goal
You clicked the tree somewhere and it would tell you either to try again, or you would win something. I think most people who won got $5 and a monkey plush toy. I’m not sure anyone ever won the jackpot. You could just click over and over again trying to remember where you had previously clicked, like a treasure hunt. Meanwhile they’re showing banner ads on the page.
It worked using the
ismapattribute on the image which tells the browser to add the x,y coordinates of the user’s click to the link when fetching the result.I still have two stuffed monkeys I “won” from that site, from when I was young and stupid and didn’t realize I was probably paying for them with my personal data.
Oh wow. That takes me back. I remember doing it, but I also remember it being way too slow and annoying to do it for more than maybe 15 minutes.
That fucking site’s cookie banner can suck my rectum. Not even going to bother.
fuck notcoin that piece of shit legitimised all these other grifts. now they all are selling boosters with other cryptos with no sign of actual launch. crypto is cancer.
Really, crypto’s existence legitimized grifting.
Idk. I feel like I would like to upgrade Elon’s empathy.
I was just about to comment that it all makes sense now. Since Musk has no friends, he hasn’t unlocked empathy yet. Someone just needs to befriend the guy, somehow.
somehow
Worse case scenario… you get a horse.
Sometimes I day dream about what I’d say if I was elons friend. There are a lot of things.
