- cross-posted to:
- ghazi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- cross-posted to:
- ghazi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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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.
At the end of every exchange, someone has to be left “holding the bag”. There’s no end state that doesn’t end up screwing over someone else so you can cash out.
While trading in general is zero sum, if you believe the product you’re trading has intrinsic value, then no one needs to be holding a bag.
If I sell you a car and you get to use the car, you wouldn’t be holding the bag, because you wanted the car. This applies to stocks, and stock derivatives, as well as commodities.
The problem arises when there isn’t an intrinsic value (or the intrinsic value is very small), such as with NFTs or many cryptos in general.
There are cryptos that have some intrinsic value like monero, since they have fungibility and a use case, but most do not.
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.
The only way these “play to earn” games can work is as a pyramid scheme. Everybody wants more money out of the pot than they’re putting in, and the company sure as hell isn’t going to run at a loss. Many of them seem to only deal with currency through their own exchange (for fiat currency directly) or through markets backed by coins that are also backed by fiat currency, like bitcoin, for exactly the reasons that you laid out. Can’t make money if everybody is buying your funny money with other funny money that lost 99% of its value 3 months after it appeared.
The only other way somebody could make this work is if the players are the product, but at that point, why wouldn’t you just sell ad space on a website.
This is very well said.
I think what people imagine will happen, if they’re thinking about the economic conundrum at all, is something rather like the Warframe economy. Players with real dollars to spare buy platinum (the premium currency), which they then either use to buy things directly from DE, or trade to other players in return for loot those players want to sell. Effectively, players flush with time grind on behalf of players flush with dollars. If there was a way to convert platinum back into dollars, it could be imagined that a player in a country with a weak currency might make a living from selling rare mods and prime parts.
In practice the reason this doesn’t work is because DE would lose a huge amount of their income if players could cash out platinum. Any dollars put into the system for the purpose of buying things from other players would then leave the system when those players cash out. So there’s no incentive for DE to do this. There’s also the problem that you need to make a game that is actually worth putting real dollars into, and these crypto games are universally dogshit (ideal time to plug Jauwn’s YouTube channel, his crypto game reviews are hilarious and really highlight what utter trash the entire field is). So no one has any incentive to buy the tokens that the play-to-earn players are trying to sell. That’s a big part of why the price always instantly crashes.
The only way to make cashing out work is to have players directly sell their tokens to other players, instead of the money coming out of the developer, but that means now the players are competing with the developer on price. Whatever price the dev sells the token for becomes the ceiling. And if course, every token sold by a player basically steals income from the developer. If the dev instead gives the token out for playing the game, then there’s no mechanism at all for the dev to make any money from the token, other than issuing large amounts to themselves and ultimately crashing the price by cashing out. None of these options work, and the model these games actually go with basically guarantees rug pulls as the only actual way for the developers to make any money.
At no point did a real US dollar enter this process.
Yes, but something something fiat currency.
Pixel Tap, another popular tap game, outright prevents you from progressing past level three unless you invite at least one friend - and by the time the airdrop rolled around, level three wasn’t enough to be eligible for any tokens. But for every friend you did invite, you got 5% of the in-game currency they earned, and 1% of anything players they invited made, essentially creating something indicative of a virtual pyramid scheme, or MLM (multi-level marketing), that eventually paid out crypto tokens to those at the top. The Pixel Tap crypto reached a high of $0.0977 shortly after it launched, but at time of writing is now worth $0.006405, less than a tenth of that peak.
Virtual pyramid schemes for monopoly money, lovely.
The problem is the monopoly money is being used in a confidence game that’s being permitted by governments because all they see are more potentially taxable transactions and don’t give a shit about what this means for the longterm health of our societies.
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.
Therapist: Cursed chibi AI Elon isn’t real. Cursed chibi AI Elon can’t hurt you.
Cryptobros: …
That fucking site’s cookie banner can suck my rectum. Not even going to bother.
Why do they have one at all if they’re going to blatantly not comply
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.
crypto is cancer.
odysee is actually a crypto video sharing website that uses it for videos and their currency it has some far right problems tho
One day, I’ll make a technology classifier which will take a small description of what a product is doing and will classify it as scam and what type of scam it is. It would also say if the technology is already exists or is a minor derivative.
Then the world will know peace.
Kinda like that big infographic of logical fallacies. Honestly there seems to be a core set of like a dozen scams and everything from there is derivative more or less. Kinda love it when I hear of some actually clever way of stealing people’s money as opposed to just grift or obvious lies.
I bet you will need a crypto-backed ai startup for that project!
/s
Lol my boss asked me if I knew how to build an EXE. I did not. So I spent a few days figuring it out with Visual Code. I build an idle game as my first game within a weekend. Man…low hanging fruit lol
That’s impressive!
I struggled with making my idle games interesting.
My boss and I made a really fun fucked up story and it passed the time well
That horrendous AI Muskthing will haunt my dreams…
Much ai generate. Very wow
Nobody would ever pay you to play a game. There is no way there isn’t an alternative motive.
Well this is a huge bummer. I like idle games. They distract from anxiety. And I have a lot of anxiety.
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.
ngl the third game art looks like a pokemon ripoff but the art is well made
As a shitty artist who dabbles in game dev, AI has helped dramatically with generating art assets that look professional
Oh but it looks self drawn tho
