Well this is a huge bummer. I like idle games. They distract from anxiety. And I have a lot of anxiety.
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.
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.
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
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.
I respectfully disagree. There are legitimate use cases do make sense. Of course, these don’t make tech bros rich quick so you don’t often hear about them.
One of them that I like the idea of is NanoGPT. It’s a frontend to various AI services where you pay per request instead of making accounts for each and pay with Nano. I haven’t used it yet, but the currency makes a lot of sense there, as it is feeless and requests can cost less than a cent.
Another one is Monero for goods and services that might be illicit under one’s jurisdiction. I don’t want to go into the discussion whether this is right or wrong; all I want to say is that laws can be nonsensical and dangerous.
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
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.
