> "I thought it was gambling and immoral, but now that it has made billions there might be a point"

That is an inaccurate/misleading summarization of my post. It is a least-charitable interpretation structured to forward your own viewpoint.

When I thought the game was simply gambling I ignored it (and in fact I assumed it was earning high revenue). This financial times article explained that the game is not gambling and instead is something more complex. The mechanic of ownership allowing players to lend in-game assets to free players for the purposes of in-game currency generation is novel to me. The additional fact that the earned in-game currency can be converted to real world cash is not novel but certainly interesting when combined with the former.

Ostensibly, someone can find a sponsor who will lend them in-game assets. They can then apply/increase their skill in playing the game to earn a share of in-game currency. So for zero stake they can earn in-game currency that is convertible to real world cash. That, to me, is NOT gambling.

Another person can invest real-world cash to buy in-game assets. They can then seek out people willing to play the game on their behalf. By finding and retaining the best players they can earn a share of the most in-game currency. That, to me, is close to gambling. It reminds me of horse owners who participate in competitive racing. People gamble on the outcome of races to be sure. But it is a stretch to me to think of the horse owners as gambling. They are investing in the best horses, the best trainers, the best jockeys with the hope that those investments will lead to enough wins to turn a profit.

A growing market, especially on Twitch, are competitive gaming orgs. These orgs seek out the best game players and sign them to contracts. They then turn a profit by leveraging the players success into brand sponsorships. I see a lot of parallels between the mechanisms behind this game and real-world economic activity.

The fact that a pretty prosaic mobile looking game ballooned to such a valuation and attention suggests to me there is something worth being curious about here. It is causing me to think. Apparently it is causing you to turn away in disgust.

> Sky Mavis has acknowledged that Axie relies on new entrants for growth and promised to release new features that will make the game more desirable for people who are not primarily motivated by cashing out their earnings.

Right now, it's difficult to differentiate from a pyramid scheme. There are RNG elements related to breeding, which means the best this game can hope to be compared to is poker, except it has the added layer of cryptocurrency "investment" which taps into the same energy as gambling and pyramid schemes, which I guess makes sense.

Without being mean spirited: do you also see something profound and interesting in GME and other meme stocks? Because in my opinion, just because it got a lot of attention and money doesn't mean that there is something meaningful there. Bernie Madoffs scheme took from the 90s (maybe 70s) to 2008 to implode, bitconnect rose and fell faster.

And as I clarified in another comment, what is causing me to voice disgust is the fact people are using these schemes to get rich off of others. And I think that even if we cannot to anything else, social shunning still has its place as a soft regulatory mechanism. If it people want to go to Vegas, let them have Vegas, if they want to gamble in this, let them gamble, but we can still express our distaste and deny respect. (Not that I think I matter much here, even if people were to follow my lead I'm sure the founders will dry their tears with dollar bills)

Not every person or every culture has the same sets of values around gambling. Not every ethical philosophy thinks of gambling the same way. In many developed countries gambling is legal and regulated in many forms. Governments around the world spend a lot of energy deciding what the lines for regulating gambling is. When I see ethical takes like this, I feel like I'm missing a _lot_ of context. The Islamic world for example sees consumption of alcohol as a sin. Is this a Christian ethical take? What's the difference between markets and gambling in this ethical philosophy? Islamic states see any form of interest as sin after all.

Answering directly to your questions, I don't have any religious background on this, I just see hijacking of our primitive vices for personal profit as immoral and shun-worthy. I think prohibition is bad (just creates Shadow markets) and the main thing to stop is running profitable gambling houses and advertising/incitement - if nobody could make a profit off of it, people would still gamble, but at least it would be intrinsically motivated and you don't get the consolidating and exploitative effects that arise from privatised gambling. Same with all other "sins" - don't stop the sin, stop the profiteering and the exploitation. The sins are fine and fun

Hijacking of our primitive vices, isn't that the basis for most economic activity? The food industry, television/movie industry, all of social media including the site we're on right now, the list goes on indefinitely.

Normal video games without a crypto element do this as well. I currently have real money tokens in at least 4 of the most popular games, none of which I can ever get anything back from except in game cosmetics. But even games like Stardew Valley that wouldn't dream of taking extra money from you are tapping into our vice centers to keep us playing.

As someone deep into video games to me this is just an evolution of world of warcraft gold, or what steam has going on with their in game items and trading cards. I can exchange wow gold/steam items for real money, which blizzard or valve takes a generous % of. I can then only use that money to buy blizzard/steam products from their respective stores. People grind for countless hours in games even for these relatively worthless (when compared to crypto/nfts) currencies. Hell people spend countless hours grinding for in game currencies that will never have any real world value at all. Mostly because it can be wildly fun to do.

I feel like a whole lot of the hatred towards the crypto space will go down in history as an old man yells at cloud moment.

Well, yes,you have rediscovered a core theme of criticism against the capitalist, consumerist mode of production anarchists and other leftists tend to raise, together with commodification. There is a coherent view that most AAA video games are skinner boxes aimed at extracting cash and Indie Games being closer to the "original" idea of them, and there are real discussions to be had about grinding on that context as a worthwhile escapism vs. a symptom of a bigger problem vs. a tool to build emotional investment that will keep you subscribing.

Don't get me wrong, I'm the old man yelling at the crypto cloud as well, but in this case I'm the old man yelling at business foundations of questionable morality. Providing healthy food, fodder for emotional and personal comfort and growth or shelter has very different business models and foundations from providing fast food/sweets, skinner Box Dopamine drips or artificially hyped status Symbols.

I agree with you entirely. Our society is very unhealthy in it's current form. But the fact is unless we want the economy to go into complete shambles (which we very well may need to happen to survive what's coming) we can't stop doing what we're doing. The difference I see with something like Axie, if done properly, is that instead of the big daddy corporation taking all the money from on high, there's potential for the consumer to partake in the success of the game.

As an example I play a bunch of league of legends currently. During the pandemic it's been a godsend for spending time with my friends. We've all bought multiple skins during this time which has amounted to probably a couple of hundred dollars between all of us. You can also earn random skins, but because typically people don't play most champions these random skins often just sit there wasted. What if instead those random skins could be sold or traded to other players? Take it one step further, what if there were unique skins that only 1 player could have at a time? I could see something like that selling for thousands of dollars. It creates a load of economic activity at the cost of absolutely nothing. We're all already using the systems in droves, crypto/nfts are just a way to have some form of actual ownership.

It's a brilliant concept, and the moral argument against it really is also moral argument against everything already in place in most of the biggest industries around.

It feels like you are agreeing with me only to go back to defending the thing you call sick? My whole point is that we might not be able to change the system, but we can at least refuse to accept it.

Other points touching on ideas you raise:

1. If I understand correctly, has a 20% premine system of AXS that represents ownership of the platform. Even if it didn't have a premine, this is the same as having a public corporation owning the platform. If Axie was a co-op where every player had 1 vote and would share equally in the profits, it'd be a bit differen, but otherwise, you can just buy tencent share if you want t participate in the success of the game 2. You are describing any game with tradeable assets, e.g. Pokemon. Right now, millionaires are making more money with pokemon unboxing (or maybe that fad died already), and similarly whoever has the best starting position will cash in on Axie...as long as enough people FOMO in 3. Which goes back to the dual fundamental sicknesses of capital tendency to concentrate and corrupt if left unchecked and profiting off of these easily exploited human desires without providing value in return. If you enjoy playing a game, you will pay for a game. That's fine. But we call artificial sparsity, spaced random rewards etc. dark patterns for a reason. Acting like the business model of e.g. brother's a tale of two sons and Axie are the same is disingenuous (and DotA existed without needing a company running the skinner Box...)

> Well, yes,you have rediscovered a core theme of criticism against the capitalist, consumerist mode of production anarchists and other leftists tend to raise, together with commodification.

I think this is a much more fruitful (if ultimately tautological due to its very definition) form of argument; you're a modern socialist and modern socialist mores drive your criticism. That brings up two questions for me:

1. What's the point of bothering with commenting or thinking about cryptocurrency at all? Cryptocurrency is all about a belief in some market, which socialists reject. It would be like a market libertarian criticizing the Soviet Union on the basis of not having a market; ultimately fruitless.

2. Do you voice similar opinions on all capitalist issues in which marketing and commodification are present? It would seem from a perspective of utility that cryptocurrency is probably one of the least harmful examples of this phenomenon. Do we disagree on our utility metric? Does utility not factor into your ethical judgement (e.g. are you a virtue ethicist)?

First of all, it's simplistic to say socialists reject markets see

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism

>Early models of market socialism trace their roots to the work of Adam Smith and the theories of classical economics, which consisted of proposals for co-operative enterprises operating in a free-market economy.

Second, just because you reject something still means you are allowed to present arguments against it. Otherwise only those who hold crypto would be allowed to think or criticize it. You aren't giving arguments against the critiques presented right now, you are just going "ah, you are a socialist, that's why". If you disagree with the critique I'd love to hear your reasoning, but what does labelling and rejecting add?

Third, yes, I do in fact. Marketing, exploitation and hostile business practices are my main problems with the current system, I don't have a moral problem with property, capital etc. If we can configure a capitalist system to be non-exploitative I'm down. One way (not realisable, semi-joking) could be to impose a hard cap on individual wealth (say 100 million, or a multiple of the median to make it timeless) with the excess poured into a UBI (land would need its own treatment but I'm just being funny right now). This would even out power dynamics, avoid dynasties and allow market forces to take hold. We can add a form of new-game-plus for those that need extra motivation, if you build up more wealth and hit 500mil, 1bn , etc you get a progressively more impressive Roman-style triumph as recognition - you still don't get to keep it though.

Fourth, you are making a nonsequitur going to utility now without taking the time to define terms. I don't think of myself as a virtue ethicist nor a utilitarian, but I do think there are some things people want that a utilitarian would still say has negative utility. Is selling crack, fixing up people to opiods or drawing them into cults providing positive utility for you? How about adding extra sugar, salt, MSG and fat to food to make it more palatable with cheaper ingredients, and possibly more unhealthy and addictive? Is it positive utility to use marketing to create a perceived problem and then selling the solution?

> First of all, it's simplistic to say socialists reject markets see

Yes I am familiar with this fact. That's why I said "modern socialist mores" in my above post, which was admittedly probably doing too much work in my head and not explaining enough. I find that libertarian socialists, market socialists, minarchists, and market anarchists are not really popular leftist positions anymore. Most socialist spaces I encounter these days mostly consider communism, socialism, anarcho-communism, or anarcho-socialism.

> Second, just because you reject something still means you are allowed to present arguments against it. Otherwise only those who hold crypto would be allowed to think or criticize it. You aren't giving arguments against the critiques presented right now, you are just going "ah, you are a socialist, that's why". If you disagree with the critique I'd love to hear your reasoning, but what does labelling and rejecting add?

Imagine if someone in the comments critiques the West's decadence and ascribes it to the West's consumption of pork. To many ethical frameworks, the reasoning would be odd; why pork of all things? In Islamic ethics, however, that is in fact a reasonable line of criticism. Likewise your positions seemed to reject a lot of things taken for granted in everyday life in many developed countries which is why your remark about being a socialist makes more sense. I'm not rejecting socialism; knowing you're a socialist makes your critique more understandable.

> Is selling crack, fixing up people to opiods or drawing them into cults providing positive utility for you? How about adding extra sugar, salt, MSG and fat to food to make it more palatable with cheaper ingredients, and possibly more unhealthy and addictive? Is it positive utility to use marketing to create a perceived problem and then selling the solution?

I don't believe it's the role of the State to police any but the most deleterious mores. I believe that humans can form social mores against the excesses of vices and that having the State enforce social mores often results in more negative than positive externalities. When there's a large collective action problem, say environmentalism, I _do_ think in terms of utility, which is why I was asking about utility. I largely think the negative utility imposed by cryptocurrency scams upon the environment is far outweighed by the negative utility of other things so, much like the renter that uses more water than they should because their management pays for water, I consider it one of the many tiny sources of negative utility out there that is only worth tackling once bigger targets have been tackled.

Thanks for the clarifications on your first two points. On the last:

You are using very wavy forms of utility. How do you define utility? I was thinking on the utility of the individual, asking about whether something like getting lost in gambling addiction after someone caught you in their funnel is truly positive utility because you "want" it.

In the same vein as your 2nd point, I'm also gonna guess you are more of a libertarian/minarchich bent because of this because while in my experience statist tend to oversimplify and wishful-think the impact of the state and anarchists tend to oversimplify and wishful-think the willingness and ableness of a group to self-organise in an anarchist way, libertarians in the US style/minarchists tend to oversimplify the question of self determinism and have inconsistent thought on what exactly the role of the state should be (it should exist because otherwise you can't have private property, but everything else...) and don't consistently acknowledge predatory behaviour that preys on human vices exists and works (AGAIN: I don't want to police the vices, I want to curtail profits on it. Self-organised vices without additional motivators are fine with me).

I also find it interesting that you claim you think term of utility and externality on collective action problems but then don't consider price of action - we don't lose anything big with crypto right now, but we would gain at least a finlands worth of energy to blow on other things ( https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/03/climate/bitco... ).

You can think that gambling is moral. You can think that gambling is immoral. To think that gambling is immoral unless it's earning a lot of money is... something.

I mean sure but that's not what GP is saying. GP is purely laying into gambling by itself.

> I have nothing but disgust for these types of games, even without the block chain veneer

That's where my question arises.

I'm specifically laying into people getting rich off of other people gambling and making a business out of it. If a group of friends wants to play poker, or if the Axie platform was a co-op owned by all of the players (and no 20% dev stake like most premined cryptocurrencies) I'd say "eh, it's their choice". But making money off of hooking into and pushing our vices is something I personally disagree with.

Sure but what about the folks that run casinos, pachinko parlors, mahjongg dens, card clubs, horse race betting owners, claw machine owners, etc, etc. There's a _lot_ of gambling around the world and it's the owners' job to market these gambling houses. Why are these crypto scams so deleterious when there's probably an order of magnitude more people gambling their money away in more traditional gambling houses designed to keep you inside, fed, and spending money for as long as possible? Is your position that all gambling like this should be run by the state?

By the state or by private individuals without profiting and without advertising. I'm also in support of banning loot boxes in commercial games like we've seen in some European countries.

Again, the problem isn't gambling. The problem is people making money off of pushing people to gamble more than they'd do naturally.

Are you talking about reggieband or igorkraw? I was referring to the former.

Igorkraw