It's clearly a Ponzi scheme, where new entrants pay a large entry fee ($1k+), which funds the returns of the existing players. Poor people borrowing money to fund other poor people, until the last to join are stuck with the bill (earnings are already crashing).
More details in:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29725845
- https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1459191090100244483
- https://ambcrypto.com/axie-infinity-ronin-blockchain-see-dec...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/AxieInfinity/comments/odmdrk/how_do...
Beyond this enablement of more sophisticated coordination between those with capital and those with time, the emergence of digital collectibles might increase the aggregate amount of physical wealth, as the emergence of physical collectibles did some 30 some thousand years ago:
You say that like its even close to a good thing. It's unproductive, a waste of time, resources, human capital. It's also a Ponzi scheme because all payouts are made from new investors minus operational costs. Gains are illusory in aggregate.
>>Gains are illusory in aggregate.
Gains might not be illusionary, given they are giving rise to new stores of wealth which can have economic utility. See the essay on the rise of physical collectibles 30 some thousand years ago.
I mean, you can make the same exact argument about any exploitation of poor people for entertainment purposes. Your description maps perfectly to Bumfights. I think most would agree that your description alone does not make an intrinsically good system, let alone a moral one.
> And no, if the transfer is done for entertainment purposes, as many game asset purchases are, it's not a "ponzi" scheme.
The rich folks are buying in to make a gain, not entertain themselves. They are 100% of liquidity. The system is unproductive and yields nothing of external economic value but purports an increased value over time via 'number go up' all while operators slowly bleed capital out of the system. This is a Ponzi scheme. Ask yourself, would it work if money weren't involved in any way?
> Gains might not be illusionary, given they are giving rise to new stores of wealth which can have economic utility.
Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff were just ahead of their time, apparently. Given sufficient mental gymnastics, they too could have been captains of industry. Bernie after all gave rise to a new store of value! Shares of Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities LLC with meaningful economic utility! You could even lend them to others to earn a yield via a brokerage, I suspect! Alas, time makes fools of us all.
Paying poor people, who are grateful for the opportunity to feed their family, is not exploitiation. People heeding your admonishments against 'exploitation' would lead to more suffering, and no party being better off. It's pure politicization of interactions, at the expense of actual real life humans.
>>The rich folks are buying in to make a gain, not entertain themselves
It's a game, with a competitive element, so obviously some proportion are playing for entertainment.
>>Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff were just ahead of their time, apparently. Given sufficient mental gymnastics, they too could have been captains of industry.
Your hyperbolic comparison, between a game with digital assets, and actual ponzi schemes, is immature.
And arguing that digital assets, which become far more durable forms of property when NFTized on blockchains, can find economic utility as a store of value, is a completely reasonable argument, and your extreme reaction to this, full of snark and hyperbole, suggests your stance on this is far too motivated by emotion and bias to assess it.
I mean it depends on what you’re paying them to do and how much you’re paying them. Axie “players” now make on average less than minimum wage in the Philippines and continued earnings depends on more people buying into the ponzi.
> Your hyperbolic comparison, between a game with digital assets, and actual ponzi schemes, is immature.
The economics are clear and you haven’t really disputed them except by invoking the intangible magic of the blockchain and digital assets.
The minimum wage in the PH is zero, with millions unemployed, and many more than normal, due to lockdown restrictions.
Axie saved many lives, and if you were to put aside your agenda, and objectively study this, you'd find out how many people in the Philippines who were on the brink are grateful for the lifeline Axie provided them.
>>The economics are clear and you haven’t really disputed them except by invoking the intangible magic of the blockchain and digital assets.
Collectibles don't suddenly become "ponzi schemes" (!) when they become digital or are issued on blockchains. Your analogy is absurd, but I suppose that's ok, given the abundance of hyperbole on the pro-blockchain side.
Social spending has risen at unprecedented rates since the 1950s:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
If the social democratic narrative were true, we would have seen the rate of wage growth rise. The opposite has happened.
It turns out social democracy benefits only the public sector unions.
A couple anecdotes illuminates the kind of power these unions wield:
New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year:
https://archive.md/JnJQY
In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year.
California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers. That is where all the social welfare spending is going.
>>Not to mention for the poor, a massively volatile speculative asset with astronomical fees is literally the worst thing they could put all their money into.
No, the worst thing is lottery tickets:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/amazing...
Tokens on the blockchain on the other hand provide hundreds of thousands of people in the Philippines with a way to make a living, and literally saved many from death during the mass-unemployment created by the lockdown. See the rise of Axie Infinity.
And there are plenty of crypto platforms that offer zero/near-zero fees, like Axie's Ronin, which is a near-zero-fee Ethereum sidechain.
>>outside people on the OFAC list, which, I would argue, is a good thing.
What about innocent people from countries on the OFAC list. Do you think that is a good thing? Acceptable collateral damage? What about WikiLeaks, which was blockaded by the credit card companies, under pressure from US government agencies, after it revealed war crimes? Good thing too?
You speak from a position of privilege, to reinforce centralized structures of control that perpetuate that privilege.