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I just heard about the "Million Dollar Homepage" for the first time last week. Would this idea (or one like it) work today? Making a million dollars for somethi

I just heard about the "Million Dollar Homepage" for the first time last week. Would this idea (or one like it) work today? Making a million dollars for something so bizarre, fun, and straightforward sounds amazing. Can anyone reference other attempts at similar ideas?

krallja 9y ago
Initial Coin Offerings are bizarre, fairly straightforward and can be fun.
- zzalpha 9y ago
  Bizarre I'll give you. Fun, well, that's a matter of taste so I won't debate you there. But "fairly straightforward"? Let's not get crazy, here. IMO, ICOs are doing to cryptocurrency what derivatives did to traditional investing. Abstraction, indirection, and confusion, all to make a buck...
- Kiro 9y ago
  > fairly straightforward I've read a lot about ICOs and I still don't understand what's going on. I can't even tell what people are actually buying (like EOS, where it explicitly says the tokens are worthless and not convertible). An even bigger question is why people are throwing so much money on them when it's so unclear what you're getting.
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    It probably makes more sense when you realize that many ICO buyers are "whales", big cryptocurrency holders who bought in when the currencies were much cheaper and amassed large amounts. When the news headline says an ICO raised $180M, that doesn't actually mean people spent $180M on tokens. Rather, they converted $180M of Ethereum, at its current valuation, which they may have purchased for say $1M collectively. The individual holders might not actually be spending more than $5-10K of their own money (or possibly nothing, if they got their ether through mining), but that money has appreciated to be worth say $1M at Ethereum's current value. It's a good example of a double pyramid scheme. The value of Ethereum is itself going up; it was worthless 4 years ago but now has a market cap of $20B. And then you can "spend" Ethereum to get additional tokens out of an ICO, which means that you're buying into another pyramid scheme with tokens which themselves have appreciated. The huge dollar values, after the double conversion, generate great news stories, which inspire more people to buy into Ethereum, which prop its value up even more, which mean that the companies who did ICOs can convert their cryptocurrency to dollars at better rates and inflate their dollar values even more, which inspires more ICOs at bigger valuations, and so on. Lest this sound too dodgy, remember that all currency is itself a pyramid scheme: it's inherently worthless, and worth only what peoples' expectations of its future valuation will be. So the endgame for cryptocurrencies is either they run out of hard-currency buyers, in which case their value comes crashing down and everyone who bought in loses everything, or they replace the dollar as the world reserve currency and everyone who didn't buy in loses everything. I think the latter option is unlikely, but also underpriced, in the sense that it's more likely than most people give it credit for.
    - CryptoFascist 9y ago
      I keep seeing the fallacy that all currency value is based on future expectations. Here's a thought experiment... in the US, work full time while getting paid in Bitcoin. Make all transactions in Bitcoin. At the end of the year you'll need to file a tax return. Your final options are: 1. Buy some USD to pay your taxes. 2. Go to jail. Demand for fiat currencies is ultimately underpinned by them being the only instrument accepted for payment of taxes.
      - nostrademons 9y ago
        You have a third option: 3. Don't pay taxes. Live like an outlaw. Shoot the tax collector. You're driving at an important point that I want to take a bit further. Ultimately, the "backing" of a fiat currency comes from the barrel of a gun. People continue to use U.S. dollars because the U.S. has the strongest military on earth right now. Same throughout history - the backing of the British pound came from the British Navy, and when the British military collapsed post-WW2, the pound sterling didn't last much longer. A major adoption driver for cryptocurrencies has been the weakness of central governments. We've seen this most with China, where wealthy Chinese businessmen are eager to take money out of the country in any way possible. But the most likely tipping point that would drive widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies would be if the perception became widespread that the U.S. government could no longer guarantee physical security; if, for example, we "lost" the war on terrorism. You could easily imagine people "hiring" personal drones or robots for protection with BitCoin if this came to pass, to fill the vacuum of the state security apparatus.
        Pulcinella 9y ago
        If the US and other national governments collapsed then every cryptocurrency would become worthless (Gas Town isn't going to accept your "money") or less than worthless (Thunderdome is going to eliminate you because your mining rig wastes valuable electricity).
        nostrademons 9y ago
graphitezepp 9y ago
It's just a random example of something silly going viral. Stuff like this definately could work today (potato salad kickstarter was a thing) but any individuals attempt probably wouldn't work, it mostly comes down to luck.
- kurthr 9y ago
  I agree, and it seems another more ironic meaning of, "even monkeys fall from trees"... see the center of the page. I always wondered why he didn't allow changing the pixels/URLs and reselling them. Should have been easy to set up and an ongoing revenue stream.
- tyingq 9y ago
  Not a million bucks, but $71k for something very recent...that was even more upfront about how useless it was. https://uetoken.com https://uetoken.com
codegladiator 9y ago
Like "go to a VC with any idea in year 2016" ?
- CalRobert 9y ago
  Man, I must have been a real idiot to not get a VC to say yes in 2016. Worth noting that it seemed, at the time, like there was less interest in seed rounds (especially after Twitter's decline) and more in Series A,B, etc.
  - codegladiator 9y ago
    I know I am naive, but to me it looked like: X Money From VCs => Y (discounts to users/deals with businesses to "start using my product") => High sales => Repeat (Series A/B...)
zappo2938 9y ago
There was a post on Hacker News several months ago to a site that posted the last five people who paid for advertising. The list made it to about $500 before the admins here shut it down. Reddit in April did a twist on the limited pixel idea with https://reddit.com/r/place https://reddit.com/r/place
cesarb 9y ago
Something similar (for fun, not for money) would be Reddit's /r/place.
nashashmi 9y ago
The kid tried to do it again. It didn't work. The reason it worked the first time was people bought it out of curiosity then it went viral over traditional news media and then original purchasers reaped profits leading to further hype leading to further buying craze leading to further frenzy. Eventually the last bit of 1000 pixels went for 37k. If the kid had extended the page another million pixels, you could have measured the peak interest and the subsequent decline.
johnchristopher 9y ago
Something like this ? https://www.google.be/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/28/cards-against-humanity-hole https://www.google.be/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2... Cards Against Humanity raises $100,000 to dig 'tremendous hole' Makers of party game livestream a backhoe digging a gigantic hole somewhere in the US, saying ‘as long as money keeps coming in, we’ll keep digging’
azureel 9y ago
Köln created a website where people were able to buy pixels of an image of Podolski for €25 per 8x8 pixel square, in order to gather €1 million to reduce the cost of the transfer;[1][2] Formula One driver and Köln supporter Michael Schumacher bought several pixels for €875.[3] Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lukas_Podolski https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lukas_Podolski [1] http://www.thespoiler.co.uk/index.php/2009/02/04/fc-koln-find-unique-way-of-funding-podolski-transfer http://www.thespoiler.co.uk/index.php/2009/02/04/fc-koln-fin... [2] http://pixel.fc-koeln.de/ http://pixel.fc-koeln.de/ [3] http://www.fourfourtwo.com/news/schumacher-helps-fund-podolski-signing http://www.fourfourtwo.com/news/schumacher-helps-fund-podols...
nostrademons 9y ago
BitCoin, where the inventor managed to convince people to accept a new currency, mined the first few blocks of it, and ended up with a billion dollars in paper wealth as a result.
- curiousgal 9y ago
  Except the inventor's coins have not been moved in ages so there's that..
- _nedR 9y ago
  By that logic all fiat currencies and even some commodities like diamond and gold(whose usefulness from an industrial perspective doesn't match their market value) would fit the bill.
enthdegree 9y ago
The Yo app was valued at +5m usd less than 3 years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app)
- komali2 9y ago
  Wow I thought that was just a silicon valley joke haha
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    It was. Just not Silicon Valley the show.
    - scrollaway 9y ago
      I had the same reaction when I saw the blood-boy thing going on last season. Then I found out where the idea came from...
      - StavrosK 9y ago
        Oh God, is that a thing that actually happens in the real SV too? I thought the show made that up.
        scrollaway 9y ago
        Look up Peter Thiel.
        komali2 9y ago
        That guy weirds me out. Says things like >Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room but then supports a candidate that denies climate change and replaces scientists in government positions with company stooges. Never understood Thiel.
8draco8 9y ago
Trading one paper clip for a house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_red_paperclip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_red_paperclip
schraitle 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save_Toby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save_Toby Also, my attempt at getting rich online: http://schraitle.flat-line.net/cash/index.html http://schraitle.flat-line.net/cash/index.html (I made a whole 26 cents in the end)
ozaark 9y ago
A more recent example that received media attention was the Big Word Project. You could buy any word at $1 per letter.
qbrass 9y ago
Cryptocurrencies. You didn't notice because the people who created them didn't, either.
lathiat 9y ago
TWiT ("This Week In Tech") / Leo Laporte did something similar to partly fund his original move from the "Cottage" to their new "Brickhouse" studios in 2011 by selling bricks on a wall. http://wiki.twit.tv/wiki/TWiT_Brick_House http://wiki.twit.tv/wiki/TWiT_Brick_House I couldn't quickly find information about how much they cost or he raised, though googling reveals multiple companies that will sell engraved bricks to power your fundraiser.
- mavhc 9y ago
  And had a lot of issues when they moved to a new building
Dirlewanger 9y ago
reddit's recent April Fool's experiment. They had a blank 10,000x10,000px (?) canvas where people could manipulate 1 pixel at a time with time constraints. No money involved, but seeing the panoply of different subcultures come together was unbelievably fascinating.

krallja 9y ago

Initial Coin Offerings are bizarre, fairly straightforward and can be fun.

zzalpha 9y ago
Bizarre I'll give you. Fun, well, that's a matter of taste so I won't debate you there. But "fairly straightforward"? Let's not get crazy, here. IMO, ICOs are doing to cryptocurrency what derivatives did to traditional investing. Abstraction, indirection, and confusion, all to make a buck...
Kiro 9y ago
> fairly straightforward I've read a lot about ICOs and I still don't understand what's going on. I can't even tell what people are actually buying (like EOS, where it explicitly says the tokens are worthless and not convertible). An even bigger question is why people are throwing so much money on them when it's so unclear what you're getting.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  It probably makes more sense when you realize that many ICO buyers are "whales", big cryptocurrency holders who bought in when the currencies were much cheaper and amassed large amounts. When the news headline says an ICO raised $180M, that doesn't actually mean people spent $180M on tokens. Rather, they converted $180M of Ethereum, at its current valuation, which they may have purchased for say $1M collectively. The individual holders might not actually be spending more than $5-10K of their own money (or possibly nothing, if they got their ether through mining), but that money has appreciated to be worth say $1M at Ethereum's current value. It's a good example of a double pyramid scheme. The value of Ethereum is itself going up; it was worthless 4 years ago but now has a market cap of $20B. And then you can "spend" Ethereum to get additional tokens out of an ICO, which means that you're buying into another pyramid scheme with tokens which themselves have appreciated. The huge dollar values, after the double conversion, generate great news stories, which inspire more people to buy into Ethereum, which prop its value up even more, which mean that the companies who did ICOs can convert their cryptocurrency to dollars at better rates and inflate their dollar values even more, which inspires more ICOs at bigger valuations, and so on. Lest this sound too dodgy, remember that all currency is itself a pyramid scheme: it's inherently worthless, and worth only what peoples' expectations of its future valuation will be. So the endgame for cryptocurrencies is either they run out of hard-currency buyers, in which case their value comes crashing down and everyone who bought in loses everything, or they replace the dollar as the world reserve currency and everyone who didn't buy in loses everything. I think the latter option is unlikely, but also underpriced, in the sense that it's more likely than most people give it credit for.
  - CryptoFascist 9y ago
    I keep seeing the fallacy that all currency value is based on future expectations. Here's a thought experiment... in the US, work full time while getting paid in Bitcoin. Make all transactions in Bitcoin. At the end of the year you'll need to file a tax return. Your final options are: 1. Buy some USD to pay your taxes. 2. Go to jail. Demand for fiat currencies is ultimately underpinned by them being the only instrument accepted for payment of taxes.
    - nostrademons 9y ago
      You have a third option: 3. Don't pay taxes. Live like an outlaw. Shoot the tax collector. You're driving at an important point that I want to take a bit further. Ultimately, the "backing" of a fiat currency comes from the barrel of a gun. People continue to use U.S. dollars because the U.S. has the strongest military on earth right now. Same throughout history - the backing of the British pound came from the British Navy, and when the British military collapsed post-WW2, the pound sterling didn't last much longer. A major adoption driver for cryptocurrencies has been the weakness of central governments. We've seen this most with China, where wealthy Chinese businessmen are eager to take money out of the country in any way possible. But the most likely tipping point that would drive widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies would be if the perception became widespread that the U.S. government could no longer guarantee physical security; if, for example, we "lost" the war on terrorism. You could easily imagine people "hiring" personal drones or robots for protection with BitCoin if this came to pass, to fill the vacuum of the state security apparatus.
      - Pulcinella 9y ago
        If the US and other national governments collapsed then every cryptocurrency would become worthless (Gas Town isn't going to accept your "money") or less than worthless (Thunderdome is going to eliminate you because your mining rig wastes valuable electricity).
        nostrademons 9y ago

graphitezepp 9y ago

It's just a random example of something silly going viral. Stuff like this definately could work today (potato salad kickstarter was a thing) but any individuals attempt probably wouldn't work, it mostly comes down to luck.

kurthr 9y ago
I agree, and it seems another more ironic meaning of, "even monkeys fall from trees"... see the center of the page. I always wondered why he didn't allow changing the pixels/URLs and reselling them. Should have been easy to set up and an ongoing revenue stream.
tyingq 9y ago
Not a million bucks, but $71k for something very recent...that was even more upfront about how useless it was. https://uetoken.com https://uetoken.com

codegladiator 9y ago

Like "go to a VC with any idea in year 2016" ?

CalRobert 9y ago
Man, I must have been a real idiot to not get a VC to say yes in 2016. Worth noting that it seemed, at the time, like there was less interest in seed rounds (especially after Twitter's decline) and more in Series A,B, etc.
- codegladiator 9y ago
  I know I am naive, but to me it looked like: X Money From VCs => Y (discounts to users/deals with businesses to "start using my product") => High sales => Repeat (Series A/B...)

zappo2938 9y ago

There was a post on Hacker News several months ago to a site that posted the last five people who paid for advertising. The list made it to about $500 before the admins here shut it down. Reddit in April did a twist on the limited pixel idea with https://reddit.com/r/place https://reddit.com/r/place

cesarb 9y ago

Something similar (for fun, not for money) would be Reddit's /r/place.

nashashmi 9y ago

The kid tried to do it again. It didn't work. The reason it worked the first time was people bought it out of curiosity then it went viral over traditional news media and then original purchasers reaped profits leading to further hype leading to further buying craze leading to further frenzy. Eventually the last bit of 1000 pixels went for 37k. If the kid had extended the page another million pixels, you could have measured the peak interest and the subsequent decline.

johnchristopher 9y ago

Something like this ? https://www.google.be/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/28/cards-against-humanity-hole https://www.google.be/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/technology/2... Cards Against Humanity raises $100,000 to dig 'tremendous hole' Makers of party game livestream a backhoe digging a gigantic hole somewhere in the US, saying ‘as long as money keeps coming in, we’ll keep digging’

azureel 9y ago

Köln created a website where people were able to buy pixels of an image of Podolski for €25 per 8x8 pixel square, in order to gather €1 million to reduce the cost of the transfer;[1][2] Formula One driver and Köln supporter Michael Schumacher bought several pixels for €875.[3] Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lukas_Podolski https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lukas_Podolski [1] http://www.thespoiler.co.uk/index.php/2009/02/04/fc-koln-find-unique-way-of-funding-podolski-transfer http://www.thespoiler.co.uk/index.php/2009/02/04/fc-koln-fin... [2] http://pixel.fc-koeln.de/ http://pixel.fc-koeln.de/ [3] http://www.fourfourtwo.com/news/schumacher-helps-fund-podolski-signing http://www.fourfourtwo.com/news/schumacher-helps-fund-podols...

nostrademons 9y ago

BitCoin, where the inventor managed to convince people to accept a new currency, mined the first few blocks of it, and ended up with a billion dollars in paper wealth as a result.

curiousgal 9y ago
Except the inventor's coins have not been moved in ages so there's that..
_nedR 9y ago
By that logic all fiat currencies and even some commodities like diamond and gold(whose usefulness from an industrial perspective doesn't match their market value) would fit the bill.

enthdegree 9y ago

The Yo app was valued at +5m usd less than 3 years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app)

komali2 9y ago
Wow I thought that was just a silicon valley joke haha
- StavrosK 9y ago
  It was. Just not Silicon Valley the show.
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    I had the same reaction when I saw the blood-boy thing going on last season. Then I found out where the idea came from...
    - StavrosK 9y ago
      Oh God, is that a thing that actually happens in the real SV too? I thought the show made that up.
      - scrollaway 9y ago
        Look up Peter Thiel.
        komali2 9y ago
        That guy weirds me out. Says things like >Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room but then supports a candidate that denies climate change and replaces scientists in government positions with company stooges. Never understood Thiel.

8draco8 9y ago

Trading one paper clip for a house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_red_paperclip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_red_paperclip

schraitle 9y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save_Toby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save_Toby Also, my attempt at getting rich online: http://schraitle.flat-line.net/cash/index.html http://schraitle.flat-line.net/cash/index.html (I made a whole 26 cents in the end)

ozaark 9y ago

A more recent example that received media attention was the Big Word Project. You could buy any word at $1 per letter.

qbrass 9y ago

Cryptocurrencies. You didn't notice because the people who created them didn't, either.

lathiat 9y ago

TWiT ("This Week In Tech") / Leo Laporte did something similar to partly fund his original move from the "Cottage" to their new "Brickhouse" studios in 2011 by selling bricks on a wall. http://wiki.twit.tv/wiki/TWiT_Brick_House http://wiki.twit.tv/wiki/TWiT_Brick_House I couldn't quickly find information about how much they cost or he raised, though googling reveals multiple companies that will sell engraved bricks to power your fundraiser.

mavhc 9y ago
And had a lot of issues when they moved to a new building

Dirlewanger 9y ago

reddit's recent April Fool's experiment. They had a blank 10,000x10,000px (?) canvas where people could manipulate 1 pixel at a time with time constraints. No money involved, but seeing the panoply of different subcultures come together was unbelievably fascinating.