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What are the implications of this for startups? Has a startup ever benefited from using a fake currency? In what ways?

by noahc 16y ago

rbanffy 16y ago
It's a very interesting story of out-of-the-box thinking at country-scales. Most impressive indeed. It's about gaming the market. It really drives the idea that the market is only a shared somewhat consensual hallucination.
- noahc 16y ago
  Which would explain lead investors and other ideas about market signaling. It also explains recent posts on lying on stage and PR efficiency.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    On a market crash, all that vanishes is what never actually existed. It's when we wake up from that consensual hallucination. The catch is that not all people wake up at the same time.
dstein 16y ago
Inflation is a useful tactic to make RPG style games addictive. I worked with someone who built a popular facebook RPG game, and part of what made it popular was that as you became an established player the amount earned per day rose exponentially. As the game became more and more popular the virtual economy started to hyperinflate almost out of control, and the established players started hitting the MySQL integer limits. The author never expected that would ever be possible, but the exponential rate of inflation plus the exponential rate of new players joining created a giant pyramid scheme.
- limist 16y ago
  Good story, reminds me of a favorite quotation: The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. — Albert Bartlett
  - Natsu 16y ago
    From what I've seen, I think that we don't understand S-curves, either. No matter which side of it we're on. They can look exponential... until they hit the limit.
- ricardo_sdl 16y ago
  This reminds me of this: http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorpg-postmortem/part4.php http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorpg-postmortem/part4.ph... Because of a bug in the game, everybody could duplicate items with no cost and everybody became extremely rich in the game.

What are the implications of this for startups? Has a startup ever benefited from using a fake currency? In what ways?

by noahc 16y ago

What are the implications of this for startups? Has a startup ever benefited from using a fake currency? In what ways?

It's a very interesting story of out-of-the-box thinking at country-scales. Most impressive indeed. It's about gaming the market. It really drives the idea that the market is only a shared somewhat consensual hallucination.

noahc 16y ago
Which would explain lead investors and other ideas about market signaling. It also explains recent posts on lying on stage and PR efficiency.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  On a market crash, all that vanishes is what never actually existed. It's when we wake up from that consensual hallucination. The catch is that not all people wake up at the same time.

dstein 16y ago

Inflation is a useful tactic to make RPG style games addictive. I worked with someone who built a popular facebook RPG game, and part of what made it popular was that as you became an established player the amount earned per day rose exponentially. As the game became more and more popular the virtual economy started to hyperinflate almost out of control, and the established players started hitting the MySQL integer limits. The author never expected that would ever be possible, but the exponential rate of inflation plus the exponential rate of new players joining created a giant pyramid scheme.

limist 16y ago
Good story, reminds me of a favorite quotation: The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. — Albert Bartlett
- Natsu 16y ago
  From what I've seen, I think that we don't understand S-curves, either. No matter which side of it we're on. They can look exponential... until they hit the limit.
ricardo_sdl 16y ago
This reminds me of this: http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorpg-postmortem/part4.php http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorpg-postmortem/part4.ph... Because of a bug in the game, everybody could duplicate items with no cost and everybody became extremely rich in the game.