9 ms·

Civil’s tokenomics has left its journalists wondering where their salary is

65 points by danso 8y ago

spacecowboy17 8y ago
I read the Civil white paper linked from the article hoping to see a description of a new business model for journalists and publishers but only found how they will use CVL tokens to vote on who is in the whitelist. Can someone please explain how/why readers would pay for the content? That's the important part, isn't it?
- anongraddebt 8y ago
  FWIW, I still have close to no idea what DLT/Crypto/Decentralization/etc. even is, or rather is for. Assuming the tech actually has wings we won't really understand the how and why until certain use cases come to dominate. Even then, it can be difficult. After Western Union was founded (19th century), people would walk into WU offices to send money over the telegraph line and say things like, "Where can I see the little man who runs along the wire carrying the money?" Having said that, here's my explanation: How? Readers can pay newsrooms for content using a debit/credit card or purchasing and sending CVL to the newsroom. Why? Because they like the pieces coming out of a set of newsrooms and want access to that type of content. Effectively, journalists end up running their own newspaper, but that newspaper is a subsidiary of a parent company that is hands-off for content but not for governance (which just means it's not totally hands-off for content). This newspaper would compete against other subsidiaries of the parent, and would have a certain percentage vote on what other subsidaries exist. Moreover, journalists would often be paid by selling their stock options in the parent. ---- Obviously, the hypothesis here is that such a direct connection between journalist and reader will lead to higher-quality content then can be found at the MSM rags. I'm agnostic about whether that is the case.
  - riffraff 8y ago
    Couldn't journalists always run their own newspaper? In Italy we had cooperatives running newspapers and magazines as long as I can remember, doesn't this happen elsewhere? I _think_ the advantage of Civil might be that you get to pay directly a journalist rather than the group, but I'm not sure it's a big improvement.
    - notahacker 8y ago
      To pay journalists directly there are platforms where you can already pay directly for the article (Blendle), plenty of blogging platforms and new media startups than pay journalists at least in part by page impressions/revenues, and online tipjars. Whether these clickbait factor or article quality depends on the journalist and audience as well as the model, but all of these approaches seem much closer to the ideal of helping journalists earn by the popularity of their output than a startup paying part of journalists' salary in tokens whose main utility according to the white paper appears to be votes to censor/censure other publications for ethics violations.
      - anongraddebt 8y ago
        Blendle is in Beta, which means people are just now coming up with revenue models that only charge customers for the articles they want to read, and allow them to do this across different outlets. The unique (not that this is good or useful) thing about purchasing CVL tokens is that it allows you not only to pay for the articles you want to read, but allows you to vote on how the Civil constitution is applied and thus how existing and newly formed newsrooms are shaped as well as affording you the opportunity to start your own newsroom (I think, not certain about this). My explanation here and my explanation above doesn't in fact explain much of anything. Again, assuming blockchain/[insert buzzword] has wings, we won't really understand much of the how or why until clear use cases begin to dominate. When Morse was trying to convince Congress to fund his endeavors, it was only after the second attempt they just gave him some money to make him go away (though, there were a couple Congressmen who really pushed for supporting him). When Morse had a telegraph line constructed in D.C. and running north (40 miles?), people still didn't understand the how when a message could be sent by telegraph faster than by a messenger sent south on the train. People still didn't grasp the why until criminals that previously had used the trains to elude police, began to get caught. Even then, it was still difficult to understand because it stood outside their conceptual framework for understanding/interpreting the world. Not that the crypto stuff actually has wings. I'm emphatically agnostic.
  - M2Ys4U 8y ago
    Why send them tokens and not real money? Especially if one has to spend real money to get the tokens in the first place...
    - notahacker 8y ago
      tbf, the whitepaper is unusually candid in suggesting that journalists on the platform in control of their revenue model will often charge in other currencies instead...
    - anongraddebt 8y ago
      The tokens allow you to do more than simply pay journalists. Something to do with how the Civil constitution is applied and how new newsrooms are created. That's what I gleaned from the whitepaper. I could clearly be wrong about this. Crypto whitepapers, even read charitably, are difficult to interpret and not because what is being said is too complex or something.
- decentralised 8y ago
  I think I can explain the Civil proposition but I'm not associated with the project or Consensys so I may be incorrect / plain wrong. It starts with a Token, a Token Curated Registry and micro-payments / paywalls.. The token has a double purpose: - Allows token holders to vote on which news sources should be in the Civil registry (ie, the trustworthy news sources). - Allows token holders to pay for content using micro-payments to access articles (ie, think Brave browser and Metamask enabled paywalls) The token curated registry is basically a whitelist of news sources/ agencies / newsrooms that are trusted by the token holder community + this organisation dubbed the "Civil Council" (veteran news and media people associated with the project) consider to be trustworthy in their reporting / fact checking etc. The plan seems to be for people who consume media to pay for content deemed to be of high quality by accessing the traditional sites / platforms (ie, unlike FB the plan is not to make a profit by aggregating other people's work in your own platform) with a type of "paywall" that requires a payment in civ tokens. Hope this helps, but if anyone wants to discuss the cryptoeconomics of TCRs and how this primitive can improve the signal/noise ratio in polling or voting systems... let me know :-)
  - spacecowboy17 8y ago
    Thanks! """with a type of "paywall" that requires a payment in civ tokens""" In my opinion this is the most important part. Why would the Civil paywall work better than a non cryptocurrency based paywall? Especially, if they want to accept regular payments as well? They seem to be focusing on the wrong problem - how to govern a registry of news sources. While the real problem is how to get readers to pay for content.
    - decentralised 8y ago
      My pleasure! I think the idea is that people feel that news sources can't be trusted in general so don't want to pay for access to a "news" article in particular. The idea of the registry is then to represent social validation by a community incentivised by their own selfish best interests (ie the token would appreciate hence they can resell for a profit...) to be accurate and judicious about their curation efforts. The paywall tech could be something like what SpankChain is doing for cams, for instance. Technically it's an interface that allows token holders to sign a message to access a content URI by placing the tokens in a state-channel contract. If the consumer does "enter" the site, the tokens are deduced, otherwise they remain available for future use. Users should be able to pay with fiat but behind the scenes the balance would still be kept in tokens for the payment infrastructure to remain trustless. (caveat: I'm speculating on a solution that doesn't exist yet and I'm not involved in building)
timoth3y 8y ago
A far bigger story would be an ICO-backed company that did not leave all their backers wondering where their money is. Aside from the startups selling tools and services to the crypto ecosystem itself, does anyone know of an ICO-backed project that has turned into a successful company?
- Nuzzerino 8y ago
  You say that as if the projects are all run by greedy grubby fraudsters. While that is often the case, there are plenty out there who are working day and night on a bare bones income, to keep their projects alive through the market crash. Sometimes, that involves pivoting from a head-in-the-clouds decentralized pipe dream in favor of a viable business, even with customers from outside the industry. Yes, even they are capable of that. Astonishing!
  - timoth3y 8y ago
    > You say that as if the projects are all run by greedy grubby fraudsters I think you are reading in something that is not there. I have several friends who have run successful ICOs and they all sincerely believe in their vision and all are working very hard. However, the fact that yet another an ICO-backed token economy has not developed as pitched is not really news. My point was that it would be news if a token economy actually did develop as pitched. It's an observation. It's not a judgment about the people working on the projects.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - Nuzzerino 8y ago
      Fair enough, I can agree with that. Hopefully 2019 will bring such news.
- chrisco255 8y ago
  ETH itself, OMG, QTUM, BAT, Augur, etc. Although "successful" is a bit difficult to determine. Did these projects ship? Yes. Will they be successful in the long run? Who knows? That's like picking winners in startup land...there's going to be a lot of strikeouts and a few home runs.
lkdjjdjjjdskjd 8y ago
"the maybe-we’ll-all-get-rich piece" It also implies that maybe you won't get rich. So these journalists didn't get rich. They made a gamble and lost. End of story.
- wyattpeak 8y ago
  There is a world of difference between gambling and being defrauded. I have little idea what will happen here, I don't know any more about the story than presented in the article, but an awful lot of securities sellers have gone to prison despite their customers being aware in theory that their investments might fail. If there's any merit to the claims, this is certainly not the end of the story.
  - lkdjjdjjjdskjd 8y ago
    The actual wording at least in the article is "maybe get rich". That doesn't sound like fraud to me. Fraud would have been to claim "you'll certainly get rich". Journalists must have known they are gambling if they don#t receive real money for their work. If not, they were incredibly naive and perhaps have learned a valuable lesson. Namely, don't rely on empty promises. The article mentions stock options. Stock options also don't always pan out. It rather feels as if these journalists feel entitled somehow to their riches, as they have seen their brothers in tech receive. But they forget to think about the people in tech who toiled in startups that failed and who also received nothing.
    - benj111 8y ago
      It can still be fraud, even if its 'maybe get rich'. If they misrepresent the risks, if they issue more tokens than what they said, that's all fraud. "you may get back less than you put in" isn't carte blanche to fleece the investors.
      - lkdjjdjjjdskjd 8y ago
        Sure - but what indication is there that they made false promises?
lozenge 8y ago
How on earth do they find so many journalists willing to be paid on a promise? I get the psychology of chucking some money on cryptos, but actually working every day for something that isn't money less so.
- lobotryas 8y ago
  Same way you find engineers who’ll take RSUs and work for your startup by accepting less pay for a possible future where those RSUs are worth anything.
  - fapjacks 8y ago
    Yeah, but having worked in tech for almost twenty years, and being completely forthright, I could probably count on one hand the number of people that ended up on the street making any gamble like that. The older I get, the more I think we really take a lot of things in our industry for granted. I mean the kind of salary people would scoff at is still two or three times what most Americans make.
    - lobotryas 8y ago
      Ending up on the street? That’s probably rare. Screwing up their future earning potential and savings requiring years to recover both? That’s pretty common. Also please don’t cheapen engineering jobs. Salaries would he lower if COL was lower in the biggest tech sectors (NYC, SF, Seattle). It would also be lower if engineering work was easy, but turns out plenty of people are either not interested or unable to hack it.
      - fapjacks 8y ago
        I'm really not sure where in my post you get that I'm cheapening engineering jobs. On the contrary, perhaps my post is worth another read. We are paid substantially more than almost every other industry specifically because engineering jobs are not something most folks out in the work force are capable of performing. This, despite our industry also being accessible when held up against the "traditional" most-highly-paid industries (e.g. medicine, law, etc.). And even more exceptional is that you can do equally well with or without a formal education in it, depending on your personality and technical capacity. And what you call "screwing up future earning potential and savings" is still light years ahead of what most people in the global workforce are thinking about. The vast majority of Americans will never be able to consider plans for a six-figure salary, but this is just par for the course in most disciplines and job titles in our industry no matter where you live. If you sit in front of a computer all day and your job has something to do with turning business processes into computer automation, you can expect to break that barrier at some point in your career, even if you're just okay at your job. In fact, it's actually a symptom of some kind of failure on an individual's part (career path, negotiation, perhaps external circumstances) if you don't break the six-figure barrier.
tokyodude 8y ago
The zigzag podcast was one of the things supposedly going to be funded by Civil. 90% of it was about if Civil was going to work and all the issues they were running into. It was supposed to but help fund them and also be the way people would influence the topics. I stopped listening to it before Civil failed its ICO so I have no idea what their plans are now. https://zigzagpod.com/ https://zigzagpod.com/
- dyeje 8y ago
  Big 99pi fan, but did not enjoy the zigzag guest episodes. Listening to them talk about crypto and startup finances was cringey.
benj111 8y ago
I'm confused. The journalists have been paid their tokens, so theres already tokens in circulation, why does it require civil to make a sale? Surely that's worse from the journalists point of view because it increases supply of the tokens. Surely it is also worse for readers. I want to support journalists by buying their tokens, not support Civil by buying theirs. But that just brings up more questions. The flow of tokens in one way. I give money to journalists to buy their tokens. What do I do with my tokens now? Do I give them back to journalists, maybe in payment for articles???
- Nursie 8y ago
  The journalists were promised massive gains in token value, repeatedly and specifically, from the article I read. They were told this would be achieved with a public sale, ICO-style, which didn't happen. The journos were relying on that to pay them. When the public sale and hype didn't happen, they were out of pocket. I presume yes, that you use the tokens to pay for articles, and also that there is a speculative market in the tokens, like with other cryptocurrencies - i.e. it's all a gamble.
- PeterisP 8y ago
  "The journalists have been paid their tokens" - have they? As far as I understand from the article, the journalists have not received any tokens, as the creation and distribution of the tokens was to be done after the initial sale, which failed, so the creation of these tokens was postponed, so they have been promised a set number of tokens that don't exist yet.
  - benj111 8y ago
    That may be. I don't know. Still the stated problem of there being no token sale seems to be missing the point. The journalists have already earned their tokens and could sell them themselves, when they receive them. I don't really see why civil needs to sell any in this situation. Isn't the whole point of 'the blockchain' to avoid having to trust 3rd parties.
sparkzilla 8y ago
Civil's main problem is that the market for "quality news" is small. The token actually makes the situation worse: it makes it harder for people to pay for a niche product, and it has (so far) made it harder for them to fundraise.

65 points by danso 8y ago

I read the Civil white paper linked from the article hoping to see a description of a new business model for journalists and publishers but only found how they will use CVL tokens to vote on who is in the whitelist. Can someone please explain how/why readers would pay for the content? That's the important part, isn't it?

anongraddebt 8y ago
FWIW, I still have close to no idea what DLT/Crypto/Decentralization/etc. even is, or rather is for. Assuming the tech actually has wings we won't really understand the how and why until certain use cases come to dominate. Even then, it can be difficult. After Western Union was founded (19th century), people would walk into WU offices to send money over the telegraph line and say things like, "Where can I see the little man who runs along the wire carrying the money?" Having said that, here's my explanation: How? Readers can pay newsrooms for content using a debit/credit card or purchasing and sending CVL to the newsroom. Why? Because they like the pieces coming out of a set of newsrooms and want access to that type of content. Effectively, journalists end up running their own newspaper, but that newspaper is a subsidiary of a parent company that is hands-off for content but not for governance (which just means it's not totally hands-off for content). This newspaper would compete against other subsidiaries of the parent, and would have a certain percentage vote on what other subsidaries exist. Moreover, journalists would often be paid by selling their stock options in the parent. ---- Obviously, the hypothesis here is that such a direct connection between journalist and reader will lead to higher-quality content then can be found at the MSM rags. I'm agnostic about whether that is the case.
- riffraff 8y ago
  Couldn't journalists always run their own newspaper? In Italy we had cooperatives running newspapers and magazines as long as I can remember, doesn't this happen elsewhere? I _think_ the advantage of Civil might be that you get to pay directly a journalist rather than the group, but I'm not sure it's a big improvement.
  - notahacker 8y ago
    To pay journalists directly there are platforms where you can already pay directly for the article (Blendle), plenty of blogging platforms and new media startups than pay journalists at least in part by page impressions/revenues, and online tipjars. Whether these clickbait factor or article quality depends on the journalist and audience as well as the model, but all of these approaches seem much closer to the ideal of helping journalists earn by the popularity of their output than a startup paying part of journalists' salary in tokens whose main utility according to the white paper appears to be votes to censor/censure other publications for ethics violations.
    - anongraddebt 8y ago
      Blendle is in Beta, which means people are just now coming up with revenue models that only charge customers for the articles they want to read, and allow them to do this across different outlets. The unique (not that this is good or useful) thing about purchasing CVL tokens is that it allows you not only to pay for the articles you want to read, but allows you to vote on how the Civil constitution is applied and thus how existing and newly formed newsrooms are shaped as well as affording you the opportunity to start your own newsroom (I think, not certain about this). My explanation here and my explanation above doesn't in fact explain much of anything. Again, assuming blockchain/[insert buzzword] has wings, we won't really understand much of the how or why until clear use cases begin to dominate. When Morse was trying to convince Congress to fund his endeavors, it was only after the second attempt they just gave him some money to make him go away (though, there were a couple Congressmen who really pushed for supporting him). When Morse had a telegraph line constructed in D.C. and running north (40 miles?), people still didn't understand the how when a message could be sent by telegraph faster than by a messenger sent south on the train. People still didn't grasp the why until criminals that previously had used the trains to elude police, began to get caught. Even then, it was still difficult to understand because it stood outside their conceptual framework for understanding/interpreting the world. Not that the crypto stuff actually has wings. I'm emphatically agnostic.
- M2Ys4U 8y ago
  Why send them tokens and not real money? Especially if one has to spend real money to get the tokens in the first place...
  - notahacker 8y ago
    tbf, the whitepaper is unusually candid in suggesting that journalists on the platform in control of their revenue model will often charge in other currencies instead...
  - anongraddebt 8y ago
    The tokens allow you to do more than simply pay journalists. Something to do with how the Civil constitution is applied and how new newsrooms are created. That's what I gleaned from the whitepaper. I could clearly be wrong about this. Crypto whitepapers, even read charitably, are difficult to interpret and not because what is being said is too complex or something.
decentralised 8y ago
I think I can explain the Civil proposition but I'm not associated with the project or Consensys so I may be incorrect / plain wrong. It starts with a Token, a Token Curated Registry and micro-payments / paywalls.. The token has a double purpose: - Allows token holders to vote on which news sources should be in the Civil registry (ie, the trustworthy news sources). - Allows token holders to pay for content using micro-payments to access articles (ie, think Brave browser and Metamask enabled paywalls) The token curated registry is basically a whitelist of news sources/ agencies / newsrooms that are trusted by the token holder community + this organisation dubbed the "Civil Council" (veteran news and media people associated with the project) consider to be trustworthy in their reporting / fact checking etc. The plan seems to be for people who consume media to pay for content deemed to be of high quality by accessing the traditional sites / platforms (ie, unlike FB the plan is not to make a profit by aggregating other people's work in your own platform) with a type of "paywall" that requires a payment in civ tokens. Hope this helps, but if anyone wants to discuss the cryptoeconomics of TCRs and how this primitive can improve the signal/noise ratio in polling or voting systems... let me know :-)
- spacecowboy17 8y ago
  Thanks! """with a type of "paywall" that requires a payment in civ tokens""" In my opinion this is the most important part. Why would the Civil paywall work better than a non cryptocurrency based paywall? Especially, if they want to accept regular payments as well? They seem to be focusing on the wrong problem - how to govern a registry of news sources. While the real problem is how to get readers to pay for content.
  - decentralised 8y ago
    My pleasure! I think the idea is that people feel that news sources can't be trusted in general so don't want to pay for access to a "news" article in particular. The idea of the registry is then to represent social validation by a community incentivised by their own selfish best interests (ie the token would appreciate hence they can resell for a profit...) to be accurate and judicious about their curation efforts. The paywall tech could be something like what SpankChain is doing for cams, for instance. Technically it's an interface that allows token holders to sign a message to access a content URI by placing the tokens in a state-channel contract. If the consumer does "enter" the site, the tokens are deduced, otherwise they remain available for future use. Users should be able to pay with fiat but behind the scenes the balance would still be kept in tokens for the payment infrastructure to remain trustless. (caveat: I'm speculating on a solution that doesn't exist yet and I'm not involved in building)

timoth3y 8y ago

A far bigger story would be an ICO-backed company that did not leave all their backers wondering where their money is. Aside from the startups selling tools and services to the crypto ecosystem itself, does anyone know of an ICO-backed project that has turned into a successful company?

Nuzzerino 8y ago
You say that as if the projects are all run by greedy grubby fraudsters. While that is often the case, there are plenty out there who are working day and night on a bare bones income, to keep their projects alive through the market crash. Sometimes, that involves pivoting from a head-in-the-clouds decentralized pipe dream in favor of a viable business, even with customers from outside the industry. Yes, even they are capable of that. Astonishing!
- timoth3y 8y ago
  > You say that as if the projects are all run by greedy grubby fraudsters I think you are reading in something that is not there. I have several friends who have run successful ICOs and they all sincerely believe in their vision and all are working very hard. However, the fact that yet another an ICO-backed token economy has not developed as pitched is not really news. My point was that it would be news if a token economy actually did develop as pitched. It's an observation. It's not a judgment about the people working on the projects.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - Nuzzerino 8y ago
    Fair enough, I can agree with that. Hopefully 2019 will bring such news.
chrisco255 8y ago
ETH itself, OMG, QTUM, BAT, Augur, etc. Although "successful" is a bit difficult to determine. Did these projects ship? Yes. Will they be successful in the long run? Who knows? That's like picking winners in startup land...there's going to be a lot of strikeouts and a few home runs.

lkdjjdjjjdskjd 8y ago

"the maybe-we’ll-all-get-rich piece" It also implies that maybe you won't get rich. So these journalists didn't get rich. They made a gamble and lost. End of story.

wyattpeak 8y ago
There is a world of difference between gambling and being defrauded. I have little idea what will happen here, I don't know any more about the story than presented in the article, but an awful lot of securities sellers have gone to prison despite their customers being aware in theory that their investments might fail. If there's any merit to the claims, this is certainly not the end of the story.
- lkdjjdjjjdskjd 8y ago
  The actual wording at least in the article is "maybe get rich". That doesn't sound like fraud to me. Fraud would have been to claim "you'll certainly get rich". Journalists must have known they are gambling if they don#t receive real money for their work. If not, they were incredibly naive and perhaps have learned a valuable lesson. Namely, don't rely on empty promises. The article mentions stock options. Stock options also don't always pan out. It rather feels as if these journalists feel entitled somehow to their riches, as they have seen their brothers in tech receive. But they forget to think about the people in tech who toiled in startups that failed and who also received nothing.
  - benj111 8y ago
    It can still be fraud, even if its 'maybe get rich'. If they misrepresent the risks, if they issue more tokens than what they said, that's all fraud. "you may get back less than you put in" isn't carte blanche to fleece the investors.
    - lkdjjdjjjdskjd 8y ago
      Sure - but what indication is there that they made false promises?

lozenge 8y ago

How on earth do they find so many journalists willing to be paid on a promise? I get the psychology of chucking some money on cryptos, but actually working every day for something that isn't money less so.

lobotryas 8y ago
Same way you find engineers who’ll take RSUs and work for your startup by accepting less pay for a possible future where those RSUs are worth anything.
- fapjacks 8y ago
  Yeah, but having worked in tech for almost twenty years, and being completely forthright, I could probably count on one hand the number of people that ended up on the street making any gamble like that. The older I get, the more I think we really take a lot of things in our industry for granted. I mean the kind of salary people would scoff at is still two or three times what most Americans make.
  - lobotryas 8y ago
    Ending up on the street? That’s probably rare. Screwing up their future earning potential and savings requiring years to recover both? That’s pretty common. Also please don’t cheapen engineering jobs. Salaries would he lower if COL was lower in the biggest tech sectors (NYC, SF, Seattle). It would also be lower if engineering work was easy, but turns out plenty of people are either not interested or unable to hack it.
    - fapjacks 8y ago
      I'm really not sure where in my post you get that I'm cheapening engineering jobs. On the contrary, perhaps my post is worth another read. We are paid substantially more than almost every other industry specifically because engineering jobs are not something most folks out in the work force are capable of performing. This, despite our industry also being accessible when held up against the "traditional" most-highly-paid industries (e.g. medicine, law, etc.). And even more exceptional is that you can do equally well with or without a formal education in it, depending on your personality and technical capacity. And what you call "screwing up future earning potential and savings" is still light years ahead of what most people in the global workforce are thinking about. The vast majority of Americans will never be able to consider plans for a six-figure salary, but this is just par for the course in most disciplines and job titles in our industry no matter where you live. If you sit in front of a computer all day and your job has something to do with turning business processes into computer automation, you can expect to break that barrier at some point in your career, even if you're just okay at your job. In fact, it's actually a symptom of some kind of failure on an individual's part (career path, negotiation, perhaps external circumstances) if you don't break the six-figure barrier.

tokyodude 8y ago

The zigzag podcast was one of the things supposedly going to be funded by Civil. 90% of it was about if Civil was going to work and all the issues they were running into. It was supposed to but help fund them and also be the way people would influence the topics. I stopped listening to it before Civil failed its ICO so I have no idea what their plans are now. https://zigzagpod.com/ https://zigzagpod.com/

dyeje 8y ago
Big 99pi fan, but did not enjoy the zigzag guest episodes. Listening to them talk about crypto and startup finances was cringey.

benj111 8y ago

I'm confused. The journalists have been paid their tokens, so theres already tokens in circulation, why does it require civil to make a sale? Surely that's worse from the journalists point of view because it increases supply of the tokens. Surely it is also worse for readers. I want to support journalists by buying their tokens, not support Civil by buying theirs. But that just brings up more questions. The flow of tokens in one way. I give money to journalists to buy their tokens. What do I do with my tokens now? Do I give them back to journalists, maybe in payment for articles???

Nursie 8y ago
The journalists were promised massive gains in token value, repeatedly and specifically, from the article I read. They were told this would be achieved with a public sale, ICO-style, which didn't happen. The journos were relying on that to pay them. When the public sale and hype didn't happen, they were out of pocket. I presume yes, that you use the tokens to pay for articles, and also that there is a speculative market in the tokens, like with other cryptocurrencies - i.e. it's all a gamble.
PeterisP 8y ago
"The journalists have been paid their tokens" - have they? As far as I understand from the article, the journalists have not received any tokens, as the creation and distribution of the tokens was to be done after the initial sale, which failed, so the creation of these tokens was postponed, so they have been promised a set number of tokens that don't exist yet.
- benj111 8y ago
  That may be. I don't know. Still the stated problem of there being no token sale seems to be missing the point. The journalists have already earned their tokens and could sell them themselves, when they receive them. I don't really see why civil needs to sell any in this situation. Isn't the whole point of 'the blockchain' to avoid having to trust 3rd parties.

sparkzilla 8y ago

Civil's main problem is that the market for "quality news" is small. The token actually makes the situation worse: it makes it harder for people to pay for a niche product, and it has (so far) made it harder for them to fundraise.