10 ms·
In 2008 an app charging $1,000 that told people you were rich was censored. In 2021 we celebrate non-fungible tokens, 6-figure digital basketball cards and mill
by CapriciousCptl 6y ago
In 2008 an app charging $1,000 that told people you were rich was censored. In 2021 we celebrate non-fungible tokens, 6-figure digital basketball cards and million dollar memes.
- 0_____0 6y agowho is this 'we' you speak of
- alsetmusic 6y ago> In 2008 an app charging $1,000 that told people you were rich was censored. That’s not censorship. It’s protecting customers from being duped into buying something they don’t understand and getting ripped off. TFA quotes an app review where someone felt scammed. The dev is quoted as saying he didn’t want people to buy it by accident and then feel cheated: > "I don't want to collect money from people who did this by accident and I am glad that Apple returned the money for two orders," Heinrich said. It sounds like he had good intent, was following the rules. It still wasn’t a good app to be in the App Store.
- blunte 6y agoIf someone chooses to drop 1k to buy any app, one must assume they made some consideration before buying. Conversely, there are countless free apps (Facebook-owned included) which extract far more value than 1,000usd from their users... and the users are completely unaware because the price of the app didn't give them pause.
- kube-system 6y agoThat might be true, if we assume the buyers are adults who are using their own phone and paying with their own money. I don't think there were many spending controls at the time.
- blunte 6y agoprobably not; but the early adopters of that technology were probably upper class people who could survive with and deal with a financial snafu of 1000$. what really got people (and apple) worked up was the idea that someone could create a "nothing" and make a lot of money with that. now we laugh because we can all create crypto tokens and sell them to naive investors.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago> the early adopters of that technology were probably upper class people who could survive with and deal with a financial snafu of 1000$ While there's undoubtedly an intersection between the set "tech geeks who want to be early adapters" and "people for whom losing $1K is no big deal", they're not identical. Remember that the original iPhone was $399[1]; losing 2.5x the cost of the phone to somebody's dumb software joke would not have just been an "oopsie, I guess we'll have to get a slightly cheaper jar of caviar for afternoon tea, Lovey" moment for a lot of us. [1]: Technically, it was $599 for the 8GB model, but that initial price only lasted 3 months, and early buyers got a $100 credit in partial offset.
- 2muchcoffeeman 6y ago> If someone chooses to drop 1k to buy any app, one must assume they made some consideration before buying. The first iPhone was released in 2007. In 2008 people had only just begun writing apps and publishing to the app store. It's probably fair to say that people were still finding their way around the app store and some people were just curious. Kids have sometimes ended up dropping thousands of dollars on stupid in-app purchases in games. I'm pretty sure they spent zero time considering the consequences. Generally I think consumer protections are a good thing.
- SllX 6y agoApp Store launch was late 2008, something like 15 months after the iPhone launched, which is to reinforce your point. At the time the ground rules were not at all well established, only what was in that first policy document developers had to sign and Apple hadn’t yet accounted for any of the edge cases developers would come to discover. App Store descriptions were also more prominent at launch than they are today. The developer did nothing to obfuscate what it was nor to try and cheat anyone. The price was there, the description was there. It was exactly what he advertised.
- interpol_p 6y agoBut if they didn't make any considerations before buying, we should still encourage them to return the app and reverse the transaction There's no point punishing people for accidentally spending money on a digital product they don't want when the tech involved to reverse that decision is available, ready to use, and won't hurt any parties involved
- Lammy 6y ago> It still wasn’t a good app to be in the App Store. aka it was bad PR for Apple, so it was removed.
- chrischen 6y agoNot sure if duping would be a good reason. Most people would easily be able to get a refund from the App store.
- adfjalkfja 6y agogot to love the $200,000 csgo weapon skins too
- blunte 6y agocough money laundering
- foobar33333 6y agoHow does this work via csgo skins? Genuinely curios how it works.
- blunte 6y agoI can't speak for cargo skins specifically, but when some "asset" sells for an abnormally high price, there is usually something else going on. It's like when a condo which would normally be worth 200k sells for 380k, it can be a way to turn dirty money into a "reasonable" sale. Sure the seller has to pay taxes and such on it, but if there's no strict know-your-customer requirement, you can accept money from any source. The usual arrangement is that the seller inflates their price a lot, and then the seller provides the product plus a kickback to the person who wants to launder the money. Now the launderer has a real, valid asset, plus optionally some of the overpaid amount in cash. As long as the buyer reports the income and pays taxes, now the seller has laundered the money. I am oversimplifying somewhat, but that's the idea. A lot of properties have been sold by a certain high profile American politician that way in the last decade. That's a fascinating place to start studying the scheme.
- robkop 6y agoCSGO skins and steam keys work in similar ways, the scheme generally looks like this (or atleast it used to, haven't looked in a few years). 1. Buy/ obtain stolen credit card details. 2. Buy CSGO skins / Purchase steam game as a gift with stolen CC. 3. Sell skins/ game keys through a 3rd party, online marketplace. 4. Collect profits. Congratulation, you've converted dirty money (used to buy stolen CCs) and potentially dirty money (charges put on stolen CCs) in clean, washed money! Of course you can do this scheme without the stolen CCs (just buy steam games/ skins) but the CCs have a nice multiplicative effect and they add more obfuscation.
- zxcvbn4038 6y agoWe did that in 2008 also, I think the only reason Apple pulled that app is they expected the sales to be charged back and they were wanting to avoid the possible media circus going on around it. I am betting that in 2021 the story might have a different ending. If I wanted to have a service that would certify someone uber wealthy or old money and display an icon, I bet it could be done. Nothing stops people from gold plating their iPhones or putting it in a jewel encrusted case - if you drop it better then gems take the blow then your phone, right? I’ve heard stories of überrich kids dropping $36k so they can rule on Clash of Clans, and grade school kids blowing their college funds on smurfberries to get ahead in whatever game uses those, and for the most part Apple is happy to let that happen but will step in with refunds to head off any media frenzy. Has anyone tried to play Blackjack on an iPhone recently? It is almost impossible to find an app that lets you play any casino games without -buying chips- to play. Who is spending $99.99, $19.99, or $9.99 of real money to gamble X amount of fake money with real reward except being on a scoreboard for a day? If you just want to play just for fun you have to go onto web sites.
- the_local_host 6y ago> If I wanted to have a service that would certify someone uber wealthy or old money and display an icon, I bet it could be done. $1000 isn't enough to charge to establish that someone is meaningfully wealthy; the app should have cost $10 million.
- shireboy 6y agoOverpriced collectibles were around in 2008 and well before. Beanie Babies anyone? Tulips? A fool and his money are soon parted. Only difference here is “digital”.
- blunte 6y agoThe tulip reference is worn out and simply not fitting with the modern scenarios it is compared to. In the 1600s, if you bought anything that didn't come from your village or region, that was a big deal. Tulips were an exotic distant foreign luxury (as frankly any flower would be if you could not grow it in your garden already). People who bought them were not average, they were privileged and wealthy. Surely no peasant was duped into investing their half-month's worth life savings into tulip futures. Also, Amsterdam was the first stock and commodities exchange in the world as far a we know (or at least in the west, as written by westerners). So peculiar investments should have been more likely. Ironically, we now live in a world where non-physical creations with non-physical provenance fetch huge sums because... ? (because there is a lot of excess wealth accumulated by a few people who can piss it away without consequence, or because they can buy it with un-tax-reported currency).
- megameter 6y agoI think the key difference is exactly what you're getting at - there isn't a physical scarcity to be had here, so a digital token primarily expresses speculative value by default. Speculation always comes and goes with the hype of a bubble. Lasting value beyond speculation appears when there is use value. But how do you apply a use value to a token? Well, you can't do it by locking down the nominally encoded asset - that's just a sticker pasted on it. These things do not gatekeep well. The use value comes from someone declaring that the bearer of the token is now entitled to something - a song, a poem, a noble rank. Anyone can do that for any token at any time. That is a thing that a unique, uncensored digital asset could be very relevant towards. So the interesting part has not really come yet.
- giaset 6y agoI was one of the buyers of the $208k LeBron, and we bought it because it was cool, not because we wanted to tell people we were rich ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- m463 6y agoHey, some startup stock options end up being worth something. :)
- chickenmonkey 6y agoI'm curious - what do you mean by million dollar memes?
- Consultant32452 6y agoI assumed doge coin.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago“Censored”