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While zero-sum games are rare in economics, this is a (sub-)zero-sum game. There is no obvious reason why the crowd spending more time on Reddit should be more

While zero-sum games are rare in economics, this is a (sub-)zero-sum game. There is no obvious reason why the crowd spending more time on Reddit should be more deserving than anyone else. In fact there are probably plenty of activities generally considered beneficial for society, such as childcare or volunteering, that are negatively correlated with time spend on Reddit. So it’s all just redistributing wealth, burning a bunch of it in the process, and rewarding those with early enthusiasm for the idea of turning a lot of money into a CO_2 producing lottery.

hanniabu 5y ago
> There is no obvious reason why the crowd spending more time on Reddit should be more deserving than anyone else. You don't need to be on reddit. Also you can apply this logic to many things and it will sound good to people that have a bone to pick but will be flawed to everyone else analyzing it objectively.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  The objective analysis is that it's an incredibly slow database with features roughly nobody needs or cares about in reality - a solution on a decade long quest for a problem. Bitcoin is probably the least efficient system humanity has ever conceived of let alone reduced to practice at scale. It's an anti-efficient anarchocapitalist game of musical chairs with the safeties off whose sole job is to redistribute wealth from late entrants to early entrants. It yields no value, and once you factor in the miners, produces negative value from the perspective of the other participants. It's an MLM scheme for the tech crowd. 125X leveraged Herbalife meets a mob casino. What I suspect the parent was saying is that the modern economic system for all its flaws rewards founders and early builders of businesses who create value for customers, not a random selection of ancaps on Reddit in 2010 who created a negative-sum MLM. It's a perversion - totally unjustifiable wealth inequality. At least you can point to Tim Cook and go, yeah, that guy created value. Giancarlo Devasini? Paolo Ardoino? Pomp? The Winkelvii? Really? Those guys? You sure?
imtringued 5y ago
>While zero-sum games are rare in economics, this is a (sub-)zero-sum game. A lot of the positive sum games only reward society collectively if it is cooperative and punishes society if it is competitive. Pretty much every time there is a balance A = B people in a competitive society will try to increase A without increasing B because that is where they derive their individual benefit. Subsequently someone else will have to decrease their A because B stayed the same and A = B is always true for the entire economy therefore A must stay the same and we get a zero sum game that didn't have to be one. This generally happens when A is considered good and B is considered bad by society. Here are some examples: income = spending, savings = investments, deposits = debts, produced goods = consumed goods, benefit of externality = cost of externality Just try to convince people that both A and B are equally important. You'll fail every single time.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  It’s not at all clear to me that society wide the total benefit of externality is equal to the total cost.

hanniabu 5y ago

> There is no obvious reason why the crowd spending more time on Reddit should be more deserving than anyone else. You don't need to be on reddit. Also you can apply this logic to many things and it will sound good to people that have a bone to pick but will be flawed to everyone else analyzing it objectively.

arcticbull 5y ago
The objective analysis is that it's an incredibly slow database with features roughly nobody needs or cares about in reality - a solution on a decade long quest for a problem. Bitcoin is probably the least efficient system humanity has ever conceived of let alone reduced to practice at scale. It's an anti-efficient anarchocapitalist game of musical chairs with the safeties off whose sole job is to redistribute wealth from late entrants to early entrants. It yields no value, and once you factor in the miners, produces negative value from the perspective of the other participants. It's an MLM scheme for the tech crowd. 125X leveraged Herbalife meets a mob casino. What I suspect the parent was saying is that the modern economic system for all its flaws rewards founders and early builders of businesses who create value for customers, not a random selection of ancaps on Reddit in 2010 who created a negative-sum MLM. It's a perversion - totally unjustifiable wealth inequality. At least you can point to Tim Cook and go, yeah, that guy created value. Giancarlo Devasini? Paolo Ardoino? Pomp? The Winkelvii? Really? Those guys? You sure?

imtringued 5y ago

>While zero-sum games are rare in economics, this is a (sub-)zero-sum game. A lot of the positive sum games only reward society collectively if it is cooperative and punishes society if it is competitive. Pretty much every time there is a balance A = B people in a competitive society will try to increase A without increasing B because that is where they derive their individual benefit. Subsequently someone else will have to decrease their A because B stayed the same and A = B is always true for the entire economy therefore A must stay the same and we get a zero sum game that didn't have to be one. This generally happens when A is considered good and B is considered bad by society. Here are some examples: income = spending, savings = investments, deposits = debts, produced goods = consumed goods, benefit of externality = cost of externality Just try to convince people that both A and B are equally important. You'll fail every single time.

sokoloff 5y ago
It’s not at all clear to me that society wide the total benefit of externality is equal to the total cost.