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> Andreessen Horowitz’s cryptocurrency fund made one of its largest investments to date in Sky Mavis, leading a $152m financing that valued the company at $3bn.

> Andreessen Horowitz’s cryptocurrency fund made one of its largest investments to date in Sky Mavis, leading a $152m financing that valued the company at $3bn. > Sky Mavis, which takes a 4.5 per cent cut of transactions within the game, has made about $1.2bn of revenues I mean, say what you want about this being a scam, ponzi scheme, etc. That is some real cash. I saw this game popping up on Twitch a few months ago and immediately realized it was some kind of crypto scheme. I thought it was gambling. The fact that this is generating billions of revenue and attracting hundreds of millions of brand-name financing amazes me. The game was released in 2018, about 3 years ago. It really makes me reconsider the group-think on hacker news. To write off this activity as a scam or criminal seems to be missing a bigger picture that we don't quite understand yet.

smoldesu 5y ago
Just because something makes a lot of money doesn't make it ethical.
- adnzzzzZ 5y ago
  It's way more ethical for people across the world, primarily in 3rd world countries, to be able to share in the success of a company via its tokens than just being mined for data so some asshole in San Francisco can be paid 10 million dollars a month in rent.
  - stathibus 5y ago
    Ponzi schemes don't become ethical when they temporarily enrich people who are lower on the economic totem pole. I would argue they actually become less ethical.
    - adnzzzzZ 5y ago
      People sharing in the success of a new company is not a ponzi scheme. If a company is started from nothing, is providing value, and early adopters are paid with tokens as a way to jump start the business the tokens are simply being used to extract future value into the present. In some cases there's no actual value in the future because the product isn't good, but that doesn't make it a ponzi scheme, just a poor business.
      - hobs 5y ago
        "Providing value" is doing some serious heavy lifting in that sentence - MLM/Ponzi schemes can definitely argue they "provide value" and its telling that its your metric for not being a con. In a traditional ponzi scheme many people get paid, until the last people are left holding the bag.
        adnzzzzZ 5y ago
        As a video game maker myself I'd say that video games generally provide value. If this particular video game provides as much value as its valued at is not for me to decide, but for the people who play it and invest in it.
        smoldesu 5y ago
        "As a tupperware party host myself, I'd say that tupperware generally provides value. If this particular piece of plastic provides as much value as it's valued isn't for me to decide, but the friends and family I invite to the party." Doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it?
        meheleventyone 5y ago
        What if the only value is speculation or rent seeking on people that are poor? It’s already the case that the pay to earn economy crashed deeply. You keep saying value but without saying what that value actually is. Until a Ponzi scheme crashes everyone in it thinks it’s providing value after all. As a videogame maker myself I’d rather give my games away for free than setup the kind of economic trap Axie has.
        zenplant 5y ago
        Axie may have done it wrong, but the concept of in game currency has been shown to be wildly lucrative in the past. Let's take Valve as an example. You get a CS:GO knife you're sometimes able to sell that for a large chunk of money. Valve takes a gigantic cut of any of those transactions, and then the money can only be used to buy further products from them. Is that more ethical than what Axie is doing? Wouldn't it be neat if instead of "valve fun bucks" it were real world money that players could pay their rent with? If someone does this correctly it could end up being a very good thing IMO.
  - sailingparrot 5y ago
    There is no “success of the company that you can share in”. This is a zero sum game: as long as more people buy tokens to get in the game, then it continue going up, and every one feels like they are getting richer. But anyone selling their tokens is taking money out of the system, from all the players. If everyone sell their tokens, there will be exactly the same amount of money that comes out than that went in, just redistributed differently amongst the players, some will lose some will win. That’s what makes it a Ponzi scheme. The real winners here are the company behind Axie and the people like the guy from the article that just take money out of the system (from other players) on a regular basis, they are guaranteed to get more out. That's where the real success of the company happens, and you have no mechanism to get a share of that success unless you are an actual investor in $ of that company. In that story, there are no external consumers that are willingly paying money to the company in exchange for some good or service, that would make the players richer.
    - adnzzzzZ 5y ago
      Investors also buy tokens because they think it will go up, not only people playing the game. Yes, people will lose if it goes down, but that's what it's like with everything. Some players will win, some players will lose, some investors will win, some investors will lose. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. This is how the world works. If people think the project has value then it will go up in value and if they don't then it won't. I don't understand why people make it so complicated and try to imply that there's anything wrong with this.
      - sailingparrot 5y ago
        Because that's actually not how the world works. With traditional company, some consumers are paying it for a service. Apple is making 300B$ a year because a lot of people are willing to partake large amount of money in exchange for some good that they (think they) need such as a laptop or a phone. The consumers have no expectation of getting that money back later, it's a trade. If you think Apple is a good company and will be more successful in the future, you can decide to invest it in, and you buy a share of that company to some other investor against cash. In theory, it's possible for every single investor of Apple to make more money than what they paid for through dividends: As long as Apple keeps making products that people are willing to pay for, it will make money, and investors get a chunk of that money. Here value is created by work happening in the entire value chain needed to produce the good. Because if you had to make your laptop yourself with a pickaxe, it would be quite inconvenient. Also, if everyone suddenly decides to dump all their Apple stock, it will go down a lot, but not to zero, because the company as an actual intrisinc value: they have hundreds of billions of $ in cash in their war chest, have a lot of valuable physical things, and will continue to make hundreds of billions every year no matter what people on the stock market think. Overall it's not a zero sum game, because consumers are providing an external source of cash to the investors. Now, the more a stock is overbought, the closer it becomes to zero sum. Tesla for example, if it fails to realise the bright future that everyone is betting on, then it will get ugly as it's current stock value is disconnected from it's current intrinsinc value. Axie is very different, the price of the token only rise because of investors (here players), there is no external source of money going in that could make everyone richer. It's a bunch of people sitting in circle around a pile of cash with the promise that they will be able to take a random piece of the pile later on. And if you want to be able to sit with them, you first have to put cash on the pile yourself. Looking at the pile of cash getting bigger and bigger is exciting, but you will have to fight everyone else to get more than you put in. Oh and while you are sitting there waiting for the pile to get bigger, the people that organise the event are shovelling money out. All (most?) crypto games today are zero sum. However it's possible in the future that they may not be. I am thinking specifically about the ones that brand themselves as "metaverse". If the game in itself is interesting enough that people are engaging with it for a long time, then companies will want to start advertising in it, and if shares of that revenue are reinvested in the in-game economy and not just entirely taken by the company behind the game, that could be an example of external influx of money.
  - hogFeast 5y ago
    It takes an extraordinary level of ignorance about basic elements of how business works (which I am sure the investors in this company have in spades) to think this makes sense. In order for someone to make money for something, there has to be an activity that generates a cashflow. There is no cash flow being generated, there is no outside money, what value are these people creating for other people? If you are playing a game to make money, you have to be providing some kind of value. So far, this company has convinced people to put money in, the rest of the money is probably coming from investors...there is no other money (and btw, the people playing the game are clearly much smarter than Andressen & Partners, they are taking out whatever isn't nailed down and making a swift exit). If you look at poker, it is obvious why some people are paid to play that game: they provide liquidity, they provide someone to gamble with, they provide the capital to take risk. It is the same with a bookmaker. This example has none of these characteristics because there is no outside money (the quote from a partner at Andressen's firm is incredible, I worked in fund management, I have seen some incompetent people, people who are truly clueless...what we are seeing in VC is unlike anything that has occurred in financial culture since the 20s). This reminds me of Football Index: the details of this are complex but they essentially paid people to play a game, there was no outside money, investors didn't understand this, management didn't fully understand this, they went bankrupt earlier this year taking down tens of millions in client money (no-one who plays this games understand that they are investing in an OTC product secured against the developer, it is nothing to do with the underlying game).
    - zenplant 5y ago
      The outside money is the value people are willing to pay for in game stuff. If it's a good enough / popular enough game that ends up being billions of dollars. Ask Riot games how well you can do with just cosmetic items that do absolutely nothing but make your character model slightly different. Their net worth is hovering around 25 billion these days, mostly off of things you assume can provide no cash flow.
- whykun 5y ago
  why do you think this is unethical?
enterthecrypt 5y ago
> To write off this activity as a scam or criminal seems to be missing a bigger picture that we don't quite understand yet. That’s how a lot of scams fly under the radar, _it’s not a scam, you just don’t get it_. Outside of cryptocurrency you can look at Theranos, it raised close to a billion dollars and was fraud from top to bottom. Within the cryptocurrency world you can look at Tether. A few hundred million in funding from cryptocurrency investors means nothing when it comes to credibility.
- vmception 5y ago
  Yeah but they clearly said revenues after the funding, which far eclipse the funding, which moves this far beyond any comparison to Theranos or high flying companies you might actually respect
Hippocrates 5y ago
> It really makes me reconsider the group-think on hacker news. This is pretty bad when it comes to crypto topics. A lot of the crypto ecosystem is toxic and gross. Schemes, scams, marketing fluff, and meme bro attitudes galore. BUT, if you can bear to pay attention and cut through the noise, there are some pretty incredible innovations occurring in crypto, gaming, and defi. HN is very dismissive on these topics. It feels to me this community dates itself when crypto topics come up, reminding me more of my grandma at thanksgiving than young innovative technophiles.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  If your developer-first finance platform fails to capture the interest of developers, I daresay you've built the wrong product.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  > HN is very dismissive on these topics. In general, when ever crypto topics come up, the pro-crypto side tends to do a pretty terrible job of establishing that there are "some pretty incredible innovations occurring in crypto, gaming, and defi." Perhaps you could list some and change our minds? I just saw on Twitter how some one is minting NFTs using the art of a deceased artist and their family is scrambling to figure out how to stop it. There are a lot of shitty things happening in this space.
  - dageshi 5y ago
    I'm not involved in nor have I ever bought anything crypto related. But I'll say this for it, it's the most interesting new tech to hit the internet in the past couple decades. Everything else has been pretty incremental over that time period, crypto is something really new and I suspect that's why its adherents are so obsessed by it.
    - Ensorceled 5y ago
      VR was pretty hyped a few years ago. Edit: Also, what exciting things are you seeing? Almost everything I see is either proposing smart contracts for intractable problems, proposing defi for intractable problems or is a straight up scam.
aunty_helen 5y ago
There's 20 search results on this page at this moment for ponzi. HN missed the boat hard on this and there's a lot of sour grapes. Technical folks have left the marketing chavs alone and they've taken a concept and made it something that we hate. We hate it so much we can't see its potential. If a bunch of people put their money into a constrained system and the price goes up that doesn't automatically make it a ponzi scheme. Edit: 28 search results now
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  the attraction is the skyrocketing value as more people join in for fear of missing out - but once the growth levels off on one particular token, and it’s no longer the fastest growing asset, then the top of the pyramid cashes out and moves on people are calling it out because we’ve literally seen it over and over again
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> To write off this activity as a scam or criminal seems to be missing a bigger picture that we don't quite understand yet. The linked article is literally about the meltdown of the game's unsustainable economy, so maybe the critics understood it better than you're suggesting. The entire Axie Infinity economic model only worked with an ever-increasing number of new players entering the economy. As player growth slows, the model breaks down. This is why people are comparing it to an MLM or other scheme that only works as long as you continue to find more and more people to pull into the system. The money must come from somewhere. If old players are cashing out money put in by new players, the game is up as soon as the supply of new players dries up.
igorkraw 5y ago
This is such a Hackernews take "I thought it was gambling and immoral, but now that it has made billions there might be a point". It can still be gambling and/or a Ponzi schemes. Adding obfuscation over methods to tap into greed and gambling euphoria does not technical innovation make. Cryptocurrency already attracts people who like to gamble and want to get rich quickly, so this is just docking onto a natural pipeline of marks to deploy their scheme. I have nothing but disgust for these types of games, even without the block chain veneer. No hate against the players and we know prohibition doesn't work so not calling for a ban, but at least I can contribute a small bit of social stigma against those that profit by hijacking their customers reward functions like this.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Not every person or every culture has the same sets of values around gambling. Not every ethical philosophy thinks of gambling the same way. In many developed countries gambling is legal and regulated in many forms. Governments around the world spend a lot of energy deciding what the lines for regulating gambling is. When I see ethical takes like this, I feel like I'm missing a _lot_ of context. The Islamic world for example sees consumption of alcohol as a sin. Is this a Christian ethical take? What's the difference between markets and gambling in this ethical philosophy? Islamic states see any form of interest as sin after all.
  - stavros 5y ago
    You can think that gambling is moral. You can think that gambling is immoral. To think that gambling is immoral unless it's earning a lot of money is... something.
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      I mean sure but that's not what GP is saying. GP is purely laying into gambling by itself. > I have nothing but disgust for these types of games, even without the block chain veneer That's where my question arises.
roywiggins 5y ago
I imagine ATM fees on casino floors are pretty lucrative. Skimming a percentage off every transaction to make a profit is what casinos do. Of course it's possible to make money this way. It's not gambling when you're the casino. It's still gambling for everyone else.

smoldesu 5y ago

Just because something makes a lot of money doesn't make it ethical.

adnzzzzZ 5y ago
It's way more ethical for people across the world, primarily in 3rd world countries, to be able to share in the success of a company via its tokens than just being mined for data so some asshole in San Francisco can be paid 10 million dollars a month in rent.
- stathibus 5y ago
  Ponzi schemes don't become ethical when they temporarily enrich people who are lower on the economic totem pole. I would argue they actually become less ethical.
  - adnzzzzZ 5y ago
    People sharing in the success of a new company is not a ponzi scheme. If a company is started from nothing, is providing value, and early adopters are paid with tokens as a way to jump start the business the tokens are simply being used to extract future value into the present. In some cases there's no actual value in the future because the product isn't good, but that doesn't make it a ponzi scheme, just a poor business.
    - hobs 5y ago
      "Providing value" is doing some serious heavy lifting in that sentence - MLM/Ponzi schemes can definitely argue they "provide value" and its telling that its your metric for not being a con. In a traditional ponzi scheme many people get paid, until the last people are left holding the bag.
      - adnzzzzZ 5y ago
        As a video game maker myself I'd say that video games generally provide value. If this particular video game provides as much value as its valued at is not for me to decide, but for the people who play it and invest in it.
        smoldesu 5y ago
        "As a tupperware party host myself, I'd say that tupperware generally provides value. If this particular piece of plastic provides as much value as it's valued isn't for me to decide, but the friends and family I invite to the party." Doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it?
        meheleventyone 5y ago
        What if the only value is speculation or rent seeking on people that are poor? It’s already the case that the pay to earn economy crashed deeply. You keep saying value but without saying what that value actually is. Until a Ponzi scheme crashes everyone in it thinks it’s providing value after all. As a videogame maker myself I’d rather give my games away for free than setup the kind of economic trap Axie has.
        zenplant 5y ago
        Axie may have done it wrong, but the concept of in game currency has been shown to be wildly lucrative in the past. Let's take Valve as an example. You get a CS:GO knife you're sometimes able to sell that for a large chunk of money. Valve takes a gigantic cut of any of those transactions, and then the money can only be used to buy further products from them. Is that more ethical than what Axie is doing? Wouldn't it be neat if instead of "valve fun bucks" it were real world money that players could pay their rent with? If someone does this correctly it could end up being a very good thing IMO.
- sailingparrot 5y ago
  There is no “success of the company that you can share in”. This is a zero sum game: as long as more people buy tokens to get in the game, then it continue going up, and every one feels like they are getting richer. But anyone selling their tokens is taking money out of the system, from all the players. If everyone sell their tokens, there will be exactly the same amount of money that comes out than that went in, just redistributed differently amongst the players, some will lose some will win. That’s what makes it a Ponzi scheme. The real winners here are the company behind Axie and the people like the guy from the article that just take money out of the system (from other players) on a regular basis, they are guaranteed to get more out. That's where the real success of the company happens, and you have no mechanism to get a share of that success unless you are an actual investor in $ of that company. In that story, there are no external consumers that are willingly paying money to the company in exchange for some good or service, that would make the players richer.
  - adnzzzzZ 5y ago
    Investors also buy tokens because they think it will go up, not only people playing the game. Yes, people will lose if it goes down, but that's what it's like with everything. Some players will win, some players will lose, some investors will win, some investors will lose. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. This is how the world works. If people think the project has value then it will go up in value and if they don't then it won't. I don't understand why people make it so complicated and try to imply that there's anything wrong with this.
    - sailingparrot 5y ago
      Because that's actually not how the world works. With traditional company, some consumers are paying it for a service. Apple is making 300B$ a year because a lot of people are willing to partake large amount of money in exchange for some good that they (think they) need such as a laptop or a phone. The consumers have no expectation of getting that money back later, it's a trade. If you think Apple is a good company and will be more successful in the future, you can decide to invest it in, and you buy a share of that company to some other investor against cash. In theory, it's possible for every single investor of Apple to make more money than what they paid for through dividends: As long as Apple keeps making products that people are willing to pay for, it will make money, and investors get a chunk of that money. Here value is created by work happening in the entire value chain needed to produce the good. Because if you had to make your laptop yourself with a pickaxe, it would be quite inconvenient. Also, if everyone suddenly decides to dump all their Apple stock, it will go down a lot, but not to zero, because the company as an actual intrisinc value: they have hundreds of billions of $ in cash in their war chest, have a lot of valuable physical things, and will continue to make hundreds of billions every year no matter what people on the stock market think. Overall it's not a zero sum game, because consumers are providing an external source of cash to the investors. Now, the more a stock is overbought, the closer it becomes to zero sum. Tesla for example, if it fails to realise the bright future that everyone is betting on, then it will get ugly as it's current stock value is disconnected from it's current intrinsinc value. Axie is very different, the price of the token only rise because of investors (here players), there is no external source of money going in that could make everyone richer. It's a bunch of people sitting in circle around a pile of cash with the promise that they will be able to take a random piece of the pile later on. And if you want to be able to sit with them, you first have to put cash on the pile yourself. Looking at the pile of cash getting bigger and bigger is exciting, but you will have to fight everyone else to get more than you put in. Oh and while you are sitting there waiting for the pile to get bigger, the people that organise the event are shovelling money out. All (most?) crypto games today are zero sum. However it's possible in the future that they may not be. I am thinking specifically about the ones that brand themselves as "metaverse". If the game in itself is interesting enough that people are engaging with it for a long time, then companies will want to start advertising in it, and if shares of that revenue are reinvested in the in-game economy and not just entirely taken by the company behind the game, that could be an example of external influx of money.
- hogFeast 5y ago
  It takes an extraordinary level of ignorance about basic elements of how business works (which I am sure the investors in this company have in spades) to think this makes sense. In order for someone to make money for something, there has to be an activity that generates a cashflow. There is no cash flow being generated, there is no outside money, what value are these people creating for other people? If you are playing a game to make money, you have to be providing some kind of value. So far, this company has convinced people to put money in, the rest of the money is probably coming from investors...there is no other money (and btw, the people playing the game are clearly much smarter than Andressen & Partners, they are taking out whatever isn't nailed down and making a swift exit). If you look at poker, it is obvious why some people are paid to play that game: they provide liquidity, they provide someone to gamble with, they provide the capital to take risk. It is the same with a bookmaker. This example has none of these characteristics because there is no outside money (the quote from a partner at Andressen's firm is incredible, I worked in fund management, I have seen some incompetent people, people who are truly clueless...what we are seeing in VC is unlike anything that has occurred in financial culture since the 20s). This reminds me of Football Index: the details of this are complex but they essentially paid people to play a game, there was no outside money, investors didn't understand this, management didn't fully understand this, they went bankrupt earlier this year taking down tens of millions in client money (no-one who plays this games understand that they are investing in an OTC product secured against the developer, it is nothing to do with the underlying game).
  - zenplant 5y ago
    The outside money is the value people are willing to pay for in game stuff. If it's a good enough / popular enough game that ends up being billions of dollars. Ask Riot games how well you can do with just cosmetic items that do absolutely nothing but make your character model slightly different. Their net worth is hovering around 25 billion these days, mostly off of things you assume can provide no cash flow.
whykun 5y ago
why do you think this is unethical?

enterthecrypt 5y ago

> To write off this activity as a scam or criminal seems to be missing a bigger picture that we don't quite understand yet. That’s how a lot of scams fly under the radar, _it’s not a scam, you just don’t get it_. Outside of cryptocurrency you can look at Theranos, it raised close to a billion dollars and was fraud from top to bottom. Within the cryptocurrency world you can look at Tether. A few hundred million in funding from cryptocurrency investors means nothing when it comes to credibility.

vmception 5y ago
Yeah but they clearly said revenues after the funding, which far eclipse the funding, which moves this far beyond any comparison to Theranos or high flying companies you might actually respect

Hippocrates 5y ago

> It really makes me reconsider the group-think on hacker news. This is pretty bad when it comes to crypto topics. A lot of the crypto ecosystem is toxic and gross. Schemes, scams, marketing fluff, and meme bro attitudes galore. BUT, if you can bear to pay attention and cut through the noise, there are some pretty incredible innovations occurring in crypto, gaming, and defi. HN is very dismissive on these topics. It feels to me this community dates itself when crypto topics come up, reminding me more of my grandma at thanksgiving than young innovative technophiles.

smoldesu 5y ago
If your developer-first finance platform fails to capture the interest of developers, I daresay you've built the wrong product.
Ensorceled 5y ago
> HN is very dismissive on these topics. In general, when ever crypto topics come up, the pro-crypto side tends to do a pretty terrible job of establishing that there are "some pretty incredible innovations occurring in crypto, gaming, and defi." Perhaps you could list some and change our minds? I just saw on Twitter how some one is minting NFTs using the art of a deceased artist and their family is scrambling to figure out how to stop it. There are a lot of shitty things happening in this space.
- dageshi 5y ago
  I'm not involved in nor have I ever bought anything crypto related. But I'll say this for it, it's the most interesting new tech to hit the internet in the past couple decades. Everything else has been pretty incremental over that time period, crypto is something really new and I suspect that's why its adherents are so obsessed by it.
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    VR was pretty hyped a few years ago. Edit: Also, what exciting things are you seeing? Almost everything I see is either proposing smart contracts for intractable problems, proposing defi for intractable problems or is a straight up scam.

aunty_helen 5y ago

There's 20 search results on this page at this moment for ponzi. HN missed the boat hard on this and there's a lot of sour grapes. Technical folks have left the marketing chavs alone and they've taken a concept and made it something that we hate. We hate it so much we can't see its potential. If a bunch of people put their money into a constrained system and the price goes up that doesn't automatically make it a ponzi scheme. Edit: 28 search results now

jazzyjackson 5y ago
the attraction is the skyrocketing value as more people join in for fear of missing out - but once the growth levels off on one particular token, and it’s no longer the fastest growing asset, then the top of the pyramid cashes out and moves on people are calling it out because we’ve literally seen it over and over again

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> To write off this activity as a scam or criminal seems to be missing a bigger picture that we don't quite understand yet. The linked article is literally about the meltdown of the game's unsustainable economy, so maybe the critics understood it better than you're suggesting. The entire Axie Infinity economic model only worked with an ever-increasing number of new players entering the economy. As player growth slows, the model breaks down. This is why people are comparing it to an MLM or other scheme that only works as long as you continue to find more and more people to pull into the system. The money must come from somewhere. If old players are cashing out money put in by new players, the game is up as soon as the supply of new players dries up.

igorkraw 5y ago

This is such a Hackernews take "I thought it was gambling and immoral, but now that it has made billions there might be a point". It can still be gambling and/or a Ponzi schemes. Adding obfuscation over methods to tap into greed and gambling euphoria does not technical innovation make. Cryptocurrency already attracts people who like to gamble and want to get rich quickly, so this is just docking onto a natural pipeline of marks to deploy their scheme. I have nothing but disgust for these types of games, even without the block chain veneer. No hate against the players and we know prohibition doesn't work so not calling for a ban, but at least I can contribute a small bit of social stigma against those that profit by hijacking their customers reward functions like this.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
Not every person or every culture has the same sets of values around gambling. Not every ethical philosophy thinks of gambling the same way. In many developed countries gambling is legal and regulated in many forms. Governments around the world spend a lot of energy deciding what the lines for regulating gambling is. When I see ethical takes like this, I feel like I'm missing a _lot_ of context. The Islamic world for example sees consumption of alcohol as a sin. Is this a Christian ethical take? What's the difference between markets and gambling in this ethical philosophy? Islamic states see any form of interest as sin after all.
- stavros 5y ago
  You can think that gambling is moral. You can think that gambling is immoral. To think that gambling is immoral unless it's earning a lot of money is... something.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    I mean sure but that's not what GP is saying. GP is purely laying into gambling by itself. > I have nothing but disgust for these types of games, even without the block chain veneer That's where my question arises.

roywiggins 5y ago

I imagine ATM fees on casino floors are pretty lucrative. Skimming a percentage off every transaction to make a profit is what casinos do. Of course it's possible to make money this way. It's not gambling when you're the casino. It's still gambling for everyone else.