@john

I obviously do believe that content CAN be valuable. In aggregate, it’s definitely net positive. Would be foolish to make the case that none of it has value at all. People like seeing what other people say and make. But I do think that MOST content posted onto feeds has ~0 fundamental value as something worth owning. Much content has indirect value in the sense that it is temporarily worth some finite amount of attention, which drops drastically over time. That attention value needs to be captured by someone who can turn it into more permanent value of another form. Beyond that, when content / art IS worth owning (very small % of it), the format matters a lot. The format is *what it is*. In the example often cited, a painting…you might want to own a nice painting, so you can hang it and look at it and enjoy it. But, what if you got something very different? Would you want to buy a receipt that says you own 0.1% of the painting, but is not visual and you cannot hang it or look at it? As an investor, maybe so, but that’s not the case being made for these coins. The case being made is that they have fundamental value. Choosing coins as the medium for this stuff makes a real trade off in this sense, and that’s not really being mentioned at all. Coins make the content / art / media LESS like content, and MORE like a financial instrument, lessening its fundamental value. The upsides of that tradeoff are several: it has the potential to go exponential in price, have an efficient market, have no minimum purchase amount, etc. But an additional downside is that it opens up a PVP and often highly volatile and destructive gambling venue. Ok so what’s the summary? - Majority of content does not have fundamental value (to the general populace) - When it does, owning a coin of it is not a great way to embody that fundamental value - The main benefit of owning it is actually the potential upside, which is more like gambling To me, the rhetoric I see here is still very much a motte and bailey. The Motte: You should trade these coins, they’re valuable. The Bailey: wait, so you think no content has value? I do think you / we are responsible for what we create. Creating things in the world that are primarily vacuous and yet each serve as a new conduit for PVP gambling while you take a rake on the trading volume, is bad. If you do this, you *should* strongly believe that most of the time, people are trading something valuable. That if they are left with just the coin with 0 liquidity, they oftentimes will be content. But I think it’s really just wrong to make that case here, or at least really refusing to do deep thinking about it. I can say “stocks of companies are valuable” and be right, but if I then create thousands of pink sheet penny stocks for extremely dubious businesses and encourage all of you to go trade them, while also calling it positive sum because “stocks have value,” I legitimately find that shady. I think I understand the contours of this kind of product better than almost anyone, I’m not a hater who craps on new tech all the time. I’ve even created quite a few coin products myself. But I want to see some more serious thinking or ownership of these tradeoffs vs this flowery vibe that ignores the specifics that comprise the entire thing.

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