The Microgig Economy

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
how do companies who run all these platforms make money? like the ones you just linked to, who runs them and how are they compensated for running them?
This is where things are unlike traditional companies. There are teams of programmers who, in the case of CityCoins, release open source code for other developers to use. Using this code, anyone can make a user interface for interacting with CityCoin protocols, and if someone makes a robust enough user interface, or add value some other way, they can charge fees.

So the programmers operating the bidding pool I was in, the largest pool for the first round of NYCCoin issuance, took a 4% cut of the total contributions, around $8,000 in total split among them, plus whatever contributions they made to the pool themselves.

But really the people making these things probably have a good balance of STX to spend on bidding for citycoins as they are minted.
 
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Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
But the biggest reason I'm so optimistic about this, is that many of the leading developers are super ideological and idealistic about crypto, and have already made enough money to afford to be idealistic. CityCoins didn't need to be an open source protocol, but it is.

Beyond idealism, the thing to find out is whether or not markets will "naturally" favor decentralized financial architectures, or whether a centralized system will be favored.

Even Zuckerberg says no company will monopolize the metaverse, and that guy seems all about monopoly.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
This feels like a genuine movement, and I think we've gotten so jaded as to forget how that can affect people, inspire them, remind them of what solidarity can feel like, and on a global scale no less.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
The way humans financially go about trusting one another is being overhauled, albeit in a far more complex fashion than most can fathom.
 

Leo

Well-known member
all this digital wealth still needs to be transferred and converted to old-school national currency at some point and deposited into a savings/checking/debit account, in order for people to use it to buy things, right? sellers of products and services may eventually accept crypto, but still a ways off on a mass scale.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
all this digital wealth still needs to be transferred and converted to old-school national currency at some point and deposited into a savings/checking/debit account, in order for people to use it to buy things, right? sellers of products and services may eventually accept crypto, but still a ways off on a mass scale.
Yeah basic living expenses, at least in the US and other major economies, are still at least several years away from being crypto-friendly in a standardized way.

So that does impact the value of crypto assets. Right now, I would have to A) sell my crypto assets or B) borrow stablecoins against them and then sell the stablecoins, if I needed to access these funds for basic living expenses. If that was a non-trivial possibility, I wouldn't have put myself in this position.

But yeah once online shopping becomes more crypto-friendly (shopping.io claims to be linked with Amazon and eBay, but I'm not sure I trust it yet), and once bills can be paid in crypto, then there will be that much less holding back massive mainstream adoption.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
and deposited into a savings/checking/debit account
You can use Coinbase to transfer funds to a paypal account, so it doesn't have to go back to banks necessarily.

That said, you still need a bank account in order to fund a coinbase account, or really most of the other big crypto exchanges.

That is why I think crypto ATMs could be big inflection points as well, as they would allow unbanked persons to get into crypto.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
But yeah right now spending crypto is piecemeal, uncommon, often cumbersome. Still quite early in this respect.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
how do companies who run all these platforms make money? like the ones you just linked to, who runs them and how are they compensated for running them?
Coinbase makes almost all of its money from transaction/deposit/withdrawal fees.
 

Leo

Well-known member
you could earn a living as a defi advisor or instructor, @Clinamenic. start doing the rounds on CNBC, Fox Business, etc., a weekly explainer column in Forbes. leverage old media (while it still exist) to build your brand, start a youtube channel.
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
how do companies who run all these platforms make money? like the ones you just linked to, who runs them and how are they compensated for running them?
But fundamentally the good blockchains are open source code, operated by anyone with a computer who wants to. Totally unlike traditional business structure.

For Ethereum there is Ethereum Foundation that gives out grants to independent developers to build on Ethereum, to enhance Ethereum somehow.

Much of the profit of this depends on how the token economics are configured, i.e. if the lead programmers or initial investors are granted 5% or 10% of the token supply, vs. something like CityCoins where there isn;t an initial supply, and the minting is immediately open to the public (or, the portion of the public who can figure out what they need to do).
 

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
you could earn a living as a defi advisor or instructor, @Clinamenic. start doing the rounds on CNBC, Fox Business, etc., a weekly explainer column in Forbes. leverage old media (while it still exist) to build your brand, start a youtube channel.
I'm already doing it for a few family members, meeting with first new acquaintance client today, but I have reservations about being financially compensated for what i am doing, largely because I need to be a registered investment advisor to receive compensation legally (not that someone at my scale would garner much attention), and also because this is so easy for me (I'm doing passive management, not active/trading).
 
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