I just heard about the "Million Dollar Homepage" for the first time last week. Would this idea (or one like it) work today? Making a million dollars for something so bizarre, fun, and straightforward sounds amazing. Can anyone reference other attempts at similar ideas?
It's just a random example of something silly going viral. Stuff like this definately could work today (potato salad kickstarter was a thing) but any individuals attempt probably wouldn't work, it mostly comes down to luck.
Cards Against Humanity raises $100,000 to dig 'tremendous hole'
Makers of party game livestream a backhoe digging a gigantic hole somewhere in the US, saying ‘as long as money keeps coming in, we’ll keep digging’
The kid tried to do it again. It didn't work. The reason it worked the first time was people bought it out of curiosity then it went viral over traditional news media and then original purchasers reaped profits leading to further hype leading to further buying craze leading to further frenzy.
Eventually the last bit of 1000 pixels went for 37k.
If the kid had extended the page another million pixels, you could have measured the peak interest and the subsequent decline.
>Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room
but then supports a candidate that denies climate change and replaces scientists in government positions with company stooges. Never understood Thiel.
Köln created a website where people were able to buy pixels of an image of Podolski for €25 per 8x8 pixel square, in order to gather €1 million to reduce the cost of the transfer;[1][2] Formula One driver and Köln supporter Michael Schumacher bought several pixels for €875.[3]
BitCoin, where the inventor managed to convince people to accept a new currency, mined the first few blocks of it, and ended up with a billion dollars in paper wealth as a result.
By that logic all fiat currencies and even some commodities like diamond and gold(whose usefulness from an industrial perspective doesn't match their market value) would fit the bill.
There was a post on Hacker News several months ago to a site that posted the last five people who paid for advertising. The list made it to about $500 before the admins here shut it down.
TWiT ("This Week In Tech") / Leo Laporte did something similar to partly fund his original move from the "Cottage" to their new "Brickhouse" studios in 2011 by selling bricks on a wall.
I couldn't quickly find information about how much they cost or he raised, though googling reveals multiple companies that will sell engraved bricks to power your fundraiser.
Fun, well, that's a matter of taste so I won't debate you there.
But "fairly straightforward"? Let's not get crazy, here. IMO, ICOs are doing to cryptocurrency what derivatives did to traditional investing. Abstraction, indirection, and confusion, all to make a buck...
I've read a lot about ICOs and I still don't understand what's going on. I can't even tell what people are actually buying (like EOS, where it explicitly says the tokens are worthless and not convertible). An even bigger question is why people are throwing so much money on them when it's so unclear what you're getting.
It probably makes more sense when you realize that many ICO buyers are "whales", big cryptocurrency holders who bought in when the currencies were much cheaper and amassed large amounts. When the news headline says an ICO raised $180M, that doesn't actually mean people spent $180M on tokens. Rather, they converted $180M of Ethereum, at its current valuation, which they may have purchased for say $1M collectively. The individual holders might not actually be spending more than $5-10K of their own money (or possibly nothing, if they got their ether through mining), but that money has appreciated to be worth say $1M at Ethereum's current value.
It's a good example of a double pyramid scheme. The value of Ethereum is itself going up; it was worthless 4 years ago but now has a market cap of $20B. And then you can "spend" Ethereum to get additional tokens out of an ICO, which means that you're buying into another pyramid scheme with tokens which themselves have appreciated. The huge dollar values, after the double conversion, generate great news stories, which inspire more people to buy into Ethereum, which prop its value up even more, which mean that the companies who did ICOs can convert their cryptocurrency to dollars at better rates and inflate their dollar values even more, which inspires more ICOs at bigger valuations, and so on.
Lest this sound too dodgy, remember that all currency is itself a pyramid scheme: it's inherently worthless, and worth only what peoples' expectations of its future valuation will be. So the endgame for cryptocurrencies is either they run out of hard-currency buyers, in which case their value comes crashing down and everyone who bought in loses everything, or they replace the dollar as the world reserve currency and everyone who didn't buy in loses everything. I think the latter option is unlikely, but also underpriced, in the sense that it's more likely than most people give it credit for.
I agree with you where you say that currencies are worth only what peoples' expectations of its future valuation will be, but that is basically a mechanism for valuing anything - not a description of a pyramid scheme.
A pyramid scheme is one where there is a continued and ongoing transfer of wealth from new scheme joiners to earlier scheme joiners, which works great until the supply of new joiners dries up - then the thing collapses.
A new currency could work (in theory) absolutely fine with no further issuance, and no new joiners beyond the first round of adopters - not at all the same as a pyramid scheme.
I keep seeing the fallacy that all currency value is based on future expectations.
Here's a thought experiment... in the US, work full time while getting paid in Bitcoin. Make all transactions in Bitcoin. At the end of the year you'll need to file a tax return. Your final options are:
1. Buy some USD to pay your taxes.
2. Go to jail.
Demand for fiat currencies is ultimately underpinned by them being the only instrument accepted for payment of taxes.
Here you describe a good reason why people need USD - indeed another currency or asset class cannot be used to pay US taxes. But its not clear to me why this means valuing currencies on future expectations is a fallacy? It just means that US taxpayers will need US dollars at tax payment time.
You have a third option: 3. Don't pay taxes. Live like an outlaw. Shoot the tax collector.
You're driving at an important point that I want to take a bit further. Ultimately, the "backing" of a fiat currency comes from the barrel of a gun. People continue to use U.S. dollars because the U.S. has the strongest military on earth right now. Same throughout history - the backing of the British pound came from the British Navy, and when the British military collapsed post-WW2, the pound sterling didn't last much longer.
A major adoption driver for cryptocurrencies has been the weakness of central governments. We've seen this most with China, where wealthy Chinese businessmen are eager to take money out of the country in any way possible. But the most likely tipping point that would drive widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies would be if the perception became widespread that the U.S. government could no longer guarantee physical security; if, for example, we "lost" the war on terrorism. You could easily imagine people "hiring" personal drones or robots for protection with BitCoin if this came to pass, to fill the vacuum of the state security apparatus.
If the US and other national governments collapsed then every cryptocurrency would become worthless (Gas Town isn't going to accept your "money") or less than worthless (Thunderdome is going to eliminate you because your mining rig wastes valuable electricity).
Maybe. My bet is that economic activity wouldn't cease in the absence of nation-states, but rather some other institution(s) would arise that currently perform the function of nation-states: physical security, dispute resolution, identity symbolism, monetary authority, etc. Cryptocurrencies have the advantage of already existing here, but there's certainly the possibility that it could be some yet-to-be-invented institution.
Man, I must have been a real idiot to not get a VC to say yes in 2016. Worth noting that it seemed, at the time, like there was less interest in seed rounds (especially after Twitter's decline) and more in Series A,B, etc.
reddit's recent April Fool's experiment. They had a blank 10,000x10,000px (?) canvas where people could manipulate 1 pixel at a time with time constraints. No money involved, but seeing the panoply of different subcultures come together was unbelievably fascinating.
