Could be worse, I just got an email saying I'm eligible for $100 worth of some ethereum altcoin because I'm a Github user. Only problem is that I have to install some app and let them hijack my Github account if I want them... of course I'm not going to be entertaining that scam.
> Unfortunately, many contributors are leaving thousands of dollars unclaimed because they think they are being scammed.
> Starkware airdrop
I didn't want to name names, but if they wanted to give me money, their email shouldn't have set off Gmail's spam filter... they could have also converted their scamcoin themsevles and donated to my patreon. /shrug
> their money as opposed to making you to look for some another early adopter to sell those cryptocoins to.
It is true that distributing one's own token is in the effort of bootstrapping their network. But people tend not to value what they receive for free and don't care about, which is why many in crypto are against airdrops as a form of token distribution.
Nonetheless, the ambition is to distribute ownership of the network and thus incentivize users as well as decentralize ownership so that the token may become a commodity and the network more robust and valuable.
Time will tell if such experiments will succeed. Certainly, the SEC is watching.
As for "their money", if you look at the balance sheets of U.S. regulated exchanges and U.S. regulated crypto companies, you will note that these crypto tokens are listed and marked to a certain value and that this accounting is recognized legally in the U.S. These tokens are in fact valuable assets even if their moneyness is debatable.
two replies - legal regulated exchanges "define value" and/or markets that have demand and clear participation "define value" .. in fact it is both, and more than both.. good to discuss this generally in the USA at this time imho
Don't airdrops restrict US persons? I mean I don't know if it's as strict as the Binance or FTX restrictions but still, the SEC is going to get involved?
The SEC exists to protect US citizens. They are only relevant as far as a company serving Americans wants to issue securities/tokens to US citizens. This is also why decentralization is desirable so that a credible argument can be made for a given token, that it should be viewed as a commodity, one day.
And yes, some airdrops are not available to U.S. citizens.
> If they wanted to give me money, their email shouldn't have set off Gmail's spam filter... they could have also converted their scamcoin themsevles and donated to my patreon.
False positives in spam filters notwithstanding, the gist of your view is reasonable and many have asked why "just contribute to my Patreon if I have one" isn't done. A brief consideration of the mechanism/logistics reveals that this approach wouldn't scale to hundreds of thousands of contributors in unknown jurisdictions.
The point, after all, is long term sustainability in automating payments to opensource contributors into perpetuity. It can't and shouldn't be assumed that there will always be people on hand to do the paperwork as opposed to having systems interact with established APIs.
That said, if Patreon/Github accept cryptocurrencies, you'll soon receive airdrops that way, as normal donations. Stripe Payment links will be used in a similar way in time.
The other major problem is legal: distributing dollars globally is not a simple process and would expose many contributors to regulatory burdens that have been documented extensively elsewhere. (e.g. in the simplest case, requiring each recipient to file a W-8BEN or something similar.)
Again: the point is to pay opensource contributors in an automatic, scalable, "uncensorable" way, for their entire lifetimes. The focus thus far has been on building "smart contracts" that do this. It's an experiment and only time will tell as we see who benefits, who doesn't, and who opts out altogether.
> they could have also converted their scamcoin themsevles
Perhaps. But the point is to pay you in the currency of their network, as distinct from US dollars, because the companies/DAOs believe in the value of their network and asset.
Just as public companies often do with the shares they issue, these blockchains also provide reliable liquidity (in this case, in the form of permissionless liquidity pools) for their "scamcoin" that you can use to convert your holdings to USD or any other currency. Alternatively, you could use a U.S. regulated exchange like Coinbase.
But don't feel that you're being forced to accept payment. There are many who have refused, on principal, to claim various airdrops over the past several years. They don't need or want the money and that's fine. But there are many others for whom payment for their free code is proving useful. All I'm pointing out is that this effort is underway in order to find out how to make opensource sustainable.
I really don’t understand why they do such airdrops. I got $300 from Starknet for doing nothing and immediately sold it. From what I understand, their community is pretty pissed that some randos got more money than they did despite actually engaging in the community and I tend to agree. Also, the fact they can just print money like this confuses me.
I heard it's because they can't do Initial Coin Offerings and just sell the coins to fund the project anymore, but they still need to distribute their coin to try to get usage going. So instead they "airdrop" it around in the hopes people will pick it up and use it. Maybe even if you sell it you're still helping someone else to buy the coin.
> I really don’t understand why they do such airdrops. I got $300 from Starknet for doing nothing […]
The airdrops are mainly to:
- Distribute ownership of the token (where distribution is eventually a measure of fairness of launch e.g. imagine if Bitcoin had been airdropped to opensource contributors when it was valued at <$1. It's currently valued at >$50k.).
- Incentivize work on opensource projects. (Some people got large airdrops merely for PRs where they corrected typos (lol!). But "large" is relative to how much you value your own efforts and time. Blockchain companies believe opensource contributions are very valuable and want to encourage more people to keep working.)
There's no such thing as a "legitimate" airdrop. They're all scams. Sometimes the scam targets aren't the airdrop recipients thought; those may be just a preliminary step to establish a measure of credibility as part of a long con.
Interesting. Please link to your investigation of all the airdrops. We've had a decade of them and I think everyone would find such investigations useful. Presumably you've also informed law enforcement in your jurisdiction of your findings.
Can you point to an airdrop connected to a single legitimate (non-gambling) economic activity? I'm with the comment you're responding to on them all being scams just because I have yet to encounter or hear about a non scam one
> Can you point to an airdrop connected to a single legitimate (non-gambling) economic activity?
In the thread above, we discussed airdrops to opensource contributors. Writing code isn't generally considered gambling. Rewarding such contributions could be healthy assuming one believes that opensource programmers should be compensated in some way.
Or do you mean that any venture in life where reward for effort is not guaranteed is gambling? In which case, yes, life is generally a gamble.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter: If you think something is a scam, don't participate. No one is forcing you to claim your airdrops. They'll remain on-chain, unclaimed, forever.
But if you can prove something is a scam, please inform the legal authorities in your region. Almost all law enforcement bodies accept submissions and reports of fraud from the public. Hilariously, crypto companies often airdrop large amounts of funds to citizens who investigate and report frauds and scams.
> So it's just a really stupid inefficient form of charity?
Charity is efficient? Thanks for informing me. I didn't know that.
> You realize you can donate to people without cryptocurrency being involved right?
Oh gee. I didn't know. I assumed that all my life and through all of human history no one has ever donated anything to people until crypto was invented.
Also, I clarified the rationale of these airdrops:
Ethereum might be a load of gas. NFTs are after all just a few hundred NFT influencers reinventing themselves and their pseudonyms for their audience of wannabes.
I've been an Ethereum user since it first launched and I've never been on the mailing list. I suspect that's the case for most of the community. I've never felt like I've missed out on information from not being on it.
I tried to write the same thing but apparently its controversial
My best guess is that people need to feel validated that crypto is smaller than its airtime, and that they didn't waste the last decade of their life in an echo chamber of things that went wrong in the space at the exclusion of the things working fine
A) no crypto enthusiast or speculator needs to be subscribed to the ethereum foundation’s blog since 2014, which was 10 years ago for reference. But even then forums and twitter worked well enough for resyndicating news.
B) Its more likely they pruned the mailing list multiple times after every bull cycle, asking people if they still wanted to be subscribed to reduce complaints and bounce rates. Crypto bear markets are deep doldrums.
Off the cuff thought, but I wonder if the early days of modern banking were marred with such blatant fraud and deceit.
I think of stage coach robberies of US bonds, and the various bank “rug-pulls” (to use crypto fraud nomenclature) that occurred before the Coinage act of 1857 - but it’s such distant history it’s hard to find how people felt about it at the time.
What I’m getting at is this - is crypto fraud innate to it’s very essence, or did all “advancements” in banking technology have the same problem before everyone settled in and “got used” to attempts at fraud.
Even in ancient Sumeria where they used sealed clay jars (an early form of baking if you think about it), they have found examples where the stated contents on the writing outside and what was found inside were not the same....
The rug pulls continued well into and past the 1930s, when bankers thought it would be funny to make an insurance pool out of tax payer money, thereby increasing deposits and business. It worked. Nothing fundamentally prevents it from happening again, state sponsored deposit insurance has expanded to more asset classes and deposit types several times. Deposit insurance is just a confidence game.
Or, many tech-savvy folks are living beyond email-era: as someone enthusiast about Ethereum and technology in general I never use emails or subscriptions and get my news simply by other means.
To steal people's crypto?