Continut platit no more.
Well over five years agoi, when Trilema introduced something not yet seen on the Internetsii, the very notion caused a splashiii. It was unthinkable! Impossible! Nonsensical! I must be crazy! And not understand how the world works! Etc!
A year later, The New York Times copied the modeliv. Before that, the survivors of the .ro media wars lined up to bid for my sales datav. Clearly, it was I that didn't understand etc.vi
It was a pretty decent ride - the widely known Bitcoin addressvii collected a rather reasonable 247.78241666 BTC, worth ~108`365.162102084 USD at today's open market rateviii which is, ironically, more than what anyone ever made out of selling content online in this intervalix, not to mention just about enough to buy a house pretty much anywhere in the world. A house pre furnished and with women included in most parts of the world, actually.
Nevertheless, both my circumstances and circumstances in general have changed significatly since that fateful 2010 Summer. For one thing, what's sensible for a tiny exotic market like Romania is not necessarily sensible for a large and fragmented market such as the billion or so English speakersx. For another thing, I'm worth a cool billion now, give or take, which is roughly speaking a billion more than I was worth in 2010. Not that I was ever poor, but millions and billions aren't really the same thing - the guy with a roll worth a grand is not as likely to pick up a nickle as the minimum wage waiter, which is how tipping works in the first place. This says nothing of the value of a penny, earned or saved, but it does say something about laziness and the human nature.
For yet another thing, the sort of content I publish has changed markedlyxi, and that means the marketing thereof ought to probably also change, whether one's stubborn or not. Lastly - for many years buying Trilema credits was the only economical activity in Bitcoinxii, but now that Eulora exists and it's doing so very well, that consideration significantly pales in importance.
Not exactly for these reasons, but for very good causes that lie at the root of them, Trilema will henceforth be freely accessible.xiii No more paid content.
The only losers in this move are, of course, the 2nd echelon of content producers - the people who aren't nearly good enough to pen their own Trilema, but nevertheless find themselves in the unenviable position where producing content is still the best relative use of their time. Apparently the universe really hates anyone coming second, because look how it works : the guy coming out first doesn't actually need to get paid, and nobody can rationally compete with free. This, incidentally, is how we get power laws, always and everywhere the enemies of quality of all kinds - from quality of product to quality of life.
I am sorry to contribute to that rampant problem. Nevertheless, weighing all considerations together it... well to be frank, it comes out second. What can you do ?
Enjoy, I guess.
A, ps : if you would like to donate, donate to The Most Serene Republic.
———Holy shit, I'm that old, am I ?! [↩]No, this wouldn't be the first time Trilema did something like that.
For instance, have you ever wondered why it was that wikileaks finally decided to publish the cables ? They were going to do the usual "sit on the goodies and work them over with the Guardian" routine they do, except an "unknown" Romanian blogger decided to publish a subsection. Sixteen hours later they caved and published.
Oh, you've never heard of this incident ? Too bad. What else have you never heard of ? [↩]The article in question clocks over 300 comments, for instance. [↩]Poorly.
The way Trilema's paid content implementation worked was that new users could read articles, up to five a week ; past that they had to pay. Literally, had to, the server delivered a notice and nothing else.
The way the NYT butchery worked was that you were served the content with a css overlay, that you were more than welcome to ignore. Technology is hard, especially for the sort of incompetent nitwits that find their life's work inside a corporation. [↩]The winner's still undisclosed, mind you. [↩]In fairness, these were very special times, the detailed characteristics of which might make the topic of paid consultancy work, except I'm not really in that market since Bitcoin. Suffice it to say that post dot-com bubble the actors were confronted with the uneasy choice of either doubling down on the "online advertising" scam ; or else trying to somehow patch up the "UGC is worth money" scam that had just blown up ; or come up with a genuine business model. They toyed briefly with answer c), discovered it's really not that easy (in the sense that MP can do it, but that doesn't help the mediocre horde one wit) so went all in a) with hysterical results (what's CTR by now, 0.000001% ? oh I know, you're on the third generation of falsified metrics, nice, well done, keep going) and are just about ready to pretend like 2001 was too long ago for anyone to still remember anything and therefore b) is ready for another spin. [↩]16crkmdoaK6Tq8NP3FVK7Uxq5Dwdicb3c3 [↩]Not that anyone's selling, nor would anyone sell on the open market - you really gotta suck a lot of cock to get the chance to buy a little coin these days. [↩]Oh, you don't think so ? Ask David Thorne. [↩]Hey, did you know most English speakers aren't white ? In fact, there's more people speaking English in China than there are in the United States. [↩]Trilema started off as the erudite work of a fellow deeply disinterested in the actual workings of the world. Today I'm anything but, Bitcoin's rekindled my passionate desire to kill people, something that had been laying dormant in silent peace since my youth. [↩]This is a fact.
Paying BTC to someone in exchange for some socks he bought with fiat, or paying BTC to someone in lieu of rent when that someone has to turn around and pay expenses of all sorts in fiat is no sort of "Bitcoin economy", not anymore than derping around on social media is some sort of "new economy". At the end of the day you still have to, have to find some way to convert those to fiat and pay your rent, which means you're dicking around.
Trilema credits on the other hand were the first, and for a long time the only, and for a slightly shorter time the most notable Bitcoin economic activity. Mind that if what you think is something along the lines of "this isn't much", all you're doing is commenting on how little Bitcoin had on its side early on, and no more. There isn't an avenue available through which you might talk fiat parasites on Bitcoin into some sort of relevancy, for the exact same reasons you can't parlay "companies" that outsource their economic activity abroad into economic agents. [↩]This measure does not in any way change my rights in the work (discussed, today as always, in the attached Copyright Notice). It has no legal effect whatsoever, but it does have the practical effect that you can read even if you're poor (and consequently shouldn't be reading). [↩]
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Category: Meta psihoza
Wednesday, 23 December, Year 7 d.Tr.