Personally, I want no part of it, but I think it might work well for people who are not me.
I've always been "on my own." My life really is a series of watersheds, where I've been the only person to believe in me, before the event, and a whole bunch of folks seemed to believe in me, after the fact. Not a particularly good setup for selling "Chris-Tokens™."
Not a bad thing, in the long run. It hurt like hell, the first few times, but I realized that I don't have the personal skills to "sell" myself (like being able to spew jargon, sound like I'm TED-talking all the time, or beat LeetCode tests), so I can't blame folks for not wanting to "invest" in me. It is what it is. I come across as a socially-awkward dork, so people don't take me seriously. I'm actually fairly good at what I do, but If I mention that, it comes across as "arrogant," despite the enormous ocean of hubris that pretty much defines today's tech scene. I don't really have the skill to "humble-brag."
It taught me to live a conservative lifestyle, be Honest and Honorable, do top-shelf work, bust my ass, and not expect much from others.
I couldn't rely on anyone else to clean up my messes, or get me out of jackpots. It has taught me to learn what I have needed to learn, despite active roadblocks being tossed out by "gatekeepers," and it also prevented me from getting mixed up with some truly awful disasters; both personal, and business.
It's not a character flaw or lack of skills in not being able to "sell yourself". It's a sense of dignity and pride as a working person.
You are not a commodity, you are a human being. You may look like a commodity to a business owner, but you refuse to allow yourself to become one.
Honesty and honor are worth more than money. There is money to be made in making yourself into a sort of corporate dog, but it will leave you feeling empty inside.
I am definitely not politically conservative, but I live in a conservative way as well. I don't think it's superior, but it's nice to have peace and stability.
> I don't have the personal skills to "sell" myself
Actually you do. You've demonstrated them in this very comment. Maybe you don't realize this, or maybe your self-deprecation is a deliberate part of your strategy. Either way, it worked on me. This comment led me to your profile, which led me to your company web sites, which impressed me. I don't need an iOS app developer at the moment, but if I did you'd be at the top of my list of people to contact.
Hello Chris,
I wanted to say that I found your comment extremely good especially this
> I'm actually fairly good at what I do, but If I mention that, it comes across as "arrogant," despite the enormous ocean of hubris that pretty much defines today's tech scene.
I agree probably since my experiences were similar. Things are much better now, but I don't remember people telling me 'here is some money; remember me when you make it big'.
There are definitely people who would benefit from this. Some of my friends would have said 'some people just put everything in their char stat'. In fact, I have this HS friend. When we were growing up, he could barely turn his PC on. Now he is an IT manager for a major US brand. He either has gotten better or he was able to BS everyone with his cool guy persona ( and he is cool ). In short, I would buy his personal IPO.
It seems like you may be indexing on a reaction that either doesn't exist, or attributing a response from individuals as if it were coming from "everybody". In the latter case, it sounds like you've adopted the right mentality, which is to let the ball be on their court if they don't want to believe in you. Unless it's actually doing you from doing something you want to do, it doesn't really matter.
> I'm actually fairly good at what I do, but If I mention that, it comes across as "arrogant," despite the enormous ocean of hubris that pretty much defines today's tech scene.
That's really insightful as I've definitely noticed many people judge by looks and impression more than the content of what's said. Unattractive/awkward people are frequently treated as insufferable when they are correct.
It's interesting to me that you think you don't have the personal skills to "sell" yourself yet most of your business is centered around consulting and app development as a service. How can these be successful without convincing people you know what you're doing? Do you work with someone who has those soft skills? Or maybe you mean something else.
I can relate to a lot of what you said. Specifically, I've overheard people say things like "grog454 does it so how hard could it be?" when deciding to try to get in to software dev (they failed). 10+ years ago a talented comp sci major was openly hostile toward me when I spoke or gave a presentation on multiple occasions.
I like to think I know what I'm doing. My personal software projects made me a millionaire before age 30 with no outside investment and minimal employees (0-1). Like you, I think I lack soft skills in the traditional sense of convincing other people that I know what I'm doing. I am routinely approached by recruiters for FAANG, and will occasionally begin the interview process just to see what it's like. In 4+ processes I've gotten to the final round of interviews but never received an offer.
What I do have is a different kind of "soft skill". Search algorithms love me. I attribute the success of my projects and (apparent recruiter magneticism) to clever SEO more than anything else, followed by luck, followed by a kind of relentlessness with which I approach my work, followed by meaningful software dev skill / business acumen. 100% of revenue is from end-users, 99.9999+% of which have no clue who I am.
I don't mean to come across as hostile, but its eye-opening to see what "I've always been on my own" and "not expect much from others" looks like to other people.
to sell yourself at scale you need to appeal to the lowest common denominator, like politicians must. i don’t think this is right or wrong- idealized value = how much you help someone * how many people you help. (idealized)
I'm not trying to be rude and I enjoyed your comment, but you say you don't have the skills to humblebrag or sell yourself but you're doing it pretty well here
Hey, Alex Masmej here. Just wanted to say that I had no choice because I had no money in the bank. During the start of COVID, I lost my only (and very first) source income at the time, and I lost all my savings in crypto (DeFi is dangerous even to crypto people like me).
Financially, this ISA freed me instantly, and gave me a newfound legitimacy as a crypto innovator. This was by far the best way I could find to break out as an entrepreneur.
Does nobody in here realize that this is just the first step towards the well-known as well as rightfully-abolished concept of slavery?
Fraction of future income and participation in "certain life decisions" is just the beginning. In principle this can ramp up to all future income and all life decisions.
And don't tell me this is voluntary, which makes it all different from slavery. Alex himself writes "I had no choice". Just take this further and apply it to some drone worker in an Amazon fulfillment center or other precarious employment. People who don't have a choice and would end up uneployed and hungry on the streets if they don't agree to terms put in front of them. The only thing between the worker and such a deal is labour laws, and we all know how popular those are in "entrepreneur" circles.
Kudos to you. It’s a new and innovative technique, seems like it could help many more people, and you showed how it would work in practice. I thought being able to do the crypto trade directly on you website was a nice touch—definitely shows its easier and more accessible than the Bowie Bond example from the article.
There’s literally nothing in this article that you couldn’t replace “token” or “coin” with “contract” or “membership” and have it work exactly the same. The idea of selling contracts against future income is interesting but putting the blockchain here is yet another solution in search of a problem.
I’m usually in total agreement about blockchain just being stuffed anywhere, but observationally, there must be a good reason why blockchain shows up in these situations so often. There’s definitely the hype factor, but blockchain does have value in that it’s reasonably trusted by average people (perhaps unlike signing a contract everytime you wanted to purchase a piece of a creator - coins gamify it), and it’s easy to setup trust systems - Alex setup his own token in a weekend for a “human IPO”, rather than running through the cost and time of properly setting it up with a lawyer and contracts.
Maybe blockchain’s biggest value proposition right now is that it’s lightly regulated and has hype, so using it greases the wheels when growing an audience or building a usually regulated product.
But what he describes, hedging risk, is not a new concept. It is something that people do every day when they diversify investments or buy insurance. ISAs and "person as tokens" just push this to new levels.
> In such a scenario, every career becomes a pyramid scheme.
In other words, the rich get richer--scalability works.
One thing the author left out (or that I missed) is that scalability increases overall wealth. If I have to learn calculus from an average teacher because of geographic limitations, and then my child gets to learn from the best calculus teacher in the world, in the latter case the world gets richer because the same knowledge is arrived at quicker at less expense. (Of course, there's fallout for the average worker, but this is something we've been dealing with in the developed world for decades and still haven't figured out.)
It’s protocol-ized finance. Sure you can do it all old school, but that takes a ton of effort and makes your situation a unique snowflake. If you do it the way everyone has agreed on with tokens, all of your tokens plug into the existing infrastructure, is standardized, and makes the cost of capital go down.
Why people continually can’t understand this, and keep saying “buh buh buh mysql and lawyer fees! No need for blockchain!” is a failure of imagination.
You’re 100% correct. Which is also why I found the article thought provoking!
Blockchain isn’t magic. It can’t do very much “new”. But if it can take something old (contract) and make that more accessible to more potential contract buyers/sellers, then that’s actually interesting.
Technology that makes slow complicated things fast and easy can have a lot of impact.
I won’t be selling shares of myself nor buying shares of others. But this we’re close to the point where blockchain actually provides real value beyond tulip speculation.
It sells itself better to a target audience that is bamboozled/enthusiastic/optimistic about the technology. Think of it as you would SEO - it's merely a feature/optimization that gets you an audience.
I always see this sentiment here on HN. Everyone says "Why use blockchain, when you could just do X". Alot of the time when people say this, i don't think they actually understand blockchain. There's a million here but i'll only ask one...How could you actively trade a 'contract' if it's not on the blockchain?
Putting the contract on the blockchain allows it to be traded like, but not as, a security while the SEC et al. drag their feet on classifying crypto-tokens as securities. Something like that.
It’s just more top signals. There’s too much money floating around if people want to invest in nonsense like this. When equities correct from the current Shiller PE ratio higher than 1929 I think you will find less people want to invest in a career token for someone.
The Bowie Bond part of the post was fascinating by the way. Had never heard that story. He issued them in 1997 which is a high Shiller PE value also before the 2000 stock bust. Lots of money floating around looking for a home then too.
We went through the 2008 financiy crisis and this is what people think is a good idea?
How long before people are trading options on risk weighted batch of people? Leveraged buyouts if whole specialties? Movement controls to enforce greatest P/E? "I'm sorry sir, you can't leave the country without presenting a Holiday Risk Bond. Perhaps a Virtual Vacay is more affordable?"
And most of all: you, as an individual, have almost no information about the market, and are almost certain to get a bad price.
Anyone who thinks they are good at this should practice buying a new car. Once you get to the final sale price, with no finance, demand another 9% off. If you can get that, and the car isn't a lemon, you're ready to negotiate for a well understood commodity.
Selling people futures, when you've just given them capital up front with the goal of enabling higher returns, is less understood, though of course there are many immigrants who do just that. But already wealthy people? It seems much less certain.
> How long before people are trading options on risk weighted batch of people?
Lol I actually love this idea. Funding an ETF of people who want to move to SF to start a career in tech, or LA to start a career in acting. Diversify your risk and support some people with potential. Could have an acting school equivilant of ycombinator and you can invest in all each batch and get a return if some succeed.
If we want a metiocracy this could help build it, by giving more capital to those who have potential but are disenfranchised by existing institutions.
So Denmark would forcibly take more than half of my income to invest in stuff I don't have a say on, while no one is held accountable by competition and economic incentives.
> "By letting other people invest in you, you are incentivizing them to promote your own story and do their best to increase your tokens' value."
In 1946, the US Supreme Court established the so-called Howey Test to determine if an investment opportunity is a security offering. These are the Howey criteria:
"Under the Howey Test, a transaction is an investment contract if:
"It is an investment of money;
"There is an expectation of profits from the investment;
"The investment of money is in a common enterprise;
"Any profit comes from the efforts of a promoter or third party."
IANAL, but these personal tokens seem to match every condition of the Howey test. I'd be extremely careful about conducting your own little security offering if you're resident in the US, or allow US residents to participate.
It's worth noting that Alex Masmej, the person mentioned in the article, conducted his token offering while in France.
> As I mentioned in an earlier piece, these tokens are not simply "certificates of ownership"; they can be pre-programmed to behave in a certain way (for example, pay a dividend each time a predefined event happens).
I don't get how you can pre-program a contact to pay a percentage of your earnings. Ethereum is very restricted as to what you can program. I don't think you can just write "check stock price of X on CNBC, if X then Y..." Even if you could you would need to prefund it with Ethereum which would make the fund raising aspect kind of pointless.
> In English, this meant Masmej was selling digital tokens under his own name ($ALEX). The token sale would sponsor his entrepreneurial journey. Owners of these tokens will receive certain rights over Masmej's future income and career decisions.
It's just a promise to backers. I can't see how its enforced by a contract. It's no different than just having people send you money via PayPal and you promising to hit them back when you make some money. I guess easier to administer and track woh you promised?
And I don't see how an income sharing agreement is a Ponzi scheme. A ponzi scheme is current investors paying out to previous investors. This is just a funding mechanism, selling equity instead of debt
Interestingly, there's nothing particularly novel about investing in a person's early career to reap late-career rewards.
In America, it used to be that parents and employers would invest a lot of money in raising and training young adults, respectively. But more and more, there's less money available to support these programs.
Given this situation, it makes sense that early-career people would have to look elsewhere for people willing and able to invest in them.
A couple thoughts if we were to "scale" the income-sharing contract concept beyond a novelty:
1. If there is, say, a hundred or even ten possible candidates to pick from, due diligence becomes brutal. Health information, full social media dumps, detailed financial disclosures etc. Also rampant discrimination. If it is unregulated, it's basically what insurance companies would like to be doing but with no limits.
2. If it is for five years and with no big payout at the end, the value of such a contract (via discounted cash flows) is likely pretty low and accordingly would be the funding. Note that LambdaSchool owns the whole "equity" of a person (no splitting into X shares) and gives you a service (at scale) instead of cash, so it probably makes sense for them.
3. It would be fun to see the accounting sorcery possible for shielding and offloading your earnings to other entities, to pay your investors (?)... preferably nothing.
Besides, people, as opposed to companies, are rarely truly profit-maximizing entities. Maybe in the second year your guy decides to be content with a mid-range salary and devote all his time to studying meditation. But hey, theoretically you could try to escape inflation with such a crazy scheme if the interest rates on "real" bonds would stay very low...
I'll mention the SF novel "Black oceans" [1] again. It describes a scheme where someone extremely driven and confident of success, but utterly poor, can make a deal with certain shady organizations, which - in case you don't make it and repay them in agreed time - will simply harvest you for (very valuable) organs.
The bit about monetizing one’s influence / social “capital” reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s novel _Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom_ (which is a great read regardless).
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|5 years ago|reply
Personally, I want no part of it, but I think it might work well for people who are not me.
I've always been "on my own." My life really is a series of watersheds, where I've been the only person to believe in me, before the event, and a whole bunch of folks seemed to believe in me, after the fact. Not a particularly good setup for selling "Chris-Tokens™."
Not a bad thing, in the long run. It hurt like hell, the first few times, but I realized that I don't have the personal skills to "sell" myself (like being able to spew jargon, sound like I'm TED-talking all the time, or beat LeetCode tests), so I can't blame folks for not wanting to "invest" in me. It is what it is. I come across as a socially-awkward dork, so people don't take me seriously. I'm actually fairly good at what I do, but If I mention that, it comes across as "arrogant," despite the enormous ocean of hubris that pretty much defines today's tech scene. I don't really have the skill to "humble-brag."
It taught me to live a conservative lifestyle, be Honest and Honorable, do top-shelf work, bust my ass, and not expect much from others.
I couldn't rely on anyone else to clean up my messes, or get me out of jackpots. It has taught me to learn what I have needed to learn, despite active roadblocks being tossed out by "gatekeepers," and it also prevented me from getting mixed up with some truly awful disasters; both personal, and business.
[+] [-] LB232323|5 years ago|reply
You are not a commodity, you are a human being. You may look like a commodity to a business owner, but you refuse to allow yourself to become one.
Honesty and honor are worth more than money. There is money to be made in making yourself into a sort of corporate dog, but it will leave you feeling empty inside.
I am definitely not politically conservative, but I live in a conservative way as well. I don't think it's superior, but it's nice to have peace and stability.
[+] [-] lisper|5 years ago|reply
Actually you do. You've demonstrated them in this very comment. Maybe you don't realize this, or maybe your self-deprecation is a deliberate part of your strategy. Either way, it worked on me. This comment led me to your profile, which led me to your company web sites, which impressed me. I don't need an iOS app developer at the moment, but if I did you'd be at the top of my list of people to contact.
[+] [-] pmkiwi|5 years ago|reply
> I'm actually fairly good at what I do, but If I mention that, it comes across as "arrogant," despite the enormous ocean of hubris that pretty much defines today's tech scene.
[+] [-] A4ET8a8uTh0|5 years ago|reply
There are definitely people who would benefit from this. Some of my friends would have said 'some people just put everything in their char stat'. In fact, I have this HS friend. When we were growing up, he could barely turn his PC on. Now he is an IT manager for a major US brand. He either has gotten better or he was able to BS everyone with his cool guy persona ( and he is cool ). In short, I would buy his personal IPO.
[+] [-] darkerside|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gedy|5 years ago|reply
That's really insightful as I've definitely noticed many people judge by looks and impression more than the content of what's said. Unattractive/awkward people are frequently treated as insufferable when they are correct.
[+] [-] grog454|5 years ago|reply
I can relate to a lot of what you said. Specifically, I've overheard people say things like "grog454 does it so how hard could it be?" when deciding to try to get in to software dev (they failed). 10+ years ago a talented comp sci major was openly hostile toward me when I spoke or gave a presentation on multiple occasions.
I like to think I know what I'm doing. My personal software projects made me a millionaire before age 30 with no outside investment and minimal employees (0-1). Like you, I think I lack soft skills in the traditional sense of convincing other people that I know what I'm doing. I am routinely approached by recruiters for FAANG, and will occasionally begin the interview process just to see what it's like. In 4+ processes I've gotten to the final round of interviews but never received an offer.
What I do have is a different kind of "soft skill". Search algorithms love me. I attribute the success of my projects and (apparent recruiter magneticism) to clever SEO more than anything else, followed by luck, followed by a kind of relentlessness with which I approach my work, followed by meaningful software dev skill / business acumen. 100% of revenue is from end-users, 99.9999+% of which have no clue who I am.
I don't mean to come across as hostile, but its eye-opening to see what "I've always been on my own" and "not expect much from others" looks like to other people.
[+] [-] dustingetz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dave_sid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noservice99|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisweekly|5 years ago|reply
> "I couldn't rely on anyone else to ... get me out of jackpots."
Huh? TIA for clarifying.
[+] [-] Wistar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexmasmej|5 years ago|reply
Financially, this ISA freed me instantly, and gave me a newfound legitimacy as a crypto innovator. This was by far the best way I could find to break out as an entrepreneur.
[+] [-] ganafagol|5 years ago|reply
Fraction of future income and participation in "certain life decisions" is just the beginning. In principle this can ramp up to all future income and all life decisions.
And don't tell me this is voluntary, which makes it all different from slavery. Alex himself writes "I had no choice". Just take this further and apply it to some drone worker in an Amazon fulfillment center or other precarious employment. People who don't have a choice and would end up uneployed and hungry on the streets if they don't agree to terms put in front of them. The only thing between the worker and such a deal is labour laws, and we all know how popular those are in "entrepreneur" circles.
[+] [-] hycaria|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maliker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beervirus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkhdigital|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattzito|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjs8rj|5 years ago|reply
Maybe blockchain’s biggest value proposition right now is that it’s lightly regulated and has hype, so using it greases the wheels when growing an audience or building a usually regulated product.
[+] [-] mooreds|5 years ago|reply
But what he describes, hedging risk, is not a new concept. It is something that people do every day when they diversify investments or buy insurance. ISAs and "person as tokens" just push this to new levels.
> In such a scenario, every career becomes a pyramid scheme.
In other words, the rich get richer--scalability works.
One thing the author left out (or that I missed) is that scalability increases overall wealth. If I have to learn calculus from an average teacher because of geographic limitations, and then my child gets to learn from the best calculus teacher in the world, in the latter case the world gets richer because the same knowledge is arrived at quicker at less expense. (Of course, there's fallout for the average worker, but this is something we've been dealing with in the developed world for decades and still haven't figured out.)
[+] [-] seibelj|5 years ago|reply
Why people continually can’t understand this, and keep saying “buh buh buh mysql and lawyer fees! No need for blockchain!” is a failure of imagination.
[+] [-] forrestthewoods|5 years ago|reply
Blockchain isn’t magic. It can’t do very much “new”. But if it can take something old (contract) and make that more accessible to more potential contract buyers/sellers, then that’s actually interesting.
Technology that makes slow complicated things fast and easy can have a lot of impact.
I won’t be selling shares of myself nor buying shares of others. But this we’re close to the point where blockchain actually provides real value beyond tulip speculation.
[+] [-] zshrdlu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RhodoGSA|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexCoventry|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danans|5 years ago|reply
Isn't that also basically what any interest bearing loan/mortgage is?
[+] [-] joelbluminator|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsanr2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|5 years ago|reply
https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe
The Bowie Bond part of the post was fascinating by the way. Had never heard that story. He issued them in 1997 which is a high Shiller PE value also before the 2000 stock bust. Lots of money floating around looking for a home then too.
[+] [-] angry_octet|5 years ago|reply
How long before people are trading options on risk weighted batch of people? Leveraged buyouts if whole specialties? Movement controls to enforce greatest P/E? "I'm sorry sir, you can't leave the country without presenting a Holiday Risk Bond. Perhaps a Virtual Vacay is more affordable?"
And most of all: you, as an individual, have almost no information about the market, and are almost certain to get a bad price.
Anyone who thinks they are good at this should practice buying a new car. Once you get to the final sale price, with no finance, demand another 9% off. If you can get that, and the car isn't a lemon, you're ready to negotiate for a well understood commodity.
Selling people futures, when you've just given them capital up front with the goal of enabling higher returns, is less understood, though of course there are many immigrants who do just that. But already wealthy people? It seems much less certain.
[+] [-] TimJRobinson|5 years ago|reply
Lol I actually love this idea. Funding an ETF of people who want to move to SF to start a career in tech, or LA to start a career in acting. Diversify your risk and support some people with potential. Could have an acting school equivilant of ycombinator and you can invest in all each batch and get a return if some succeed.
If we want a metiocracy this could help build it, by giving more capital to those who have potential but are disenfranchised by existing institutions.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jopsen|5 years ago|reply
Social programs.
In Denmark part of my taxes goes to pay public pensions, and when I get old taxes will fund some pension for me.
The public pension isn't huge, so yes, almost everybody has a private pension scheme too.
My private pension is exposed to global stock performance over ~30 years.
My public pensions is exposed to value of humans in Denmark in ~30 years.
So in a way I do have exposure to some human investment :)
This is also why it makes sense for my taxes to fund tuition for everybody.
[+] [-] andxor|5 years ago|reply
I'll pass.
[+] [-] pavlov|5 years ago|reply
In 1946, the US Supreme Court established the so-called Howey Test to determine if an investment opportunity is a security offering. These are the Howey criteria:
"Under the Howey Test, a transaction is an investment contract if:
"It is an investment of money;
"There is an expectation of profits from the investment;
"The investment of money is in a common enterprise;
"Any profit comes from the efforts of a promoter or third party."
IANAL, but these personal tokens seem to match every condition of the Howey test. I'd be extremely careful about conducting your own little security offering if you're resident in the US, or allow US residents to participate.
It's worth noting that Alex Masmej, the person mentioned in the article, conducted his token offering while in France.
[+] [-] sgt101|5 years ago|reply
Saying "not really" doesn't make something so. This is, literary indentured servitude. By definition.
[+] [-] bko|5 years ago|reply
I don't get how you can pre-program a contact to pay a percentage of your earnings. Ethereum is very restricted as to what you can program. I don't think you can just write "check stock price of X on CNBC, if X then Y..." Even if you could you would need to prefund it with Ethereum which would make the fund raising aspect kind of pointless.
> In English, this meant Masmej was selling digital tokens under his own name ($ALEX). The token sale would sponsor his entrepreneurial journey. Owners of these tokens will receive certain rights over Masmej's future income and career decisions.
It's just a promise to backers. I can't see how its enforced by a contract. It's no different than just having people send you money via PayPal and you promising to hit them back when you make some money. I guess easier to administer and track woh you promised?
And I don't see how an income sharing agreement is a Ponzi scheme. A ponzi scheme is current investors paying out to previous investors. This is just a funding mechanism, selling equity instead of debt
[+] [-] caseyross|5 years ago|reply
In America, it used to be that parents and employers would invest a lot of money in raising and training young adults, respectively. But more and more, there's less money available to support these programs.
Given this situation, it makes sense that early-career people would have to look elsewhere for people willing and able to invest in them.
[+] [-] stereolambda|5 years ago|reply
1. If there is, say, a hundred or even ten possible candidates to pick from, due diligence becomes brutal. Health information, full social media dumps, detailed financial disclosures etc. Also rampant discrimination. If it is unregulated, it's basically what insurance companies would like to be doing but with no limits.
2. If it is for five years and with no big payout at the end, the value of such a contract (via discounted cash flows) is likely pretty low and accordingly would be the funding. Note that LambdaSchool owns the whole "equity" of a person (no splitting into X shares) and gives you a service (at scale) instead of cash, so it probably makes sense for them.
3. It would be fun to see the accounting sorcery possible for shielding and offloading your earnings to other entities, to pay your investors (?)... preferably nothing.
Besides, people, as opposed to companies, are rarely truly profit-maximizing entities. Maybe in the second year your guy decides to be content with a mid-range salary and devote all his time to studying meditation. But hey, theoretically you could try to escape inflation with such a crazy scheme if the interest rates on "real" bonds would stay very low...
[+] [-] ausbah|5 years ago|reply
I guess there is more "freedom"? but that seems to come at the cost of stability and more winner take all scenarios
like a lot of this stuff isn't new, but the degree to which is seems prevalent reads dystopic
[+] [-] airza|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arberx|5 years ago|reply
At the core a ponzi relies on guaranteed return, paid for by other investors.
Just because you might not like or understand how something works, doesn't mean it's a ponzi.
[+] [-] ramblerman|5 years ago|reply
But the conclusion seems a bit off. Basic income seems like the only recourse IMO
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|5 years ago|reply
Is this just a failure of government to supply the upfront investment in its citizens so that they pay enough tax in ten years?
[+] [-] gattr|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charne_oceany
[+] [-] booleandilemma|5 years ago|reply
You’re reduced to a slave, with many masters instead of one.
No thank you.
[+] [-] anm89|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mollems|5 years ago|reply
https://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_t...