“Play-to-Earn” and Bullshit Jobs
In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we&#x27;re talking several hundred hours minimum.<p>At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in-game currency, gold pieces or GP. It was something like $10 to 1M GP. I could chop enough magic logs in about 4-6 hours to make $10.<p>I had a breakthrough. What if I wrote a macro to record my cursor and clicks during my route from the &#x27;bank&#x27; (where you can deposit any amount of any material) to the nearby respawning magic tree forest?<p>Weeks went by and I had passive income. Runescape eventually introduced the Grand Exchange, a literal in-game stock market that allowed power users like me to sell much larger quantities of certain items instantly, across all Runescape servers (referred to as Worlds) simultaneously. This required a standardized pricing mechanism, like an order book, where prices of any item would fluctuate based on buy and sell orders.<p>Suddenly, I now could see a +-10% change on the value of my digital assets, on which my passive income was built.<p>I could go on; Runescape in fact taught me much about economics. What&#x27;s extraordinary is selling Runescape gold led me to Bitcoin, and I&#x27;ve watched cryptocurrency for nearly a decade, seeing trends from a MMO propagate throughout the world. It seems human nature to innovate and stagnate, and the more immediate our collective feedback loops, the quicker these cycles are.