h!h!👋🙃

Just wanted to give a thorough response to @ehcarpenter about his concerns and also share some of my own + hopes for the future of $Moxie as a Ⓜ️oxieist✊

We are 57 days into the protocol’s development and in Farcaster fashion, they are developing, growing their network of users/builders and shipping updates at a rapid speed!

This makes me bullish!

I have personally earned a lot (for me) of $moxie, without putting a penny of my own money, except maybe the negligible amount that I’ve paid in fees (thanks to base) or by being extraordinarily online/popular!

This makes me bullish!

I have had a lot of fun collecting my daily rewards and immediately going shopping for my favorite flavor of FanTokens from all the people I had fun interactions with that day + most of my FT purchases have gone up tremendously in value as well and that makes me feel great about letting my $moxie park there, opposed to immediately trying to swap them out for $fiat.

This makes me bullish!

All in all so far these are the sentiments that are personally guiding my monkeh brain to keep on playing the game🎰🐒

But let’s get meta and dive into it;

‘In my experience, the staking of “social tokens” is a fall-back measure deployed by project teams to prop up token prices.’

Gonna argue some semantics here based on the examples you provided. Your “social tokens” for me = meme/shitcoins and $moxie is an ‘algo social token’ by my definition.

‘There are many examples of this, including Shiba Inu, Terra(LUNA), $LIT and Axie Infinity – and while the specific cause or set of causes for the decline in token value in each case may vary, most can be tied back to one or more of the following issues: excessive supply, market sentiment, lack of utility, and/or profit-taking. This is important, because all of these factors have the potential to impact $MOXIE's value.’

The game with shitcoins has been to be a pseudo kind of casino. Every interaction is another purchase you have to make and the only winners are the house and all its insiders of whales. This is true of memecoins like $DOGE, $SHIBA, $LIT + so many more examples that launch a copypasta chain, hand wave about TPS (now TIPS* too lol) or hype culture b.s. before they’ve actually created any kind of culture to get hyped about. Buy in and sell out at the top before it drops, ooo much fun, such memes…😑

$AXIE tried to be some sort of a webkins x Pokémon kind of game but the mechanics for having fun were not worth the cost of interacting with it. Terra/Luna + FTT are great examples of good ole fashion crypto ponzis/dMLMs (decentralized Multi-Level Marketing) schemes not unlike most corporations in TradFi to be honest and I hate to break it to you…

Then there is $moxie

Which like I said I’ve earned a hearty amount and am encouraged/incentivized to continue casting / building / growing their protocol based on the rewards I’ve gotten thus far + hopefully I’ll increase my score to earn/give even more! Showing my stats is by no means a big flex at all (I’m a grower not a shower ok) but this is a much different game from gambling is what I really want to articulate. Buying $moxie certainly is still a gamble at this point but EARNING it is far from a gamble. The best reasoning for this is you are either already casting on FC or you are expending your time and energy casting for free elsewhere. Paying to boost your FarPower through giving to LP or Locking FT’s IS a gamble BUT the immediate pay off of being able to distribute more $moxie IS a kind of yield reward for helping support the protocol.

You get to have your stake, distribute it and if you own their FanToken, then you get to eat too!

‘– rewards are promised which encourage maxis to lock their tokens – at a price point from which the token often continues to fall below the value of those rewards. And If the token value rises in an interim period, stakers are unable to capitalize on gains.’

This is a SOCIAL protocol so all the game mechanics MUST be pro-social NOT pro-gamble for it to be a success. Locking does this and I hope there will be more ways/incentives to come that help slow down and prevent all the speculators from trying to turn $moxie into a socialized pump n dump coin… We still need some* degen apes and whales but they should NOT be the focal point by any means, merely complimentary. For instance it’d be a travesty if apes and whales were more enabled to buy themselves into popularity by increasing and advertising their scores like the Ⓜ️ilkers are doing right now…🐮

I’m lactose intolerant of all the milking stuff but I do love the memes making fun of them…

Keep em cümming Ⓜ️eⓂ️er Ⓜ️fers!✊👏🙌

🐙🧔🏻🐙

Moxieism is about SHARING + CARING for each other in REAL ways and SOCIALIZING the rewards for increasing the value of moxie/farcaster!

✊🤝✊Ⓜ️

‘One mitigating factor to consider - in my opinion - when evaluating how much to worry in any specific case of non-functional staking is the extent to which this mechanism was (or was not) a publicly-stated element of the token's deployment. In other words, if the use of staking as a price-stabilizing, governance, or incentive mechanism appears in the original whitepaper or tokenomics of a project, I’m less worried than if it suddenly appears at a time when prices / interest is dropping.’

Personally I’m less concerned about this. I can concede that it is a potential* red flag but any action trying to do something* about the farmers/milkers is cool with me. Try and fail a bunch of different methods a lot of times to rid us of as many of them as possible is my hope because we don’t need gamblers to make a social protocol. Just imagine for yourself how much ‘socialization’ really happens in a casino…?

I don’t necessarily think locking will do a great job of this either but I’m cautiously optimistic and hopeful of more features to come in the future. Personally would love to see more governance/voting games to play as a network i.e. vote for who should get a boost to their FarPower for a day, week or month, best/most interacted with frames/casts/memes/art/games for bonus moxie rewards. A community moderation system for flagging and removing spam/farmers would be great because it shouldn’t be entirely on the dev team to be on top of them.

‘That said, I still find such "use cases" concerning - if a token has real utility, it should not require the artificial (and time-limited) effects of functionality-neutral staking; there is no reason governance, for instance, cannot be based on "free token" counts in a hodlers account, rather than locked tokens.’ This is valid although I may disagree with the token having no* utility or being ‘functionally neutral’ while staked because of the boost to score. That said I would like to hear more about what their governance will look like and how they plan to distribute the weighting for votes. I’d also like to see more ‘tightening the window’ of $moxie earning. It’d be great if overtime those that earn the most earn less and those that pass a certain threshold of quality/proof of ID/not a milker with their casting to earn more. Bring the high earners, lower and raise the lower earners up.

This is the way.

I think a progressive income tax could be really applicable here too. Once you start earning X amount of $moxie then you start getting taxed and those taxes are sent below to raise the earning standards of other quality casters. This can replace owning airstack FT in the future and be used for more advanced access/features for the top casters/builders. I’m also getting the sense that a Harberger tax could be levied in the future potentially? Maybe for owning channels or some other crypto property?🤔 (Plz t@g me if you have any ideas, yes you reading this🫵)

‘If you don’t already know the answers to these questions, I’d encourage you to look for them.

• Who has made the most actual gains off $MOXIE to date?

• I’ll get right on chain analysis using moxiescout to see what kind of data I can glean.

  • Have those gains come from liquidity mining, selling $MOXIE for ETH/USDC, or ??

  • Very important to me that the TOP earners are actual casters/builders. Not from LP or Locked FT holdings.

  • Who has made (and lost) the most in “unredeemed value” of $MOXIE holdings?

  • Another crucial analysis that may be a bit more difficult to uncover all the answers in the data alone so may require some surveys/polling.

  • Who stands to gain the most from the current staking initiative, and who will be most at risk?

  • My initial feeling about locking/staking IS that it’ll mostly come from maxis who were already HODLing their $moxie, so at least now they’ll be distributing more and apers will continue to ape the price.🦍

  • What will staking do to the bonding curves?🤔

I wish I could give you answers to some of these questions – but for now, I can only pose them as a starting point - and ask for your input:

• Do you have a solid answer to any of the questions I've raised?

• What other questions would you suggest people ask before staking $MOXIE?’

Right now, as it is for all of crypto, the apes and whales are winning the game BUT it’s to a lesser extent with $moxie than it has been with all the purely speculative gamba coins of the past. I believe in $moxie’s value proposition and think more people like me will eventually go from earners, to true believing and contributing $moxie maxis. For me I’m not in a place to speculate financially but I do have the timenergy to invest in earning it. That’s Ⓜ️oxieist, allowing us lowly pooroles to earn by contributing NON monetary value, not just by spending our hard and hardly earned saving$$$…