Jace Hall's Feed

Jace Hall
02-24-2021 at 04:10 PM

I posted this in response to @RedDawn 's Wall post, but it may have been missed by most. Also I wanted to add a thought to it.. Wondering if anyone has any additional thoughts...

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As TG continues to improve itself and the community grows, there has been an increasing positive sentiment and desire to contribute expressed from the membership and public.

Currently, TG has no advertisements, no donation mechanism, no merchandise, etc. All of the ongoing costs of operation are paid for by TG ownership.

While it is always great to offer free service to people in the spirit of community, fun, and achievement recognition, the fact that the ownership must pay for everything at any given moment certainly creates limitations on how fast and how much improvement can be accomplished.

I think there are many community members who would like to see more done and a faster pace, and they are willing to contribute to help make that happen if there was some reasonable way to do so.

I've been thinking about the various ways that this may be accomplished, and of course there are pros/cons to every method.

After careful evaluation, the most interesting solution I believe may be for TG to create its own Cryptocurrency.

This would allow people to buy the currency and own it, and eventually its value may increase as TG continues to develop and then makes use of the currency for tournament/contest/event prize money, submission point conversion, TG merchandise purchases, certificates, etc.

Specifically want to call out the idea of allowing submission points to have some kind of conversion ability into the crypto - I think that could be interesting...

I'm reasonably confident that I have enough industry relationships to eventually help facilitate the step-by-step business deals required for TG currency to potentially be accepted or awarded at other locations, be it websites or physical locations - and eventually get it on the crypto exchanges.

The money received by TG from the initial currency sale would be directly used to improve the site and meet all the feature requests the community asks for much more quickly.

In my view this solution may be better than a donation button or putting up ads and etc. Its a way for the community to contribute and not only get a better TG with more resources, but also own something that specifically can go up in value as TG improves along with it.

Anyway, that's been my current thinking as one possible direction.

Opinions are welcome. Please express your thoughts.

User comments (29)

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Quote Originally Posted by Jace Hall


The things listed above are items I would really want TG to have and I'm sure will one day eventually have. However, as you can imagine, each of these items require further significant economic investment and time to complete and integrate properly.

It is what it is.

I guess my biggest concern is how are you going to afford and follow through on a completely original crypto when you don't have the money or follow through to print pieces of paper.

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Quote Originally Posted by swaggers


I guess my biggest concern is how are you going to afford and follow through on a completely original crypto when you don't have the money or follow through to print pieces of paper.

They are very different types of costs and management concerns.

For instance, here is one of many issues with merch and such -

Physical inventory management. This includes handling returns, and providing refunds, tracking packages when addresses are incorrect, etc. etc. Someone has to do this, and they have to get paid to do so.

There is more labor involved than what it would seem to require on the surface. One might suggest finding a 3rd party service to help deal with the execution, but any 3rd party fulfillment place still has to deal with those challenges and will need minimum guarantees and etc before accepting any kind of agreement. Then of course, you have to manage and monitor that relationship, which is time/work investment unto itself.

Merch may make sense when you can achieve an economy of scale but without that, generally speaking it tends to not be a profitable activity. Especially if the goal of the merch is quality and uniqueness.

If you have ever sold items in quantity on ebay, you may have experienced some of the challenges and amount of work the sales and fulfillment process can grow to be..

In regard to a crypto coin for TG, it is a different set of management and cost issues. It is not difficult to create the actual crypto currency itself. The main difficultly is in creating a market for it. Please keep in mind that @Snowflake was correct in identifying that TG already has a currency in the form of submission points. The work for that currency is already done and can be slowly expanded over time to include more uses/features.

A TG Crypto would leverage that previous work.

I hope that made sense....

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Quote Originally Posted by swaggers


I guess my biggest concern is how are you going to afford and follow through on a completely original crypto when you don't have the money or follow through to print pieces of paper.

LMFAO. Good point :)

Anyway, I like the idea that someone proposed earlier in this thread, that being that the GOLD founding members of the new TG get an "equal distribution/share of 10% of all coins mined". Sounds good and very fair to me.

Heres the list of gold founding members..................................

https://www.twingalaxies.com/wiki_index.php?title=Twin-Galaxies-Honorary-Founders



john


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just thought of a way to partially implement submissoin point transfer to avoid abuse (not sure though if the implementation is too hard).

rememebering the real issue is noone wants blind voters and bots rewarded for massive blind voting (mining submissions points), the only thing though that really stops complete blind voting is credibility.

What if anyone could receive submission points, but only people with sufficiently high cred could donate/spend them? the blind voters with their occasional dings on cred would never get the reward they want and so would face no motivation for abuse.

Finding the exact cred number would be difficult. also the programming would have to be tested. The top cred members A.D. has a little over 60k. Maybe at first make the bar 60k, a number only one user has, and slowly lower the bar of who can spend submission points as you become more confident that different bars are safe from abuse.

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Quote Originally Posted by Jace Hall

For instance, here is one of many issues with merch and such -

Physical inventory management. This includes handling returns, and providing refunds, tracking packages when addresses are incorrect, etc. etc. Someone has to do this, and they have to get paid to do so.

There is more labor involved than what it would seem to require on the surface. One might suggest finding a 3rd party service to help deal with the execution, but any 3rd party fulfillment place still has to deal with those challenges and will need minimum guarantees and etc before accepting any kind of agreement. Then of course, you have to manage and monitor that relationship, which is time/work investment unto itself.

Merch may make sense when you can achieve an economy of scale but without that, generally speaking it tends to not be a profitable activity. Especially if the goal of the merch is quality and uniqueness.

If you have ever sold items in quantity on ebay, you may have experienced some of the challenges and amount of work the sales and fulfillment process can grow to be..

The above is one way to look at merch. When I was referencing 3rd party (and I think some others were on this page), I was talking about a site like Cafe Press which removes all of the issues of physical inventory you mention and removes all of the third party concerns you mention. For example, let's say you want to make a shirt available to the community. Cafe Press charges a base of $18 for their shirts. Let's say you then make the cost of the shirt with your logo $25, then every shirt that sells, you pick up $7. Add that out for different products you want. I thing they charge a "store" fee which can be paid upfront, but can also be paid with your monthly products (makes sense if you're not selling much/getting started and then the smaller upfront cost can be paid when regular sales are coming in). Concerned about the quality of the product? Customize a TG shirt just for yourself and order it and see. There are multiple sites that provide this surface, Cafe Press is just the most well known.

This isn't going to create a windfall of cash for TG, but it could a) create enough cash flow over time to complete some of these smaller projects that the community has been in favor of (a bounty system), b) give the community something they've been asking for (shirts and/or other merch), c) allow the community members who want to give to TG a route to do so.

And the great thing about an endeavor like this is that you can end it whenever you want. If 5 years from now, you're ready to scale merch up and handle it in house, then you close the shop. if 2 months from now, you decide you want to drum up demand by making the shirts unavailable, you can take them off line. Ultimately, it gives the flexibility to try it on and see how it fits without actually having to "buy"

Want to make more on each shirt without all of the cons you mention above? Cool, create (or better yet, let a community member volunteer and create) a gofundme campaign (or something similar) for the shirts (I've done multiple successful campaigns of this sort and would be happy to talk with you more about what it would look like or volunteer my time on the project if you want). This would also allow more say in the quality of the products. I have no idea what it would cost to create a basic bounty system for the site, but let's say its 8k. So you set up a campaign to raise say $14k (to cover the cost associated with the shirts as well) and make it clear that the profits will go to the creation of the bounty system (There are also systems in place that would allow the third party volunteer to ship out everything without ever having direct access to the funds - again, details I'm happy to go into deeper if you are interested). Then the only question becomes whether TG could actually fulfill the development of the system, which I think is what folks are getting at now...

A crypto currency requires some level of confidence if it's every to move beyond the immediate community. The confidence can most easily be built by historic actions from the entity. I'm going to look at who is creating it as much as how it is created and what it does in determining what crypto currency I feel comfortable holding and to what levels. Maybe complete some of the stuff that's been talked about and show us all it can be done before jumping into the deep-end of crypto currency.

You wrote - "A TG Crypto would leverage that previous work." That would be awesome. But wouldn't the same be true for a lot of things with TG? With most of this there is room to leverage previous work (logos, art/archives, community involvement etc...) to create future gains.

Often the way we think a process needs to be carried out and run versus the ways it can be actually be built do not line up. As someone who started and ran (and eventually sold) a screen printing company in NYC for over a decade, I see where your base assumption of what needs to happen for merch lies. But one of the services we provided was consulting for orgs and businesses that wanted to develop merch but had the exact same concerns you had. We worked with them to develop a turnkey income stream which didn't require the investment of additional positions and had minimal labor beyond initial set up (and we rarely created products for them because it wasn't the type of work we did). This was 10 years ago and the possibilities have only ballooned since then.


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Quote Originally Posted by Snowflake

just thought of a way to partially implement submissoin point transfer to avoid abuse (not sure though if the implementation is too hard).

rememebering the real issue is noone wants blind voters and bots rewarded for massive blind voting (mining submissions points), the only thing though that really stops complete blind voting is credibility.

What if anyone could receive submission points, but only people with sufficiently high cred could donate/spend them? the blind voters with their occasional dings on cred would never get the reward they want and so would face no motivation for abuse.

Finding the exact cred number would be difficult. also the programming would have to be tested. The top cred members A.D. has a little over 60k. Maybe at first make the bar 60k, a number only one user has, and slowly lower the bar of who can spend submission points as you become more confident that different bars are safe from abuse.

Possibly tie in a new (not public) system of cred that deals specifically with the ability to spend the currency? Start everyone from zero and build from there?

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Quote Originally Posted by Blackflag82

The above is one way to look at merch. When I was referencing 3rd party (and I think some others were on this page), I was talking about a site like Cafe Press which removes all of the issues of physical inventory you mention and removes all of the third party concerns you mention. For example, let's say you want to make a shirt available to the community. Cafe Press charges a base of $18 for their shirts. Let's say you then make the cost of the shirt with your logo $25, then every shirt that sells, you pick up $7. Add that out for different products you want. I thing they charge a "store" fee which can be paid upfront, but can also be paid with your monthly products (makes sense if you're not selling much/getting started and then the smaller upfront cost can be paid when regular sales are coming in). Concerned about the quality of the product? Customize a TG shirt just for yourself and order it and see. There are multiple sites that provide this surface, Cafe Press is just the most well known.

This isn't going to create a windfall of cash for TG, but it could a) create enough cash flow over time to complete some of these smaller projects that the community has been in favor of (a bounty system), b) give the community something they've been asking for (shirts and/or other merch), c) allow the community members who want to give to TG a route to do so.

And the great thing about an endeavor like this is that you can end it whenever you want. If 5 years from now, you're ready to scale merch up and handle it in house, then you close the shop. if 2 months from now, you decide you want to drum up demand by making the shirts unavailable, you can take them off line. Ultimately, it gives the flexibility to try it on and see how it fits without actually having to "buy"

Want to make more on each shirt without all of the cons you mention above? Cool, create (or better yet, let a community member volunteer and create) a gofundme campaign (or something similar) for the shirts (I've done multiple successful campaigns of this sort and would be happy to talk with you more about what it would look like or volunteer my time on the project if you want). This would also allow more say in the quality of the products. I have no idea what it would cost to create a basic bounty system for the site, but let's say its 8k. So you set up a campaign to raise say $14k (to cover the cost associated with the shirts as well) and make it clear that the profits will go to the creation of the bounty system (There are also systems in place that would allow the third party volunteer to ship out everything without ever having direct access to the funds - again, details I'm happy to go into deeper if you are interested). Then the only question becomes whether TG could actually fulfill the development of the system, which I think is what folks are getting at now...

A crypto currency requires some level of confidence if it's every to move beyond the immediate community. The confidence can most easily be built by historic actions from the entity. I'm going to look at who is creating it as much as how it is created and what it does in determining what crypto currency I feel comfortable holding and to what levels. Maybe complete some of the stuff that's been talked about and show us all it can be done before jumping into the deep-end of crypto currency.

You wrote - "A TG Crypto would leverage that previous work." That would be awesome. But wouldn't the same be true for a lot of things with TG? With most of this there is room to leverage previous work (logos, art/archives, community involvement etc...) to create future gains.

Often the way we think a process needs to be carried out and run versus the ways it can be actually be built do not line up. As someone who started and ran (and eventually sold) a screen printing company in NYC for over a decade, I see where your base assumption of what needs to happen for merch lies. But one of the services we provided was consulting for orgs and businesses that wanted to develop merch but had the exact same concerns you had. We worked with them to develop a turnkey income stream which didn't require the investment of additional positions and had minimal labor beyond initial set up (and we rarely created products for them because it wasn't the type of work we did). This was 10 years ago and the possibilities have only ballooned since then.

This was a very thoughtful post and I wanted to take a moment to provide a note or two on a few of the good points that were made.

Any Crypto that TG would theoretically issue would tend to be focused more on the immediate community and not necessarily be replete with big plans for it to move beyond that limited scope in its early implementation.

@Snowflake pointed out a few of the interesting community-centric use cases and perhaps more ideas like those could be explored.

In regard to mech, and etc. New TG has generally avoided exploring the merch opportunity until TG can approach it in a way that it feels is more meaningful to the purchaser than a typical scenario.

By this I mean, TG having the ability to include unique attribution characteristics to each merch item, wherein there is a form of scarcity and enhanced value built-in.

Perhaps a shirt can only be acquired if the purchaser has some level of recognized achievement within TG. The shirt would carry a unique id of authenticity, etc.

Unique TG items that have a built in scarcity tend to increase in value. We saw this with the TG Hoodie code we gave out - essentially becoming a digital currency that peaked in value at $3000 for a hoodie set.

This uniqueness is something we were able to accomplish with the new certificates that were issued. Each one is unique and carries specific attribution elements (some of which are not publicly known) to ensure that forgery is extremely difficult. One-of-a-kind to be sure! :)

Of course all this special stuff related to merch requires TG to do engineering on its side in order for the relevant data to be uniquely tied to each merch item sold or produced. The new certificates went through that.

Anyway, it is because of this TG longer term concern / interest, that dissuades the use of fulfillment services like Cafe Press, and etc. Those solutions do work as you described, but they must perform within least-common-denominator-type parameters to achieve their economy of scale pricing - and TG would require highly customized solutions for its goals - and those solutions will require TG to do engineering work on its end regardless of who may be ultimately producing and distributing the merch.

If TG were to go the Cafe Press route, at this point in time the demand for the generic merch would probably not be high enough to generate enough revenue to make any difference in terms of TG being able to hire additional engineering to get stuff done more quickly. It would also likely diminish the more interesting achievement oriented merch concept that TG could later roll out...

Now, in thinking about a TG crypto, the hope is that it may be able to accomplish a few things:

1.) It could "replace" (have a conversion rate relating to) Submission Points and effectively give the members the ability to transfer their value to other people. The ability to transfer SP will likely make Submission Points a more valuable asset.

2.) It could provide a way for members to donate to TG in any amount they want (to help the site add features faster), and in return members receive tokens that represent that value. As Twin Galaxies grows and adds new things, these tokens may increase in value on their own in relation to that activity. OR members themselves may cause the value to increase by trading/using the token among each other or elsewhere as reward/trade value.

From those 2 basic points, there could be a very slow build of the kind of show of proof you mentioned in you post, which I agree with - and perhaps the TG crypto would grow - but to be clear, I'm not talking about TG Crypto as some kind of investment-type vehicle like a BitCoin or whatever. I'm just talking about it as a better solution to improve and extend some of the things that we already have, while also providing a way for the members to help TG shoulder the cost of adding more features quickly.

Anyhow, those are just some of my thoughts...










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Quote Originally Posted by Jace Hall


This was a very thoughtful post and I wanted to take a moment to provide a note or two on a few of the good points that were made.

Any Crypto that TG would theoretically issue would tend to be focused more on the immediate community and not necessarily be replete with big plans for it to move beyond that limited scope in its early implementation.

@Snowflake pointed out a few of the interesting community-centric use cases and perhaps more ideas like those could be explored.

In regard to mech, and etc. New TG has generally avoided exploring the merch opportunity until TG can approach it in a way that it feels is more meaningful to the purchaser than a typical scenario.

By this I mean, TG having the ability to include unique attribution characteristics to each merch item, wherein there is a form of scarcity and enhanced value built-in.

Perhaps a shirt can only be acquired if the purchaser has some level of recognized achievement within TG. The shirt would carry a unique id of authenticity, etc.

Unique TG items that have a built in scarcity tend to increase in value. We saw this with the TG Hoodie code we gave out - essentially becoming a digital currency that peaked in value at $3000 for a hoodie set.

This uniqueness is something we were able to accomplish with the new certificates that were issued. Each one is unique and carries specific attribution elements (some of which are not publicly known) to ensure that forgery is extremely difficult. One-of-a-kind to be sure! :)

Of course all this special stuff related to merch requires TG to do engineering on its side in order for the relevant data to be uniquely tied to each merch item sold or produced. The new certificates went through that.

Anyway, it is because of this TG longer term concern / interest, that dissuades the use of fulfillment services like Cafe Press, and etc. Those solutions do work as you described, but they must perform within least-common-denominator-type parameters to achieve their economy of scale pricing - and TG would require highly customized solutions for its goals - and those solutions will require TG to do engineering work on its end regardless of who may be ultimately producing and distributing the merch.

If TG were to go the Cafe Press route, at this point in time the demand for the generic merch would probably not be high enough to generate enough revenue to make any difference in terms of TG being able to hire additional engineering to get stuff done more quickly. It would also likely diminish the more interesting achievement oriented merch concept that TG could later roll out...

Now, in thinking about a TG crypto, the hope is that it may be able to accomplish a few things:

1.) It could "replace" (have a conversion rate relating to) Submission Points and effectively give the members the ability to transfer their value to other people. The ability to transfer SP will likely make Submission Points a more valuable asset.

2.) It could provide a way for members to donate to TG in any amount they want (to help the site add features faster), and in return members receive tokens that represent that value. As Twin Galaxies grows and adds new things, these tokens may increase in value on their own in relation to that activity. OR members themselves may cause the value to increase by trading/using the token among each other or elsewhere as reward/trade value.

From those 2 basic points, there could be a very slow build of the kind of show of proof you mentioned in you post, which I agree with - and perhaps the TG crypto would grow - but to be clear, I'm not talking about TG Crypto as some kind of investment-type vehicle like a BitCoin or whatever. I'm just talking about it as a better solution to improve and extend some of the things that we already have, while also providing a way for the members to help TG shoulder the cost of adding more features quickly.

Anyhow, those are just some of my thoughts...










I appreciate you fleshing all of that out. That gives me a much better idea of where you are coming from on those things and the overall goal.

I hope that a scenario like what you describe can be realized. It would be a really big step forward on a lot of fronts.

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I was listening to Peter Schiff podcast on my way home from a friends yesterday and he was bashing crypto again but said he'd actually respect a crpto if a place like starbucks did it cause at least it would be backed in something. I'm just thinking how cool it would be in a future podcast to hear peter talking about twin galaxies crypto.

even if all tg sold was some tg hat or frisbee, it would be a crypto backed in something, likely gettings some news articles meaning free press. yeah i know i'm saying "hey jace consider this gimmick", if you just do it for news then yeah its a gimmick but even still, just one more thing to take into account.

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