Maybe the most interesting thing to me about this is how, as the btc price has exploded, stackers have become more generous, not less. I know this is true of me, as well. I attribute this to two things, basically -- as NGU, people in this space get excited and feel good, alive, like the slog and the obsession is paying off. People feeling good are generally kind and spread the goodness around -- which is a good lesson for life, I think -- and it's true here, too.
The second reason is perhaps a controversial hypothesis: stacking has little to do with price. People are not price sensitive in their bones. The cheap-asses going around zapping one sat are not doing it because they need every fraction of a cent to buy a micro-hamburger to keep from starving. I don't even think they're doing it because they imagine an outsized future. Even if the price goes up tenfold in the next decade, which I am confident it will not, your 100 sat zap -- which would be generous, by the standards of most stackers -- is now worth sixty cents. You're telling me some latent multi-millionaire is clutching his pennies this tightly? I just don't buy it.
So my hypothesis is that we should expect more of the same -- NGU leading to stackers making it rain.
142 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 28 Feb
That's what I felt like I saw last cycle. People spend more money when they have more of money.
reply
I have a completely contrary hypothesis to yours.
As the price (purchasing power) rises, stackers are acting more in line with the incentive structure of the site's rewards mechanism. That's exactly what we'd predict from rational economic agents.
reply
How could we disambiguate between our hypotheses? It strikes me that yours has not accorded well w/ reality, as demonstrated by your repeated reminders that people's normal zapping tendencies are un-economic.
reply
They're getting less uneconomic as the stakes increase though. We refer to that as "saliency" in experimental economics. Oftentimes experiments fail to find results because the design didn't create a big enough payoff spread between the different actions.
If I could earn another kilosat by zapping better, I'm more inclined to make the effort to do so when that kilosat is worth more.
reply
Ah -- that seems plausible. I might incorporate that into something like:
  1. the psych factors of all the exuberant feels lead to people zapping more
  2. this gives them the chance to observe economic payoff matrices
  3. increased value makes those payoffs salient enough to care about
If that's the generative model, it's not obvious how to realistically pry apart #1 from #2 and #3. You could run an experiment but it would be unnatural-seeming.
reply
Numbers 2 and 3 lead researchers to identify this problem. A bunch of experiments were putting people in unusual situation that nonetheless had very distinct theoretical predictions. However, due to funding constraints, the payoff differences were only like a nickel.
The participants quite rationally didn't find it worth their time to think through what was going on nor did they notice a material difference in the payouts they were getting so they couldn't learn anything anyway.
reply
what does NGU mean?
reply
Numero go up (price)
reply