March 15, 2021: Party Bus Disaster! 🚌💥
#REKT! Was the Bus to Nowhere the Fyre Festival of Crypto?
Oh, the humanity!
We set out to create a party bus that would drive participants directly off a cliff to combat high gas prices.
But the bus failed to drive! Countless lives were tragically saved in the fiasco.
A dozen amazing people chipped in 2.47 ETH to help get the bus off the cliff, but this was insufficient to meet the reserve price.
These wonderful donors had really hoped to lose all their money. Instead, they’ll sadly have to accept that no funds were lost, and content themselves by withdrawing safely and easily from the sexy and gas-optimized contract.
On the bright side, the NFT minted to commemorate the failed bus ride did sell on Mintable! Maybe NFTs aren’t as bad as we once thought.
Any proceeds from this sale will be reinvested back into the next iteration of Pool Party, or if that also fails, then donated to Meals on Wheels.
Post-Mortem
So what can we learn from the experiment?
For one — we attacked the wrong market. We were looking at saving people gas money to interact with Curve. But Curve is already the most efficient site in DeFi in terms of gas usage… so an extra ~75% wouldn’t really make a big difference.
However our biggest error was trying to build something people wanted. Only an idiot would think that’s a good strategy.
Everybody around the Ethernet was complaining about gas fees. Everybody said gas fees were the biggest problem on the entire planet. It made sense we should help fix that?
Yet when we offered a solution, few people jumped. People didn’t care enough about gas fees to get the bus to run. Why?
It’s simple. Whales are the bulk of the DeFi market. And whales don’t give half a fin about gas fees. We previously crunched the numbers on this. We found that anybody who is complaining about gas prices is simply signaling that they aren’t a whale.
I mean, check out this beauty:
Do you really think the whale making a $50MM transaction is worried about an extra $20 or even $2000 worth of gas? Not when they’ve got an angry Christie’s collector about to break their kneecaps finna get that Beeple money.
An easy rule of business is that it’s easier to build a viable business if your clientele is wealthy. Would Tesla be were it is today if it built cars for people who were actually worried about petroleum gas prices? Nah, then they would have just built a cyber-trolley or something lame. They knew the money was in building silly toys for rich people.
Like all things, Ethereum seems to work on a Pareto Principle. ~80% of the useful traffic on the network comes from a smallish pod of whales. ~20% is from poor people who don’t add much value to the network. But there sure are a lot of us! And my goodness are we loud!
Trying to help poor people crash a party for rich people was a doomed idea from the get-go. Besides, wouldn’t poor people spoil the party? Wouldn’t they, like, spill food stamps in the punchbowl or something?
When offered a chance to attend the rich person’s party, the indigent preferred to complain rather than solve their problem. Next time you hear somebody whinging about gas fees, tell them you don’t believe they’re serious and link them this article as evidence.
The moral of the story is that instead of helping poor people spend less on gas to get around Ethereum slower, we should have helped rich people spend more on gas to get places better. So now it’s time for, like, custom helicopter service for whales or something.
What’s Next?
We’re going to go back to the drawing board. When we figure our next service, one likely focused on making whales’ lives marginally easier, we’ll re-use the existing contract to get it off the ground. Anybody who wants to keep their funds invested will get a jump on the next iteration. Of course, we understand if anybody’s passion is not helping whales and therefore prefers to withdraw their funds.
In the meanwhile, a major plug for everybody who helped get this experiment off the ground. In particular, any crypto projects looking for outstanding smart contract developers should contact @bosstweed on Github and Telegram, who was a great sport about building and testing this fateful bus.
Meanwhile, since the buses are stalled, I got stuck poolside. So I’ll just continue enjoying the party until a bus shows up to get me out of here. There are worse fates in life…
For more info, check our live market data at https://curvemarketcap.com/ or our subscribe to our daily newsletter at https://curve.substack.com/. Nothing in our newsletter can be construed as financial advice. Author is a $CRV maximalist.