Beenz, a digital currency before Bitcoin
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
My then-wife spent a huge amount of time -- certainly 100+ hours minimum -- completing surveys, reviews and the like, got paid in Beenz, then we exchanged them for high street store vouchers and bought a vacuum cleaner which lasted far less than 100 hours and the store we got it from went out of business. It was a wild ride.
This was a period when one of the biggest drags on the development of e-commerce and monatizing Internet businesses was the absence of a good micro-payment solution. PayPal hadn't really taken off yet, App Stores weren't a thing, and everyone was scrabbling around for a way to enable cost-effective small payments that didn't have prohibitive transaction fees. Plus the advertising infrastructure that Google enables didn't exist, so micropayments for doing things online made a sort of sense.
Beenz was one option for this that I vaguely remember. I think I had an account, though I never spent any Beenz on anything. e-Gold was another popular option.
I'm not sure the analogy with Bitcoin and crypto really holds. Beenz was trying to solve a particular problem, and became obsolete when that problem was solved more elegantly by PayPal, Amazon and the credit card vendors. Bitcoin is trying to solve the 'problem' of state-backed inflationary fiat currencies. It might fail in its own terms but fiat currencies aren't changing in response to it.
That said, clearly most of the crypocurrencies and ICOs out there are somewhere between follies and scams. Almost all will fail, but they'll fail because they're largely dumb and they suck and they aren't solving a problem at all.
If it was brought back today I would endorse it a lot more than those silly ponzi-coins that people get so excited about.
I say ponzi-coins pejoratively for everything cryptocurrency related, and I do think that there does need to be some campaigning against them. A little bit of idle speculation here and there by people wanting to get rich with a bit of play money does encourage those people that skim off from the rest of society with their ponzi-coin scheming.
Trade makes the world happen and makes us human rather than Neanderthals, they died out because they did not trade. Beenz may have had get rich quick dreams but the ethos was there, to enable publishers to get money for articles and for people to buy/sell stuff.
The problem I am having with ponzi-coins is that there is none of that, not even a veneer of wanting to make the world a better place. An army of people now exist that just have nothing better to do than to make everyone else bag holders of their blockchain bamboozle voodoo and I think they need to have their oxygen supply cut off. Ponzi coins have done nothing for the public good. Does this make Visa/Mastercard and the banks 'better'? Nope, but just like Beenz was not the right solution neither are these ponzi coins.
My experience with the Bitcoin community goes back to 2012-3, when they were very much Libertarian Utopians trying to make the world a better place (at least their concept of a better place!). Those people still exist, though they've been drowned out a bit by the "Lambo" goldrush types.
Of course, the VAST majority of scamcoins are just about getting rich and have no idealists at all, just the conmen and the conned.
I'm surprised to see Maximiles apparently survived the dotcom bubble [0] - it's still possible to collect and exchange points, though I imagine at a much smaller scale than before.
I also agree that it is nonsensical to compare Beenz (which are more comparable to points you get in online panels) to modern-day cryptocurrencies.