Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Aaron Levie: Token incentives invert Metcalfe's Law by penalizing later users

Aaron Levie · #80: More or Less Holiday Special Pt. 2 (Crypto and Antitrust) · More or Less Podcast · Jan 4, 2025 · at 1:07:36

Box CEO Aaron Levie explains why tokenized social networks resemble multi-level marketing structures that decay over time rather than benefiting from traditional network effects.

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“Adding a financial incentive sort of creates this very perverse dynamic where, where sort of, you know, you want to invite 10 friends and they invite 10 friends and then the early people get all the money and then the later people don't get any of the money. And if the money is the utility, That by definition, your later users are getting less utility. And the way that these networks work is you want Metcalfe's Law. You want more utility the more people are on the network. And not, not sort of less utility the later you join.”

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