Oliver Sampson
@oliversampson@sigmoid.social  ·  activity timestamp 2 days ago

The article had a provocative title: "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero",

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/

TL;DR: There's some amount of friction in the #marketplace that prevents #fraud and prevents a large amount of non-fraud. Somehow understanding and tuning for that is what can make or break a #business.

I just read #wiki to catch up on #Kickstarter, and there's definitely an optimal amount of how much of a #business platform you can move to the #blockchain, and it's exactly zero.

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Oliver Sampson
@oliversampson@sigmoid.social  ·  activity timestamp 2 days ago

I'm catching up on @pluralistic 's newsletter and there was a line in https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/05/be-the-first-person/#to-not-do-something-that-no-one-else-has-ever-thought-of-not-doing-before that reminded me of an article I read recently:

> So #Kickstarter jettisoned the escrow step, handing campaign creators the full payout and then trusting them not to run off with the dough. The platform understood that this would allow a certain amount of #fraud and failure, but deemed it worthwhile, especially after they took countermeasures to minimize backer losses, such as...

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Oliver Sampson
@oliversampson@sigmoid.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 days ago

The article had a provocative title: "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero",

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/

TL;DR: There's some amount of friction in the #marketplace that prevents #fraud and prevents a large amount of non-fraud. Somehow understanding and tuning for that is what can make or break a #business.

I just read #wiki to catch up on #Kickstarter, and there's definitely an optimal amount of how much of a #business platform you can move to the #blockchain, and it's exactly zero.

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