Why value 4 value is a scam
I’ll have to use my best Tone Vays impersonation voice for saying this, “..but actually “Value for Value, is à scàm”.
We hear a lot about Value4Value in bitcoin. People giving some content, good or service, and then getting their proverbial hat out, to collect whatever it’s deemed worth to the audience.
Some examples:
- Jimmy makes a nice website for the community, and gets a donation from whoever likes the work he put in.
- Mathilda makes a nice series of travel videos about bitcoin places, and does a little dance, and people can donate sats.
- Jody makes a podcast about bitcoin philosophy and the local community and people can donate for every episode.
That’s all very nice in theory.
I keep thinking about a documentary maker who told his audience he slept on a kitchen table because he had no money for a bed. And he would stop doing things V4V because of it. I can understand that sentiment, and I fear he’s not alone in that feeling.
One of the other artists in attendance told me “then he should work harder and make better things or get some sponsors”. Which contradicts the V4V model, and is rather disparaging towards that filmmaker.
In the world of "Value for Value" (V4V), the system is rigged from the get-go because of dodgy fundamentals based on goodwill. It borders on a scam, be it a voluntary run scam from both sides.
Unfortunately, there are very, very low percentages of people (let alone bitcoiners) that have goodwill. At least in Europe (I don’t know how this exactly works out in the US or Asia).
A personal friend of mine ran a history podcast for many years, and got more kudos, and gifts than I ever had in bitcoin.
And no, it’s not about the money, the income. You can call me a sour person all you want for saying this. It’s mainly about feeling a slight appreciation for what you do
On top of that, the subject itself is a bit of a “no-no” to talk about. If you do, you’re often branded a complainer, a wanker, a negative Nancy. Well… that’s one of the signs you participate in a sort of scam. When you point out holes in the scheme, you’re branded a complainer or a negativist; you often also get ousted.
That’s the way we’re all supposed to go thumbs-up on everything while sleeping on a kitchen table, while doing “good for the community.
To clarify (some close to the reality numbers):
If you put in ± 10 hours in an episode in total in a history podcast, you got rewarded about 50€ (usually from people appreciating the story and effort, relating to the part in history).
If you put in ± 6 hours in two episodes in total (less research than a history podcast), in bitcoin in Belgium, you get rewarded with 2 likes (one from myself and one from another bitcoiner), and no re-shares and about 2000 sats per episode on a good day, and 0 on a bad day.
unknown bitcoin artist holding an orange cup New people in bitcoin who fall for this need to be aware of the loss of time they'll face (which some can stomach, others won't...). Maybe this blog post can help prevent people from turning sour or becoming blatantly against the community.
People who have a good "ethics" stance in bitcoin will probably start to do things in V4V, hoping they get a good return for their work. You dive into this for the love of the community, for proof-of-work in Bitcoin, and maybe to carve out a name for yourself, or so you believe. But over time, this passion isn't enough to outweigh the hours, effort, and the relentless critique from the community's armchair philosophers – and trust me, there's no shortage of those.
Soon, however, such goodwill people will start to be disgruntled or at least less happy about the V4V model's returns. Let's face it, Value4Value was a marketing term invented by Adam Curry, along with Dave Jones, to launch a concept as an anti-movement against Apple's hegemony. It was meant to preserve free speech (that, it succeeded in; they've put the "free" in free speech). For themselves, because they had the first-mover advantage, it worked out fine. And until like the end of 2015, it worked very well.
However, I never heard of anyone after the year 2015 who lived off a value4value scheme having enough income and being happy about the exchange of goods and services...
Many podcasters resolve this by asking a fee for their "full" private and ad-free stream. Others just quit or go full paid service. It's all good, as long as you pick your poison and don't rely too much on appreciation in this community.
I'll go even further; in my opinion, the value proposition of Value 4 Value has a negative influence on bitcoin adoption. Because so many people will start under this model, hoping to make a living or at least break even on their hobby project, they'll soon turn sour.
This negative impact is due to an over-supply of content, or the implication that you have to get sponsors. I regularly got that message from people like, “Why don’t you get a sponsor?” They act like I don’t know that working for free isn't paying the bills. I know. Trust me on that. I work for free out of passion and genuine interest. If that gets punished, then there's something really wrong with this community.
On sponsors: the problem with this approach is that you can't call your own sponsor's product "a toy-grade piece of unreliable garbage" on-air if you take their money. And if you do, it's probably not doing wonders for your income.
Not only are you sacrificing your independence, but you're also stripping away the very essence of why you started the podcast in the first place. On that subject, I can't bring myself to read ads about dog food or some insurance company's new scammy tactics to "protect" people. If I go that route, I would whore myself out to the extent that I might as well start a "banging hot crypto of the week" podcast and shill any NFT, meme-coin, and garbage scam token out there if they pay me. That's also not the "value" people tune in for, I guess (although some Belgians still make a career out of doing so).
Broken value
There's an element of guaranteed discontent in Value4Value that's profoundly broken.
So here's my breakdown:
In Value4Value, you have at least two elements in the equation: the maker of goods/services/content and the receiver of such content, who also turns into the giver.
The first one is the first giver, the second one is the second giver in the exchange.
The first giver, often a content creator, pours their heart, time, and energy into something, expecting nothing in return but hoping for recognition or a fair exchange. Instead, they're often left with scraps while others freely take, use, and even profit from their work without so much as a nod. Giving credit is passé as well... even people who blatantly steal stuff from others smile in your face and go on with their "business". Result: the first giver feels scammed out of their time.
Then there's the second giver, the one who actually decides to pay up and not be a bitch. They give away their hard-earned fiat or bitcoin for something they could've gotten for "free", hoping to keep the cycle of generosity alive. But as reality sets in, they realize they're the only ones p(l)aying this game, leaving them feeling cheated, especially when they hear about others enjoying the same benefits without contributing a sat. Result: the second giver feels scammed out of their money, but at least they got something out of it.
Both ends
In essence, V4V is a scam on both ends.
There's the dishonest way where you might earn a bit, but at the cost of your integrity (for example, praising a rotten hardware wallet like it's a revolutionary invention while collecting the kickbacks). Or there's the so-called honorable path where you gain nothing but scorn and perhaps a pat on the back before someone else capitalizes on your efforts. (Not talking about the people here even ridiculing you for doing something for free).
This leaves a bitter feeling for everyone involved. Those who dare to charge for their services face another kind of scam - the guilt of appearing to be in it for the money while potentially exploiting the naive under the guise of community spirit. And those who speak up about it, like that documentary maker and some artists alike, are all getting brutally laughed at. Because it's a taboo subject to "complain" about income.
But that's not the issue here; I never started a podcast to earn a living or make money. I would be mad doing so and thinking so, certainly not in this market and community. The deeper issue is less trivial, however: when value for value is not recognized, and there are hardly any widespread tools to really capitalize on it, then it's a negative point for bitcoin adoption.
(Just an example) People who run the podcast feed on their own website steal potential income from me by circumventing a good podcast 2.0 platform like the Fountain app. It's probably well meant, to spread the word, but in general, it's profiting from content in the most lazy way possible.
You can prevent that from happening by making the feed private, but then you need to pay a service fee, which you can't pay because 90% of the bitcoiners are too cheap to pay for it. So you pay it out of your own pocket, only to get the critique about your podcast being "behind a paywall". So... you either let yourself be ripped off even further and earn less every episode... Or you just give up, take everything offline, and go work at McDonald's (at least they pay you by the hour, and then you're in the fiat scam and you know it!).
The same goes for artists who get their designs, logos, and artwork copied or see some other artwork that's "heavily inspired" by their own creation popping up somewhere else.
And don't get me started on people copying tweets, ideas, parts of a blog post, and re-telling it to pass it off as their own idea in a book or their own content channels (even some pretty famous people in the bitcoin space do this on a regular basis; you have to get your content somewhere, I guess, after years of getting free tickets to any conference and enjoying life in our little bubble of misfits and backroom deals).
We route around problems
One of Bitcoin's amazing properties is that it isn't bringing you "yield" on itself. One bitcoin doesn't generate more bitcoin by printing more bitcoin, like in fiat. You can't just sit on your ass and get more diluted Mickey Mouse money.
So if you want to be active in the space, you have to either sell yourself (your soul maybe included), or sell a product you have total control over (your own brand of orange-themed cuddly toys for grown-up men, hoodies, umbrellas, paintings with the same themes everyone else does, 3D printed action figures of yourself, or whatever you can come up with that's not too embarrassing to show up with at a conference).
It's in fact no laughing matter. In bitcoin, we're used to routing around problems.
According to me, the broader adoption of bitcoin and its ethos (mind my words here) cannot grow and be successful if we don't solve this problem. The majority of content creators aren't the "big names" with their big middlemen sponsors (even a few got sponsored by FTX and Celsius Network back in the day, and currently a lot of them eat out the hands of some hardware wallet manufacturers and exchanges). These smaller names and new people, make content and art or the likes in order to grow their audience, have fun, learn and make a bit of money on the side if possible. Some of them even want to make a real career out of it. That's all fine.
As a community we need to learn to support people in a decent way.
Some initiatives I've seen were also utterly flawed, so we need to do better. The idea of a "bitcoin influencer" team, for example, was, as far as I could tell, an utter failure from the start, certainly if I saw some people in that group at a conference dry-humping a potential beneficiary (or the other way around; we all route around problems in our own special way :), then I somehow start to question their motives. But it might also be my imagination; the end result is the same; everyone still sleeps on their proverbial kitchen table while delivering free stuff.
We often claim that the fiat world drains us of our energy, time, and effort in order to reward us in 'melting' fiat currency. Well... at least they got a melting ice cube instead of the proverbial pat on the back on the black hoodie you wear in support of someone else's project.
If bitcoin ground-level pleb things, run by real people, need to be successful to grow bitcoin awareness, then we need to find a better solution for this problem. Otherwise, many people will be utterly turned off by the promising "peer-to-peer" world they've stepped into. It not only turns them into the fiat-slave mindset again but also discourages people from building and doing cool things. No one likes to be ripped off. No one likes to work for free. No one likes to be spit in the face and get dirty looks or eye-rolls when you enter the room.
And no, don’t invent things just for me; I’m fine.
I see donations and likes/shares as a real-life measuring stick for the quality and reach of my work. With an average of 3 retweets and shares per episode, it's a failure. And with 13,420 sats over 7 episodes, it's not a big deal, but it's something. Many people in the space would be happy to get such a gift for 18 hours of work.1
Like the famous monologue in the movie Trainspotting, we could also ask ourselves collectively, ... Choose Bitcoin. Choose Value4Value. Choose a scam. Choose life... which scam do you prefer?
Will you choose working for free for bitcoin? Or choose life?
thank you for reading,
by … Kim DV for @AVBpodcast :
no donation button here for obvious reasons
1 sarcasm, a beggar near the Brussels Central station makes more money just sitting on his ass with a Mc Donald’s cup in hand telling people “ s'il te plaît “I’ll have to use my best Tone Vays impersonation voice for saying this, “..but actually “Value for Value, is à scàm”.
We hear a lot about Value4Value in bitcoin. People giving some content, good or service, and then getting their proverbial hat out, to collect whatever it’s deemed worth to the audience.\
\
Some examples:\
\
- Jimmy makes a nice website for the community, and gets a donation from whoever likes the work he put in.\
\
- Mathilda makes a nice series of travel videos about bitcoin places, and does a little dance, and people can donate sats.\
\
- Jody makes a podcast about bitcoin philosophy and the local community and people can donate for every episode.
That’s all very nice in theory.\
\
I keep thinking about a documentary maker who told his audience he slept on a kitchen table because he had no money for a bed. And he would stop doing things V4V because of it. I can understand that sentiment, and I fear he’s not alone in that feeling.\
\
One of the other artists in attendance told me “then he should work harder and make better things or get some sponsors”. Which contradicts the V4V model, and is rather disparaging towards that filmmaker.\
\
In the world of "Value for Value" (V4V), the system is rigged from the get-go because of dodgy fundamentals based on goodwill. It borders on a scam, be it a voluntary run scam from both sides.\
\
Unfortunately, there are very, very low percentages of people (let alone bitcoiners) that have goodwill. At least in Europe (I don’t know how this exactly works out in the US or Asia).\
\
A personal friend of mine ran a history podcast for many years, and got more kudos, and gifts than I ever had in bitcoin.\
\
And no, it’s not about the money, the income. You can call me a sour person all you want for saying this. It’s mainly about feeling a slight appreciation for what you do\
\
On top of that, the subject itself is a bit of a “no-no” to talk about. If you do, you’re often branded a complainer, a wanker, a negative Nancy. Well… that’s one of the signs you participate in a sort of scam. When you point out holes in the scheme, you’re branded a complainer or a negativist; you often also get ousted.
That’s the way we’re all supposed to go thumbs-up on everything while sleeping on a kitchen table, while doing “good for the community.\
\
To clarify (some close to the reality numbers):\
\
If you put in ± 10 hours in an episode in total in a history podcast, you got rewarded about 50€ (usually from people appreciating the story and effort, relating to the part in history).\
\
If you put in ± 6 hours in two episodes in total (less research than a history podcast), in bitcoin in Belgium, you get rewarded with 2 likes (one from myself and one from another bitcoiner), and no re-shares and about 2000 sats per episode on a good day, and 0 on a bad day.
unknown bitcoin artist holding an orange cup
New people in bitcoin who fall for this need to be aware of the loss of time they'll face (which some can stomach, others won't...). Maybe this blog post can help prevent people from turning sour or becoming blatantly against the community.
People who have a good "ethics" stance in bitcoin will probably start to do things in V4V, hoping they get a good return for their work. You dive into this for the love of the community, for proof-of-work in Bitcoin, and maybe to carve out a name for yourself, or so you believe. But over time, this passion isn't enough to outweigh the hours, effort, and the relentless critique from the community's armchair philosophers – and trust me, there's no shortage of those.
Soon, however, such goodwill people will start to be disgruntled or at least less happy about the V4V model's returns. Let's face it, Value4Value was a marketing term invented by Adam Curry, along with Dave Jones, to launch a concept as an anti-movement against Apple's hegemony.\
It was meant to preserve free speech (that, it succeeded in; they've put the "*free*" in ***free* speech**).\
For themselves, because they had the first-mover advantage, it worked out fine. And until like the end of 2015, it worked very well.\
\
However, I never heard of anyone after the year 2015 who lived off a value4value scheme having enough income and being happy about the exchange of goods and services...\
\
Many podcasters resolve this by asking a fee for their "full" private and ad-free stream. Others just quit or go full paid service. It's all good, as long as you pick your poison and don't rely too much on appreciation in this community.
I'll go even further; in my opinion, the value proposition of Value 4 Value has a **negative influence** on bitcoin adoption. Because so many people will start under this model, hoping to make a living or at least break even on their hobby project, they'll soon turn sour.\
\
This negative impact is due to an over-supply of content, or the implication that you have to get sponsors. I regularly got that message from people like,\
*“Why don’t you get a sponsor?”*\
They act like I don’t know that working for free isn't paying the bills. I know. Trust me on that. I work for free out of passion and genuine interest. If that gets punished, then there's something really wrong with this community.\
\
On sponsors: the problem with this approach is that you can't call your own sponsor's product "a toy-grade piece of unreliable garbage" on-air if you take their money. And if you do, it's probably not doing wonders for your income.\
\
Not only are you sacrificing your independence, but you're also stripping away the very essence of why you started the podcast in the first place. On that subject, I can't bring myself to read ads about dog food or some insurance company's new scammy tactics to "protect" people.\
If I go that route, I would whore myself out to the extent that I might as well start a "banging hot crypto of the week" podcast and shill any NFT, meme-coin, and garbage scam token out there if they pay me.\
That's also not the "value" people tune in for, I guess (although some Belgians still make a career out of doing so).
**Broken value**
There's an element of guaranteed discontent in Value4Value that's profoundly broken.
So here's my breakdown:
In Value4Value, you have at least two elements in the equation: the maker of goods/services/content and the receiver of such content, who also turns into the giver.\
\
The first one is the **first giver**, the second one is the **second giver** in the exchange.\
\
**The first giver**, often a content creator, pours their heart, time, and energy into something, expecting nothing in return but hoping for recognition or a fair exchange. Instead, they're often left with scraps while others freely take, use, and even profit from their work without so much as a nod. Giving credit is passé as well... even people who blatantly steal stuff from others smile in your face and go on with their "business". Result: the first giver feels scammed out of their time.
Then there's the second giver, the one who actually decides to pay up and not be a bitch.\
They give away their hard-earned fiat or bitcoin for something they could've gotten for "free", hoping to keep the cycle of generosity alive.\
But as reality sets in, they realize they're the only ones p(l)aying this game, leaving them feeling cheated, especially when they hear about others enjoying the same benefits without contributing a sat.\
**Result**: the second giver feels scammed out of their money, but at least they got something out of it.
**Both ends**
In essence, V4V is a scam on both ends.
There's the dishonest way where you might earn a bit, but at the cost of your integrity (for example, praising a rotten hardware wallet like it's a revolutionary invention while collecting the kickbacks).\
Or there's the so-called honorable path where you gain nothing but scorn and perhaps a pat on the back before someone else capitalizes on your efforts. (Not talking about the people here even ridiculing you for doing something for free).
This leaves a bitter feeling for everyone involved. Those who dare to charge for their services face another kind of scam - the guilt of appearing to be in it for the money while potentially exploiting the naive under the guise of community spirit.\
And those who speak up about it, like that documentary maker and some artists alike, are all getting brutally laughed at. Because it's a taboo subject to "complain" about income.\
\
But that's not the issue here; I never started a podcast to earn a living or make money. I would be mad doing so and thinking so, certainly not in this market and community. The deeper issue is less trivial, however: when value for value is not recognized, and there are hardly any widespread tools to really capitalize on it, then it's a negative point for bitcoin adoption.
(Just an example) People who run the podcast feed on their own website steal potential income from me by circumventing a good podcast 2.0 platform like the Fountain app. It's probably well meant, to spread the word, but in general, it's profiting from content in the most lazy way possible.\
\
You can prevent that from happening by making the feed private, but then you need to pay a service fee, which you can't pay because 90% of the [bitcoiners](https://x.com/i/grok?text=bitcoiners) are too cheap to pay for it. So you pay it out of your own pocket, only to get the critique about your podcast being "behind a paywall".\
So... you either let yourself be ripped off even further and earn less every episode...\
Or you just give up, take everything offline, and go work at [McDonald's](https://x.com/i/grok?text=McDonald%27s) (at least they pay you by the hour, and then you're in the fiat scam and you know it!).\
\
The same goes for artists who get their designs, logos, and artwork copied or see some other artwork that's "heavily inspired" by their own creation popping up somewhere else.\
\
And don't get me started on people copying tweets, ideas, parts of a blog post, and re-telling it to pass it off as their own idea in a book or their own content channels (even some pretty famous people in the bitcoin space do this on a regular basis; you have to get your content somewhere, I guess, after years of getting free tickets to any conference and enjoying life in our little bubble of misfits and backroom deals).
**\
We route around problems**\
\
One of Bitcoin's amazing properties is that it isn't bringing you "yield" on itself. One bitcoin doesn't generate more bitcoin by printing more bitcoin, like in fiat. You can't just sit on your ass and get more diluted Mickey Mouse money.
So if you want to be active in the space, you have to either sell yourself (your soul maybe included), or sell a product you have total control over (your own brand of orange-themed cuddly toys for grown-up men, hoodies, umbrellas, paintings with the same themes everyone else does, 3D printed action figures of yourself, or whatever you can come up with that's not too embarrassing to show up with at a conference).
It's in fact no laughing matter.\
In bitcoin, we're used to routing around problems.\
\
According to me, the broader adoption of bitcoin and its ethos (mind my words here) cannot grow and be successful if we don't solve this problem.\
The majority of content creators aren't the "big names" with their big middlemen sponsors (even a few got sponsored by FTX and Celsius Network back in the day, and currently a lot of them eat out the hands of some hardware wallet manufacturers and exchanges).\
These smaller names and new people, make content and art or the likes in order to grow their audience, have fun, learn and make a bit of money on the side if possible. Some of them even want to make a real career out of it. That's all fine.\
\
As a community we need to learn to support people in a ***decent*** way.\
\
Some initiatives I've seen were also utterly flawed, so we need to do better. The idea of a "bitcoin influencer" team, for example, was, as far as I could tell, an utter failure from the start, certainly if I saw some people in that group at a conference dry-humping a potential beneficiary (or the other way around; we all route around problems in our own special way :), then I somehow start to question their motives.\
But it might also be my imagination; the end result is the same; everyone still sleeps on their proverbial kitchen table while delivering free stuff.\
\
We often claim that the fiat world drains us of our energy, time, and effort in order to reward us in 'melting' fiat currency. Well... at least they got a melting ice cube instead of the proverbial pat on the back on the black hoodie you wear in support of someone else's project.\
\
If bitcoin ground-level pleb things, run by real people, need to be successful to grow bitcoin awareness, then we need to find a better solution for this problem. Otherwise, many people will be utterly turned off by the promising "peer-to-peer" world they've stepped into. It not only turns them into the fiat-slave mindset again but also discourages people from building and doing cool things. No one likes to be ripped off. No one likes to work for free. No one likes to be spit in the face and get dirty looks or eye-rolls when you enter the room.\
\
And no, don’t invent things just for me; I’m fine.\
\
I see donations and likes/shares as a real-life measuring stick for the quality and reach of my work.\
With an average of 3 retweets and shares per episode, it's a failure. And with 13,420 sats over 7 episodes, it's not a big deal, but it's something. Many people in the space would be happy to get such a gift for 18 hours of work.[1](https://allesvoorbitcoin.substack.com/p/why-value4value-in-bitcoin-is-a-scam#footnote-1-157195425)
\
Like the famous monologue in the movie Trainspotting, we could also ask ourselves collectively, ...\
Choose Bitcoin.\
Choose Value4Value.\
Choose a scam.\
Choose life... which scam do you prefer?\
\
Will you choose working for free for bitcoin?\
Or choose life?
thank you for reading,
\
by … Kim DV for @AVBpodcast :
***no donation button here for obvious reasons***
[1](https://allesvoorbitcoin.substack.com/p/why-value4value-in-bitcoin-is-a-scam#footnote-anchor-1-157195425)
sarcasm, a beggar near the Brussels Central station makes more money just sitting on his ass with a Mc Donald’s cup in hand telling people “ s'il te plaît “
