RE: Splinterlands Economics: The Gini Ratio
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This is a really cool post! I like your simple explanation of the coefficient and some real-world examples. I've given you a follow and look forward to reading your other articles.
Holy fuck that is a bad number. 0.97! Are you kidding! I've never felt more bearish about splinterlands than I did after seeing that. That is unreal.
Fortunately, I do think it's not as bad as all that. Discord is a skewed population: the people there are probably the most invested, and when you only include those who are actually verified, the skew gets even worse (I only got verified for maverick status after getting 1000+ packs). So the actual number is probably not as bad as all that. Some more explanation on selection bias would be helpful in the post to alleviate these kinds of worries.
I don't agree with your logic that a high gini in SPL isn't as bad as a high gini in a real country. Your example of renting making it not as bad as it seems is not something I find compelling. It's basically saying "what if a few people owned all the property and nicely rented it out to us plebs?" Same with giveaways. Like yeah, some of the wealthiest are passing scraps on to the poors and calling it philanthropy. Hooray? Most of the means of production in the hands of a few capitalists = not good no matter how you slice it.
Thank you for the follow and discussion! I actually had a similar reaction when I looked at the numbers while doing the research for this article - like, I knew that it was going to be uneven, but not by THAT much.
My understanding of the data is that it includes every account that holds cards. The Peakmonsters richlist also shows ~340k accounts holding cards which seems in the same ballpark. So it isn't limited to players registered in Discord, but it DOES include all of the bot accounts holding a reward card or two, and every player who has started at some point but later left it and/or quit playing. As you mentioned, the true distribution is probably a bit better than .97, though I don't really have the data to quantify how much that is.
I agree that a high gini ratio is undesirable, and totally understand where you're coming from. From an income and equality viewpoint, Splinterlands is heavily skewed towards the players with large amounts of capital and for the people here trying to make their ROI this is a huge concern and something they should keep a close eye on. In my opinion there are a couple of factors that make this not as bad as it seems though.
The biggest thing for me is that players don't invest their resources in order to become more productive or innovate (at least in a pre-land world) like workers in the real world would, so there isn't a societal loss as the result of the inequality. And also, not every player is here to make money. I know this can seem like sort of a consolation prize, but some players are here for the game more than the earnings, and they are still able to enjoy themselves despite the economic inequality.
The last thing I would note (and now that I think about it I should have mentioned it in the blog post) is that the current conditions in Splinterlands are the result of a period of huge asset appreciation combined with a significant period of time when cards (along with almost everything in the game shop) were sold out last year. I'm very curious to see how things change once Chaos Legion is out for a while!