Just now my phone popped up another swarm of red dots: social mining, fan tokens are back, and 「attention is mining」… It all looks lively, but my first reaction is still the same old problem from chain games: once production opens the floodgates, inflation is like a faucet that hasn’t been turned off, and the little real demand in the pool can’t possibly keep up.

To put it plainly, many pools aren’t killed by hackers—they’re killed by their own token issuance. The more rewards they pump out, the more people start acting like they’re clocking in to collect wages, with selling pressure every day; new players aren’t coming in to play—they’re here to take the bag from the output you generated yesterday. The short-term numbers look good, but in the long run it just drags the “break-even cycle” out until nobody is willing to wait, and then once liquidity pulls out, all that’s left is slippage all over the place and people complaining.

Attention mining is the same. Attention isn’t an asset—it’s more like emotional fuel, and it burns fast. Anyway, when I look at pools now, I only focus on two things: whether there are real consumption scenarios for the output, and whether exiting will cause everyone to stampede each other. Without those two, no matter how much narrative there is, it can only hold up for a few days at most.