Yep, pretty dumb comparison.
Hmmm, doesn’t seem like you get it. It’s not even possible to join the society on a whim, you have to go through a timed bidding process before tattooing. It can’t happen the way you described.
If you want to discuss this seriously, you should show some respect, tattoos are an ancient form of art going back thousand and thousand of years. I don’t care if someone gets a tramp stamp on a drunken haze and regrets it later, that doesn’t mean all tattoos are thoughtless decisions. There are people who actually care about their symbolism, meaning or aesthetics and use them to express themselves.
I don’t expect many people to understand this, but the society goes very deep in the rabbit hole of meaning. The tattoo represents a link between human and machine. This isn’t just a vapid narrative, it actually makes a lot of sense. See this and this.
I’m one of the first few members and I can only speak for myself, but I’m very happy with this experiment and I think it’s still on its infancy. Gav is working on V2 right now, there’s still a lot of different things to try.
You probably already figured this out, but we don’t have access to the funds AT ALL. It’s not correct to say we are “the richest collective” or that we have $3m in our bank accounts. That’s simply not true. Only a tiny fraction of the funds are accessible by winning the bidding game and successfully becoming a member. By the way, the rate in which the funds are being spent is a function of success, not failure. The demand to join the society was so big that most people bid near-zero KSM to join in 2022.
We did discuss in the past the possibility of becoming a sort of DAO and managing the funds with proposals and members voting, but we received a no-go from Parity/W3F regarding concerns with regulations. In order to be clear of any regulatory implications, it would basically require every member to be KYC’ed before letting them vote, which would be a pretty annoying and contradictory thing to do on a privacy-preserving pseudo-anonymous society.
So, considering these limitations, we simply can’t expect the society to do much more than it did in the past. The society treasury, even thought it’s pretty big, it’s unspent. In the worst-case scenario, it’s just sitting idle, which is not even that bad considering how quickly the greater Kusama treasury was drained and how poor some of the proposals were. The effect is pretty similar to burning.
That being said, I’m not against burning or transferring out these tokens. We need less than 1% of that to keep the game going. I just think the society is getting a lot of unfair and inaccurate criticism.