Fan tokens / Socios / Blockchain

[BrighouseWhite]

Information from the club website here....

https://www.leedsunited.com/news/club/2 ... socios-com

It does say that we'll be the 4th Premier League team to use the tokens, I wonder who the other 3 are and what their fans think of it. To be honest it looks suspect and a bit of a rip off to get fans spending more money and not something I'm likely to get involved with.

[Selby White]

Information from the club website here....

https://www.leedsunited.com/news/club/2 ... socios-com

It does say that we'll be the 4th Premier League team to use the tokens, I wonder who the other 3 are and what their fans think of it. To be honest it looks suspect and a bit of a rip off to get fans spending more money and not something I'm likely to get involved with.

On the link among the many European clubs it lists Man City, Arsenal & Everton.

Like you Brig its certainly not getting any enthusiasm from me.
Won't say never but will say doubtful.

[Davycc]

To me the token isn't exactly a crypto currency but is based on the same idea.

For anyone interested a basic intro to crypto can be found here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzAuB2FG79A

and here

https://www.etoro.com/crypto/what-is-cr ... WEQAvD_BwE

[Aaron]

Petition to end partnership: https://www.change.org/p/leeds-united-e ... ith-socios
A glimpse of their reviews: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8BU2GNXEAM ... name=large

Copied from a Redditor:

I'm genuinely dismayed about this. If all the club wanted to do was give fans an influence in the club, they could do it through an official fan club/the existing membership system. People would still be putting some money into the club in exchange for a say, and it would be restricted to genuine fans of the club.

Of course, this isn't the only thing going on here. The Socios platform is designed to encourage financial speculation by creating assets ('tokens') that are tradeable by anyone and can go up as well as down in value. This is the only plausible reason for tying these tokens to 'blockchain technology'.

Watch what happens when well-meaning Leeds fans put money in expecting to get meaningful input into the club, maybe even make a bit of money by getting in early. The price of the token will go up and other fans will think, 'yeah why not, it helps Leeds and I'm obviously getting in at the right time because I'm in the know about my club.' Only for all the savvy crypto traders to sell the assets they've been holding, making easy money and tanking the price, leaving the fans (and a bunch of non-fans) with a worthless asset that lets them vote on the colour of the team bus or the pre-game music or whatever. Not to mention that the people behind Socios might hold tokens from the start, which they can sell themselves for a tidy profit as well as any profit they make from people using the platform.

If you think this is over the top, it's already happened to Atletico Madrid - https://twitter.com/uglygame/status/139 ... 90177?s=20

This is an attempt to exploit fans' love for their club to tempt them into financial speculation. Notice how the press release makes no mention of this being an investment platform, but that's what many fans will view it as when the price of the 'asset' starts going up. Real fans are going to lose a lot of money gambling on something that seems too good to be true.

There's a petition already, which I'd encourage you to sign.

And here's a good write up on Socios by an Arsenal blogger - https://shewore.com/2021/07/20/socios-d ... enal-fans/

TL;DR - Leeds selling out to cryptocurrency recruitment scheme / glorified gambling.

[Aqua-]

I know very little of crypto and block chain tech.
I've seen athletico madrid, barca, juve, scums (i think), and more clubs issued a currency. Till this thread i didnt understand what was the purpose of linking a currency to a club, now i understand.

Just to share my general knowledge - block chain technology is a method for saving up information in a secure and transperent manner. It brings to the table mainly transperancy and different governing methodology to what we have now.

[*] You may think of it as a huge (say excel) table that save information. The entire information on the table is visible by everyone, making it fully transperent.
[*] The technology relying on the users to operate it (im simplifying), i.e. to add other user's info to the table and make sure no malicious transformation is being made to either the existing information or the new info desired to be saved.
[*] Because everyone has access to the entire information at all times, once someone wants to add new info to the table it is subject to approval by the other users. It is very hard to hack this method as the majority of users will have to cooperate to sabotage the existing table (51% attack).
[*] Why other users bother to work for the community? they get rewards for keeping it up. The lucky user who adds the correct new row in the table gets a reward.

Now let's have a look at bitcoin for example. bitcoin is digital gold. the table is acting as a ledger. When an individual transfer money to another individual he ask to inform everybody in the community about it.
The other users check different parameters like - does the guy sending bitcoin have enough funds in his account? is the recieving end exist? when those are validated many people run over the list and rise proposal as to how the new table should look (the old one + the new row). If someone try to change an older row in the table or change the current one it will not be approved as the other users' suggestions aren't in agree with his suggestion. the suggestion with most users agreeing on is the one that end up replacing the old one.

That means that banks no longer in control of this info. The technology wasn't invented in 2008, but it was first popularized in 2008-2009 as a result of the recession.

* Note that the info can be anything. I can save information of currency transaction as in bitcoin, or save up photos which on the computer are represented as a string of characters anyway, PDFs of financial reports, legal contracts etc.

Now regarding the leeds united tokens (or any other club for that matter). My personal opinion is that it might be a nice way to let supporters sound their opinions regarding different things in the club as COP explained, but once the coin is open for sale in the free market platforms e.g. binance, coinbase etc. it will most likely be bought by random people for trading purposes. even if none of them will cast votes maliciously (becuse they dont give a damn about the club), they will still rise the price up so any other real fan that want to influence will have to pay more per vote.

AGAIN THIS IS SAID WITHOUT ANY REAL KNOWLEDGE OF HOW THIS PARTICULAR COIN IS GOING TO SERVE AND OPERATE

I agree with the redditor who said the club could make it a real nice thing by creating an app and gifting tokens to fans - members, merch buyers, etc. rather than making it an open market asset.

Say the club would gift any fan with a mebmership with 100 tokens (like the carnival analogy by COP), then for a season ticket another 3800 tokens, for enter to ellend road you get additional 100, buy the kit you get 500 and so on... then the real fans would've been rewarded with more influence than fans like me who watch every week but never arrive at the stadium (which is fair imo).

To wrap this up, i think that it's a nice idea to allow fans influence on non professional matters in the club like choosing kit colors, or picking designs out of few choices, picking song after a goal, new badge, and stuff like that, but it needs to stay out of the free market. Once outside money starts to play role it loses the point of increasing involvment by the fans and boost matchday experience, and cross the line to being a poor idea.

[Aqua-]

The club released a short article on the subject a few days ago.
Still have'nt read it though.

https://www.leedsunited.com/news/club/2 ... -explained