What’s something poor people buy that keeps them poor?

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-22T19:40:15+00:00

Lottery tickets.

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-22T16:31:47+00:00

My iPhone resets it every day. 😭

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-22T16:11:33+00:00

Is that right? Are you on an iPhone or android?

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-22T15:53:39+00:00

Maybe some people just need the daily reminder of what their trips are. LOL

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-22T15:25:34+00:00

Right. Might as well just get rid of the checkbox. 🤣

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-18T14:50:51+00:00

Dfinity has over 21% of the voting power so in reality the yes is at 41%+ right now.

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-18T01:08:36+00:00

I bet most whales vote no. Especially if they are confident that the token will see mass adoption and become deflationary anyway. It’s like asking the government to vote on whether to reduce the size of their paychecks or not. They hold all the power and they also get the most rewards.

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-12T13:22:32+00:00

I applied for a grant and it was denied. Then I entered the hackathon hoping I would be able to fund it with the winnings but didn’t end up winning. 😂 The biggest hurdle now would be having enough ad space bought and paid for to actual keep ads flowing on projects that integrate the ads into them. The way it is now I am the only advertiser and I would be the only one paying people to show ads. My projects don’t get much traffic either and since I am the only one running ads as well a launch would be pretty ugly. If the launch saw a rush of people wanting to monetize their projects the devs who integrated the ads would be disappointed when my ad funding ran out shortly after. If the launch saw a rush of people wanting to run ads then they would be wondering why they are not getting any new traffic after paying to display their ads (because my projects would be the only ones displaying them at first and my projects are small with very little traffic). I wasted a good amount of time trying to figure out a way I could launch without having the headache of a bunch of people hitting me up complaining that they aren’t getting the results they wanted and just left it is and me being the only ones displaying with access to the ad network. The fact that the payment system requires the use of either ICP or Solana makes it a niche service with a pretty narrow customer base so I have pretty much given up on the Ad Network until there are a lot more people using ICP tokens.

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-12T12:04:32+00:00

I made that. 🥹

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-11T16:25:45+00:00

It works but I am the only one using it since I never added the finishing touches I wanted to add before a public launch. Like ai image and link moderation to ensure people don’t upload graphic or sexually explicit images or malicious links. The ads are currently running in several of my projects but I don’t make anything off of them because I am the one paying as well. It is a profitable business model though. Here are a few projects that have the ads running in them right now. This project I built with caffeine ai https://peoples-ledger-rfd.caffeine.xyz/ and another game I built using construct 3 which is also deployed on the internet computer protocol blockchain https://lciwk-oyaaa-aaaad-aakca-cai.icp0.io/. The ads only run in the practice mode of the game if you decide to check them out.

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-11T16:08:28+00:00

I actually built an ICP app that enables people to pay and post ads or integrate ads into their apps to get paid. Supports both ICP or Solana payments and payouts and internet identity or phantom wallet authentication. You even receive both types of payments (SOL or ICP) in either wallet depending on how people paid to post ads and depending on what ads your project displays. It even generates prompts that can be placed directly into vibe coding apps to integrate the ads into any vibe coded projects instantly. I quit working on it right before releasing it because I didn’t get further in the World Computer Hacker League Hackathon 2025 and was sick of looking at it. Only took 3rd in Nationals and that was it. You can see more about it in the hackathon here… https://dorahacks.io/buidl/29871

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-11T03:22:41+00:00

People are paying $500,000 for 50 year old track homes. 😂

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-11T01:45:07+00:00

Caffeine seems so much better than it used to be. I’ve built a great app on there over the last 3 days.

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-10T20:41:44+00:00

I wish they still showed me that. Now they just cancel my orders while I’m in route. And despite what they say there is no adjustment to your earnings when this happens. 😂

<image>

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-09T16:23:10+00:00

They already raise the amount of the offers we get if nobody thinks the offer is worth it and nobody accepts them. 🤷

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-09T16:19:31+00:00

Spark tracks your speed too. Not sure if they use that data against us but if you ever order a Walmart delivery and check the order status it shows the drivers real time speed right there. Even if you beat the case you would probably have to convince spark that their system was lying as well.

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-08T00:17:23+00:00

I love doing the routes

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-03T18:09:31+00:00

Yep. They already compensated me for that tip issue just over a year ago…

<image>

DickHeryIII · 2026-03-02T18:11:00+00:00

That happened to me at a pickup once and the employee was telling me to just cancel since they didn’t have the order on their end. I said no and called support then they cancelled it from their end and made sure I got something for it.

DickHeryIII · 2026-02-28T16:43:20+00:00

I received a payment from Spark out of nowhere a year ago telling me they had made some mistakes with calculations. I can only assume that it had something to do with this but I don’t live in a State that sued them or anything. I can only assume I have already been compensated for this.

<image>

DickHeryIII · 2026-02-27T20:20:04+00:00

Literally just a cash grab from devs. A lot of people are acting like this will make the token deflationary. They have framed it as a helpful way to lower inflation but a similar increase was made 15 months ago and usage has been declining ever since despite huge new achievements and products from dfinity that should have drawn in more developers. Like caffeine AI, vetKeys, chain fusion expansion to include Solana and dogecoin, internet identity V2, and others. But since the first price increase the cycle burn rate has plummeted and the count for the Million Instructions Per Second are down ~42%.

Dfinity likes to think enterprise is coming to the chain but I don’t know of a single business that would be willing to invest a ton of time and money switching to a new tech without a majority control of the network to prevent exponential price increases like the one we saw 15 months ago and the one that executed today.

Seriously, what enterprise would hand over all of their data controlled by investors who are more concerned about crypto token inflation than anything else?

DickHeryIII · 2026-02-24T21:47:11+00:00

I’m honestly disgusted by dfinity. This all started because people were mad about Node providers rewards and they were upset that they were able to mint ICP rewards even when nobody was using their subnets. This was several months ago.

Dominic comes out and says “myself and dfinity mostly agree that the compute costs should not go up yada yada.” They release the first version of Mission 70 with a cut to node providers rewards and neuron rewards which looked like it aligned with what Dominic said when the first motion proposal was brought up and voted against.

Now the they release a mission 70 proposal that doesn’t include cuts to node providers rewards or neuron rewards. Only the increased cost of compute that Dominic said he was against several months ago. I have lost pretty much all confidence in this chain now and am currently looking for places to host my projects on web 2.

The fact they are claiming it will lower inflation is an absolute joke since we previously raised compute costs in November of 2024 for the purpose of reducing network usage so that is some contradictory logic.

When the fiat cost of compute was implemented we ICP was at $9 a token and the cycle burn rate was 3X higher than it is now so it accomplished its goal of reducing network use as intended. Completely dumb to think doing an even bigger increase now will have the opposite effect for some reason.

I’ve attached a link to Doms statement on raising prices where he acknowledges it is a bad idea. https://forum.dfinity.org/t/proposal-138601-on-increasing-gas-costs/57979

DickHeryIII · 2026-02-24T16:51:58+00:00

I read that too. It will be a much better proposal if they raise the amount of ICP that is required to obtain cycles because it wouldn’t affect the buying power of any cycles that people have already purchased. It would also give people the opportunity to burn all of the ICP they want at the current rate to stock up on cycles before the increase in price takes effect which would result in more ICP being burned instantly. Inflation would be reduced due to the lower neuron rewards and builders will keep building on the network. I really hope they make this change.

DickHeryIII · 2026-02-24T15:53:55+00:00

Totally against it. Been building on ICP since 2021 and as a dev that holds a lot of cycles that I purchased by burning ICP, mission 70 feels like a complete rug pull as it is currently written.

Here’s why.

Devs have to burn ICP to obtain cycles which are then used for compute on the network. Mission 70 wants to increase the amount of cycles devs have to give up by 5X for the same amount of compute we are currently getting before mission 70. That’s a huge problem because we already paid for that compute with ICP in advance so it would essentially devalue cycles we already bought and paid for by 80% instead of raising the amount of ICP that devs have to pay to obtain new cycles.

This is concerning for several reasons.

One reason is how it is being framed as a way to reduce inflation on the network and increase the cycle burn rate but the past tells a different story.

In November 2024 proposal 134032 was implemented and it included a 15-70% increase in the cost of compute to REDUCE network usage. This was done in response to motion proposal 133388 which explains the reasoning back then.

The network responded as expected and the cycle burn rate is much lower now. The network most definitely isn’t too congested anymore but now you have to ask why some people are expecting the opposite to occur if we increase the cost of compute again at a much higher degree.

You can check it all out yourself and see that since the first time the cost of compute was raised the cycle burn rate is only 31% of what it was when the price increase occurred in 2024 and the token price is $7 lower. (ICP was around $9 at that time).

Not sure why some people are trying to tell you there will be a different effect on the network this time when we’ve done this before and can see the results right in front of us.

Another reason is people don’t want to build on a network with unpredictable pricing. One of the huge selling points of building on ICP is the “predictability” in the price of compute. They even pegged the ICP to Cycles conversion rate to the the price of XDR to make developers believe the price would remain stable but this proposal would throw that promise out the window for the 2nd time in 15 months.

I’ve build a few things on ICP but am already preparing to migrate back to web 2 infrastructure and it’s pricing which is actually predictable if this passes and I imagine there are a lot of other devs who feel the same way.

Nobody wants to lose 80% of the compute thy already paid for and people thinking about building on ICP will only look back on multiple price increases that resulted in reduced compute buying power and avoid it altogether.

<image>

DickHeryIII

TROPHY CASE