And not the lazy con arguments like "moons have absolutely no use", "moons are just a shitcoin", etc... by people just hating on them.

I've followed and participated in Moons since the very first distribution. And objectively, I still have some major concerns with them.

Here are the top 5 issues I learned, from mildly bad to worst:

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5- While it has utility, does the utility out-weigh the selling incentive of a free airdrop?

Moons are a free airdrop people get. So why wouldn't people simply cash out free money falling on their lap?

a. It's not actually free.

It's not something completely "free" that came at no cost or no work. People still have to work and participate to receive that "free" airdrop. It's not a completely passive airdrop.

Still, does the utility side outweigh the incentive to simply sell this airdrop?

b. The utility and hodl forces.

The main utility is the governance. If you want to maintain that power, and also continue to earn full distributions, you have to keep as much of your earned Moons as you can.

And on top of that, there are now liquidity pools taking away some selling pressure.

c. Supply and demand.

But is that enough? Do moons actually need a lot more utility than that to truly get people to keep them for what they are, and not just all wait for $1 to sell?

With the current hype and growing demand of Moons, it doesn't seem like supply is an issue. In fact, with all those Moons going to exchanges and going to increasingly more new wallets, there is just as much potential of overstretching supply.

However, this is because of short term conditions. Long term it may be a different story, and there is always that monthly supply and airdrop.

d. Growing user base can have a similar effect as the mining halving, with the same amount of work being rewarded by fewer coins.

If the user base on the sub sees growth, the distributions and the supply will be spread more thinly among more hands. More new wallets created, more people participating in the distribution, for the same amount of work, but yielding fewer Moons.

The same thing that happens to miner work rewards during halvings.

To illustrate this, imagine 1,000,000 moons distributed to 10 people. Each person get an average of 100,000 moons for their work on the sub. 2 moons seem like dust and chump change of very little value.

Then imagine 1,000,000 moons are now distributed to 500,000 people. Each person on average gets 2 moons per distribution. Now those 2 moons won't be seen as merely just a spec of dust, but as a full distribution. And getting much more than that requires a lot of extra work.

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4- There are many elements chipping away at decentralization.

The token was originally using Ethereum's decentralization. But on the Arbitrum Nova network, you don't quiet have that decentralization, to instead get cheaper and faster high transaction throughput. Making it much more centralized than on L1.

On the governance side, it's actually not as centralized as people might think. Mods control less than 10% of the governance. And even whales (with 50K moons or more) controlled only about 4%. And this data was taken before the recent price spike, and before many whales started to sell.

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https://preview.redd.it/38msplyd7aib1.png?866&format=png&auto=webp&s=92cc480f5200c378b8090296d1506b51519c52a5

And on the distribution side, users will always get more than 50% of the power, because of the community funds re-distribution to users.

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https://preview.redd.it/87zkafrg7aib1.png?778&format=png&auto=webp&s=d0b6f19cc5090ef8817bce52b08c51af3b6b32c7

But the issues comes in areas like how much the admins can change the smart contract, how mods can veto governance proposals etc...

This really puts some major questions about a few people controlling key choke points. And even the distribution that is heavily in the hands of average users, has choke points in what proposals can be voted on.

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3- Moons still have flaws.

There are many flaws with Moons.

It was meant to reward contribution and quality content. But we haven't seen much in its ability to reward quality. At best it rewards heavy participation. At worse, it also rewards manipulation, and people who figured out how to game the system.

It's been rewarding also low effort clickbait, the hot topic at the time, and whoever hits the visibility lottery in the comments.

More details on this here: https://np.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrencyMeta/comments/tt7aik/you_may_wonder_how_some_people_manage_to_hit_15k/

There's still issues with rewards being easier to hit with just one liner generic comments like "just DCA", or simply posting a link, rather than taking the time to make a good post.

And there's a lot of symptomatic behavior coming from this system, like stingy upvotes, vote manipulation, commenting without reading, etc...

There is still also very little use of its key feature: tipping.

The good thing is with governance all of that could potentially be fixed. You just have to hope that manipulators, spammers, and problematic people didn't rack up too much voting power.

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2- They can't expand that much.

Moons are a social media token for just this sub, not for Reddit. Don't get any illusions about all of Reddit adopting Moons. It's already been explained how RCPs will work if more subreddits adopt RCPs.

Moons could still expand to partners subs like r/cryptocurrencymoons, r/cryptocurrencymeta, r/cryptomarkets, r/cryptoccurrency_tech, etc...

And internally, there could be expansions.

We've seen how we've expanded Moons utility with banners. And we briefly had a marketplace, where outside sites accept Moons as currency.

While non-network subs may not be doing Moon distribution, they could still use Moons. There's two outside subs that use Moons as a currency for services (moons jobs) and one in an onlyfans-like capacity.

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1- The utility side is too heavily dependent on one company and its whims.

If Reddit shuts down, it's true that you will still have your Moons and be able to continue to use them and trade them, because they're simply an Ethereum token, but their main purpose as a social media token would be gone.

RCPs are a Reddit project, and they can pull the plug any time they want. Or they can even piss more users off and have Reddit go into decline, which can cause the token to decline. In addition, it's also a coin attached to a single subreddit.

So its utility depends also on the whims of the mod team here. There's also nothing stopping admins to simply decide to discontinue Moons.

While discontinuing Moons would mean no more new distributions, which could boost its tokenomic value, it would also decimate its utility value.

How long will Reddit continue RCPs?

Right now it doesn't look like we have to worry for a while. Reddit has invested a lot of resources on this, hired new people, and it increasingly looks like Reddit is betting on web 3.0. We've seen how they abandoned Reddit coins but are keeping RCPs and pushing NFTs. And on top of that there is the IPO.

But how long will that gravy train last?

It could become a successful social media token for many years, just as much as it could go down in flames or abandoned.

Long term, there will always be that uncertainty of Reddit changing its course on RCPs like Moons.