Consider the thousands of online services for a minute. Nobody is creating a service for free. There are development and running costs associated. These costs need to be covered somehow. So, if you don't have to pay for the service, somebody else will.
Take any social media platform for instance. They are all offered for free. You don't have to pay a red cent. So, who is paying for the hundreds of servers and the thousands of staff, if not you? You know the answer; it's the advertisers. So, in fact, while you are using the platforms to communicate and express yourself, the companies developing and running the platforms, are using your attention and time spent on their servers as a commodity. What profiles you visit, what posts you like and share, your personal data and connections are also a commodity. The platform is simply a by-product. A machine that 'creates' attention. The real product is you, your data, your attention, and your time.
Same goes with other products, like the web browsers. Brave was built upon exactly the concept of admitting that you are the product. And officially bearing a (very low) price tag. But the Brave team were not the first to come up with the idea. Many others before them sold to their prod... ahem, users, the idea of revenue sharing. MLMs are built exactly on that same concept; the network has become the product the 'affiliates' are selling. MLMs took it one step further. The 'products' are also the marketing dollars. It's the 'affiliate' that is doing the recruitment, along with sales, not the MLM company.
Brave and others took the MLM concept a step further. "What if not only we get the 'products' to promote us to sign up new products for peanuts, so we have more products to sell to our advertisers, but also we pay them in our own currency that does not exist, and that won't be bearing any financial burden to us. So, we will be saying they they will be getting X dollars per new user who is using our software for over a month, but we won't actually have to pay a red cent. We will be giving them our own tokens. What they will be doing with these tokens, and how much these tokens will worth at that time, is none of our business."
It's brilliant! It's like a company selling X product, hiring sales people to sell their product and paying them with thin air. And the suckers, not only are indeed selling the product, but also they are happily accepting that thin air as a means of payment. But they don't stop there. Human stupidity can go miles. Not only they happily accept thin air as a means of payment, but they also defend the company to anyone pointing the fact, saying that "our competitors are not paying their sellers a red cent".
Guess what? The company you work for, is not paying a red cent either! They just pretend they pay. The difference is that they are getting paid in real US dollars when they sell their ads.
