A pickup screen at a milk tea shop in Guangzhou showed “1,002 cups in progress.” One thousand and two cups. At the same time, a shop in Wuhan had already put up a “Closed for the day” sign shortly after ten, while one in Nanchang simply shut off online ordering. An employee said over the phone that they’d have to finish at least half the orders before the system would let them reopen.
The situation itself wasn’t complicated. Jasmine Milk White opened its 3,000th store and ran a three-day “Buy One, Get One Free” deal on its Must-Drink List. Eight medium-sized drinks, available only for dine-in pickup through its mini-program. The promotion ended on the 20th.
The switch was hidden in the rules. Each member could claim 100 coupons a day. It said so right in the promotion details. This wasn’t a loophole at all. If one person has a hundred coupons in hand, how many orders can one store handle in a day? That’s how demand was created: piling up, one cup at a time.
A lot of people think a flood of orders means a place is popular. In reality, half of it is by design. Cut the price in half, let people claim coupons in batches, and orders will naturally pour into one store. Until the system gives up. And it really did.
Centralized systems have something that on-chain systems don’t: a pause button. When a store can’t cope, the platform can shut it down with one click. Nobody has to pay extra, and the queue simply stops where it is. There’s no such button on-chain. When block space is full, you can only bid up the price. The same transfer that normally costs a few cents can cost tens of dollars when the network is congested. That extra money doesn’t go into anyone’s pocket; it all goes to miners and validators. The queues work differently, and so do the costs.
I’ve thought about that coupon. It seemed familiar. A hundred coupons per member is much like an airdrop sent out by address. If the rules recognize accounts, accounts will multiply. The Sybil detection, identity verification, and token-holder snapshots that projects later scramble to put in place are all attempts to redefine what “one person” means.
A milk tea shop doesn’t need to detect that. It only cares who’s going to make those thousand cups today. That’s all.
There’s no telling how many of those thousand cups were genuinely wanted. One person claiming the full hundred coupons, several accounts claiming them together—the platform has never disclosed how much of the total came from these patterns, and didn’t stop them either. The only thing you could see was the ordering page being shut off. That was it.
The people behind the counter know best. She doesn’t know what a Sybil attack is. She just knows they opened at nine, and by 10:53 there were already more than 700 orders, while people outside were standing there with their phones, unable to get an order through no matter how many times they tried. The platform issued the coupons; the staff had to manage the queue. There was nothing she could do.
I’d rather read this as a signal about the rules, not about demand. The moment you see “each person may claim up to X coupons,” you can pretty much predict a pileup. Nobody knows how late that Guangzhou shop stayed open. The company hasn’t said whether it will run the promotion again.
Any project planning its next airdrop might want to do this bit of arithmetic first. The more coupons you issue, the more addresses will be lining up.
#茉莉奶白 #空投 $BTC $USDC $ETH
The situation itself wasn’t complicated. Jasmine Milk White opened its 3,000th store and ran a three-day “Buy One, Get One Free” deal on its Must-Drink List. Eight medium-sized drinks, available only for dine-in pickup through its mini-program. The promotion ended on the 20th.
The switch was hidden in the rules. Each member could claim 100 coupons a day. It said so right in the promotion details. This wasn’t a loophole at all. If one person has a hundred coupons in hand, how many orders can one store handle in a day? That’s how demand was created: piling up, one cup at a time.
A lot of people think a flood of orders means a place is popular. In reality, half of it is by design. Cut the price in half, let people claim coupons in batches, and orders will naturally pour into one store. Until the system gives up. And it really did.
Centralized systems have something that on-chain systems don’t: a pause button. When a store can’t cope, the platform can shut it down with one click. Nobody has to pay extra, and the queue simply stops where it is. There’s no such button on-chain. When block space is full, you can only bid up the price. The same transfer that normally costs a few cents can cost tens of dollars when the network is congested. That extra money doesn’t go into anyone’s pocket; it all goes to miners and validators. The queues work differently, and so do the costs.
I’ve thought about that coupon. It seemed familiar. A hundred coupons per member is much like an airdrop sent out by address. If the rules recognize accounts, accounts will multiply. The Sybil detection, identity verification, and token-holder snapshots that projects later scramble to put in place are all attempts to redefine what “one person” means.
A milk tea shop doesn’t need to detect that. It only cares who’s going to make those thousand cups today. That’s all.
There’s no telling how many of those thousand cups were genuinely wanted. One person claiming the full hundred coupons, several accounts claiming them together—the platform has never disclosed how much of the total came from these patterns, and didn’t stop them either. The only thing you could see was the ordering page being shut off. That was it.
The people behind the counter know best. She doesn’t know what a Sybil attack is. She just knows they opened at nine, and by 10:53 there were already more than 700 orders, while people outside were standing there with their phones, unable to get an order through no matter how many times they tried. The platform issued the coupons; the staff had to manage the queue. There was nothing she could do.
I’d rather read this as a signal about the rules, not about demand. The moment you see “each person may claim up to X coupons,” you can pretty much predict a pileup. Nobody knows how late that Guangzhou shop stayed open. The company hasn’t said whether it will run the promotion again.
Any project planning its next airdrop might want to do this bit of arithmetic first. The more coupons you issue, the more addresses will be lining up.
#茉莉奶白 #空投 $BTC $USDC $ETH