The Disappointing Tea.xyz

Hi, as it’s come up a few times in the comments: Tea completely unrelated to Homebrew other than happening to have the same creator. Homebrew has zero connection to anything related to Tea and Max hasn’t been involved with Homebrew for the best part of a decade.<p>Mike McQuaid, Homebrew Project Leader and Homebrew maintainer for the last 15 years.

Cryptocurrency has basically completely inverted the trust issue it&#x27;s meant to solve (at least for many developers).<p>In theory, a decentralized ledger of project contributions &#x2F; owners is a good idea for distributing sponsorship dollars without a middleman controlling things.<p>In practice, the brand of crypto has gotten so bad that developers are far more likely to trust centralized mechanisms like GitHub&#x27;s funding.yaml and associated partners.

The financialization of everything is why we can&#x27;t have nice things.

Much akin to the Hacktoberfest debacle, manufactured incentives seem to hurt public spaces.

Just as an aside Tea.xyz is funded by Binance. [1]<p>Make of this what you will, but I call immediate scam.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businesswire.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;home&#x2F;20220323005603&#x2F;en&#x2F;Tea-Raises-8-Million-Led-by-Binance-Labs-to-Create-New-Open-Source-Software-on-the-Blockchain" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businesswire.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;home&#x2F;20220323005603&#x2F;en&#x2F;Tea...</a>

The idea of creating a bounty system for open source projects is one that has been tried many times over the last decade+. These bounty systems never gain much traction because the incentive structure&#x2F;economics don&#x27;t work. The closest we&#x27;ll get to these bounty systems are for-profit open source software companies, which is pretty good considering that there&#x27;s a VC-backed open source company for almost any software category you can imagine.

Thanks for doing the research. My repo getgauge&#x2F;taiko (listed on the screenshot) was affected by this. I reported these as phishing attacks as I had no idea what it was about.

&gt; So much like Keybase got spammed with an influx of garbage users when they announced their Stellar token - GitHub is getting an influx of garbage users taking time and energy from me and others for this tea stuff.<p>Kinda off-topic but when this happened it was the beginning of the end for my use of Keybase. Stopped using it entirely after the Zoom acquisition, and I&#x27;d used their chat <i>very heavily</i> early on -- but trust was lost.

I think an inherent problem is that donors need to be continuously buying the tokens that developers are selling or the project goes to zero. So the the protocol should be built for the donors.<p>They could say &quot;People can contribute to a project by just staking tokens against a project&quot; but staking tokens isn&#x27;t a stream of new money. New money needs to be coming from somewhere.<p>Tokens can be created out of thin air, but money can&#x27;t be.<p>It doesn&#x27;t look good to me through a &quot;game theory lens&quot;.

This is an obvious pump and dump scam grift.<p>I thought we have learned from the crypto hype that stuff like tea.xyz and others in the crypto &#x2F; blockchain nonsense space are setup for investors to dump tokens on others trying to make money out of it.<p>It is unfortunate that this is now targeting open source developers and it is even more disappointing that this is made from the creator of Homebrew.<p>Who is the customer of this and why?, there is still no use case at all. A solution in a perpetual search of a non existent problem.<p>Shame.

Tea is from the same person who was using AI generated descriptions in their package manager the other day. Probably best to put your old grift to bed before starting your new one?

Max Howell (creator of homebrew) is also behind tea.xyz<p>imo that give them some more credibility or at least makes me think that they probably are well intentioned

The first mistake was to buy xyz-domain

Eh I think it&#x27;s interesting. Added it to some of my eligible projects, I&#x27;ll wait and see how it goes.

With BTC and ETH pumping again expect to see another tidal wave of scammy &quot;web3&quot; garbage.