The outbid.lol craze has a strong whiff of the crypto dynamic

A developer, Jonathan Wilke, built a website in a few hours last week. His site hit over $200k within days. There are now over 150 clones and variations.

This reminds me of the crypto craze and its mechanics.

The structural parallel

Crypto solved one problem: how do you prove you own something digital without a central authority deciding?

The answer is payment-as-proof. A transparent, immutable public ledger of who paid what, with no algorithm deciding your worth.

Wilke solved the same problem in a different market: how do you prove your product deserves attention without an algorithm deciding?

The answer is the same. Payment-as-proof. A transparent public ledger of who believes in their product enough to pay.

The original bidding site is an attention blockchain.

The clone wave is the altcoin wave

After Bitcoin, there followed wave upon wave of altcoins. Each with its own variation, slightly forking the mechanic. Where Ethereum added programmability, others added speed, privacy, yield.

After outbid.lol, hundreds of clones — including a thriving ecosystem of bidding boards listing other bidding boards. A feeding frenzy. At one point the top ranked site on outbid.lol was another bidding site. It felt like incestuous digital cannibalism.

Some bidding sites inverted the auction. Others added death mechanics. Niche boards fragmented the audience. Dutch auctions added price discovery.

The bid is the signal

Buying a bid is a credibility signal.

"I paid $57 to be here" means something slightly different to "the algorithm ranked me here." It means public conviction. Real money. A visible bet.

In crypto this is called proof of work. You prove the asset is worth something by spending something real to obtain it.

Pay-to-rank boards are proof of work for products.

What kills both

Crypto's existential problem is infinite forkability, which destroys scarcity. Every new coin diluted crypto as a whole.

With the proliferation of bidding boards, the attention that made outbid.lol valuable is being forked into irrelevance in real time.

The boards that survive are the ones that solve what crypto has not fully solved: a reason to keep coming back.

I built besaved.lol. Your link survives for £1/hour. Strangers can save you and earn credits doing it. If nobody pays, it disappears into the graveyard.

Proof of work. Public ledger. Community consensus.

Sound familiar?

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