Looking at today’s full-screen posts celebrating Pi’s anniversary, only this image best fits the project.

Influencers are raising their glasses to toast a new milestone, but for those still坚持点闪电, this only means that the previous carrot (Pi coins) has been polished even brighter today. How much longer will you keep delaying?···
1. Language Traps: Packaging thresholds as favors, free mining and zero cost—this is the biggest language trap. Basic economic principles tell us: attention, personal privacy data, daily click time, and massive traffic value are all extremely high hidden costs. The video claims no economic threshold is needed, but in reality, it consumes users’ sunk costs (daily check-ins) to lock them into its ecosystem, creating serious psychological dependence.

Hard work: This emotionally charged language is a form of moral kidnapping. It transforms technical inefficiencies or strategic delays into a tragic narrative of carrying the burden for everyone, making users afraid to urge progress. Urging is seen as impatience or small-mindedness.
2. Grand Narrative: Web3 breakthroughs built on a pile of sand, forcibly representing the industry’s future: The video states that Pi is following the path that the entire cryptocurrency industry must ultimately follow. This救世主 mentality is a typical grand narrative. It attempts to define what true Web3 is and positions itself as invincible. If the project fails, it’s because the industry hasn't kept up with its pace.

Fake correlations in the real world: The video repeatedly mentions production processes and real goods. But in blockchain logic, without efficient consensus mechanisms and genuine liquidity, so-called off-chain integration is just a simple mall built inside an app. It’s no different from the points exchange system of 20 years ago and fundamentally cannot change production relations.
3. Concept Switching: Blurring value and price,
Trading VS Practicality: The video heavily disparages trading (financial attributes), describing it as false or meaningless. This is a complete concept switch. In the blockchain world, without liquidity and price discovery,所谓的实用性 is just self-indulgence. How can a token without market pricing be valued when exchanged for goods?

Validators and AI Training: A perfect zero-cost digital labor freeloading scheme

Using validators to train AI to make money in B2B

You think you're doing KYC, but actually you're a free “data annotation worker”: Currently, the most time-consuming and expensive part of AI training worldwide is reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) and high-quality data annotation.

Profitless business model: Pi cleverly designed a validator mechanism. Users, to make their coins usable or to earn some elusive Pi rewards, voluntarily or even competitively help the system verify others’ IDs.

This not only solves the project’s own KYC costs but also, more critically: millions of users spend their time and effort for free, helping the project train an extremely powerful AI visual recognition model that covers complex global ethnicities and document formats!

The ultimate B2B monetization trump card: Even if Pi coins become worthless in the end, the project already holds two extremely valuable core assets from traditional business society:

1. A globally verified KYC AI model with extremely high accuracy, validated by millions of people. This technology can be packaged as an API and sold as an enterprise (B2B) service to other financial institutions, exchanges, or multinational platforms needing global KYC.
2. The world’s largest, most active, and most authentic real-name database (integrating phone numbers, identity info, and activity levels).

4. Cognitive Biases in the One-Year Celebration: Whose Carnival?

Anniversary trap: Using a sense of ceremony to cover up endless tug-of-war truths, turning a “public network” that has yet to fully materialize into a one- or two-year celebration. In business operations, this is called redefining milestones and managing expectations to the extreme.

A normal mainnet launch is a瞬间动作—code open source, decentralized nodes, free cross-chain token transfer—when achieved, it’s achieved. But Pi prolongs this process, even holding anniversary celebrations for it, essentially packaging an incomplete state as a status.

Boiling a frog in warm water: When the first year passes without open mainnet, officials say they are laying a solid foundation; in the second and third years, holding anniversary celebrations again, users’ psychological expectations are completely reshaped. People will habitually think that mainnet opening is a long construction process!

This closed or Schrödinger’s open network can continue to exist indefinitely. By the tenth anniversary, they can still say: We are conducting an unprecedented decentralized social experiment in human history, so taking it slow is normal.
—This is how grand narratives are used to mask technological stagnation and delays in delivery.