Seeing people shill the 7X multiplier for Convex bribes (e.g. you get $7 of CRV tokens for $1 of bribes to Convex). After investing/voting/working in the ve space for 5 years, I'm realizing bribes are not sustainable. There's a good reason to use them, but if you're a protocol you can't rely on them forever. Here's how they work: 1 - token distribution. it's basically an airdrop or a way to decentralize your supply without selling. you actually are getting CRV or AERO/VELO or whatever for these tokens so it's a capital efficient tradeoff depending on the multiplier. 2 - customer acquisition cost before there is organic market demand for your token. Voters can discover your token when you bribe them. volume/organic swap fees are what will keep the token price up eventually or your token dies. 3 - some kind of auto-bribe mechanism. this is for protocols that have organic use and can basically recycle the fees they generate into bribes 4 - protocols who have a lot of their own liquidity in the pool can earn CRV/AERO and just lock it to continuously vote for their pool. this ensures liquidity and is the most sustainable. there are no limits to how much you can vote, even if there are bribe limits for low volatility conditions. Bribes are great for ve lockers because they are free yield. LPs have to be careful because if the music stops the pool dries up and you can become a bag holder, or worse, exit liquidity for protocols taking advantage of unlimited emissions. I think bribes are cyclical and there's a time for them. Successful protocols that enable bribes will consistently need new tokens and teams to launch and bribe, or they'll have to generate enough swap fees to keep voters happy.