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Comment by influx | Hacker News Reader

You don't think there's any value in an open source system that proves scarcity in a digital universe?

Absolutely not. Most of the appeal of digital comes from the lack of scarcity. Artificially introducing faux-scarcity is asinine.

the market has chosen faux-scarcity many many many times over (at least) hundreds of years. we live in a market based economy, the market doesn't care that your MySQL database can do it, the market is saying "I'll pay you to write to a public access database you set up, so quit with this Betamax technical superiority stuff, we don't care."

It's not about technical superiority … I think it's more about morality/ethics: is it _right_ that we should introduce scarcity artificially when it doesn't exist naturally, with the primary outcome being that a small group will exploit it at the cost of many who can't? Is that healthy?

Yes, it is a free market issue, and people will choose what they know, and will choose based on their fears.

there are plenty of crypto (and non-crypto but tech) projects that opted not to introduce scarcity, or simply failed to while they intended to. the market ignores them. you can praise them if you want. the teams ran out of money and did something else for food and shelter and nobody in the community wanted to use their own resources to continue. the survivorship bias goes to the what you see, the high flying things that galvanize participation and the human element well, which is based on current and increasing and sustained scarcity.

Imagine you live in a country with abundant fresh water. You can just drink from a spring at every corner.

A group of foreign investors comes in. “It’s shocking how the market for bottled water is completely inexistant here. Don’t worry, we’re going to teach you how to make money selling imported water! First thing, we’ll dynamite those springs that disturb the market…”

Do you welcome these business gurus and their scarcity-introducing ideas with open arms?

Did...you just describe Nestle?

Honestly, not really. Scarcity only means something by enforcement. A record is just half the battle. However, enforcement is by its nature centralizing.

The NBA NFTs, for example. Why NFT? If the NBA is running the enforcement, you'd de facto have to trust them to be in the system, and if you trust them, then surely you'd trust their MySQL database just as much.

Why would you want to prove scarcity in a digital world? That's precisely the opposite of what you should be doing in a digital world. And currency isn't a reason.

This is such a shifting of goal posts. Could there potentially be some value in such a system? Yeah it's possible.

Is that the same thing as saying: should this system be used to design a whole new "Web 3.0"? No, it isn't the same (and no, it shouldn't).

Proving scarcity in a universe where copying data is nearly free may swing all the way around to an actually evil construct.

If we're trying to do accurate record-keeping on the scarcity of tangible artifacts using digital means... That's useful, but it's not the problem BTC or its ilk solves.

Wait until we get some DRM together with NFTs.

That feels like the endgame for some of this. A crypto enforcement layer in your PC that validates whether you have the right to copy an ape jpeg.

Requiring a transferable license to use IP in a locked-doen metaverse (say, having permission to play a certain album in your "public" space) is the only use case I can see for NFTs and also the reason I'll be using exclusively pirate-friendly metaverses

Economic value, perhaps. But clearly economic value and true value to people are completely divorced in this modern day and age, artificial scarcity is a disturbing concept and not one we should laud, and it is foolish or malicious to dedicate efforts and literal energy to such that we waste more on speculators gambling in this artificial scarcity space than medium-sized countries use to exist.

Why would I want artificial scarcity in any situation? Scarcity is bad.

> Scarcity is bad.

We could just print money and all be rich? If you value money, and you think that compensation for work can be paid with money, then compensating the work that went into creating digital goods seems appropriate. Should compensation for digital goods be through donations?

Banks pretty much can. The only real limit on bank money is the banks ability to find a credit worthy borrower. There's far more of that in the system than central bank money. Of course the issued currency is balanced with a liability. In the case of normal banks this liability is generally taken by a person or entity in the system. For the central bank it's marked up as not-yet-taxed-away money. Crypto currencies are just silly and absolutely rely ultimately on social stability, which essentially means the state.

> compensating the work that went into creating digital goods seems appropriate. Should compensation for digital goods be through donations?

I consume digital goods all the time, and I pay for them with money.

Money is an inflationary asset that I keep in order to pay people. It is not an investment, it's value (in my country, the US) is stable, and I get paid in money.

There is no cryptocurrency that shares these characteristics and there never will be as long as people try to pitch it as both deflationary (good investment) and spendable.

> I consume digital goods all the time, and I pay for them with money.

Do you have an example of one that's not digitally scarce or donation based? Or is donation the future?

It's called DRM and we've had various iterations of it for over 20 years now.

Yes, though that’s half of DRM. The other half are anti-circumvention laws that give it legal, if not technological, teeth.

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