4 ms·

Am I wrong in believing trying to force a sort of artificial scarcity on digital goods, is a flawed concept to begin with ? Maybe I don't understand NFTs

dmarcos 5y ago
Artificial scarcity works pretty well in the physical world. See limited edition products: cars, sneakers, books, collectable card games like Pokemon, Magic, Yugioh, limited print runs of art pieces… Value is the scarcity not the physical support. edit: pressed publish too quickly
- polynomial 5y ago
  You wouldn't download a car, would you?
- angryasian 5y ago
  I would argue that value is based on some sort of emotional measurement. The idea that a mass produced good, that is a physical item.. is only valuable because of the ability to hold it and the emotion behind it. whether or not digital good carry that same weight, is left to be seen.
th0ma5 5y ago
What's weirder is that this sort of implies DRM while not even providing it, even though we all know DRM doesn't work. The scarcity is having a spot in a ledger between other entries in one lineage by a (supposed, but rarely purely) distributed non-cooperative consensus of ledger entries. Anything other than that is imagined and probably done through other means just as well. I'm not sure why someone couldn't just periodically tweet pictures of note cards with a list of who owns what because that'd be just as effective.
Noos 5y ago
Not really, because the value of non-scare digital goods can be effectively zero. Look at public domain content for example; you can go to amazon and buy collections of 100 classic novels for two bucks, and that is just if you want the convenience of buying them at one stop as opposed from getting them for free from project gutenberg. Eventually we might see values trend so low that it may not make sense to make digital goods at all; i think video games in particular will be vulnerable to this soon.

dmarcos 5y ago

Artificial scarcity works pretty well in the physical world. See limited edition products: cars, sneakers, books, collectable card games like Pokemon, Magic, Yugioh, limited print runs of art pieces… Value is the scarcity not the physical support. edit: pressed publish too quickly

polynomial 5y ago
You wouldn't download a car, would you?
angryasian 5y ago
I would argue that value is based on some sort of emotional measurement. The idea that a mass produced good, that is a physical item.. is only valuable because of the ability to hold it and the emotion behind it. whether or not digital good carry that same weight, is left to be seen.

th0ma5 5y ago

What's weirder is that this sort of implies DRM while not even providing it, even though we all know DRM doesn't work. The scarcity is having a spot in a ledger between other entries in one lineage by a (supposed, but rarely purely) distributed non-cooperative consensus of ledger entries. Anything other than that is imagined and probably done through other means just as well. I'm not sure why someone couldn't just periodically tweet pictures of note cards with a list of who owns what because that'd be just as effective.

Noos 5y ago

Not really, because the value of non-scare digital goods can be effectively zero. Look at public domain content for example; you can go to amazon and buy collections of 100 classic novels for two bucks, and that is just if you want the convenience of buying them at one stop as opposed from getting them for free from project gutenberg. Eventually we might see values trend so low that it may not make sense to make digital goods at all; i think video games in particular will be vulnerable to this soon.