Is this what the struggles of the transition from scarcity to post scarcity looks like? Building systems that simulate scarcity to generate the illusion of value and to front run that value?

Of course. It's even more clear with NFTs: people aren't spending thousands of dollars on low-quality NFT sprites because they think they're sound investments or artworks that are that unique and enjoyable in and of themselves. It's people with serious wealth, people who have benefited from scarcity in other domains, trying to promote a system of artificial scarcity in the digital art world. Artificial scarcity that they will later profit off of. This is why they attach huge prizes to what is really worthless crap in order to generate hype and adoption.

Yes, because it’s the only way to generate “wealth” in a world full of plenty. Humans, like most creatures, have a biological imperative to try to outdo one another in order to reproduce.

The Tyranny of the Hierarchy.

if you are joking, I hope you realize you have stumbled on a real epiphany, and keep pulling the thread.

Wait until everyone realizes that money, food, and land aren’t scarce either.

I don’t understand how a post-scarcity society would even be desirable. For things like art and music, their creators need to be able to command a price on their creations. The digitization of these things removes their scarcity and essentially makes them function as a public good, making it impossible to set a price on them that will support the artist. If there’s no way for digital artists to support themselves, then they’ll cease to exist. Extend this to any other proposed “post-scarcity X” and you get a society I wouldn’t really want to live in. This isn’t meant to be flippant, I’m genuinely curious if there’s something here I’m missing.

The artist won't starve if all the basics of living are free. Universal basic income or some other scheme could maintain the means of economic transactions, but post-scarcity fundamentally means that everyone is taken care of to a minimum basic standard of living. Food, water, healthcare, shelter, sanitation, and safety are available by default to every citizen. An artist would only ever starve or suffer if they renounced the basics.

The nature of economics and markets changes radically in ways we can't predict. Post-scarcity systems could be fundamentally unstable concurrent with fungible currencies of the type we use now. New mechanisms of valuation based on time and so on might take hold, or it might require distribution of resources in ways not yet considered. The point being that incentives and accumulation of wealth will be radically different to the extent that there's not a clean or obvious connection to current incentives that drive human behavior.

> I don’t understand how a post-scarcity society would even be desirable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_vulture_and_the_little_gir...

> If there’s no way for digital artists to support themselves, then they’ll cease to exist.

They'll have day jobs and create art on the weekends and evenings. Alternately, they'll be sponsored through some full-time fellowship to create art.

> They'll have day jobs and create art on the weekends and evenings. Alternately, they'll be sponsored through some full-time fellowship to create art.

If public wants a specific artist to create a specific art, they will be forced to pay such artist money to incentive them. Examples: patreon, Kickstarter, etc.

>making it impossible to set a price on them that will support the artist.

What part of post-scarcity don't you understand? Money doesn't matter. Post-scarcity.

> Money doesn’t matter.

That would be a pretty huge departure from how we currently create and transact anything of value, so I’d say I don’t understand that.

Nothing to be ashamed of tbqh. Post-scarcity is the type of thing that will probably give everyone nowadays nightmares and existential ennui.

Imagine life where the guy bumming on the street and the guy working hard at his craft are both contributing the same amount in the long run because there is more than enough to keep everyone living comfortably, with no need to actually compete.

In fact, I imagine the trauma of the paradigm shift could very well break a generation or so adjusting to it.

Perhaps! Because people are trying to create opportunity from the lack of scarcity maybe?

The author beautifully missed the point of having a EVM in the first place, he missed the "it's trustless" memo. EVM is slow because it runs the same code in millions of computers where no computers are trusted and only the consensus of the computers are trusted. You won't be running Firefox or Linux on EVM.

I like how even the most educated and experienced people in the world can't bother to read the bitcoin whitepaper with no reservations.

> I like how even the most educated and experienced people in the world can't bother to read the bitcoin whitepaper with no reservations.

I get your sarcasm, but the bitcoin paper has little to do with the EVM and smart contracts except as a foundational idea.

Either way, I’m inclined to agree with the beautiful sarcasm the OP posted. Trustless doesn’t make it more valuable than the trusted systems that we already have that are cheaper and do a decent job without artificial scarcity

>but the bitcoin paper has little to do with the EVM and smart contracts except as a foundational idea

I am not claiming the bitcoin whitepaper has anything to do with EVM, but it explains why a trustless, digital currency is needed and how it can be implemented. It predates real cryptocurrencies, so it can read easier without references to cryptocurrencies that exist today. The author has demonstrated incredible ignorance of why things like EVM exist in the first place.

>Trustless doesn’t make it more valuable than the trusted systems

Author doesn't understand why people think it could be/is valuable either.

He does understand. It’s for the people that manage to grow into adulthood without realizing that Ayn Rand was a terrible hack. “Trustless” sounds like a good idea to these most boring of cynics who consider anything but ruthless short-sighted egotism to be weakness or naïveté, all institutions to be corrupt (with the same magnitude of “totally”), and the only debate to be had is if it’s the Wall Street Jews, Hilary Clinton, or all women that are ruining their lives.

> The Ethereum virtual machine has the equivalent computational power of an Atari 2600

Is there a source for the computational power of the ethereum VM?

To me this is rhetoric that conveniently ignores the sole advantages of blockchain and distributed computing.

Blockchains don't exist to be fast, efficient, or scalable. They exist to be decentralized, permissionless, and censorship resistant.

> People are trying to move from a world in which compute resources are efficient and almost limitless to a world of scarcity because they want to build an economic system where you can trade your fortnite skins for online currency

Actually, no one's doing this. You've created a strawman argument. Netflix and Youtube aren't moving their hosting to the blockchain. Google's not storing database shards on IPFS. What people are trying to use blockchains for is the creation and persistence of digital property. Blockchains are expressly better at provenance because records cannot easily be altered, compared to a centralized service.

> Creating economic ownership schemes of things that nobody needs to own because they're not scarce in the first place.

Congratulations, you just defined western capitalism.

> Netflix and Youtube aren't moving their hosting to the blockchain.

I see people claim, basically constantly, that the blockchain will be the source of all such content in the future and that this will free people from youtube's tyranny or whatever.

That's not practical, but decentralized sources like IPFS, BitTorrent, etc will be useful sources of hosting for videos/creators who don't want to face censorship from Youtube etc.

They have. And this is where the "decentralized storage of video will replace youtube" argument comes from that apparently the person I replied to have never seen. As you mention, this is completely impractical except for the very few people who are willing to spend the enormous overhead for this sort of hosting.

Yeah most of these posts start with a straw man and try to work their way backwards from there.

What I think it really boils down to is that web3 represents a shift away from the centralized dystopian organizations that employ most of the people in this community.

Away from centralization and straight into energy inefficient pyramidal schemes.

Thank you for that insightful and not at all cliche response.

It’s a cliché because it’s true. Just pointing out that it has been true for a long time doesn’t change its truth.

Show me the Atari 2600 that people are happy to store billions of $ on.

> Show me the Atari 2600 that people are happy to store billions of $ on.

Uh, they just did.