> Etherum allows you to treat digital entities as if they are physical. I.e. it creates scarcity in an otherwise abundant digital universe.
I always hoped I could see a post-scarcity physical world in my lifetime. Now you are telling me that there are people trying to present me with a pre-scarcity digital world? No, thank you. :)
Heh you are actually touching onto something quite interesting and fundamental.
Things that have value are often valuable exactly because they are not abundant but scarce. The scarcer the more valuable.
Post-scarcity is about creating enough fundamentals (ex. food) to everyone, but it's not about removing the value of scarcity for some food that might be extra hard to produce.
Many things only works if they are scarce that does not mean we shouldn't try to achieve post scarcity.
As for examples:
Digital Pokemón Cards. Basically the ability to create digital collectors items.
E-books that could gain value. You could sell ebooks at a premium and allow people to re-sell them. Because the history of their ownership is recorded you could even see them gaining value if they had been owned by a celebrity.
Private but public healthcare records. For research and usage. Store the health-records publicly as personas but allow individuals people to link it with their identity. This would help with research in completely new ways.
Voting made public but anonymous Make it hard to manipulate voting results by making the anonymized results available for everyone.
Artificial Intelligence Using the protocol to create automated consensus models.
Companies without owners Build a company with a political purpose without any owner.