The original comment was about the "end game" of NFT's. My point is that money has value because we choose to value it, and fungible tokens often don't give you enough information to adequately make that choice, which means that nonfungible tokens have a bigger part to play than their current form would indicate.

Currently, most people don't consider whether using a given type of money is in line with their personal values because we all value food and shelter and clean water, so there's enough common ground that it's not worth splitting hairs over. But if you chart a course to a post-scarcity world, then it will take you through a time when food and shelter and clean water are no longer scarce. There will still probably be people causing problems in the world (and using money to do it), and the nonviolent way to take the wind out of those people's sails is to stop valuing their money because it's encouraging behavior that's not in line with your values.

This might happen several times before the greedy learn to behave, so in such a world it might be difficult to decide which type of fungible token to use. If you end up using tokens minted by people that ultimately end up pissing off the masses, those masses might reject your money. One way to hedge against this kind of risk is to just go around doing things that you're pretty sure everybody will agree are good things. For each public good provided, mint an NFT and use it as money. Initially we'll need some way to burn stale NFT's to keep the scarcity-logic in check, but this is the road to post-scarcity. Once we're well practiced in valuing a token for its effects, rather than for its scarcity, we'll be prepared to let go of the scarcity logic entirely. Or at least that's the plan.

Huh? Money, currency -- these aren't market goods, they're exclusive mandates established by sovereign states. You don't get to decide which money you want to use, it's a function of the government of wherever you happen to be.

Bitcoin isn't a currency. NFTs aren't money.

If you anticipate that whatever government mandates your money will still be around when you retire, then you're not living during (what I'm claiming is) the endgame of NFT's.

I'm so confused by what you're saying.

> money has value because we choose to value it

Yes, in a broad sense.

> and fungible tokens often don't give you enough information to adequately make that choice

If by "fungible tokens" you mean things like fiat dollars or crypto bitcoins, then this is a nonsensical statement. The "we choose" of the prior clause isn't an individual choice, it's a collective choice expressed via government.

> which means that nonfungible tokens have a bigger part to play than their current form would indicate

This doesn't follow at all.

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> the endgame of NFT's

What is the endgame of NFTs? It seems like you're speculating about a post-scarcity society? But in that scenario there would be no reason for any money, fungible or non-fungible, to exist at all. Money is an abstraction, a time-tested mechanism for economic exchange and growth. And the purpose of economics is to _manage scarcity_. If you remove scarcity then economics, money, bitcoins, NFTs, they all have no reason to exist and disappear.

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> If you anticipate that whatever government mandates your money will still be around when you retire

Yes. Obviously this is true. China and the yuan, Russia and the ruble, Europe and the euro, America and the dollar, they will all be around, in one form or another, when I retire. And when you retire. And when my children retire. And their children.

Sovereign states are the evolutionary output of humanity's effort, over all history, to achieve peace, growth, and stability. They're not problems waiting to be disrupted. They're solutions that we as a species have arrived at, after enormous toil and suffering.

I'm speculating about a state that's pre-post-scarcity (at least for most things humans want, there will always be scarcity somewhere) by maybe about 50 years. It's not like you're going to be able to just wave a magic wand and poof the scarcity away. We'll have the capacity to provide what people need, and that day will come and go long before somebody actually authors the commit that makes it happen. That author is going to need a sense of security that everything is going to be ok if they just start giving everything away for free.

I'm open to hearing alternatives, but the best I can come up with is a system where we allocate whatever resources remain scarce based on merit. Not merit like whoever manages to wrest more money from whoever else wins, but merit like wow that's a really great contribution to society--I personally value what you've done, so I'm going to behave in a way that benefits you. A generation that grows up thinking along those lines just as often as they think in terms of market clearing price is more likely to produce the magical commit that redirects the robots from competition to cooperation, and fungibility just doesn't fit that use case very well.

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In the more immediate term, I wish that I shared your optimism about the stability of sovereign states. I'm not saying that we should disrupt the government, I'm saying that the government is doing a fine job of disrupting itself and I wish we had some kind of backup system in place.

Eliminating scarcity requires unlimited and easily accessible resources i.e. energy. We are hundreds to thousands of years away from this point.

You are otherwise describing a barter meritocracy, which is dystopian :(

It strikes me as rather utopian compared with:

> The "we choose" of the prior clause isn't an individual choice, it's a collective choice expressed via government.

But I guess it's ok that we disagree about which modes of exchange are desirable, the world is probably big enough for both :)

I mean, humanity started out as a loose collection of independently-governed city states. We evolved to the current notion of larger-scale sovereign national governments. This wasn't an accident or a pathology. It delivers better outcomes. A competent single governing body like the Roddenbury Federation would be better still! What you're suggesting is a regression :(

It's a regression that has happened several times, and it'll happen several times more before we've got that pre-to-post scarcity transition to contend with. It's what happens to systems that don't regulate their parts well--they get cancer and die, and in the case of societies, their people move on and try again.

When I said that I'd prefer to live in a world with decentralized power structures, I should've said that I'd prefer it to a centralized one that's on the decline. I think we need to iterate faster on our societal structures until we find one that works for everybody, and bail earlier on things that clearly don't work. Probably, when we find it, the ideal system will involve some central authority--though held better accountable.

100 years ago, getting creative with how we structure society meant starvation and bloodshed. I see crypto as an opportunity to build a stop gap. It need not be better than whatever we build that follows it, it just needs to hold us over until we can figure out what that's going to be.