I think we can use Vickrey Auctions for this problem. Vickrey Auctions are able to give not only price discovery, but also value discovery. Vickrey auctions incentivize bidders to bid their true value. If instead of using price discovery, we use value discovery, the price can stay at 0, so long as a certain (limited) amount of people are faced with a choice that would have them go without.

So for example perhaps we sample 50,000 people and say 75% of people keep access, say when they vote. If you bid in the top 75%, you keep access for the period, and you pay the value that the bottom person that kept access bid. That money is then not used to pay for the IP, some other tax will fund the IP or Open Source Software or Meme, that 25% will then go to all the voters for providing their values. So the average bidder will pay nothing, the below average bidder will lose something they value low, but gain, and the highest bidders will fund that. We then take some other collection and sample another 50,000 people, until we find out the value of all of these digital items to people.

If you do the subsidization process correctly, I think the idea of IP owners holding their supply back would go away, as releasing it to all would always provide more value than holding it back. I think at the very least this would be an obvious answer to Open Source Software, and this would easily fund things like Linux and Firefox. I think this would stretch further to research, and colleges would now be funded through this mechanism, and the professors who currently waste enormous amounts of time doing grant writing would be able to be productive. Thus the whole issue of journals goes away. Even things like ads, people would bid on their service less because of them, so there would be no fundamental reason to include them as it would reduce the subsidy.

I'm sorry, I have no idea how this relates to either of my questions. Can you clarify?

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> The end-game of economics ought to be to eliminate scarcity

This doesn't make sense. Economics isn't something with a goal, it's a praxis which exists solely to manage scarcity. Eliminate scarcity and economics disappears.

When you grant a monopoly over items that have zero marginal costs, you are creating massive dead-weight losses. The reason that we use artificial scarcity is because then we can use supply and demand on that, and use the funds to reward the creator.

There will always be new things to create. Some think that because IP is a monopoly, you should tax the monopoly. But that's going at it from the wrong direction. Creating new things produces a positive externality to others. You want to reward that. This is a scheme that might possibly do so.

I'm sorry, I don't understand how any of this responds to my questions. I didn't ask about monopolies, I didn't ask why artificial scarcity exists, I didn't ask about intellectual property.

You asked how to have an economy without scarcity. There will always be certain things, like natural resources, that are scarce. You can not make more land. Those things will always have scarcity.

There are other things that have zero marginal costs, and can indeed eliminate scarcity. But if you eliminate scarcity on those items, there becomes no incentive to create new things, as the natural price of anything with infinite supply is zero.

The creation of new digital items needs to be balanced with the very real scarcity of natural resources. The essence of your question is - how do we reward the creation of things if we can not restrict the use of it? And so we need to find a way to figure out the value of infinite supply items.

I had not heard of those before, that's cool.

What do you need an economy for once you've managed to get rid of all scarcity? Th economy is imho just a tool for allocating scarce resources.

Scarcity will exist until we become a type-2 society. That's not happening for hundreds or more likely thousands of years. If you want to perform the intellectual exercise of speculation then I'm on board but let's make it clear that's what we're doing.

I thought that's what we're doing in this thread, since we're talking about the "endgame" of economies.

If I'm an artist I still need food, shelter, and to buy things in the real world. If I can't make money making digital assets then that heavily disincentivizes me to make them.

Of course in your scenario we haven't reached the "endgame of economics" that we're currently speculating about, because there still is real-world scarcity.

Luckily, I don't think this is an issue that we need to have consensus on. Even if 95% of the world thinks that NFT's are silly, if 5% wants to use that model to fund the creation of things that they like, there will still be a market for your tokens.

> How do you have an economy without scarcity?

It's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

I don't understand the point you're making. I'm all for Gene Roddenbery post-scarcity space communism, but the entire crypto space is based on scarcity...

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.