Zeros

When Worth Replaces Price: A Technocratic Daydream with Digital Assets What if the economy ran less like an emergency  and more like a really well-designed and orchestrated special event or attraction?  In a system optimized for the  virtue of usability rather than profit value , the infrastructure pays attention to itself. Your views, your clicks, your engagement — these have always been worth money to someone. The technocratic possibility is routing that value back to you directly, rather than letting it evaporate into an ad platform's quarterly earnings. You get paid to be marketed to, because your participation is the product and the system competes to compensate you accordingly. T he people who actually use a thing should have a say in how it's valued. Not only shareholders and hedge fund managers but also the users .  These concepts connect into a genuinely interesting economic argument — that worth should be measured by utility and ease of ...

Money Is Not Made Up A short history of why value was never invented by feelings, and what that means for digital assets today. There is a strain of thought in digital currency circles — earnest, sometimes feverish — that money is fundamentally a social construct, a collective hallucination , worth exactly whatever the next person agrees it is worth. The logic tends to go: fiat is fake, gold is arbitrary, and therefore anything can be money if enough people believe in it hard enough . This reasoning gets things approximately backwards. Value is not an agreement. It is a description of usefulness. A brief tour through the history of exchange makes this clear. The Word Salary Is Not a Coincidence The Latin root of the word salary is salarium . The prevailing etymology holds that Roman soldiers received salt as part of their compensation, or were paid wages specifically intended for the purchase of salt . Whether the literal payment was always in salt cakes is debated by hi...