this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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Thank you for taking the time to respond. With siphoning money, I mean not giving actual value in return. The NFT market was a clear example of this: get some hype going, sell the promise of great gains on your investment, once the ball gets rolling make sure you're out before they realise it's actually worth nothing. In the end, some smart and cunning people sucked a lot of money from often poor and misinformed small investors.
I think I have an inherent idea of value, as in: the value it has in a human life and the amount of effort needed to produce it. This has become very detached from economical value, as there you can have speculation, pumping value and all that other crap. I think that's what frustrates me about the current financial climate: I just want to be able to pay the people who helped produce the product I buy fairly with respect to how much time and work they put it. Currently however, so much money is being transferred to people "just for having money". The idea that money in and of itself can make more money is such a horrible perversion of the original idea of trade...
I get where you're coming from, I used to think about that too, and reached the conclusion that the only thing that has any "inherent value", is what in the health insurance industry they call "qualys": quality years of life. Everything else, derives its value from how it relates to people's quality of life over a lifespan... but the relationship is not necessarily obvious or easy to quantify. That's where money comes in, as an approximation... but it's accuracy depends on everyone's realization of how many qualys are they putting into, and receiving from, a given good. The perversion starts at the beginning: with some producers not realizing they've received too little money for too many of their qualys put into a product, and consumers not realizing that they're giving too much money for too few qualys they'll ever get from a product.
Ideally, these transactions would be transparent and for everyone to see, so people could adjust their exchanges accordingly... but IRL they're a highly guarded secret by most actors, from producers trying to charge more, to consumers trying to pay less, to all sorts of intermediaries trying to insert themselves into the transactions in order to increase and pocket the difference. All of that gets compounded by the delay between production and consumption: the longer the delay, the harder for both parties to communicate, and the higher the opportunity for intermediaries to step in.
It can't, not by itself. There need to be a series of mechanisms set in place to allow it, and some actors to set them in motion. Presently, it's the abstraction of money as credit (aka trust), and mints creating an amount of virtual money that has an attached time limit and credit difficulty on its return, with punishments for those who fail to fulfill their trust obligations (...unless they're "too big to fail").
Money as an abstraction is not that bad of an idea out by itself; it's definitely better than the gold standard, which was limited by the amount of gold extracted, while the reality of a world with an exponential population growth, is closer to a mechanism capable of generating enough money to represent everyone's qualys. Just need to find the right mechanism, and a way to set it in motion.
Influencers, con men, and other swindlers, are a consequence of secrecy. With total transparency and full information, most of those would not be possible.
This one... has much more going on than what meets the eye; GIF NFTs are just the tip of the iceberg, both for the good and for the bad. Bare NFTs are just a tool with multiple applications, "NFTs as digital art" are a DeBeers type scam with a twist (not a pyramid scam; with NFTs the scammer doesn't need to exit the market, ever), NFTs over ETH are a funnel to get people to invest in ETH, and so on.