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In my view, it doesn't matter if you print your corperate scrip on metal, paper, with a merkle tree, on someone else's merkle tree, on the world's merkle tree, in between lightning channels, or whereever or whatever. Shitcoins are shitcoins, coperate scrip results in human suffering, and company shares only work in a regulated model where arbitration and courts and resolve disputes.
Lyn covers the usual ground about how commodity money acquires its value. The story is that it starts as a collectible (cowrie shells is a famous example) that people value for aesthetic reasons; or perhaps they use a different commodity (e.g., wheat or tobacco) because people have need of those things, though those types of commodities also have their drawbacks, as she discusses. Eventually, the thing acquires an additional monetary premium on top of its commodity value.
In philosophical language, you would say that the value of the cowrie shell is grounded in its aesthetic appeal. The satisfaction you get bc something makes pretty jewelry, or because you can smoke or eat it, is the foundation that allows it to eventually take on a monetary premium. In terms more familiar to most bitcoiners, grounding is what Mises was talking about with his regression theorem. (Although note that many Austrians got wound around the axle whether btc could have value bc it violated the regression theorem.).
It makes sense to care very deeply about this initial process of monetization when the idea of money is new. But these days, we're obviously familiar with the concept of money. And practically speaking, this new money (btc) is grounded in an older kind of money (fiat) that happens when one is exchanged for the other. But this has always seemed precarious to me -- it's relatively easy for the government to squash formal exchange at scale. Not entirely, but to turn the fire hose off.
Given bitcoin's overwhelming grounding in fiat at this point of time, and its novelty and foreignness, what would it mean for the torrent to become a trickle?
Pretty good observations on why Ads are used so many. This one I didn’t realize:
6/ Smooths out inequality: different consumers pays different price for the same content and nobody complains. Ie. wealthier people who buy more stuff through ads are subsidizin the people who don’t buy as much.
Programming will be less important than knowing how to structure your thoughts. Just like Bitcoin, it changes you the more you understand it.
Keep going but don't expect it to be the career cash cow you might’ve expected it to be. We are likely arriving at the commodification of code.