RE: First Principles: The Secret to Understanding Money & Cryptocurrencies [Techonomics]
That's a really good question, and to be honest a difficult one to answer. I mean, can attention be traded? I guess there are basically markets where attention is traded (those markets that deal in online advertisements). But part of what I'm trying to do with my videos is help us get away from "word thinking." Maybe the real question is whether there is any benefit to thinking of attention as a commodity. I think maybe the simplist definition of a commodity might be "anything that can be monetized." Then the question becomes whether people's attention has been monetized, which yeah I think that's happened. But this is also kind of "economic thinking." When talking econ we tend to forget there's more to "things" than the economic terms we use to describe them. "Attention" is an important part of being human that in many ways we still do not full understand. What exactly attention is (for example, one could argue it is how we determine what matters) might be a more important question. How's that for a non-answer answer? Thanks for the great question!