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RE: First Principles: The Secret to Understanding Money & Cryptocurrencies [Techonomics]
Whaaaat?! Incredible! Glad you liked it. Let me know if your exploration leads to any additional insights
Whaaaat?! Incredible! Glad you liked it. Let me know if your exploration leads to any additional insights
Do you feel that someones "attention" is the true currencey of the moment?
Great question! Well, it really depends on the definition you are using for "currency." Colloquially "currency" can have a very loose meaning. It doesn't always mean "fiat currency" or "money currency" when used. Typically when people use "currency" in association with a term like "attention" they aren't speaking literally. They aren't saying, "I have a piece of paper or coin that represents a unit of attention that can be used to purchase something else." My definition of currency would be something like, "the official money of a specific population." What I think you're really getting at is the fact that up until now no one has been able to effectively MONETIZE people's attention. People's attention is valuable, but existing forms of money aren't inexpensive or efficient enough to enable anyone to monetize their attention. One of the strongest arguments for STEEM and steemit is that it enables people to monetize their attention. If that's all STEEM did, then it could be called "the currency of attention." But that is different than saying that attention = currency. In that context I would say "currency" is being used synonymously with "valuable." Thanks for the thoughtful question!
So does that make attention a "commodity?"
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!