Mining the Digital, Physical and the Transfer of Value Between

With the increasing focus on the Metaverse and the melding of the physical and digital worlds, eyes are inevitably going to turn toward cryptocurrencies, as they are the medium of exchange in the hybrid world. This is nothing new to crypto of course, as from the genesis Bitcoin block that mined 50 BTC, the world changed. Something of value from nothing was created - fast forward 12 years and that "something from nothing" is valued at the equivalent of 3 million US dollars.

What does 3 million buy in the real world where you live?

In some ways, this shouldn't be possible, as the laws of Physics just can't deal with the concept of nothing at a practical level, and as everything is energy and energy can only be transferred, having something from nothing should be a non event. But, Bitcoin wasn't something from nothing at the conceptual level, which when it comes to what humans value, is important.

Our entire understanding and dealings with value is based on concepts and even when it comes to the physical needs of our body, our conceptualization of what is valuable can warp what we feed our bodies to the point we make ourselves ill. Candy anyone? Because of our beliefs and conditionings, we have twisted what we consider valuable to our own detriment and because this can be influenced, it can be used to control us. Marketing is a simple example of how we can be influenced, political and religious ideology another.

At a conceptual level, this too is mining values that will interact with the real world, where for example, a church can convince a believer that in order to get to heaven, they need to give a percentage of their income to the church. With that, the church can then buy land, paintings and golden candlesticks. This is social mining, is it not?

None of this is new.

What is new is that for the first period in history, we can organize ourselves granularly and as small units, at a global scale across billions of people, all with different understandings and concepts, all having a unique profile of what is valuable in this world. For anyone who has ever spoken to a crypto skeptic, you will know how hard it is for them to wrap their head around what makes a token valuable or not. Yes, they can understand scarcity, they can understand demand, but it is the "something from nothing" aspect that they cannot grasp.

This is understandable, because they have been conditioned to believe that something from nothing is impossible and they have never investigated all of the valuable things in their lives that have been born from nothing and now hold value. Bitcoin isn't actually unique in this. For example, almost exactly two years before the Bitcoin Genesis block, Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone release in 2007. What was the demand for the iPhone a decade earlier? Yet, 14 years later, 2.2 billion iPhones have been sold, helping to make Apple one of the most valuable companies on the planet.

Demand. Something from nothing.

Once people became aware, they wanted it and demanded it and Apple have mined that vein hard. But, not only Apple, how many other companies exist today in the form they do because of the iPhone? Many. I am not just talking about the application makers who build for them, but social media in general shifted course, as did pretty much all business models from around that time, to increasingly go digital in a new way - A personal way.

No one needed to buy an iPhone to be affected, just enough people had to in order to create a critical mass for a market that drove all kinds of innovation and competition. Similarly, this is going to be where crypto currency leads and ironically perhaps, it is going to be piggybacking on the technology that has helped centralize control into the hands of the largest and most valuable corporations on earth, the data collectors - and the financial institutions and organizations that facilitate them.

Even for people in crypto, I think a lot of this goes over the head or at least, passes by without much thought, not realizing how influential the concepts we use daily are going to be on the world. When it comes to the blend of the physical and the digital, what crypto does is gives us a transparent, logical and predictable medium of exchange that can transfer the value of one to the other and vice versa. And, this exchange doesn't have to rely on any central authority to control or protect it at any level, whether it be a central authority to back it, a government to ensure it isn't counterfeited, or a bank to transfer it - it can all be done by us, for us.

The something from nothing value generated is going to be enormous, which is what is actually meant when people talk about the future of abundance. It isn't that there will be an endless supply of tokens created, it will be that just like the iPhone, what is created will give us access to new products and services to demand in ways we haven't before. This doesn't mean that the physical world becomes unnecessary of course, because we are physical beings, but it does change the way we can experience our lives and increasingly, it won't matter where we are living, or the conditions to which we were born.

for some, this will be freedom, for others it is going to be dystopic and, there is going to be a very large disruption to what is considered valuable and where it is possible to make, something from nothing and most importantly, who can make it. Currently, very few have access to the majority of the wealth generation tools in the financial markets and this is by design. However, that is going to shift, as those same tools will be increasingly built in decentralized and accessible ways that anyone can enter. What tends to happen to the legacy versions of technology?

The most "valuable" innovations over the last 40 years have been in the financial markets, but the cost of doing the same, decentralizing it and making it accessible or everyone is rapidly coming down. The window for those something from nothing pools is closing, as is the exclusive access to participate. The world of finance is going to be torn apart in the coming decade and the uber-wealthy on paper, might find themselves a little lighter, while the blockchained investors, discover they are far heavier.

This shifts the flow of wealth-based demand, meaning there will be a new breed of investor that organizations looking for capital investment will need to court. This will include governments and financial institutions too. There is a reason that they are worried about where crypto leads, because once wealth can be generated from nothing by anyone, demand shifts, as does the reliance on centralized control, making much of what we know today, obsolete. The "too big to fail" are going to find that they have been hamstrung by a shift in demand, just as all centralized systems have failed before.

While I am certain that it isn't going to be easy and I am positive that every generation feels that what is happening is the greatest change to the world as we know it, I do believe that the next decade is going to make radical changes to our world and, it is going to be a very rough ride for all of us. The main reason it is going to be so hard, is not just because of the pushback from those with power now, but the complete paradigm shift we as a global society will have to make to reconceptualize what value means and, how it can be transferred between what we value in all the worlds we inhabit, whether physical, digital or whatever else we come up with.

It will be empowering and frightening at the same time as while the world will open up to us, a lot of what we believe and understand will change, and what we have known for so long, will have its doors closed forever.

You are part of this already.

There is no going back.

You are a miner.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]