v1

• Fundamentally: money is “the thing that is scarce”

  • Social fiction that is used to represent scarcity

• Historically, scarce things looked like: land, gold, food, clothing, information

• Now:

  • land doesn’t matter
  • goods are cheap due to manufacturing
  • services are replaced by software
  • information is transmitted and replicated infinitely

• What’s left? The attention of other humans

• In cyberpunk VR utopia the only thing that matters is other people

• Other candidates for scarcity:

  • Time
  • Health
  • Power
  • Reputation
  • (are these other ways of describing attention?)
  • What goods are positional?

v0 braindump

Ads are a fee in attention space

Fees make the world go around

Taxes are fees

Economist should study attention

Attention is the scarce thing M$ represent (cf attention is the scarcest resource)

Legitimacy vs attention??

Paying for a top spot on Manifold/leaderboard - bank account determines what the site does

Anyone digging through the site sees top 10 markets

If the money determines what they are - what does it mean about what the site does