— v0.9 [[web3]] [[money]] [[value]] [[draft]]
I have a friend who has friends everywhere in the world. He has been traveling with a laughable budget, Couchsurfing, and volunteering for over 6 years now. His bank balance is nothing. He mostly works on Couchsurfing reviews and just personal charisma. But if you check his bank balance, you’d say he’s poor.
My dad has been running a traditional trading business for over 30 years. Sits in a 10×10 feet office with 5 phones and manages a business running in large $ figures today. But he hardly brings much home. His bank balance should have been 10x with the work that he does. But if he calls, the biggest manufacturer in his business, they will give him any amount of credit without any collateral. Way beyond his and your net worth. Why? Because he has never cheated anybody in his entire career. Never taken a shortcut. In his business, everyone knows this.
Another friend of mine gets access to high-stakes poker because he just has a way to make rich people happy. He is an insider to a table to which most expensive watch owners couldn’t get access. He hears things that amaze me.
This is how the world was supposed to work. Before hyper-capitalism tried to boil all of this down to money.
Money became the store of value.
But what is value?
It is what a person brings to the table and what they achieve with it. It is the effort, skills, knowledge, trustworthiness, and respect combined into one sign: $. Of course, there were other decent attempts like certification for credibility, awards, credit ratings, etc. But there is hardly any correlation to real-life stature without over-simplification.
Value is now fluid. It cuts across thousands of tokens, NFTs, wallet-based identities, openly verifiable credit ratings, and land holdings in the metaverse.
This creates a perfectly competitive market for value.
I theorize that there will be a token denomination of trust, legacy respect, charisma, vibe (which translates to access), and many other vague terms.
Being rich will be a combination of these. Only having $ or Bitcoin in a wallet will not cut it.