Like many folks these days in the United States (and beyond I am certain) I was raised to believe certain myths about money.  I was not taught about how it really works, and how to make it work for me.  It took a lot of unlearning, and reprogramming to overcome those false beliefs, and it is still a work in progress!  However, throughout my journey in life, it has remained apparent that scarcity is a myth.

Literally everything that we need in life is provided for us a la the planet we were born on, in abundance.  Sure, a millennia ago when our less-evolved ancestors were fighting off Sabretooth Tiger, hunting Mastodon and Mammoth, and heck even as recent (and evolved into the present) as The Great Depression and Dust Bowl, it was encoded in their subconscious minds that there is an element of scarcity, that they are unsure of what the future holds.

If there is anything that our leap frogging in technological advances has taught us, is that we do in fact have all of the resources we could possibly need, and scarcity is truly just a figment of our imagination.  It is okay - you can re-read that as many times as you need to and really let it sink in.  Scarcity is manufactured in our current system (capitalism) and it is how we have been arbitrarily creating or deriving value.  Objectively, it is misguided.  (I am not here to instigate a debate about capitalism, it is just a fact that a system that posits infinite growth with a "finite" amount of resources is on its head.)

What we are bumping up against nowadays is how the things that actually have intrinsic value (like food, shelter, safety - the base levels on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, our attention, our time) actually cannot be quantified without serious debate.  We can come up with arbitrary values on things that are essential, but like art, those basic necessities are priceless.  

I know what you are thinking, "Yeah, yeah - how does that have anything to do with Crypto?"  Well - it is the fact that there are so many Crypto projects out there that recognize that our time, attention, computing power, etc., all have value and are in fact a type of currency.  It is an energy, and an exchange.  When one creates, there is another to witness, consume, or experience that creation.  What I find interesting is that this is truly the Future, in the present, when it comes to the ways in which we are going to be navigating and moving through the world, and we still have to use old-world ways of knowing to determine value.

I am not a programmer in any real sense of the word (I can read code and get a general idea of what it is supposed to be doing), but I do practice critical thinking, logic, and am a tech nerd, and from an entirely ontological standpoint the question that is coming down the pike for Crypto projects is - is there a way to determine value without manufacturing scarcity?  That question is wholly rhetorical, and I would be interested in hearing what others have to say about intrinsic value that is just because, as opposed to being derived from a contrast to conditions of scarcity.