I remember seeing people pay hundreds of dollars for space in Ultima online for their house.
I wonder if humanity will ever have a platform shared by the entire world that wouldn’t be discarded every 10 years where people would actually want to invest long-term.
Maybe bitcoin is a type of land in that sense, it is finite and verified, and you can build on top of it?
Fun to think about at least.
The nice thing about physical land is that you can't discard atoms (in numbers big enough to matter), and we have a multi-millenium history of landownership being good for fostering multi-generational wealth. You can also do neat things with land like agriculture, and I don't see the opportunity to do something similar digitally, since there is always a subscription model, not ownership. Of course, governments and real estate law can change, but it does so much more slowly than digital "law," and the benefactors of the last regime often overlap heavily with the benefactors of a new regime.
IMO, any digital asset would have to have a healthy and growing market for at least a generation or two for people to start making the types of investments you see with real estate.
Land is scarce so it makes sense to “invest” in, ie convert dollars into land with the expectation that you will be able to convert it back into more dollars later because there will be more people and the same amount of land.
But what’s the reason when you can instantly create more “digital land”?
I have been reading Iain M Banks again recently and have been thinking about the post scarcity society where you can have as much land on an orbital as you’d like. So, what does it mean to invest in land in a situation like that?
Did they brainwash people to stop reproducing? Given enough children, you can fill hundreds of space colonies (I'm assuming that is what you mean by orbital).
>So, what does it mean to invest in land in a situation like that?
In a post scarcity society nothing has value, why would anyone invest? To solve a nonexistent scarcity problem?