If someone is not willing to pay for something, then it has no value to them. That is literally how value is measured: cost. It doesn't have to be monetary, but if it's "nothing", then that item is viewed as worthless.

The air you breathe has almost infinite value, because if someone tried to cut off your air supply, you would pay _anything_ to get more air.

Most of the notes you look at on here, and the software you use on here, have no value to you. You would not pay _anything_ to continue to have access to them. In fact, you might even pay _something_ to never see them or hear of them, again.

Until we acknowledge this point, Nostr will never have a viable monetization model because we are denying basic market theory. Product quality matters. Signal concentration matters. Exclusivity matters.

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Discussion

What's the relationship between ALL CAPS and zaps? I don't recall Hayek ever mentioning all caps text.

ALL CAPS text is the signal to start the reader furiously zapping, but only if you are the originator of the ALL CAPS style.

I wish I could invent some brand new text style, not caps, not lower case, some mind blowing new style.

Wingdings or whitespace

Nice. I wish I could post pure Comic Sans.

One day in the not too distant future, you will!

Woohoo!

W h a t. A. G r e a t. I d e a.

I. A m. A n. I n f l u e n c e r. N o w.

L o l . T h i s . I s . M o r e . R e a d a b l e . T h a n . C a p s.

Counterpoint: value for value model. Give away content for free and people pay for it that value it.

It is actually working for some people.

This is simply to say that only the people paying for it, value it. Which is the same thing, that I'm saying.

Then we are in agreement!

Yes.

Although there's limited use in giving things away for free, to people who don't value them. Useful mainly for finding additional people who might want them, in an environment with poor discovery, which makes it a form of advertisement-by-sample.

Social media or monetizing otherwise free user-generated content isn’t the use case that will encourage #nostr adoption. It’s a start, but certainly not the end game. Nostr events have no value of themselves. Once someone figures out how to use nostr to underlay a completely novel use case, then things will take off. I have a hunch, it will be based on what is specified in NIP-01 along with a few conventions, no more.

I see it in this way, through 3 concepts (that I made myself, be cautious):

1. Mana value is the utility of certain tool to satisfy a necessity you have (Eg: a car can cost you 0 btc, but that doesn't mean it isn't useful to transport you to somewhere). It doesn't have a specific unit to measure it. Sometimes I call it technological value.

2. Monetary value is the slice of the global mana value that is represented by certain amount of money. For example 1 btc = worldtotalmanavalue/21000000, 0.5 btc = worldtotalmanavalue/42M, etc

3. Chronological cost treats the same phenomenon than monetary value but from a different point of view. It measures the difficulty of obtaining certain tool or item (the typical way of measuring this is through work hours but you can also use monetary units).

In the case of certain software, I could say that it has a lot of mana value if it's useful for someone in the real world. If people replicate it and keeps being needed, you could say the mana value has doubled. If this specific software is replicated a lot (which is common), the chronological cost of it will tend to zero pretty quickly. It will be dead easy for me to obtain it.

However, if I sum all the softwares in the world, that will give a pretty big monetary value because they provide a lot of utility today

The things I described are not 100% exact because the industries and markets don't behave linearly