With NFTs blowing up, there's been quite broad experimentation regarding pricing, sales, auction formats, and collection sizes. What an NFT is supposed to represent (from art to virtual real estate) can be quite broad, but regardless of that there still exists interesting tensions between the creators, collectors, and the size of collections. These tensions aren’t new. I can bet that the trad art world, trading card game designers, sneaker designers, and many in-between have given these questions some considerable consideration before. What’s new with NFTs is that 1) the asset lives on the same substrate as where the auction/sale occurs, and 2) we have native, beautiful, open source data to dissect. While I have written before about collection sizes (and designed a new implementation using bonding curves), I want to delve a bit further into these tensions: the creator vs the collector, and collection sizes.

Virtual reality is a prime space to experiment with property rights because space is infinite. What is finite, however, is distance to experience. If land can be infinite, then locating close to meaningful virtual experiences is what becomes valuable. This provides ample opportunity to experiment with new property rights, all perhaps, even in the same virtual space.

A few weeks ago, I had a chat with the Cryptovoxels community on ideas on how to increase or decrease land in this decentralized virtual space. I want to share two such ideas: a COST (Harberger Tax) zone, and a Bonding Curve zone. Both rely on land being minted and destroyed as desired. Both generate value back into the community.

The boundary of the firm remains a perennial and interesting question: where should firms begin, and where should they end? When should a firm be split apart, and when should it absorb another firm?

The Celestial Roche Limit is the distance at which a celestial object would be ripped apart by its own tidal forces as it approaches a larger object. This article derives an Economic Roche Limit to determine and explore a new boundary of the firm.

Recently, the topic of personal tokens started gaining traction again in the blockchain community. This is particularly driven by new tooling and platforms (such as Uniswap), enabling easy trading of personal tokens. This is a far cry from 2014, when I first proposed ideas around personal tokens. Back then, the only way to experiment with this was to launch your own blockchain. Glad times have changed.

New examples of personal tokens take various forms. I'll explain some of them, and then propose a new variant for liquid, social reputation tokens.

Markets themselves is an approximation of many individual self-interests, and thus it is a reflection of society. If we can utilize markets as a medium in art and not shy away from it, perhaps we might learn more about ourselves.

The first draft chapter of my upcoming novel: Hope Runners of Gridlock.

Blockchain technology has allowed us to re-imagine the arts. As a movement, it's been rife with seemingly disparate narratives: people adopting its cocktail of hashes & cryptography as a Rorschach test for their beliefs. It's simultaneously the most anarchist, most libertarian, most egalitarian, most socialist, most freeing, most authoritarian technology. I've always seen it as a tool empower creatives. In this post, I explore property rights experiments with new markets in the arts.

In imagining & visualising economic systems, especially the firm, there's a lot of metaphors that have been used in the past. For example, firms as culture, or firms as machine. One that I particularly enjoy that I haven't seen mentioned in depth at all, is seeing the firm like biological cells.

By combining the incentives of patronage, profit & collectibles, we can create a new tradable asset class that supports the funding of the commons. In addition to supporting artists and open source communities, this idea can be utilized to save our fragile planet from the ongoing effects of climate change.