A reflection on digital assets

Digital assets are a relatively new kind of asset which, as I determined in my last article, we could conceive as: a tradeable thing that has value in an agreed sense, with the characteristic of being composed of a particular series of digits, which we can recognize as things and meaningful experiences.

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The concept of asset is elastic and has to englobe more things over time. Today, we value gold as we did in the past; we now have video games and NFTs; we don’t value chocolate as many prehispanic cultures did. Things themselves, their utility and our appreciation of them changes as the decades pass. We can actually see many combinations of such changes taking place in history for a certain thing, like the conservation of the physical characteristics of a theater and its capacity to host operas, but its loss of value given the new lack of interest for operas. What we can conclude here is that things can be independently judged in terms of different values.

Most of us could agree that assets are good as means to satisfy needs and as items of trade, but it is very difficult to agree on the value of assets outside the trading world. Beer is a good asset to have because it has high demand in the market, but morally speaking, it is not always good, like when it is given to children.

Value in the market is not absolute value. We can recognise this when we think about the fact that we sometimes trade things that we don’t value ourselves. I might not like Picasso and would not hang his painting on my walls, but I sure would like to have one of those to trade. Not because something is an asset it implies that it should be desired in every other sense.

New technologies are good because, of many things, they can offer new assets to trade in the market. Economies grow with new technologies and that represents a possibility for material flourishing. Agreed. What we must not forget is that the individual assets we trade and the very act of trading them can have other implications outside the economic aspect, which we should consider. Further reflection is needed in order to determine the possible outcomes in a broader sense of the introduction of a new asset, especially when the asset is of an elusive nature, like the digital assets.

In the digital sphere, we should pause to consider exactly what our trading of likes, aps, ads, video games, videos, digital art, and TV series can do to us in the long term. The Earth has suffered from our deficiency to achieve this process of reflection with the introduction of highly tradable energetic products that contaminate the air. With digital assets, it could be us that suffer as a whole if we do not consider our options outside the economic ones.

As a side note, I would like to say that it seems to me that the increase in the amount of digital asset types is not correlated with the increase of perception of value in other aspects of life. Every time we concentrate more on adding more assets to our personal lives, we are less and less capable of discovering other sources of value which are not tradable -in many other things, even assets themselves. We must never forget that capitalism is not a formula for an increase in meaning, but a mere structure to fair trade of assets. Assets are not the only valuable things.