> enforcing digital scarcity in a federated metaverse
I don't know, I feel this sentiment betrays a industry-wide common lack of imagination. We start building digital realities, and our first thought is to try and make them more crappy like the regular one?
Nobody really likes scarcity other than speculators and collectors. We shouldn't be trying to invent more of it, we shouldn't be trying to get rid of the advantages of digital abundance. We should instead be trying to manage and mitigate the limited forms of scarcity that still exist in digital systems -- a long term goal of the Internet should be the complete elimination of most non-physical scarcity. Every time we can make a new asset or utility stop being scarce, that's a step in the right direction.
It's a failure of creativity, vision, and (frankly) courage, that so many people in the tech industry are incapable/unwilling to imagine worlds that aren't artificially hobbled and restricted so that they mimic existing systems.
We build these incredible, world-changing technologies, and then instead of rethinking ownership or creator incentives we just waste a bunch of energy and time building little pretend speculative "art markets" and stressing out over whether somebody might copy and paste a file between two computers or share it online.