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by tornato7 1438 days ago
Let’s forget any bridges to physical assets for a minute; cryptocurrencies, or more broadly scarce digital assets, have an unfathomably large TAM. More and more of our lives are being spent online instead of dealing with real world assets, giving increasing value to the GDP of digital assets over time. First, the entire financial system can and will be made digital, making every dollar you deal with every day a digital asset that can falls under blockchain TAM. Then, you have all online goods: virtual game items, ad space, Twitter handles, memberships, subscriptions, metaverse property, virtual conference tickets, certificates, domain names, hell it turns out people even want to trade JPEGs as scarce digital assets. There are probably things that I can’t even imagine today that will one day be tokenized digital assets that can be traded on blockchains.

Sure, plenty of the mentioned items can run more efficiently on a centralized database but the question then becomes, “whose centralized database?” Blockchain is the only solution that provides credibly neutral and publicly interoperable accounting of digital assets, which could one day be 50% of the world economy.

1 comments

TAM? Maybe define uncommon acronym before using them. I cannot even find its expansion using Google.

> First, the entire financial system can and will be made digital

It already is.

> making every dollar you deal with every day a digital asset that can falls under blockchain

That is a very bold statement.

> Then, you have all online goods: (…)

Those all suffer from the exact same problem than physical assets, they exist and have a purpose outside the blockchain. You already have the oracle problem.

> credibly neutral and publicly interoperable accounting

This is again a very bold statement and facts disagree with you. Blockchains are not interoperable with one another and cannot be, for starters.

> which could one day be 50% of the world economy

This is pure wishful speculation on your part and is based on absolutely nothing.

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EDIT: I found "TAM"'s expansion: total addressable market.

I'm not saying that all digital goods will be traded on blockchains, just that they could be, so they fall under the Total Addressable Market (not an uncommon acronym among yc folk at least).

Likewise, in-game items and other digital assets can exist in or outside of a blockchain. They can serve their original purpose when on-chain as well. I can expand on my point about interoperability:

Blockchains are not typically natively interoperable between them (exception might be rollups), but all assets on a blockchain are. If I create a video game and tokenize my items + currency, I suddenly open up a world of possibilities for users and developers to expand on whatever in-game functionality I can make with my limited team, like:

- Making items tradable on DEXs - Borrowing and lending services - New UIs and tracking tools - Clubs and clans that verify ownership - Derivatives and staking

In a world with tokenized assets, I could easily make a deal with a guy on the internet to let him stay in my decentraland property for 3 weeks in exchange for a ticket to a digital Marshmello concert - completely trustlessly and transactionally.