Not sure if this thread is still relevant, but here’s a few thoughts
This has more to do with leverage and value capture vs the dynamics of labor/capital. It’s possible to do work that has compounding returns (something where you create new assets and/or skills that build over time). It’s also possible to do work where you don’t learn or create anything new and day after day you have to do the same work over and over.
This is a feature of life. For example, this forum could be viewed as a market: sellers post ideas and buyers respond to and/or like the ideas. The more interesting/valuable the ideas the more attention, likes, and responses they will get. The “currency” is attention, but it’s still a market. The problem has been, until recently, that that’s very hard to measure.
The problem here is not the transactional mold, but that it’s hard to measure things. A “transaction” in the purest sense of the word is an exchange. We exchange value all day long.
The problem is that a lot of that value is hard to measure. As a result, we have not measured it. Things that are concrete have been measured, and as a result have accrued value. Things that are subjective have not been measured, and as a result have been “free”.
With better tools we can make better measurements. This will allow us to measure and reward all sorts of valuable contributions. Things that have previously been too subjective and/or small to “price” can now be recognized and rewarded. This will allow “markets” on ideas, attention, and conversations. Content creators (people creating posts/comments) are “selling” and content consumers (people liking posts/comments) are buyers.
In addition to expanding the set of immediate transactions that can be measured, the way we measure the assets being exchanged has room to improve. Many transactions are investments that lead to benefits later on, but are only measured at the time of exchange. This is due to the fact that measuring intangible investments over time is difficult. We’ve created financial contracts and markets tfor investments in tangible assets that are easy to measure (see paragraph above), but we did not expand that model to intangible assets. This is because the intangible assets are hard to measure, but even if we could measure them, the (historical) cost of setting up infrastructure to do so would have been prohibitive. Today we have computers, the internet, blockchains, and advanced data processing algorithms. This makes it easy and cheap for people to directly exchange value. It also makes it possible for someone to create value for another, but then receive value back in the future as that value is realized. This has many of the characteristics of a traditional capital investment: value is exchanged in the present for future expected value. The main difference here is that the set of “value” that can be measured increases, transaction costs decrease, and all value creation can result in future value for creators and is thus a type of investment.
In the context of SourceCred the, the “market” is SourceCred: a dynamic non-linear system that determines the value of content produced by the community. This value is measured and contributors are awarded Cred and Grain for their efforts. this measurement happens on an ongoing basis so the value of contributions can be “realized” throughout time rather than as a static transaction. It’s an evolution of capital markets: open ended multi-party transactions in a non-linear market.
The transactions still happen, they’re just more sophisticated.