Technology

Whether you have the rights is kind of irrelevant to this discussion. Let's say it's GOG games that are all DRM-free, my point is digital consumption has nearly infinite upper limits for consumption.

money... is made from merely money being passed around whilst no actual value is created

Crypto is a zero-sum game, so money is never "made," it's exchanged. So if one person does well, another person must do poorly. That's the same for stocks, though stocks are a bit different in that the stock price includes the actual, physical assets a company owns.

Real estate isn't. When real estate increases in value, that doesn't mean another property decreased in value, it just means people value that property more today than in the past. This could be due to limited supply (there are only so many plots a geographic area) or renovations, meaning its intrinsic value changes (higher expected rents), therefore it's not a zero sum game.

So you really need to define what "wealth" is if you're going to lump real estate in with stocks and crypto currency.

Stocks were a share of ownership in a structure

They still are. The stock price includes the intrinsic value of the company, as well as expected future growth in its intrinsic value. It's that expected future growth that is doing a lot of work here, and it's why companies like Palantir can trade at ~1700 times earnings when a "normal" company would be around 10-20x (for reference, Nvidia trades around 50 times earnings, Johnson and Johnson is around 20), people expect Palantir to grow way faster than "normal" companies.

Expected future growth has always been a part of that equation, that's not new. What is new is the amount of hype around certain stocks, and that probably has more to do with the news cycle (people have access to information way quicker than 50 years ago or even 20 years ago).

each token can claim less and less quyantities of the traditional underlying value things - just notice food inflation.

Inflation has also been a thing as long as fiat currencies have been a thing. The target has been 2%, and the average between 1913 and 2020 was about 3.6% (source; I took the total 2555% and divided it by the 87 years of that period).

Whilst official Inflation numbers don’t tell us this story

Do you have evidence of that? The CPI the US uses has been criticized for various reasons, but it's still the official measure used, and there's a good reason for that: it's pretty good.

Things like housing are very location-dependent, so changes in one region won't really reflect on overall inflation figures if other areas aren't experiencing that as well. But if you look at expenditure figures using percentages of peoples' incomes, housing stays relatively constant in overall percent, which is around 30%. Again, these are national numbers, things may certainly vary by region, since areas like LA will be quite a bit different than rural Texas.

The societal consequences of the value-representation structures we have (literally, of thing like money, stocks and even certificates of ownership) unwinding would be huge.

Sure, if what you say is actually true. But I don't think that's the case. I think instead, salaries increases tend to trail inflation, and some people still haven't yet caught up from the high inflation just after COVID. The averages look good, but that breaks down in individual cases.

Rents, for example, are starting to come down in my area (about 6.5% from last year), which was one of the hardest hit. A lot of the problem was due to new construction projects getting delayed due to COVID supply-chain disruption, and we're finally catching up to where we should've been.

Also, If I understand it correctly it's also called this because caulking requires jamming pitch soaked rope into the joints so it's still about rope!

This is the level of pedantry I can get behind.

Username checks out.