W4-005 · Condition 01 — Persistent worlds
World economy
A world economy is the set of activities inside a persistent world that produce and exchange value people want independent of speculation — labour, services, goods and the settlement between them.
Land is worth what happens on it. Nothing was happening.
The 2022 land correction is usually explained as a bubble, and it was one. But the reason the assets did not recover is more specific: there was nothing to do on them. Value in real property derives from the economic activity it hosts, and virtual property is no different.
A world economy needs producers, consumers, a reason to transact that is not price appreciation, and settlement that clears. Where any of those is absent, activity is performance — participants doing things that look economic in the hope of a later buyer.
This is where condition 01 becomes dependent on 03 and 04. An economy needs a unit that settles and participants who show up. Worlds that tried to bootstrap an economy on human attention alone were open only while humans were awake — which is the argument for the agent layer stated from the world’s side.