Planned Obsolescence and the Tokenized Economy

I never really understood what a smart contract was until someone phrased it like this.

An NFT can be representative of an asset. When you trade that asset, the smart contract can give the creator 10-25% of the revenue of that sale.

This means, people can buy any digital asset and trade it amongst each other. The company producing the good or digital product can then still be profitable while decentralizing ownership. This cuts out a portion of vendor profits though. But it could be arguable that the gross profit increases due to sale frequency increasing overall, due to the reduced price and the ownership of licensing.

This sort of model has been flipped on its head in the software world though, because we now have a trend towards subscription service rather than a perpetual license.

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Tokenizing physical assets and tying them to warranties can incentivize manufacturers to build products to last. When someone sells a washer or a refrigerator -- imagine if it came with an NFT that was basically a warranty. If something happens to the fridge, you can use your NFT to get a discount on repairs from the manufacturer. When you sell the Samsung refrigerator to someone else, you also sell the NFT and the manufacturer gets a percentage of the sale.

This 'programmable money' decentralizes ownership and provides services while routing money to the correct parties. Manufacturers of goods are also incentivized to make their product to be longer lasting so additional sales can be performed on the same item. Everybody wins, even the environment. The age of buy and throw away would be disincentivized.